In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Last summer ( here , here , and here ) I looked at how the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser treated what he calls "just war doctrine" as it relates to the B-2 mission to bomb Iran's nuclear program and the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan. What's increasingly troubled me about his reasoning is that he never quite spells out exactly what comprises "just war doctrine" in his arguments. He continues not to do this in a post on his blog from Saturday, The U.S. war on Iran is manifestly unjust . Instead, he cites piecemeal paraphrases, like The war clearly does not meet just war conditions. First, the U.S. cannot claim a just cause. . . . The war also does not meet the “lawful authority” condition of just war. . . . For a war to be morally legitimate, that there are realistic prospects of success must be established before the fact, and a lucky break cannot retroactively make just what was entered into unjustly. In...

Epstein's relationship with Kathryn Ruemmler, a former close confidante of Barack Obama as White House counsel and subsequently chief counsel at Goldman Sachs, came to light only in the last tranche of Epstein files released by the Justice Department in January. Referring to sources behind paywalls, Chrome AI Mode says "Ruemmler and Epstein reportedly swapped approximately 11,300 emails between 2014 and 2019, with The Economist reporting they exchanged direct messages on roughly 70% of days during that period." Once the extent of this relationship became known, she almost immediately resigned as chief counsel at Goldman Sachs, although this is not to take effect until June (given the way these deals work, she may well have already cleaned out her office). This makes her the eighth propminent woman to have had such a complex, ambiguous relationship with Epstein, It's likely that they were lovers, while Ruemmler's connections with the Obama administration, the ...

🚨 BREAKING: After listening to testimony from Bill Clinton, Rep. Luna says she believes Jeffrey Epstein was running an "INTELLIGENCE-GATHERING OPERATION" She's also calling on four co-conspirators who are being falsely called "victims" to be subpoenaed: - Lesley Groth -… pic.twitter.com/iRHPOItJ93 — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) February 27, 2026 Rep Anna Paulina Luna asks a good basic question in the video embedded above, which I'll interpret as, "Precisely what was Epstein's grift?" She suggests it was an intelligence operation, but so far, Alan Dershowitz's informed view is that if Epstein had actually been a spy, he never would have gone to prison. But Rep Luna raises the issue of what Epstein's various women associates were there for, and that's a question worth pursuing. She lists four names, all of which I've covered in past posts here, Lesley Groth ( December 14, 2021 ), Nadia Marcinkova ( December 13, 2021 ), Adria...

What's puzzling about the whole Epstein affair is that in the US, it's looking like the last few reluctant pops of a batch of popcorn, while in the UK and Norway, it's buildng to a frenzy it never remotely reached in the US. Over the past week here, A board member of Beta Technologies resigned because he was mentioned somewhere in the last document dump Lawrence Summers resigned his last paid faculty gig at Harvard , having long since been fingered as an Epstein crony Hillary Clinton says "ask my husband" about any Epstein questions, while insiders worry Bill himself could "have a Biden moment" in his own testimony. But in the old country, it's become a much bigger deal: Former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland was hospitalized following a suicide attempt days after being charged with "gross corruption" for his part in the Epstein scandal World Economic Forum CEO Børge Brende, another Norwegian, is res...

Now Bill Gates is undertaking a belated crisis management program, although the damage from his association with Epstein, as well as his sexual harassment of subordinates at Microsoft and his divorce, was done several years ago, and as more comes out from the latest tranche of Epstein files, the cleanup job just gets harder. The poor guy is just a creep. More than a year ago, February 1, 2025, he published a ghostwritten memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings , which as far as I can tell almost nobody noticed who wasn't paid to notice it. I asked Chrome AI Mode, which on the whole I think is quite a good product, better than Grok or ChatGPT, which charge for features Chrome provides for free, "Who was Bill Gates's ghostwriter in Source Code ?" It answered, Bill Gates's memoir, Source Code, was written with the assistance of Rob Guth. Guth is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who now works for Gates. Gates has described their collaborative process ...

A week or two ago, I was reading that the ongoing crisis over Andrew's relationship with Epstein was "the worst for the royals since 1936", referring to the events that led to Edward VIII's abdication over his intent to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Although there were rumors of Edward's intent prior to the crisis, without belaboring details, the entire matter was resolved in a ten-day period that December after it finally reached the press on December 1. Having abdicated on Deceember 10 in favor of his brother Albert, who became George VI, he left the country on December 12, and everything was over, long live the King. But as I noted the other day, the Andrew-Epstein scandal first reached the press in 2011, 15 years ago. It seems pretty clear that the royal family, the government, and the family's own advisers never anticipated how the matter would fester. In fact, in recent days in the UK (and Norway as well), having largely blown over in ...

More or less buried in yesterday's headlines: BREAKING: US played role in death of top Mexican cartel head: Mexican dept of defense White House Now Confirms, U.S. Provided Intelligence Support for Mexico's Jalisco Cartel Strike Now this morning: Trump quietly got Mexico to hand over 100 cartel leaders — including El Mencho’s brother — before Jalisco raid In other words, not only did the US provide intelligence to the Mexican army to catch El Mencho, it somehow transplanted the backbone into President Sheinbaum to get her to order it done. This goes a step or two beyond Woodrow Wilson's "I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men" or even his Mexican Punitive Expedition of 1916. Trump is telling Latin Americans to fix it or else . Though initially hesitant to cooperate with American forces and crack down on the cartels, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has adopted a tougher stance towards the crimin...