In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

For some resson, the Wall Street Journal put up a link on Facebooki to a piece they ran last April, What Happens When Europeans Find Out How Poor They Are? . Coming back to it today, I find they've tucked it back behind a paywall. But the first paragraphs give up the gravamen: Do Europeans understand how poor they are? And what will happen when they find out? Those are the Continent’s big political-economy questions for the next few years—perhaps decades. The widening gap between American and European prosperity is among the most important facts of the global economy. The clearest manifestation is the chasm in per capita gross domestic product: $94,400 in the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund, compared with $65,300 in Germany, $61,000 in the U.K. and $52,000 in France. I don't know what history books this fellow has been smoking -- I've gradually come to recognize I did well by not taking any undergraduate history courses -- but European and UK u...

Back in 2020, I posted about my first serious look at the Bourne franchise : The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever. Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha. A quick summary of the Bourne story as portrayed in the films is that David Webb, a former member of the US Army Delta Force, is recruited into a double-secret CIA program called Treadstone. This uses drugs, psychological manipulation, and elite-level special forces training to create super-assassins, who take out world political figures to furth...

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 ...