In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Merriam-Webster defines "decoerum" as "agreement with accepted standards of conduct". In light of the renarkable rash of suspensions and terminations being visited on people who publicly celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination, some people like intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds are saying, "I mave doubts about these firings. . . . The courts can sort it out later, just like they did (sometimes) when so many people on the right were being cancelled." He concludes maybe the courts will sort it out -- well, he's a law professor. But this isn't really a legal issue. What's happening is that ordinary standards of decorum are being reestablished. If you think about it, before anything else, Bud Light's Dylan Mulvaney campaign, in which a leading national brand endorsed transsexualism, was a violation of decorum. You don't talk about people's plumbing in a national media environment; even if children can't drink beer...

The people celebrating the assassination are just random nobodies like Washington Post staffers, people teaching your children, university professors, aides to elected officials, medical professionals, and prominent talking heads. — Sunny (@sunnyright) September 11, 2025 Via the UK Daily Mail : Left-wing social media fanatics have celebrated influencer Charlie Kirk's murder - with some comparing him to Adolf Hitler and even suggesting he 'deserved' his fate. . . . The killing of Donald Trump's ally is the latest example of political violence in the US spanning a range of political ideologies and affecting both major political parties. I think the source of this is in the US educational system, and the celebrants will turn out to be students and alumni of elite universities, or at least wannabes. It always bothered me from my time as an undergraduate at one such that the subtext of the whole elite-school admissions rat race was to pound into the winners, ...

I was puzzled when, as of last night, all the FBI had released was satatements that they'd detained and released two persons of interest and were asking for support from the public. But heck, I'm just a guy who watches true crime on TV, and I know that's not how this works. This is 2025 on a college campus. I remember 20 years ago listening to students at my alma mater bellyache about having to swipe key cards to get in and out of their dorm buildings. Even then, I had to swipe key cards to get in and out of my hotel rooms, and in fact there was consensus that this was improved security. Now, I'm sure it's at least ten times worse. Cameras are everywhere, lobbies, hallways, elevators, outside. And as best anyone can tell, this guy got onto a roof to make the shot. How did he get onto a roof? I doubt if just anyone goes up some stairs and out onto the roof of a multi-story college building. At least what we're being told this morning finally suggests law en...

🚨 UPDATE: Scott Bessent is DEMANDING the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a LOT to make up for their total inaction following a major jobs revision. "If the Fed says they're data dependent and the data has been atrocious, then it seems like there are probably some makeup… pic.twitter.com/L7M80tGUQC — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 9, 2025 So far, only Byron York at the Washington Examiner grasps the importance of yesterday's revelation: The Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised the number of jobs it says were created in the year between April 2024 and March 2025. Until now, the official line was that the economy created 1.758 million jobs in that period. Now, the BLS says only 847,000 jobs were created, less than half what was originally thought. That is a stunning downward revision of 911,000 jobs. The new numbers upended much of what everyone, regardless of political party, thought about the economy. Democrats maintained that President Joe Biden...

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...