In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Not long ago , In a watershed moment, on February 3, 2026, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) issued an official position statement recommending that a key step of “gender-affirming” care—surgical intervention—be delayed until the patient is “at least 19 years old.” The recommendation against performing gender-affirming procedures in minors extends to all types of gender-related surgeries, including breast/chest, genital, and facial surgeries. However, the ASPS statement goes much farther than merely advising surgeons to delay surgery. It raises serious evidentiary and ethical concerns about the entire gender-affirming treatment pathway for youth, including social transition, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones. Via The Wall Street Journal , Suffering from anxiety, depression, disordered eating and social phobia, [Fox Varian] received a gender dysphoria diagnosis at age 15 and had her breasts removed at 16. . . . In a historic medical malpractice t...

You know something has morphed into pure conventional wisdom when it turns up at Real Clear Politics: The singularity is going viral . The title links a meaningless hypostatization, "the singularity", with a cliche, "going viral". For starters, I asked Chrome AI mode to define "singularity", and I think it did about as good a job as can be done with a very amorphous term: A singularity is a point where existing rules or models break down because a value has become "infinite" or undefined. While the term originates in mathematics, it is most commonly used today in two very different contexts: astrophysics and technology. . . . The core idea is that an upgradable intelligent agent (like an AI) could enter a "positive feedback loop" of self-improvement. Each new, more intelligent version would be able to redesign itself even faster, leading to an explosion of superintelligence that far surpasses all human capability. . . . Fu...

The illustration above is a panel from Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco's Epic of American Civilization series on the reserve reading room walls of Dartmouth's Baker Library. I saw it with the other parts frequently as an undergraduate, but this one in particular, entitled "Anglo-America", didn't make much of an impression on me at the time -- at best, I thought it might represent the artist's respect for the prosperity and organizational genius of his neighbors to the north. Now that I revisit it, I have a sense of his profound discomfort. I think a very similar sense lies behind the controversy over Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show -- there's an unsettling sense that corporate elites have signed onto the idea that America is "too white", or at least too Anglo, and, well, maybe too male and too straight as well. Here's Rolling Stone's take : Here’s a rather essential fact about the guy some conservatives tried to ...

As usual. Glenn Reynolds shilled his latest New York Post column on Instapundit this morning: What if AIs set out to conquer the world . . . with love? His most unintentionally insightful observation: [L]et’s face it, you don’t need a 120,000 IQ to fool humans. Or even a 120 one. If I had to guess, as I've said before, I'd put that man's own IQ at not much higher than 120 himself, allowing for his Yale Law degree and that he passed a bar exam, but in most areas, he's just not that smart. As I pointed out the other day, he believes in Ray Kurzweil's Technological Singularity, in which individual human consciousnesses will upload into a giant computer by 2045 or so (or something like that), but in case that doesn't happen, he has a contract with Alcor to freeze (or "vitrify") his head upon his death, because at some point in the future, "science" will have found a way to resuscitate his brain and bring his body back to life. Somehow ...

Here's one question that's been bugging me for several days: someone at Savannah Guthrie's level must be surrounded by an army of agents, lawyers, publicists, image consultants, and so forth, retained by both her and NBC. Some of these people must also be able to double as crisis managers, since someone in that position is likely to have some type of public "crisis" at any time, whether it be family dispute, serious illness, infidelity, divorce, DUI, shoplifting arrest, whatever, these are people who are skilled at keeping you out of the news or getting you into it as needed. The biggest dog that isn't barking here is that there's no evidence of a professional publicist-cum-crisis-manager invovled in this whole hinky kidnapping story. But let's leave aside Savannah's status as a national media figure. Even a prosperous middle-class family is typically advised to have a trusted family spokesperson, maybe a good friend who's also a lawyer, ...

Todsy's post was delaywd due to network issues. As investigators continue to find nothing new in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping, amid non-stop breathless coverage that might have been custom designed by Savannah's and NBC's publicists, Fox News interviews Former NYPD officer Tom Smith at 2:50 in the video above and actually asks some real questions: Q: Can you say now with certainty that these ransom notes are authentic, or could they still be fraudulent? A: Oh, they could definitely still be fraudulent. I'm not sold on them 100% at all. . . . When you have a kidnapping, kidnappings are quick. Get them, negotiate, give me the money, get the person back. That's how kidnappings happen, because even the perpetrators don't want to hold onto the victims too long, because that enables police to track them down quicker. So the length of time is concerning. And how much deadline after deadline after deadline is going on, so it's sort of desperation as well....

Andy Ngo writes in The New York Post, The anti-ICE activists are an insurgency, not a protest movement : On Saturday, the Democratic Socialists of America celebrated hitting 100,000 members. Almost on cue, their footprint in organizing anti-ICE so-called “protests” continues to grow. But these are not protests. They are coordinated obstruction campaigns modeled on the playbook of revolutionary insurgency inspired by violent revolutions. That much is clear from the latest reporting in The California Post, documenting how militant far-left activists from the Golden State are advising radicals in New York on the latest tactics for sabotaging federal immigration operations. But also yesterday , Immigrant groups have a message for their mostly White allies: Quit blowing the whistle on ICE. Fox News Digital has reviewed days of messages inside Signal chat rooms that reveal that a new internal feud has erupted inside the anti-ICE protest industry, pitting immigrant-led or...