In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Trying to bring myself up to date on the history of modern Israel yesterday, I ran into the British Mandate for Palestine : In Palestine, the Mandate required Britain to put into effect the Balfour Declaration's "national home for the Jewish people" alongside the Palestinian Arabs, who composed the vast majority of the local population. . . . The British controlled Palestine for almost three decades, overseeing a succession of protests, riots and revolts between the Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities. . . . The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was passed on 29 November 1947; this envisaged the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states operating under economic union, and with Jerusalem transferred to UN trusteeship. . . . After the failure of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, the 1947–1949 Palestine war ended with Mandatory Palestine divided among Israel, the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank and the Egyptian All-Palestine Prot...

I've been noticing that opposition to the Iran attacks from the right stem to some extent from both the Evangelical and Roman Catholic conservative wings. This certainly isn't to say that all Evangelicals or conservative Catholics oppose the Iran attacks, but certainly there's a strain of this in both movements. For instance the comments on Edward Feser's post that I discussed Monday seemm to agree heavily with Feser that "just war doctrine" can't apply to the US-Israeli attacks on Iran. Feser says in the thumbnail on his blog that he writes "from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective", although he has recently attracted the attention of generally conservative Archbishop of Los Angeles José Gomez for being "too controversial", which ought at least to suggest an elment of caution should be involved. But this comment on Feser's post from Saturday raises intriguing questions about how "conservative" those who agree w...

I was idly listening to some UK commentary on Saturday's decapitation strike on Iran , and it convinced me that just about everyone is missing the point. The UK government has continued to tread a delicate diplomatic line by avoiding explicit support for the US and Israeli strikes on Iran while condemning Iran’s “indiscriminate” attacks on other countries. . . . The Greens and the Liberal Democrats have both denounced the military action taken by the US and Iran as illegal. . . . As strikes on Tehran continued, the Sunday Times reported that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had blocked the USA from using British air bases to launch attacks on legal grounds. Healey repeatedly batted back questions this morning on whether he believed the strikes were legal, saying that “we didn’t participate”. But by March 1, Starmer had sorta-kinda changed his position : But Iran is striking British interests nonetheless, and putting British people at huge risk, along with our...

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...