In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In the second half of 2025, and continuing into February of this year, Trump sponsored a major effort to settle the Ukrane war : Since mid-November 2025, there has been a renewed diplomatic push to secure a peace agreement in Ukraine. Fresh rounds of talks were prompted by reports that US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart, Kirill Dmitriev, had been working on a 28-point peace plan. . . . Many of the proposals outlined in the plan are not new. They prompted concern among Ukraine and its European allies that the plan was overly favourable to Russia and that it reiterated Russia’s maximalist demands for resolving the conflict, including the ceding of territory. Following talks in Geneva between the US, Ukraine and European allies on 23 and 24 November 2025, a new deal was reported to be on the table. Details of that revised plan have not been made public, but it is thought to be based on European counterproposals that limit Russian gains. . . . Three rou...

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German ex-physicist who several years ago got frustrated with the academic environment, dropped out, and became a full-time YouTube commentator on general science issues. Her commentary on AI is provocative, but I'm not sure if it's entirely well-informed, and it has the problem of trying to talk about an abstraction as if it's something concrete, in other words, hypostatization. (This was my hobby horse when I taught freeshman comp half a cenrury ago.) At 1:13, she says, The future is not everyone gets a genius assistant. The future is your genius assistant is currently unavailable, because billionaires are using it to optimize tax avoidance. The artificially intelligent systems we currently have are just about to become useful in some domains like coding and text-based tasks. They're still far away from humanlike general intelligence, but we'll get there. . . . Large language models have serious shortcomings. Most importantly, ...

The current crisis in the UK is turning out to be a sort of backhand civics lesson for those of us in the US. The UK parliamentary system basically provides for a single set of elections to the House of Commons every five years, unless the prime minister asks the king to call an election, which the king must then do. The prime minister can nevertheless call for an election at any time if he thinks it might strengthen his position, or if he loses a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons. As of now, the five-year term until the next mandatory election doesn't expire until August 2029, but there are clearly issues in the UK that ought to be resolved by a general election before then, especially migration, even-handed prosecution of migrant crime, and accountability for the decades-long grooming gang scandal. In the US, regular two-year elections for the House of Representatives, along with four-year presidential elections and staggered six-year Senate terms, serve as regular ...

Temperature check: just three years ago , In mid-May [2023], the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team invited an activist LGBTQ+ drag troupe called the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” whose members are known for dressing in drag resembling the black-and-white habits of Catholic nuns, to appear at the team’s annual Pride event next month. The group’s members, it’s worth noting, use various sexual and blasphemous stage names that really don’t bear repeating. They annually host a “Foxy Mary and Hunky Jesus” contest on Easter Sunday — the holiest day of the year for Christians. According to Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron, who previously served as an auxiliary bishop in L.A., this year’s performance included one performer using the cross in a pole-dancing routine. . . . A public outcry from leaders of the Catholic Church prompted the Dodgers to rescind their plans to honor the group with a “Community Hero Award,” as initially announced. But the Dodgers caved to progressive voices a...

This was Trump's remark the other day about Keir Starmer. But here's my question: were we ever dealing with Winston Churchill? YouTube toff Jacob Rees-Mogg in the clip embedded above characterizes Churchill as "one of the great heroes of our country". He lists several others, including Elizabeth I, William Pitt the younger, Lord Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington, but he concludes, "the greatest hero of them all has to be Churchill". Just yesterday, Keith Humphreys in The Washington Monthly referred nostalgically to the UK election of 1924: Consider some political history. In the 24th year of the century, the Labour Party won a third of the vote in the general election, a disastrous performance that cost it 40 seats and led to a further descent into minority status. That was the nature of British politics in 1924, whereas in 2024 a comparable level of popularity with voters allowed Starmer-led Labour to gain 209 seats and achieve a stonking maj...

The alt aggregators were teasing Starmer's rumored Monday resignation, or at least his announcement of a transition plan, all weekend, but once the news dropped, only Breitbart had it . British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at times appeared on the verge of tears as he announced that he’d lost the confidence of the governing Labour Party and would resign, but nevertheless set a months-long departure period that will see him through to the end of the summer. The resignation of British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer could barely be heard in Downing Street as protesters outside the gate blasted Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ — the anthem of the European Union — as he spoke on Monday morning. Sir Keir boasted of the achievements he perceived he had made in office before setting out his timetable for departure, confirming he would remain on as caretaker Prime Minister during a summer-long leadership challenge. The best, though certainly not perfect, analysis I've seen is fro...

Prominent libertarian, transhumanist, law professor, and intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds has just run an essay on corruption in universities in the New York Post. I love it when professors stand up and loudly proclaim they're not like the bastards who run the place. The path to tenure is so crowded with choices to take the system or leave it that nobody who's made a career in the academy can claim to be without sin -- but let's leave that aside for now. Reynolds's latest brought back to mind his transhumanist faith, through which he's publicly acknowledged that he has a contract to have his head removed and frozen at the time of his putative "death", on rhe expectation that at some future date, Science will not only have developed a cure for what finally ailed him, but it will be able to thaw his frozen head out, resuscitate it, reattach it to a donor body, and presumably allow him to resume his tenured chair at the University of Tennessee Kn...