In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Every time a rich guy messes up his PR, I keep going back to Ivy Lee (1877-1934), the inventor of the field, who said, "Tell the truth, because sooner or later the public will find out anyway." He's credited with rehabilitating the Rockefeller family's reputation after thr publication of the muckraking History of the Standard Oil Company and the 1913-14 Colorado miners' strike, which culmnated in the Ludlow Massacre. (I've always thought Ida Tarbell's characterization of Rockefeller Sr is second only to Milton's Satan in Pardise Lost.) But to the Rockefellers' credit, Lee had to have something to work with. If they followed his advice and told the truth, after all, there had to be something good to tell the truth about. Sonehow, even if Ivy Lee were still around, Bill Gates wouldn't have been such a successful client. A Wall Street Journal piece reports Bill Gates Spent Years Crafting His Image. Now It’s Cracking . Bill Gate...

The latest polls are an illuminating vignette. There were a few polls in March that had incumbent Kasren Bass at abouit 25%, Mamdani clone Nithya Raman at between 9% and 17%, and Spencer Pratt trailing in the low double digits. There were no polls in April. All of a sudden, the pollsters got interested, and there were four polls in May; the big change is Pratt. Three of the polls put him at 22%, while one, McLaughlin, puts him at 30%, leading Bass by one point. All four put Bass in the mid-to-high 20s, while most have Pratt leading Raman, who is between 19% and 20%. The big difference between March and May is Pratt's momentum. The hurdle he has to overcome in the primary tomorrow is that he must finish in the top two and keep Bass from getting over 50%, in which case she would be elected mayor withut going to the November general election. This is his only possible strategy, since he himself doesn't have any serious chance of making 51% himself, at least as of now. But he...

The failure of Disney's latest Star Wars chapter, The Mandalorian and Grogu , has been a big story for weeks. For instance , The last time a S tar Wars movie under Disney ownership registered a low opening, it was 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story with an $84M 3-day, $103M 4-day and $153M WW (in like for likes). We bashed that result. The ambitious Star Wars expansion pic’s ticket sales were impacted by behind-the-scenes drama, in addition to the fact that Alden Ehrenreich was no Harrison Ford. Now, Disney’s latest Lucasfilm title, this weekend’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is opening lower with $81M 3-day and 4-day $98M U.S., lower than Solo: A Star Wars Story‘s domestic start. Global is at $167M WW with $69M from 51 offshore territories. The movie was made under the previous Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy, but it’s executive produced and co-written by Dave Filoni, who is the new co-Lucasfilm Head. Even worse, just this past week , The Mandal...

Elon Musk just put the entire university system on trial. Not the curriculum. Not the professors. The premise. Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.” For a thousand years,… pic.twitter.com/F5FS6lzlts — Shadow Intel (@TheShadowIntelX) May 22, 2026 Toward the end of my time as a graduate assistant -- more than 50 years ago, in fact -- the whole purpose of a four-year degree began to clear up for me. Those of us who were teaching freshman comp were acutely aware of how many of the papers we got were plagiarized, and it must have been not too far from 100%. The students were going through the motions of submitting them, we were going through the motions of grading them, and everyone expected an A. I finally got so fed up that I found an obvious case, and I started the formal process of bringing the student up on honors-code violations. This caused a major problem, such that my faculty ad...

A big story in yesterday's news was David Rush, characterized as a management-level CIA employee, but with no other specifics given, who was arrested last week with roughly $40 million in gold bars and currency that he's alleged to have embezzled from the agency. The New York Post asks the obvious question : Ex-CIA officer David Rush’s alleged years-long scheme that netted him $40 million in gold bars and a top-secret security clearance has those in the Clandestine Service community questioning how he slipped through the fastidious vetting process — and who else may be flying under the radar. Former CIA staff operations officer Tracy Walder was baffled over the stunning allegations against Rush and believes they could point to a much more troubling issue within the agency. “This would have been a large-scale lying cover-up. There would have had to be a lot of other co-conspirators,” Walder told The Post. Nevertheless, there have been other puzzling episodes that call...

It's too bad Pope Leo didn't take on space aliens in Magnifica Humanitas -- it's a question of technological misunderstanding not all that far from transhumanism, which he does discuss. But in any case, some crazy stuff has been coming out of the CIA lately, not least of which is the story of David Rush, the management-level spook who was busted with $40 million worth of gold bars in his home , which I'll likely get to tomorrow. But today, there's this : The Central Intelligence Agency attempted to use genealogy database sites in its search for aliens, a whistleblower claims. Dr. Jason Reza Jorjani told the “American Alchemy” podcast that Army veteran Lyn Buchanan informed him of an initiative in which the agency was exploring sites like 23andMe and Ancestry. Buchanan claimed he was a spy with the CIA’s Remote Viewing Program. “The CIA wants to hunt them down,” Jorjani stated, citing the program’s purpose of probing whether people could use extrasensor...

Last week, I posted a 30,000-foot view of how badly the California High Speed Rail project has fallen short of what was sold to the taxpayers in 2008. The version that legacy media now seems to accept without question is that the project has been trimmed to a "first phase" 171-mile segment between Bakersfield and Merced in the Central Valley, for instance here at the Fresno Bee from last February : Today, after years of delays and cost increases, the rail authority is required to focus on first completing a 171-mile Merced-to-Bakersfield route, which the agency is hoping to finish by 2032 at an estimated cost of $34.76 billion. However, it isn't clear where the 2032 completion date comes from. 2032 was an estimate for the completion of the whole LA-to-San Francisco project as of 2018, but as 0f 2022, there was no projected completion date for either the entire project or any segment. And this appears to be only the received version of the project that legac...