In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The @nytimes story on the January DC plane crash hides its takeaway until the last sentences: the lady helicopter pilot ignored multiple warnings from her right seat about altitude (and his directly telling her to turn away) and flew straight into a passenger jet. The end. Ugh. pic.twitter.com/7emtYkZTwQ — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 27, 2025 There's a new fuss over what seems to be a previously unreported excerpt from the cockpit recording of the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into an American Airlines jet at Reagan National Airport on January 29. Three months on, new details published by The New York Times revealed that the pilot made more than one mistake leading to one of the worst catastrophes in aviation history. Not only was Lobach flying her Black Hawk too high, but in the final moments before the impact, she failed to take advice and instruction from her co-pilot to switch course. . . . Just 15 seconds before colliding with the commercial airpl...

An Atlantic piece, Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet , was linked on Real Clear Politics this morning. Its complaint: In Donald Trump’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rotates through various costumes—firefighting gear for drills with the United States Coast Guard, a cowboy hat and horse for a jaunt with Border Patrol agents in Texas, a bulletproof ICE vest for a dawn raid in New York City. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany. And FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino spars with agents on the wrestling mats of Quantico. Kristi Noem is a particular target: Noem, who has earned herself several dismissive, Mattel-inspired nicknames—“Border Control Barbie,” “ICE Barbie”—is perhaps the most conspicuous offender. She has been photographed behind the controls of both a Coast Guard boat and a Coast Guard plane, donned a helmet and Border Patrol fa...

Alt media so far haan't been happy with either Attorney General Bondi or FBI Director Patel, accusing both of grandstanding on Fox News without making real progress on the Trump agenda. At the moment, Bondi’s position is much more politically precarious with the right, which might explain her omnipresence on Fox News and Fox Business programming, where she’s repeatedly turned to safely articulate her explanation for the Epstein files mishap — “Everything’s going to come out to the public,” she assured host Sean Hannity — and return to her preferred message of cleaning up the Biden era Justice Department and prosecuting violent crime. The same story suggests Trump is nevertheless happy with her: By all indications, Bondi’s position remains secure with President Donald Trump, who called her “fantastic” on Thursday and gave her a glowing review during a visit to the Justice Department Friday. The longer-term question is how much more patience and grace Trump’s b...

In posts like this one a few weeks ago , I've tried to trace the ecosystem by which the Biden administration brought in illegal migrants, not just by letting them through the border, but by recruiting them in their home countries, flying them to the US, settling them in designated communities, giving them quasi-legal protected status, and paying for their food, shelter, transportation, and medical care. What we still don't know much about is who designed this very complex system. We do know that a key part of it was roughly a dozen "faith based NGOs" that received billions in federal grants to implement the settlement program. Although they represented different denominations with different governing structures, they all appear to have operated in a similar way, settling migrants in specific cities and coordinating with for-profit sweatshop employers, slumlords, and car dealers. One nationality that keeps reappearing in these accounts is Venezuela. This is partly ...

I woke up this morning for some reason with the name Krafft-Ebing hangng in my thoughts like a tune that won't go away. I don't think I'd thought of that name in years. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), an Austrian psychiatrist, was a pioneer of the modern notion of sexuality, so in the context of recent events, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that he'd pop up that way. Let's just do a quick review of recent news stories. On Monday , Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former Democratic aide best known for being filmed on the receiving end of a backdoor sex romp in a Senate hearing room in 2023, is finally speaking out about the scandal that cost him his job and prompted him to flee the country. The Washington Free Beacon exclusively reported in February that Maese-Czeropski had moved to Australia to launch a new career as an independent sex worker who posts pornographic photos and videos on the internet. This week the disgraced Democrat, who was a l...

I'm going back to Harvard, because as usual, the media, alt, legacy, or otherwise. is playing its annual game of extending spring break into Memorial Day, at which point they can check out for summer vacation. The two big stories this week are "Who will be the next pope?" and "Is Trump trying to ease Hegseth out?" which don't have answers and don't require mental effort -- and that comes after a weekend of evergreen bromides saying nice things about Easter. Things likely won't pick up until October. But I found a piece at the Harvard Crimson that illustrates how Ivy students are insidiously brainwashed into believing the system that's selected them is good because, after all, it selected them in a highly selective, meritoratic process. This is also at the heart of David Brooks's endorsement of the Ivies in Bobos in Paradise . The system is meritocratic because, after all, it selected David Brooks. Just look at him! The Ivy student bod...

In an illustration of Glenn Reynolds's thought processes, he posts a link to Matt Taibbi's substack , which is behind a paywall, that contains another link to a David Brooks column in the New York Times , which is also behind a paywall. All the Times will let me see beyond the paywall is Brooks's title, "What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal." Anyone who's able to get past both paywalls just like that is probably subscribed to a good deal else besides The New York Times and Matt Taibbi's substack -- for starters, maybe The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, which means they're likely paying hundreds of dollars a year, or maybe expensing it, to get material that's not worth that kind of money. And at least it used to be blogger etiquette not to link to items behind paywalls. But that's Glenn Reynolds and Salem Media these days. Taibbi quotes a single paragraph from Brooks: We l...