In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In yesterday's post, I advanced the thesis that AI doesn't make people smart, and it doesn't make up for people not being smart, either. After I posted that, I heard that Jake Tapper's publisher (or Tapper himself) had felt the need to hire a crisis management team in the runup to the release of the book by him and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice , this coming Tuesday. If Penguin Random House had fired Tapper and replaced him with an AI bot, they couldn't have made a worse decision. According to PR Week , Tapper, who co-authored the book with Thompson, confirmed to outlets that Risa Heller, founder and CEO of Heller Co., was hired to offer advice as the authors plan to roll out the book “as smart as possible,” per reports. It is set for release on May 20. . . . Some commenters in President Donald Trump's party were critical of Tapper and Thompson, saying Tapper a...

I've ventured into AI now and then here, mostly with a certain amount of skepticism. Late last year, I asked, " If AI Is So Great, Why Do I Get So Much Spanish- And Chinese-Language Spam? " Theoretically, AI should have been able to identify what languages I speak and direct ads in those languages to my e-mail, YouTube, and Facebook feeds, while avoiding the unnecessary waste of sending me ads in languages I don't speak. I post frequently on Facebook in German and have several German and Austrian Facebook friends. So far, I haven't received a single German-language ad, but I get lots in Chinese and Spanish, neither of which I speak. The basic problem is that AI doesn't make people smart, and it doesn't make up for people not being smart, either. I think there's a misunderstanding of AI in the public imagination, and so far, It appears that remarks from our new Holy Father reflect this. Via the National Review : Leo XIV views the current ...

. @Charles__Marino , a former Secret Service agent and national security expert, tells me James Comey is "gonna have a very, very, very long night." From his experience in the USSS, Marino predicts the Washington field offices for the USSS and the FBI have already been… — Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) May 16, 2025 It wasn't until I got up this morning that I began to realize Comey's 8647 Instagram post hadn't just gone viral, it had metastasized. As both a true crime fan and a follower of the various lawfare cases against Trump, I have sort of a sketchy idea of what can happen if you get the feds on your case. James Comey, as a former FBI Director, should have had a much clearer idea -- but if he did, he apparently never thought it would apply to him. Farther down in the tweet embedded above, Susan Crabtree quotes more from the former Secret Service agent Charles Marino: "Look, here's the deal, they're sending agents out, and they're go...

Episcopal Church Bishop Sean Rowe: It's against what we stand for to help white refugees fleeing South Africa pic.twitter.com/h4LEZaYQt6 — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 14, 2025 I left The Episcopal Church behind a couple of years before I became Catholic, via a twisted path that involved an unsuccessful attempt by a "continuing Anglican" parish to enter the Ordinariate. On balance, that distance from my Episcopalian days has kept me from thinking very hard about the problems I saw with day-to-day Episcopalianism. An article from Last year in The Critic , which came well before the latest controversy from Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe's statement that it's "against what we stand for" to help Afrikaner refugees fleeing South Africa, gives a conventional picture of TEC's predicament: The figures are stark. Only 12,000 people were confirmed into the Episcopal Church in 2022. . . . As those confirmation figures imply, the statistics are far from...

I ran into a remarkably obtuse essay by Joel Kotkin at Real Clear Politics this morning, Donald Trump has scrambled the old class allegiances . I don't follow Kotkin, but according to Wikipedia , Kotkin is the author of several books. The New Class Conflict was published in September 2014 by Telos Press Publishing. In this book, Kotkin assesses the changing complexities of class in the United States, which he argues can no longer be understood in terms of traditional political divisions between left and right or conservative and liberal. For Kotkin, the new class order of the twenty-first century is marked by the rise of a high-tech oligarchy, a culturally dominant academic and media (both journalism and entertainment) elite, an expansive government bureaucracy, and a declining middle class. So he's an expert on class, but in the current essay, Kotkin gets about half of everything wrong. He begins, US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class po...

I'm not sure what this signifies, but I'm belatedly learning that between the death of Benedict XVI and the election of Leo XIV, several related conspiracy theories have emerged. Since I'm a Catholic convert, I should point out that if I thought there was a grain of truth to any of them, I would have to revert to my childhood Presbyterianism, but so far, that hasn't happened. The most recent elaboration of this set of theories is contained in the hour-long YouTube post embedded above, in which Michael Lebron, who posts on the YouTube channel Lionel Nation, interviews Erik Thaddeus Walters, an adjunct associate professor at John Cabot University in Rome, which caters to English-speaking students who for whatever reason find themselves there. His D Phil is from the University of Vienna. Mr Lebron, who jokingly says he's not a conspiracy theorist but a conspiracy analyst, has had several interviews like this with Dr Walters in the runup to the just-concluded c...

When I learned that Robert Francis Prevost had been named the new pope, I was convinced I'd seen the name somewhere before. As my wife and I drove to mass yesterday morning, it was confirmed: we found ourselves right behind a Prevost bus on city streets that led us almost all the way to the parish. From Wikipedia , Prevost . . . formally known as Prevost Car, is a Canadian manufacturer of touring coaches and bus shells for high-end motorhomes and specialty conversions. The company is a subsidiary of the Volvo Buses division of the Volvo Group. Even before that, once I saw photos of Leo XIV, I decided I liked any pope who wears glasses, as Pius XII did in my childhood. In fact, at that time, both President Truman and the pope wore glasses. Something basic has been restored. As I've begun to feel reassured, The Guardian is not so much : After years of sympathetic and inclusive comments from Pope Francis, LGBTQ+ Catholics expressed concern on Thursday about hostile ...