In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I first started seriously looking into dire wolves sometime last year, when the researchers on the Secret of Skinwalker Ranch show claimed to have found the skull of a recently deceased dire wolf in a creek on the ranch, and a guy in a park ranger-style outfit from a local museum sorta-kinda claimed it was authentic. Now, I view Skinwalker Ranch as pure entertainment, but out of curiosity, I looked up dire wolves to see how likely this would be. My main question was why only a single skull was ever found, when, according to Wikipedia , It can be assumed that dire wolves lived in packs of relatives that were led by an alpha pair. So if there are living dire wolves roaming the Utah mountains, they would be found in packs, their remains would be more common, and the packs woould be both visible and audible. So I dismissed the idea of a live dire wolf as having the same credibility as the rest of Skinwalker Ranch; it's fun entertainment. But before I dropped my research, I ...

Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump's agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense. ⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/ITFeGw0kUf pic.twitter.com/MO68aje1X2 — Sean Parnell (@SeanParnellATSD) April 11, 2025 The removal of Pituffik. Greenland Space Base commander Col. Susannah Meyers from her position was big news this morning : Just days after Vice President JD Vance's March visit to Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, the installation commander sent out an email to the base distancing it from Vance’s criticism of Denmark and its oversight of the territory, Military.com has learned. Col. Susan Meyers, the commander of the 821st Space Base Group who also oversees the Pentagon's northernmost military base, sent a March 31 message to all personnel at Pituffik seemingly aimed at generating unity among the airmen and Guardians, as well as the Canadians, Danes and Greenlanders who work there, following Vance's appearance. She wrote ...

It looks as though USA Fencing stepped into a public relations disaster it could have avoided : A female fencer was disqualified from a competition for refusing to compete against a transgender opponent, USA Fencing said in a statement to ABC News on Thursday. The incident occurred last month at a USA Fencing-sanctioned regional tournament where fencer Stephanie Turner decided to remove her mask and take a knee instead of competing against Redmond Sullivan, a transgender woman. Following the act of protest, the referee of the University of Maryland match -- which was not an NCAA tournament -- issued a black card to Turner, removing her from the competition. USA Fencing's current transgender and non-binary athlete policy was enacted in 2023 and allows athletes to participate in sanctioned events "in a manner consistent with their gender identity/ expression, regardless of the gender associated with the sex they were assigned at birth." While Ms Turner m...

Every now and then, calls appear for greater involvement of university alumni in governance and decisionmaking at their respective schools. I'm not entirely sure why alumni are especially qualified to do this, especially in light of the general decline in educational standards -- if the value of a four-year degree is decreasing, why should the university seek out the guidance of former students who are its own low-quality product? After a lifetime, I'm able to ask that question now. I didn't ask that question 25 years or so ago, when I got involved in the alumni trustee movement at Dartmouth. I think the best argument I heard was in effect that membership on university boards is dominated by very wealthy donors who are representing largely plutocratic interests, and the selection process bypasses potential candidates who may represent other points of view. In the case of Dartmouth, the unique history of its board offered a potential test case : The s...

This is in the pull quote from David Brooks's latest at The Atlantic . Yesterday it was apparently the new article for the day that The Atlantic deemed worthy of exempting from its paywall, so I skimmed it. Intending to discuss it in greater detail today, I found that it's back behind the paywall, and the task of starting a free trial so I could go back to it proved too daunting. I think the gravamen of his argument is that there are polite Ivy Leaguers, who run the world, and impolite ones, who are trying to take over. He makes the point that just about everyone in the Trump cabinet has an Ivy degree, but they're terrible people like Pete Hegseth (Princeton), Bobby Kennedy (Harvard), and Scott Bessent (Yale). Brooks tries to tie both Trump and Elon Musk to Penn, but neither has degrees from Penn's College of Arts and Sciences, the traditionally Ivy style liberal-arts school there, but The Wharton School, the business school, instead. He then goes to some leng...

The Guardian ran an "exclusive" yesterday that had nothing new on a two week old story but continued to get everything wrong: According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate. Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story. . . . According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be relat...

Just this morning I saw yet another threat to an Ivy over anti-Semitism and DEI : The Trump administration is poised to block $510 million in federal grants and contracts for Brown University over the school's response to antisemitism on campus, the New York Times reported. Following the report, Brown Provost Frank Doyle said in an email that the school couldn't substantiate the information but was aware of "troubling rumors" about federal action against its funding. The potential freeze follows similar moves by the US government against Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, Brown's Ivy League peers. As I noted yesterday, Alan Dershowitz never believed that the Ivies ever dropped Jewish quotas, they just disguised them throughout the postwar period as geographical "diversity" admissions preferences -- if you were applying to Harvard from someplace like Kansas or Montana, you got a few extra points, not least because you probably weren't Jewish. ...