In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday I noted that I'd been searching -- at least as of late last year -- for any news about a promised independent investigation of the violent takedown last May of a teenager dressed as a Star Wars trooper by Lethbridge, AB police. A Canadian visitor sent me a link to this story in the Calgary Herald dated December 21, 2020, seven months after the episode: No criminal charges will be laid following an external investigation into the Lethbridge Police Service takedown of a teenager dressed as a Star Wars character in May. Well, criminal charges are beside the point and would hve been unlikely. In the US, there's a charge for assault under color of authority, which is usually applied to race-related incidents. The Lethbridge cops, and their supervisors, were just really dumb, not criminal, and the question is whether they should be dealing with any issues requiring good judgment, which is what police jobs often require. So the external investigation skipped over the r...

David Freiheit of the Viva Frei YouTube channel is generally uneven, and even when he makes good points, you have to suffer through his vamping and mugging to get them. In the video above, the constant personal references or the whiny kids in the back seat are at least at a low enough level that you can sit through them to get the meat. One thing that's puzzled me in general about the current phase of the COVID panic is that the late 2020 surge has largely abated worldwide, while the vaccine is being widely distributed everywhere. The chart for Canada at right reflects this. Even in California, Gov Newsom has relaxed the extra measures he imposed in December, and the Los Angeles County health department has gone even farther, allowing schools to begin reopening and allowing outdoor sports. The attitude in the US, justified or not, is optimistic, especially given the vaccine, and in fact I think it will be very difficult for the authorities not to continue relaxing COVID measur...

The piece at the UK Open Democracy website that I linked yesterday suggests that somewhere, there's a cohesive expression of an ultra-leftist agenda that includes abolition of the traditional family, abolition of private property, transsexualism, radical environmentalism, and probably much more, into which the current blue program of extended lockdowns dovetails. I've got to figure that somewhare there's a book, at least, that lays this out. Some of it clearly comes from late 19th century free-love leftism that was popular in the UK for a few decades, while other parts are just recycled, romanticized Marxism-Stalinism. But radical environmentalism and outright transsexualim (as opposed to ordinary tolerance of homosexuality) are new. If anyone knows whether there's an influential published playbook that outlines the whole current program, I'd like to know about it. What's plain, though, is that the current US Congress, with very slim majorities, is intent ...

I went googling for Dr Fauci's latest remarks and came up with intriguing questions. The screen shot above is from a CNN story , where Fauci is giving the current line on the New Normal, clearly endorsed by an upper-class white woman with The Look, in this case Dana Bash. It used to be that The Look went with a facial expression that at least affected a wide-eyed ingenue quality, but no longer: Ms Bash is trying on Big Sister, which we're going to be getting more of, I do believe. Fauci, meanwhile, is blathering away with a self-satisfied smirk. Asked by CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union" whether he thinks Americans will still need to wear masks next year, Fauci replied: "You know, I think it is possible that that's the case and, again, it really depends on what you mean by normality." It's plain from the CDC news conference I referenced yesterday that Fauci isn't just speaking on his own account, the suits at the CDC are behind ...

I was drawn to this exchange at the White House CDC COVID briefing Monday: MODERATOR: Next we’ll go to Chris Megerian at Los Angeles Times. Q Hi, everyone. I was interested in your thoughts on the messaging around the vaccines. There’s a lot of conversation about how you need to keep doing the same things even after you get vaccinated — you know, like wearing a mask, not seeing your family, things like that. Do you think that’s preventing people from being more enthusiastic about getting vaccines? And may we see that change in the future? ACTING ADMINISTRATOR SLAVITT: Well, I’m going to invite both Dr. Walensky and Dr. Fauci to comment on that, and then — you know, and then I will as — I will as well, if there’s anything to add. DR. FAUCI: Yeah, I — actually, let — I’ll start — well, whatever. (Laughs.) I’ll start off and be very brief and hand it to Dr. Walensky. I don't know if video of this conference is available -- I haven't seen ...

I had a real adventure trying to find a picture to illustrate this post. After a week of Mars rover specials on TV, plus the usual History Channel fare, I was beginning to realize the world is still run by upper-class white ladies who all look the same, because no matter how many transsexuals, blacks, Latins, Asians, or whatever else they have on the show to explain things, there's always -- always -- an upper-class white lady to endorse whatever is said, although the lizard people have given everyone else an approved script as well. So, knowing what I was looking for, I started doing google image searches for "upper class wasp woman look", and sure enough, I got mostly picures of insects, with a few 19th century sketches of period fashion as well. I tried variations. "Understated elite look" brought, remarkably, ladies in bikinis. "Upper class look" brought ladies in big hair. Finally, as a last ditch effort, I hit on it: "Sally Quinn"....

I keep thinking back on the Mars mission special I watched a week ago. A space probe professor type made a remark that, to the great disappointment of all the space probe professors, Mars looked like the Sonoran desert or something. Well, not actually. the 1953 Disney film The Living Desert simply contradicts that characterization. The Sonoran desert doesn't look much like Mars at all. What appears to be the conventional wisdom promoted in the current media discussion of life on Mars is that, given liquid water and t amount of time, life will appear in some microbial form and evolve from there. The quantity given for t is at most a billion years, because that's the time span Mars is supposed to have had liquid water. Where they got that isn't explained, but let's grant it. I went to Wikipedia's timeline of life on Earth. I recognize that all these estimates, a billion years for water on Mars, 4.4 billion years ago for the first liquid water on Earth and so f...

According to Fox News, White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that it's "very likely" that family members who have been vaccinated against coronavirus can safely hug each other. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director explained that what vaccinated individuals can safely do with family members and in a public setting differ greatly. If an individual is vaccinated and with another person who is vaccinated, the things they can do are "much, much more liberal in the sense of pulling back on stringent public health measures," Fauci said during an interview on MSBNC with host Andrea Mitchell. But wait a moment. Last August he said people could hook up on Tinder, and that was even before the jab: "[I]t's what's called relative risk," Fauci said. "If you're willing to take a risk — and you know, everybody has their own tolerance for risks — you could figure out if yo...

The other day I was browsing the web for news of the lunar rover's landing. What I noticed was that the TV broadcasters were all reading from the same script, apparently approved by the Bilderbergs, but even more jarring was they were all wearing the same rictus that North Korean broadcasters affect to celebrate Dear Leader's birthday. This was a major, major event. The reason for this latest multibillion-dollar excursion, as indeed the expressed reason on the TV specials for all the previous ones, is to find evidence of life on Mars. And this has been a national effort not too far in scope from the Manhattan Project. Somehow our way of life, or democracy, or civilization or something, hangs in the balance. Wha? To me, as I would guess to vast numbers of other people, whether the rover landed on Mars was about as critical as whether Tom Brady won the Super Bowl. So I thought back to the TV special I saw last weekend about the mission. I won't cite which one, I think they ...

The photo above appears regularly as a Facebook ad. What's begun to occur to me is that there's been no change in the COVID narrative. There's simply no information on how to sign up for a shot, where you cqn go, what the lines are like, or whatever -- in fact, Mayor Garcetti closed many sites last week for lack of vaccine, but there's no info on whether they've reopened or what this week's supply is like. I went to Kaiser yesterday for a shingles shot, which was hard ebough to go through, what with an entitled medicql staff taking its time to do any tasks at all. But the tech asked me if I had any intention of getting a COVID shot. I said of course, but we can't get them from Kaiser. In fact, my wife fianlly got an appointment next month at Rite Aid, but Kaiser still says they're just doing front line workers and over-75, So I'm not sure if the lizard people even want us to get the shot. I see a lot of opinion that they and the Bilderbergs want ...

Yesterday I speculated that Dr Fauci, in the course of overstaying his 15 minutes of fame, could potentially fall victim to revelations of kickbacks or MeToo. But my wife pointed out that his million-dollar prize for "defending science" was exactly a payoff, in the same way that Hunter Biden's recent book deal , which involves an undisclosed payment for a manuscript that will inevitably be ghostwritten, is a payoff to both Hunter and his dad. Well, a hooker is paid a speciric fee for a particular sexual act, and this is against the law. An excort is paid for a particular amount of time, in which activities are not specified, and this is perfectly legal. The same principle is at work here. So what was Dr Fauci paid for? He already earned $417,608 in 2019, the highest paid employee in the US government. (That amount probably doesn't account for other lagniappes, bonuses, deferred compensation, and the like) A milllion bucks is chump change, but so far, I haven...

In yesterday's news: Dr. Anthony Fauci has won the $1 million Dan David Prize for “defending science” and advocating for vaccines now being administered worldwide to fight the coronavirus pandemic. The Israel-based Dan David Foundation on Monday named President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser as the winner of one of three prizes. It said he had earned the recognition over a lifetime of leadership on HIV research and AIDS relief, as well as his advocacy for the vaccines against COVID-19. In its statement, the private foundation did not mention former President Donald Trump, who undermined Fauci’s follow-the-science approach to the pandemic. But it credited Fauci with “courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition during the challenging COVID crisis.” “As the COVID-19 pandemic unraveled, (Fauci) leveraged his considerable communication skills to address people gripped by fear and anxiety and worked relentlessly to inform individuals in the Unit...

If 2020 was the year of the dumpster fire, I'm beginning to wonder if 2021 won't be quite so bad, mainly because things are shaping up where the people who are trying to make things bad for us in the plebs are incompetent. Let's take a few current events, the Trump "impeachment", the TJ Ducklo "resignatiom", and Gavin Newsom. It's hard to figure out just what the Democrats and a few Republicans had in mind with trying to "impeach" a president who'd already been voted out, who was completely out of the government at the time the "trial" occurred, and over which the chief justice, presumably an authority on its constitutionality, apparently declined to preside. The foreordained result was acquittal, which surprised no one but Speaker Pelosi, who lost her temper. They narrowly beat Trump in November. The best I can surmise is that the Democrats deeply feared the potential for Trump running again in 2024 -- but as the conven...

One of the first things I learned more or less in adolescence is that there are no surprises in politics, especially for someone at the level of the US House Speaker. The result of Impeachment 2.0 was never in doubt. She could bully her party in the House to vote for impeachment, but the Senate was going to follow its own rules, and it was understood from the start that there would never be the votes to convict. So why was Speaker Pelosi so angry with Mitch NcConnell? He was playing the game. In fact, I have a sense that most political leadership recognizes slmost all the time that they and their opponents are playing a game by an established set of rules, and scripted outrage is part of the whole show. What Pelosi did was pretty clearly not scripted. It was an angry rant over an outcome that was never in doubt. It was made all the more feckless by being delivered through a mask in a lisping mumble. The ncouraging thing is that these people are in fact incompetent.

I may have been premature in placing my old blog on inactive status. Over the past week or two, there have been important developments in the field I'd been covering there: The pastor of an important parish in the US ordinariate, St Barnabas Omaha, was removed for financial mismanagement, placing that parish's survival in question The Anglo-Catholic parish that in 1976 started the whole idea of a Roman Catholic personal prelature for disgruntled Episcopalians, St Mary of the Angels Hollywood, CA, appears to have lost the income producng property that sustained it and will probably not survive The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that established the personal prelatures for the disgruntled, the idea that originated in Hollywood, is now threatening to close the one in Austrailia for lack of growth and lack of money. I have a post on the other blog covering this last development .

Amid news that the national Republican Party has donated $250,000 to the Recall Newsom campaign, I've already noted that Gov Newsom has been remarkably passive. It's plain that the vaccine campaign is faltering, with Mayor Garcetti calling the number of dosess delivered to Los Angeles "unacceptable". Both Garcetti and Newsom are on the same side -- why isn;t Newsom taking the same line? By the same token, statistics show California is actually administering less than 70% of the doses it receives. I assume the others expire on the shelf. Where's Newsom? According to the Sacramento Bee , Democrats, meanwhile, are circling around the governor as he goes on the defensive. Last month he lifted stay-at-home orders across the state and is pushing hard for a deal with the Legislature on reopening schools. In recent weeks, he’s been traveling to vaccination super sites around the state to promote his work on the coronavirus pandemic, one of the key points of cri...

Via Fox News , Los Angeles is temporarily shutting down several city vaccination sites in the coming days after it burned through its limited allocation of first doses for Moderna’s vaccine. LA Mayor Eric Garcetti made the announcement during a briefing Wednesday, noting that the city distributed 98% of all doses received. The closure will affect sites at Dodgers Stadium and the other four non-mobile vaccination sites on Friday and Saturday, with reopenings eyed for Tuesday or Wednesday. "This week we only received 16,000 new doses. 16,000," Garcetti said during the briefing. "That’s about the number of doses we give out every single day. That is unacceptable." The week’s allocation is a reduction of 90,000 doses from the week prior, the mayor said. However federal officials involved with the COVID-19 response struck an optimistic tone this week, with the Biden administration claiming vaccine supply has increased from 8.6 million doses delivered to...

Yesterday, the CDC updated its masking guidelines . We've been in this pretty much a full year, the pandemic surges and wanes, and the CDC's answer is we need to wear two masks now instead of one, since nothing else has worked. After months of demands for federal health officials to update mask recommendations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced new guidelines Wednesday that include wearing well-fitting face masks or two masks at a time to help curb the COVID-19 pandemic. The updated guidance follows the release of new research from the CDC which tested various masks in a lab setting and found evidence that combining a cloth mask over a surgical mask could dramatically reduce both the spread of the virus to others and exposure to the virus oneself. So over the course of a week, he CDC has done "new research" into whether two masks are better than one? Exactly a week ago, Dr Fauci was saying there was no scientific evidence, just do it...

So I'm seeing headlines about Statement on crossing state lines for vaccine , COVID-19 vaccine lines growing across states , HOLLYWOOD ELITE CUTTING LINES , and so forth. My wife stopped by a local Subway, and the lady behind the counter, seeing my wife was a member of the eligible over-65 cohort, asked if she'd gotten her shot yet. My wife replied that we've checked, and there's so far no realistic way we can get one, even though we're eligible. The lady behnid the counter said she had a friend who paid to get it, but then he bragged about it, and now he's under investigation. I've done web searches on whether there's a black market in the vaccine. A few articles say there "could" be one, but it's only for the wealthy, and anyhow, it's Trump's fault. But the Subway lady's friend doesn't sound like he's rich and powerful -- at minimum, he wouldn't be investigated if he were. So it seems like stuff is happening, b...

The 2021 Super Bowl ratings, like the 2020 election results, were delayed. When they finally came out, they reflected the continuing decline of the Super Bowl as a media event. According to the New York Post, CBS announced on Tuesday morning that 96.4 million viewers watched the game across all their platforms, “including the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports and NFL digital properties, Buccaneers and Chiefs mobile properties, Verizon Media mobile properties and ESPN Deportes television and digital properties.” . . . Last season’s Super Bowl, a Chiefs victory over the 49ers on Fox, averaged 102.1 million viewers across all platforms. Some in the elite, who apparently weren't paying close attention, complained that the fans in the stadium were clearly not social distancing. Even though the ones in the stadium could be excused, since they were cardboard cutouts, it does strike me as a valid point -- if corporate policies require employees attending Zoom meetings from home to ...

I'm a convert to Roman Catholicism in late adulthood. This means I have no practical memory of the pre-Conciliar Church. I came in after 20 years or so in various Anglo-Catholic environments, and I was led to believe, especially under the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus , that the transition would be minimal -- at worst, a few months of catechetical touchup on Sunday afternoons before we'd be received justlikethat. The people who proposed this, including Jeffrey Steenson, were unfortunately deluded, and the sad disappointment of the North American ordinariate reflects this. I had no choice but to become a convert to the post-Conciliar, diocesan Roman Catholic Church once the process envisioned by Steenson and others failed in the case of our Anglcan parish. On that basis, one must assume I saw merit in becoming Catholic outside any special provision for Anglicans. And if I saw enough merit in post-Conciliar Roman Catholiicism, and had no practical memory of any so...

In 1984, Apple was Apple, and the Super Bowl was the Super Bowl. Steve Jobs ran the commercial to introduce the Mac, and the Super Bowl was the place to introduce it. The theme of the ad was that the Mac would show how 1984 wouldn't be like 1984. How things have changed. Just for starters, the female hammer thrower in the ad would mow have to be a transsexual guy, just to show how woke Apple is. But I have no reason to think ratings for this year's Super Bowl won't continue to reflect declining interest in the game, what with narcissistic, ultra-privileged, multimillionaire players taking a knee during the anthem mostly just to insult the fans for being racists. Beyond that, Apple's changed. Jobs launched the Think Different campaign in 1997, a generation ago. "[H]e claimed specifically that 'you always had to be a little different to buy an Apple computer.'" Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if Apple still even sells computers. It...