In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Dutch Caribbean Coastguard is a fun program on the National Geographic channel that for whatever reason lacks the tendentiousness of most material there. Curaçao, Aruba and St Maarten are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and their waters are patrolled by the Dutch Coast Guard, which works closely with the US Coast Guard, US Navy, and US Marines. The islands are due north of Venezuela, so a big part of the job for all the agencies is to monitor drug trafficking and illegal immigration from that country. Pretty much every episode of the show has scenes of Dutch patrol aircraft tracking "gofast boats" carrying cocaine from Venezuela, which whenever possible are referred to Dutch or US surface vessels for interdiction. To those who watch the National Geographic show, gofast boats and interdictions are nothing new, and it gives context to Secretary Rubio's remarks in Mexico City : The deadly US military strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Tuesday...

Via The Postmillennial : Outside the Capitol building on Wednesday, Reps Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna held a press conference regarding their Epstein Files Transparency Act they introduced to Congress in July. During the press conference, women who identified themselves as victims of infamous financier Jeffrey Epstein spoke out. One of the women said that survivors of Epstein would be compiling their own list of people who frequented Epstein's world. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse adds an important qualifier : Most of the various victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation have previously been paid victim compensation amid various lawsuits including a substantial $290 million financial settlement from JPMorgan Bank in 2023, one of the financial institutions used by Epstein. These lawsuits resulted in what has been reported as ‘various non-disclosure agreements’ (NDAs), which the victims signed. After the DOJ and congress has released all of the available ...

I said last week that more would inevitably come out about Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve board member whom Trump fired for alleged mortgage fraud. And in fact, more has. But I keep thinking about remarks by Shelby Steele, who invented the term "grievance elite" to describe the highly prestigious post-civil rights era African-American leadership and examine the conditions that created them. In a 1999 presentation The New Betrayal of Black Freedom in America , he said: If we go back to the 1960s and the civil rights era, and so forth, there was this, I think, interesting moment, when America on the one hand did something extremely honorable, which was to say, “We are wrong as a society in the way we have treated black Americans. It is immoral what we did.” Almost no other society that I know of on Earth has yet done that other than America. . . . What happens when you say you were wrong is that you lose moral authority. You just don’t have it any more. It is the price...

Last Wenesday, Trump fired Centers for Desease Control Director Susan Monarez. The conventional wisdom goes like this : Monarez had refused to go along with the anti-vaccine madness of Trump’s “health czar,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK). Trump had named Monarez as CDC director just a month ago. At her Senate confirmation hearing, Monarez said that “vaccines save lives” and that their use should continue to be supported. If Trump and RFK thought they could just strong-arm Monarez to go along with their anti-vaccine crusade, they were proven wrong. Monarez had much to say : The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leadership was in stunning disarray Wednesday evening after the Trump administration fired the agency’s director hours after she refused to resign under pressure. The director, Susan Monarez, said she was resisting being ousted by the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for political reasons after about a month in office. “When CDC Director ...

I can't ask for a better illustration of my thesis on the problem that's beset US inner cities since the 1960s than Trump's latest chioice of opponents : President Donald Trump on Saturday took aim at Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Truth Social, citing Chicago’s violent crime numbers and vowing that federal support could be on the way. “Six people were killed, and 24 people were shot, in Chicago last weekend, and JB Pritzker, the weak and pathetic Governor of Illinois, just said that he doesn’t need help in preventing CRIME. He is CRAZY!!! He better straighten it out, FAST, or we’re coming! MAGA. President DJT,” Trump wrote. I asked the web, "What is the Pritzker family's net worth?" and "AI" replied, The total net worth of the Pritzker family is not a single reported figure, but rather a collection of individual fortunes held by numerous family members, with individual net worths often in the billions. For example, in May 2025,...

How did Cook afford to take out three mortgages in a matter of a few months? Most lenders would throw a big red flag at this in general—raises more questions: https://t.co/N4E8F4N9qd — Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) August 29, 2025 On Thurssay, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte issued a second criminal referral to the Justice Department for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook: As Director of the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency," Pulte wrote in an Aug. 28 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Special Attorney Edward Martin, "I reiterate the referral on August 15, 2025, and provide new information concerning a 3rd property for Lisa D. Cook ('Cook') and what appears to be multiple false representations to the United States Government by Cook while she was a Governor of the Federal Reserve." In response, Cook's attorney Abbe Lowell said , This is an obvious smear campaign aimed at discrediting Gov. Cook by a polit...

In a trip to Minnesota, J D Vance asked a question : Why is it that you have mayors and governors who are angrier about Donald Trump offering to help them than they are about the fact that their own residents are being carjacked and murdered in the streets? Other remarks are reported elsewhere : We were having lunch yesterday and the president said, ‘JD, I don’t know how I did it? I have actually gotten the Democrats to come out in defense of crime.’ If Donald Trump came out tomorrow and said he really likes puppies, you would have AOC come out and say ‘Puppies are terrible.’ Actually, I think there's an answer. Let's recall that at least since Dukakis ran against Poppy Bush, the Democrats have represented an alliance between the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat , Marx's urban criminal underclass (Clinton made himself a deliberate exception). Marx had the instinct to recognize that the criminal underclass was not a reliable ally of the working class, ...