In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Late last month, information leaked that Mikie Sherrill, a US congresswoman and candidate for New Jersey governor, had been somehow caught up in the 1994 Naval Academy cheating scandal, which I've discussed here. Her original version as of September 25 was this: "There was a test at the school that was stolen," Sherrill said. "I did not realize it was stolen. I took the test... afterwards I knew what the rumor mill was... I didn't come forward with that information." No documents released or obtained by news outlets have shown that Sherrill was involved in the cheating, but because she did not report her classmates, she was not permitted to walk at graduation. However, on October 9, she appeared to modify this story, indicating that she had in fact spoken to inveatigators : “There were hundreds of people in my class that spoke to investigators. When I did, I told them what I knew,” she told reporters after her second debate when asked about ...

In Sunday's post, I began to think about the role of public space in a well-ordered society, and it brought me back to what I've recognized for several years: there's an ongoing battle over who controls it. Remarks in 2021 by former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva brought the issue into focus: “Public space belongs to the entire public, not to one individual. And that is the fundamental responsibility of government. That’s the fundamental failure of the Board of Supervisors, L.A. City Council and the mayor of L.A. — they have refused to regulate public space,” Villanueva said Monday. “And that is why the problem is growing exponentially year after year.” The particular problem was that the Venice boardwalk, a feature of a city beach area, had become a space for homeless encampments, which due to filth and antisocial behavior had driven out ordinary citizens who had expected to visit for recreation. In effect, the local authorities had abdicated their responsibil...

On Monday, Israeli Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana called Trump a "giant of Jewish history". Now, I've been though a couple of Old Testament surveys and Fr Schmitz's Bible in a Year, and the only comparable non-Jew I can think of who would get that designation is Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who conquered Babylon and issued a decree permitting the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple, ending the Babylonian exile. In fact, Ohana said this: Mr. President, you stand before the people of Israel not as another American president, but as a giant of Jewish history — one for whom we must look back, two and a half millennia into the mists of time to find a parallel, in Cyrus the Great. In other words, I think it's a real mistake to underestimate Trump. And reading analyses of how Trump brought about the Hamas agreement, I keep thinking about the business school article I've mentioned here several times that makes the point that Trump...

For some time, I dismissed the female Archbishop of Canterbury and the near-simultaneous graffiti installation at Canterbury Cathedral as irrelevant -- the Church of England itself probably became irrelevant around the time C S Lewis died (November 22, 1963); the great uncle of the current Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church abdicated over whether he should marry a divorced woman, a religious issue that never remotely disqualified his grandnephew, whose marital situation was identical. In fact, there was a time when designating a woman bishop of any sort would have been the province of medieval Lords of Misrule. If it's done now with even a faded aura of seriousness is an indication of how things have changed -- but this isn't the world proletarian revolution that loomed over the leisiured class for more than a century. Communist regimes dynamited churches. The 1911 Mexican revolution aimed to destroy the Catholic Church. The current revolution doesn...

Judge Immergut's temporary restraining order a week ago prohibiting Trump from deploying the National Guard to protect the ICE facility in Portland has disappeared from the news, probably because the issues are complex, but they mostly favor Trump. On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals placed an administrative hold on the case prior to hearing arguments on Thursday. Via the Oregon Capital Chronicle , U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut. . . granted the restraining order against Oregon Guard deployment on Saturday, saying the Trump administration had not made the case that a “rebellion” was taking place at the protests outside the ICE facility. A stay would prevent Immergut’s order from taking effect, but because of a second, broader restraining order she issued Sunday that has not yet been appealed, federal troops still couldn’t be deployed. Via Oregon Public Broadcasting , Federal law allows the president to deploy Guard members...

The headline of an Atlantic story on the Portland Antifa protests a week ago was Portland’s ‘War Zone’ Is Like Burning Man for the Terminally Online . The subhead is. "There’s more absurdity than menace on the city’s streets—at least for now." Most of it is behind a paywall, but this much is visible to a non-subscriber: In the days since Donald Trump directed his “Secretary of War” to marshal troops against “domestic terrorists” in Portland, Oregon, encouraging the use of “full force” in a city he likened to a “war zone,” I have been hanging around the demonstration that the president wants to crush. What I’ve found is an atmosphere that is more like a carnival than combat. By some accounts, this all started back in June, when a group of friends decided to pitch a tent outside an ICE facility in the city. “I was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah! Occupation against deportation! Let it begin, bitches!’” Andy Siebe, who has cropped, caramel-color hair and thin, rounded stumps for tee...

Through this link , The Restoration of America Foundation (ROAF) is a watchdog providing transparency of the nation’s military academies’ oversight boards. It issued a report on this past September's meeting of the US Naval Academy's Board of Visitors (equivalent to a civilian college or university's board of trustees), which included a presentation by Dean of Admissions Bruce Latta: Latta has been in the position for over 20 years, including when USNA was sued in 2023 for using race-based admissions practices. Latta told the BOV that race, ethnicity and sex were never considered in determining qualification for admissions. That assertion contradicts Latta’s court deposition and evidence in the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) case against USNA. In SFFA Latta said, "If USNA was prohibited from considering race or ethnicity (across all minority groups) as one of many nondeterminative factors, I expect that USNA's class of admitted midshipmen woul...