In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I was all ready to talk about The Washington Post this morning, when I ran into this at Instapundit : Glenn Reynolds shills a Substack essay proposing that "the Singularity" is already here. He begins by citing Ray Kurzweil. At best, Kurzweil is an idiot savant , posssibly a brilliant inventor, but also, according to Wikipedia , a believer in freezing his body aftrer death in hopes of having it resuscitated at some future point: Kurzweil has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. After his death, he has a plan to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him. As of 2005, Reynolds was a big fan of this quackery, enthusiastically promoting the work of both Kurzweil and Aubrey de Gray , a promoter of human lifespan extension. According to the Wikipedia link, De Grey is a cryonicist, having signed up with Alcor. When...

Let's start with just one data item, the Real Clear Politics Trump approval average from yesterday . Trump's approval is 42.8%, his disapproval is 54.6%. The polls that make up the average range from the high 30s to 50% approval in one case, so RCP loads them all together, no matter the differences in methodology and bias, and gets an arithmetic mean, which I'm increasingly convinced is garbage in-garbage out. Below the numeric totals are several graphs showing Trump's overall approval trends, but I'm intrigued by the one that shows his first-term approvals. By the end of 2020, his approval was roughly 40%, while his disapproval was roughly 57%, which might explain why he "lost" that election -- except now we're beginning to learn that over 300,000 votes in Fulton County, Georgia are in question. He lost Georgia overall by only 11,779 votes. If equivalent questionable results in other states like Michigan and Arizona make the overall outcome of the...

In yesterday's post, and in this one last month , I demonstrated how easy it is to get an AI bot to generate prose that would otherwise be written by a human writing to formula like Victor Davis Hanson or Robert Reich. In my thinking, I've routinely taken this farther: there should be no reason for any paper to pay a weather reporter to write chirpy, cliche-ridden predictions of the day's weather. Just set up a bot to print that out (blue skies this morning, but take an umbrella!) at the time of day needed, and you've saved a high five-figure salary right there. But this brings me to Salem Media, until recently characterized as a "conservative media powerhouse", except that its financial performance has been poor, it's been unloading important properties like Regnery Publishing, and last April, Donald Trump Jr and Lara made a big investment with the idea of bringing them back: Today, Salem announces a historic, multi-dimensional de...

Over the weekend, a word popped into my head that I hadn't heard since graduate school: bovarysme . Bovarysme is a term derived from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), coined by Jules de Gaultier in his 1892 essay on Flaubert's novel, " Le Bovarysme, la psychologie dans l’œuvre de Flaubert ". It denotes a tendency towards escapist daydreaming in which the dreamer imagines themself to be a hero or heroine in a romance, whilst ignoring the everyday realities of the situation. The eponymous Madame Bovary is an example of this. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are anti-ICE demonstrations an example of bovarysme?" The reply says to me that AI is not stupid -- I doubt if more than a tiny percentage of four-year degree holders could give this answer: Bovarysme is a literary term derived from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. It refers to a tendency toward escapist daydreaming where an individual imagines themselves as a heroic or ro...

On Patrol: Live with its earlier incarnation, Live PD , has been a major indicator of which way the political winds are blowing for law enforcement, especially since the show was off the air for more than two years following the George Floyd riots, despite the fact that it's reliably been a top show in its time slot. Its host, Dan Abrams, is a solid legacy media figure who was able to engineer the show's return, but it should never be forgotten he's legacy media through and through. It's genesrally recognized, though seldom explicitly stated, that as the show switches among ride-along vignettes from nine or ten departments each week, the producers generally do not feature scenes involving dead bodies, excesssive blood, nudity, or other situations that could be particularly disturbing. I've also noticed, though Abrams has never said explicitly, that the producers have seemed to avoid scenes involving illegal migrants identified as such, or inded any mention of t...

Wow. In the Epstein emails DOJ dropped, Jeffrey sent himself emails memorializing a fight he had with Bill Gates. In it he says that Bill Gates got STD’s from Russian hookers, and then asked Jeffrey for antibiotics that Bill could secretly give to Melinda without her noticing. 😳 pic.twitter.com/XNA0vNWTcI — Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) January 30, 2026 As far as I can see, the takeaway frpom the latest tranche of Epstein files is that Trump and Epstein were part of the social scene in both New York and Palm Beach, and as a result, their paths sometimes crossed, especially because Epstein was always a wannabe, while Trump was much more authentic. Epstein made occasional half-hearted efforts to ingratiate himself with Trump, but he always pretty much knew they wouldn't get anywhere. CNN has a detailed summary , from which we can garner typical examples: One of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims told the FBI that his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell once “presented her” ...

From Tom Homan's presss conference this morning at 12:00 in the video embedded above: One thing we all agreed on was that US Customs and Border Protrection is a legitimate law enforcement agency and has a duty to support the laws enactged by Congress and keep this community safe. Like I've said many times for the last several years, even before this administration, jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities are sanctuaries for criminals. Sanctury cities are sanctuaries for criminals. . . . To be clear, we did not agree with Minnmesota state and local officials that they would be involved in federal immigration enforcement. I didn't ask them to be immigration officers. I'm asking them to be cops working with cops to take criminal sliens off the street. What we did agree upon was not to release public safety risks back into the cummunity when they could be lawfully transferred to ICE. . . . I'm also pleased to announce ...