In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The legacy media take on Trump's crime crackdown in DC was to say that crime was aready declining there. For instance, from CBS News : Identifying the specific causes of changes in criminal activity is complex because it can be driven by many factors – and local police data was already showing that reported crimes were trending downward in Washington prior to the president's action. Violent crime, for example, in the two weeks prior to Aug. 7, was down about 20% already from the same period in prior years, according to the MPD data. But the assertion that DC crime had already been declining is actually very questionable : Last month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) informed Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Chief Pamela Smith, in a letter, that his committee is “investigating disturbing allegations that DC crime data is inaccurate and intentionally manipulated.” Comer told Smith that a whistleblower “with direct knowledge of internal MPD ...

Yesterday I touched on the idea that's at the basis of The Big Short that a hoax can be perpetrated on the public -- and by this is meant the educated, informed, and prosperous classes -- via respected institutions and the media. But this isn't just paranoid thinking -- the mortgage-based securities hoax that led to the 2008 financial crisis was predictable and quantifiable, which is one of the chief themes of the film. Near the end, the contrarian Mark Baum makes the point that the fraud has been taking place "not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball". I noted yesterday that his omission of medicine must have been inadvertent. What we're seeing in the era of Trump 47 is a systematic, at least notionally top-down effort to dismantle the comprehensive social hoax. For instance , You could see just how much the Health and Human Services secretary is despised last week at a Senate committee hearing when Democr...

Last night, my wife and I watched the 2015 film The Big Short after not seeing it for several years -- certainly not since Trump's return to the presidency. Not long into the film, my wife exclaimed, "This movie put Trump in the White House." If the film itself didn't directly do it -- certainly I don't remember hearing it brought up in either the 2016 or 2024 campaigns -- on watching it again, I think it characterizes a certain mindset that's grown over the past decade. Via Wikipedia, Based on the 2010 book of the same name by Michael Lewis, it depicts how the 2008 financial crisis was triggered by the United States housing bubble. . . . A critical and commercial success, the film grossed $133 million on a $50 million budget and received acclaim for the performances of the cast (particularly those of Bale and Carell), McKay's direction, editing, and the screenplay. The film won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in addition t...

The YouTube embedded above is one of very few attempts I've found anywhere to parse out what Trump's objectives are now in Venezuela. In it, Preston Stewart is a West Point graduate and Afghan combat veteran who posts about veterans' affairs on TikTok and YouTube, as well as on various podcasts. In this episode, he interviews Juan Gonzalez, whom he identifies as a former National Security Council Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere and currently a resident fellow at the Georgetown Americas Institute. Under the principle of "trust but verity". I note that Mr Stewart has inflated Mr Gonzalez's title from "Director", as it appears on this link , to "Senior Director". He omits that Gonzalez was also "Special Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden from 2013-2015, where he advised and represented the Vice President on all policy matters related to the Western Hemisphere". Gonzalez was also Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bure...

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...