In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Vox writer Eric Levitz asks the perennial question: "Who counts as 'working class'" ? He gets things partly right: This conception of the “working class” has deep roots on the left. As Jacobin’s Ben Burgis explains, orthodox socialists subscribe to a “two-class map of capitalist society,” in which “Some people are capitalists who own their own ‘means of production’ (like factories, farms, offices, or grocery stores) and other people work for the capitalists.” Many contemporary socialists (including Burgis) find this dichotomy reductive, and endorse more nuanced portraits of America’s class structure. But the orthodox, “two-class” model informs a great deal of the modern left’s rhetoric, among both socialists and progressives. And the notion that lawyers and day laborers both belong to the “working class” is widely held among anti-capitalists. There’s something to be said for this idea. Educated professionals and manual workers surely do have s...

It looks more and more like the UK government, with complicit media, is working to creatre an overall public impression that terrorism is a far-right phenomenon, and migrants and leftists aren't responsible for it at all. Last week, I posted on a peculiar story that counterterrorism police had thwarted a right-wing plot against a Muslim gathering , but because police sent the Muslims home early, nobody was harmed. Twelve people were arrested. I was puzzled, as some UK observers also were, that the police offered so few details, in contrast to what US agencies like the FBI would release in any similar case. It turns out that the story is steadily shrinking, although the most complete version I've found is behind a paywall at the BBC. But via the Metropolitan Police : Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) previously opened an investigation into a suspected threat against the UK Ijtima event held at Shrubland Hall, Suffolk from 9-12 July. Twelve people [A-L] wer...

Lately I'm seeing lots of talk to the effect that the Democratic Socialists of America are communists, but their agenda goes back a lot farther than that. I found the graphic embedded above at Conservative Treehouse, which says it comes from DSA Co-Chair Gustavo Gordillo . I think there's less of Marx in it than England of the 1600s and the subsequent UK. The first two agenda items are "Eliminate the US Senate" and "Congress [presumably now just the House] chooses Executive & Judiciary". This, with a few small differences, is the system England adopted during its 1642-1651 Civil War and codified in the Bill of Rights 1689 and the Settlement Act of 1701, that "Parliament is supreme". In the time since then, "Parliament", theoretically the House of Commons and the House of Lords, has come to mean the House of Commons exclusively in normal speech, and somewhere during the reigns of Victoria or Edward VII, the monarch lost all ex...

There's been a story out over the past week or so about a cheating scandal at Brown University. It's behind a paywall at the incongruously named Free Press , but the gist of it is at USA Today . There's a new morality emerging in the corridors of America's finest universities: If you're not cheating, you're a sucker. Look no further than Brown University, where an artificial intelligence cheating scandal has rattled longtime economics professor Roberto Serrano. This spring, after three decades of teaching at Brown, Serrano let his students take their midterm exam at home, upping the difficulty to compensate for the unlimited time. The average score, which had historically run between 65% and 80%, jumped to 96%. Was that a particularly studious class? Maybe. But Serrano suspected a simpler explanation: AI. He announced that the final would be given in person, causing 18 students to drop the class. Nine more didn't bother showing up for the ...

The more I look into the Canadian fires, which seem to have become an annual event that sends enormous amounts of pollution accross the border to the US, the more I'm convinced that Canada has a vast world resource in its boreal forests over which it's incapable of exercisng stewardship. Even more so than in the US, most of its wild territory is publicly owned, 89% to 40%, but in the US, this territory is almost entirely under federal control, via the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Fire prevention and control are managed at the federal level, under consistent national policies. The only equivalent national agency in Canada is Canada Parks, which manages fire prevention and control within national parks. Based on my research, Canada Parks actually has enlightened forest management policies , including controlled burning, but these apply only within national parks. The rest of the wild boreal for...

Towering plumes of smoke fill the sky as firefighting helicopters battle fast-moving wildfires in western Canada. The massive blazes are sending smoke south, triggering air quality alerts across more than a dozen U.S. states, including Washington, D.C., as officials warn… pic.twitter.com/uLcDG1lERW — Fox News (@FoxNews) July 18, 2026 U.S. Senator Plans to Introduce Bill to Hold Canada Responsible for Wildfire Smoke : U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno on Friday released text of legislation that would sanction Canadian government officials, block their assets and revoke their visas over wildfire smoke that has repeatedly fouled the air in Ohio and across the United States. The Westlake Republican’s bill, formally titled the “Countering Atmospheric Nuisances Arising from Drifting Airborne Foreign Incendiary Residual Emissions Act” or the CANADA FIRE Act, is scheduled for introduction in the Senate on July 20. “Thanks to Canada’s failed leadership, Ohio’s skies are seeing the...

Sarah Jones, a writer for upscale New York Magazine, asks, What does it mean to be a working-class candidate? Was Platner a real proletarian or a nepo baby who put on a show? Were his supporters working class? The truth may be that he was both: a Hotchkiss dropout who had experienced some hardship. He campaigned hard and made his pitch directly to voters at hundreds of town halls across the state, from the reddest and most rural communities to cities like Portland. Of course, people of all classes experience "some hardship". That doesn't make you working class. Her puzzlement grows: If the category includes anyone without a college degree, a car-dealership titan can be a man of the people. If we define it by income, we might exclude foundering households in areas with high costs of living. A person might have a master’s degree and a six-figure salary and struggle with student-loan debt or the cumulative costs of housing, health care, and chi...