In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The best point about the fallout from the final tranche of Epstein files was made by Eric Florack at PJ Medioa last week: Backfire: Epstein Files Hitting Everyone Except The Left's Original Target . If anything, one of the documents released by the Justice Department went further to exonerate Trump : CNBC reports Trump personally called the then-Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter “to tell him ‘thank goodness you’ [are] stopping [Epstein], everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Reiter told the FBI in October 2019, according to the FBI document, known as a 302. The document stated whistleblower Trump “was one of the very first people to call” the police when word spread Epstein was under investigation. . . . The outlet notes, “Reiter’s name is redacted from the 302. But the document identifies the interview subject as the person who had been Palm Beach’s police chief at the time of the department’s investigation of Epstein, who was Reiter.” Reiter told the Miami ...

The controversy over Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who survived the sinking of a small boat carrying Cuban refugees to Florida in 1999, reminded me of the US Left's attachment to the Castro regime, which had apparently gone undiminished over four decades. At the time, it struck me as an incongruous artifact from the late 1950s. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Why did US intellectuals like C Wright Mills support Castro?" It answered, C. Wright Mills and other US intellectuals supported the 1959 Cuban Revolution, viewing it as a, non-Stalinist, anti-imperialist, and "New Left" alternative to both US corporate capitalism and Soviet bureaucratic communism. Mills believed the revolution represented a "human socialism" emerging from the Third World, not from existing Communist parties. It appears that this fantasy of the Castro regime persisted within the US Left despite the clear movement of the revolution toward Marxism-Leninism from the start : ...

Deep into yet another cataleptic holiday weekend, Michael Lebron, a legal analyst, sometime conspiracy theorist, and standup comic who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, has come up with the best summary of the so far two-week-long hysteria over Savannah Guthrie's mother's disappearance. At 15:00 in the video embedded above, What does this sound like to you? Distraction! Distraction! Look the other way! Look over here! Hey, isn't this wild? You think you undestand? Oh, here's a new fact! That'll get you going for a week. Yeah, news. Send all your crews, all your people, over here. Yeah, don't worry about what's going on with Epstein, don't worry about Pam Bondi. . . Over the past week, as of Wednesday , A person was detained for questioning Tuesday in the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, hours after the FBI released surveillance videos of a masked person wearing a handgun holster outside her front door the night she vanished from her Ari...

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 ...