In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I had a lengthy post here giving what was known at the time about the stabbing of Henry Nowak, an 18‑year‑old British university student, by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old British Sikh, in Southampton, UK. At the time, although policy required that the circumstances of the stabbing, Digwa's arrest, and Nowak's treatment by local police be investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the IOPC was leaking to the UK Guardian that this would be perfunctory : The Guardian understands the IOPC has found no indication of any disciplinary or criminal offence by the officers involved after six months of inquiries, after it was referred to the watchdog in December. Hampshire police said of four officers involved, three remained on full duties and one has resigned. But as of yesterday, things seem to have changed : The two police officers who handcuffed Henry Nowak as he lay dying from stab wounds have been placed under investigation for gross misconduct ...

Last week, The Atlantic ran a piece, Higher Ed Is Very Sorry: Universities are studying how they lost the public’s trust : Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. The disdain has become so difficult to ignore that, over the past year, several universities and higher-education organizations set out to study how they lost the public’s trust—and how they might restore it. The most insightful of theae studies appears to be from Yale: The report, released in April, is nominally about Yale, but it could just as well be about the Ivy League in general. It identifies three main areas where elite universities have fallen short. First, according to the report, these schools lost trust because of their convoluted pricing system; many set exorbitant tuition a...

Over the past two weeks, tne National Geographic Channel ran the four-part BBC series Titanic Sinks Tonight , which has its own Wikipedia entry . This is a peculiar new iteration of the Titanic story from the UK side of the Atlantic; the US version tends to concentrate on the "pride" side of the story in songs like "Down With the Old Canoe", while the UK version tends toward hand-wringing over things like the class system, wealth, and so forth. Per Wikipedia, The series places emphasis on the social class and sex of the passengers, as well as the perceived mistakes by those in command. The BBC definitely wrings its hands. It's worth noting that of the six talking heads who offer commentary on the action, four are women. Of the women, one is an apparently mandatory non-white, Somali-born novelist Nadifa Mohamed, whose unsmiling face seems to be there chiefly as buzzkill. That they would need to provide an African perspective on the story is incongruous ...

Back in 2024, I had several posts on the problems that Haitians on temporary protected status were causing in Springfield, OH, including one on Gov DeWine's support for the program . In this post , I outlined how the mayor profited by renting apartments he owned to Haitians, and that he and DeWine appeared together in a press conference demanding that then-candidate Trump stop making "false allegations" against them. However, at least so far, there's no evidence that DeWine has profited personally from the program. Nevertheless, in the wake of Thursday's Supreme Court ruling that allows Trump to end temporary protected status for Haitians, DeWine prominently disagreed, although he simply repeated the same 2024 talking points in the CNN interview embedded above: It is not in the United States's interest, certainly not in Ohio's interest, to have people who are working every single day, who are supporting a family, who are buying houses, startin...

A piece by Fred Fleitz, former chief of staff at the National Security Coluncil under Trump 45, in American Greatness : In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have repeatedly struck oil refineries in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moscow’s main refinery in Kapotnya was hit twice in a single week in mid-June, sparking massive fires that sent thick plumes of black smoke billowing over the capital and disrupting fuel supplies and airport operations. . . . These attacks are much more than symbolic. They are precision strikes that target the economic engine funding Putin’s war machine. At the same time, Russian forces have suffered catastrophic losses—estimates now exceed 1.3 million casualties (killed, wounded, and missing), with Ukrainian General Staff figures approaching 1.4 million as of late June 2026 and independent Western assessments confirming well over a million. . . . Russia’s spring–summer offensive has stalled. In April 2026, Russian forces recorded a net loss of territory ...

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, ...