Mass immigration from Mexico, legal and illegal, transformed California and created a fractured, riotous, and unstable polity. The sad news that Brian Wilson, the musical genius behind the Beach Boys, died last week at 82 carried with it a strange and foreboding symbolism. His death came as Los Angeles…
Have you noticed how many wars there are without being declared? Israel launches a military attack on Iran and Iran retaliates, but there is no declaration of war. Israel will attack again, and Iran will again respond by retaliating. But neither country is at war. Russia has been in conflict with Ukraine since…
One of the features of the Trump era has been the sense of chaos that seems to surround everything about the man. Whether as a candidate, as president or as the hero in the fight against the villains of Washington, there is always a whirlwind of action around him…
In the past few days, Los Angeles has been awash in protests, rekindling fond memories of Rodney King, and the long, hot summer of 2020. Well, to be fair, there is a whole lot worth protesting about America 2.0. I mean, what with the overreaching corruption, the taxation without representation, and…
After a half-hour ride from the Serena Hotel, our driver stopped shy of the Nairobi airport. “Everybody out!”, he insisted. Perplexed at this odd order, we exchanged glances. “Are we there?”, we wondered. “No. You must walk thru security”, he said while pointing toward a roadside structure. “I’ll meet…
Tucker Carlson sounded the alarm about the looming danger of a U.S. war with Iran under President Donald Trump’s leadership, warning that such a move would not only devastate America’s global standing but end Trump’s presidency outright. During an interview with Steve Bannon, Carlson laid bare the stakes, accusing…
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is among the few MAGA voices in Congress who is breaking ranks and becoming vocal over what increasingly looks like inevitable American involvement in the Israel-Iran war which is currently spinning dangerously out of control. We earlier detailed that it seems a majority in…
Story out of Utah, where, as loyal readers of this Substack will remember, it took local prosecutors more than 3 years to charge a BLM gunman for shooting a driver in the head during a street blockade. As far as I can tell, the gunman was never charged. No…
So here’s the good news about AI: it can now do more BS work, author David Graeber’s term for the meaningless churning of bureaucratic “work” that lost its purpose and functionality long ago but is now considered “essential” to the operation of a system in which complexity and…
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we had a little “Golden Age” of television when manly shows with manly characters briefly flourished. Sopranos, Band of Brothers, The Wire, The Shield, Deadwood, Rome, Generation Kill, Justified, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, and the first season of True Detective broke the network mold and told dark, gritty stories in ways that had never…
