In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The value of a college education : In a new research brief, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education found that only 44 percent of American high school students expected to earn a bachelor’s degree in 2022, down from 72 percent in 2002. The study also revealed a parental gap among high school students, with only 33 percent of first-generation students aspiring to a bachelor’s degree in 2022, compared to 60 percent two decades earlier. . . . Historically, the prestige of higher education relied on a form of geographic and information monopoly. In 2002, the narrative surrounding a teenager’s future was tightly managed by local gatekeepers—parents, high school guidance counselors, and FCC-regulated television networks that uniformly reinforced the traditional American Dream. If these gatekeepers insisted that a bachelor’s degree was the sole gateway to a middle-class life, a teenager had few tools to verify or challenge that claim. The cultural value of the...

The more I read or see reviews of Disclosure Day , the more I wonder if Steven Spielberg's head is stuck somewhere in the 1970s, or maybe his private fantasy of the 1970s. This review has two insightful points; first: Disclosure Day is a movie that is hanging on to the value of legacy media, with the overarching journey trying to get the stolen footage on network television. There’s an archaic quaintness to this, and it’s a willful one, as O’Connor’s whistleblower seems heavily inspired by Wikileaks, so Spielberg and Koepp know the internet exists. The reason for the focus on network television may be entirely functional - the movie needs a ticking clock. It has two - Wardex chasing our heroes as they try to release the footage and WWIII brewing in the background as North Korea starts acting up significantly. In other words, we're back to Woodward, Bernstein, and "Deep Throat", using the white hats at the Washington Post to catch the Nixon administrati...

🚨 JUST IN: Outrage erupts after a 17-YEAR-OLD GIRL was ST*BBED in broad daylight in England These ANIMALS feel emboldened! The 17YO is now being treated in the hospital after major wounds to her neck 🙏🏻 The animal, 30, is "suspected" of attempted murderer IT'S GETTING OUT… pic.twitter.com/p7KgWwTdaH — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 12, 2026 A more complete story is at legacy BBC : A girl who was stabbed in the neck as she walked down the street has been released from hospital. The 17-year-old was attacked as she walked along Wood Street in Brierfield, Lancashire, at about 15:00 BST on Friday. A 30-year-old, described by Lancashire Police as a British man of Pakistani heritage, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder of the teenager, who the BBC understands is also of Pakistani heritage. "This was a very serious incident but thankfully the girl's injuries were not life-threatening," a police spokesman said. This seems not to have...

I asked the AI oracle, "Has Disclosure Day been getting bad reviews?"It answered, Yes, Steven Spielberg's sci-fi film Disclosure Day has been receiving a significant amount of mixed and negative reviews. While it has a decent audience score of roughly 75% on platforms like Rotten Tomatoes, critical reception has been polarizing. "Polarizing" is a polite word for it; a good example is the YouTube review embedded above, for which I can only give an extreme bad language warning. The Critical Drinker makes the point that the two big summer blockbusters released so far, The Mandalorian and Grogu and Disclosure Day , have been runnming behind a pair of low-budget horror flicks made by YouTubers, Obsession and Backrooms , although my barber says although Obsession is good, even Backrooms isn't worth the time and money. I haven't seen any of these, but I'll speculate on why nobody's interested in Disclosure Day . In some ways, t...

A recent piece at the Atlantic, How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi , asks, "Who broke Britain?" but it asserts that this somehow took place over just the past 18 years, specifically since the 2008 financial crisis: In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking. This is a remarkably short-sighted view. In 1982, the UK was, at enormous trouble and expense, and only with covert US help, able to reconquer the Falkland Islands with a naval task force. But even in 2008, this would have been unlikely; the three aircraft carriers that had played a key role in 1982 were in the process of being decommissioned, with no replacements planned. But the UK's decline had been in progress well before then. The inspiring utterances of two Royal Navy admirals...

I've been mentioning here the problem of the UK's social decorum and the extent to which the Starmer government and the legacy media have been exploiting it to minimize public frustration over the migration problem. A good example is in the video embedded above, in which at 1:45 the host features a woman who maintains that Stephen Ogilvie, the Belfast stabbing victim, was not only special-needs, but he had been working hard to help the Ugandan who stabbed him move in. In fact, the woman says, it wasn't just one Ugandan who attacked Ogilvie, it was two; one of them escaped when the crowd moved in to help Ogilvie, but he was never caught. Skeptical of this narrative, I asked the AI oracle, "Had Stephen Ogilvie been helping the Sudanese who later stabbed him to move in?" Yesterday, it answered, "Yes, Stephen Ogilvie had been helping the Sudanese who later stabbed him to move in," but this morning, it had changed its mind and and said, "No, Stephe...

I woke up this morning to news of an anti-migrant riot in Belfast, with organized groups of Northern Irish deliberately setting out to burn the homes of migrants : Protesters had been advised to dress in all-dark clothes, and to mask up: rather than hosting the carnival of livestreamers accompanying many such anti-migrant events in England and the Irish Republic, tonight was to be serious business. What violence there was, rather than aimlessly directed at the police, was to be coldly and carefully targeted against individual migrant homes. This is an intriguing development that deserves its own discussion, which I'll take up separately. But it comes in the context of a remarkable cluster of knife-attack news: The demonstrations in the UK following the conviction of Henry Nowak's Southampton murderer A homeless man slashed five people in New York's Penn Station on Sunday Decarlos Brown Jr, accused of stabbing Iryna Zarutska to death on a Charlo...