In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Via International News : UK leader Keir Starmer accused US tech tycoon Elon Musk on Thursday of "trying to whip up division" in Britain following anger over the police handling of the murder of a white student by a Sikh man. . . . Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has posted numerous times on the platform about the police response to the stabbing. In one, he falsely asked whether people knew that "official police policy requires them to be racist against Whites?" . . . Musk has offered to fund a private prosecution against the police over its handling of the murder and insulted the Hampshire Police force involved. UK legacy media has generally portrayed public criticism of police polices, especially from Musk, as "far right". From The Guardian : Musk is a regular poster of ethnonationalist content, and is a strong supporter of Restore Britain, the far-right party set up by Rupert Lowe, a former Reform UK MP. . . . In recent w...

Right now, I think I may be the only person who thinks the UK is in a serious constitutional crisis, or at least the only person who's writing about it. In this post a couple of weeks ago , I talked about the basic problem of the UK's constitutional monarchy, in which the sovereign is theoretically "above politics", but the monarch nevertheless opens parliament with a "king's speech" written for him by the prime minister outlining the government's legislative agenda. In that post, I noted the palace's extreme discomfort with any implication in the whole king's speech ritual that the king in any way supported the extremely unpopular Starmer government -- but there's only so much poor Charles can do to distance himself from His Majesty's Government. This is precisely the conundrum Thomas Jefferson, a really smart guy, exploited in the text of the Declaration of Independence: The history of the present King of...

For those who haven't been following the story, here are the basics of the Henry Nowak murder case, from Wikipedia : On 3 December 2025, Henry Nowak, an 18‑year‑old British university student, was murdered by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old British Sikh man, in Southampton, England. Digwa stabbed Nowak five times with a Sikh dagger [but see below], including a fatal wound to the chest. When police officers from Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary arrived, Digwa falsely accused Nowak of assault. Police body camera shows that Nowak repeatedly told the officers that he had been stabbed and pleaded that "I can't breathe," as the police handcuffed him. Nowak died shortly after being handcuffed. There's been a great deal of sloppy reporting on both sides of the pond, especially regarding the knife Digwa used, which is shown in the police photo above. Even the Wall Street Journal gets this wrong : This week, Digwa was sentenced to life in prison for mur...

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...