In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday I posted about the Hunter Biden venture capital firm's investment in a for-profit startup that worked with the Wuhan lab to perform gain-of-function research. The image above is a screen shot that comes from another Natalie Winters piece in the National Pulse , dated yesterday, where she refers to a 2018 presentation at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill by Ralp;h Baric, a close colleague of Peter Daszak, entitled “Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!” In yesterday's post I offered half-crazy speculation that anti-computer virus tech tycoon John McAfee was suspected of creating the computer viruses for which his company sold the antidotes only as a way to suggest such opportunities conceivably exist. Natalie Winters seems to be on a similar wavelength. The slide outlines what type of stocks and industries surged during the Ebola outbreak, which he uses to extrapolate financial advice on how to “make money in the next pandemic....

There's a particularly annoying offshoot of the TV true crime show, the unsolved murder genre. In this, a crew revisits yet again the scene of the crime and the relatives, still weepy and ready to cry on prompt after 30 years, to rehearse the whole unsolved routine one more time. With nothing new and the case getting older and older, there's little entertainment value other than to prove the continuing popularity of watching people cry on camera. I've always thought the interlocutors get a bonus for each time they can do it. The odd thing is that legacy media coverage of the COVID origin story, just weeks after it became OK to cover it at all, is already starting to look like an unsolved murder show. There are different thories about how the virus arose. One of them, unconfirmed, is that it was engineered in a Chinese lab. But the Chinese will never cooperate with investigations, so we'll never know. Ain't it awful? Bob Baloney is in Minneapolis, where he intervi...

Posters like the one above were all the rage in student apartments after Humanae Vitae in 1968 -- I have clear memories from that time. In an era of anti-authoritarian rage, the Catholic Church was having difficulty making its case at all. Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, made news at the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome by joking, "He no playa the game, he no maka the rules." Although Cardinal Cooke demanded an apology, the Church was clearly on the defensive. A generation later, it was hit by the pedophilia scandal. For whatever reason, this marked a roughly 50-year period in which the Church had little control over its public narrative. It's notable that over the past year or so, the Church is regaining its public voice via its bishops, something that had been envisioned in Lumen Gentium . The Church took a lead in filing lawsuits against COVID lockdowns that specifically limited worship in 2020. The decison by the US bishops to draft a teaching do...

While thinking about the whiter-than-white TV commercials I've seen lately, I ran into an essay by Victor Davis Hanson, " Why Are They Woke? ". This outlines the fundamental contradictions in current elitist thinking: Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them. It's worth noting that the picture of Gov Northam above dates from a 1984 yearbook, incongruously a full generation after the US Civil Rights movement. Northam appears in another yearbook from 1981 with the nickname "coonman". Yet this was while Northam was in post-Civil Rights formation to become a doctor, a member of the elite. There are similar implications in President Biden's routine slips and gaffes, like the one just this past week where he said, “It’s awful hard, as well, to get Latinx vaccinated as well. Why...

My wife and I record the TV programs we like and watch them the following night so we can fast-forward through the commercials. Still, this is an imprecise exercise, and it's still possible to be slow to initiate the fast forward or stop it too soon, so you still see some, which continues to convince me that the commercials alone on TV will lower your IQ by 20 points. (This reminds me that once on a plane, surrounded by a family with screaming kids, I gently reminded the mother that "studies show that if you allow your children to scream, it lowers their IQ by 20 points." She became very flustered and immediately began to shush them.) Anyhow, trying to fast-forward through the commercials last night, I inadvertently glimpsed several. It suddenly dawned on me that, save the very occasional token African-American, everyone on every commercial was white. And not just sorta-kinda white, uber white, Aryan white, blonde, clear-skinned, trim, prosperous, and smiling with perfe...

The New York Post revives a COVID origin question that had originally come up in May 2020 , that COVID may have escaped from the lab earlier than previously assumed. The story from May 2020 reported, A group of French athletes who competed in Wuhan back in October fear they may have brought the coronavirus back home — meaning that the deadly bug may have been around months earlier than first reported. The French delegation took part in the seventh edition of the World Military Games in Wuhan from Oct. 18 to 27 last year, just 20 days before the first confirmed case of coronavirus in China, the Sun reported. Wednesday's Post story says it wasn't just the French: Members of Congress are calling on the Biden administration to launch an investigation into whether an international competition in Wuhan, China, involving thousands of athletes from around the world in October 2019 was the ​world’s ​first coronavirus “superspreader” event, according to a report on Wednesday....

I note several stories that appear as puzzling data points, some or all of which may or may not be related. But if any of several are, something's going on. Warren Buffett has resigned as a director of the Gates Foundation . This may simply be because he's 90 and reducing his workload, or it may be in anticipation of what may come out in the Gates divorce case. The Lancet has acknowledged that Peter Daszak had a conflict of interest in items he published there . It has recused him from its commission investigating COVID's origins. Eventually EcoHealth Alliance will be forced to remove him as CEO, also due to conflict of interest. China is replacing its ambassador to the US with a man closer to Xi who has a harder-line style. This clearly has nothing to do with a rumored high-level defector. A new set of juicy stories has suddenly emerged from Hunter Biden's laptop, eight months after a first flurry. This clearly has nothing to do with rumors of...

A quick recap, via the AP : U.S. Catholic bishops overwhelmingly approved the drafting of a “teaching document” that many of them hope will rebuke Catholic politicians, including President Joe Biden, for receiving Communion despite their support for abortion rights. . . . The result of the vote — 168 in favor and 55 against — was announced Friday near the end of a three-day meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that was held virtually. . . . As a result of the vote, the USCCB’s doctrine committee will draft a statement on the meaning of Communion in the life of the church that will be submitted for consideration at a future meeting, probably an in-person gathering in November. To be formally adopted, the document would need support of two-thirds of the bishops. I brought up my calculator and found that 168 plus 55 is 223, the total number of bishops voting. 168 is 75% of 223, so this is some indication of which way a vote on a completed draft might go. My first, ...

A story from the weekend has Dr Fauci complaining to the New York Times that people call him Hitler . He insists this is not the case, he is not Hitler. "The more extreme they get, the more obvious how political it is ... ‘Fauci has blood on his hands,’" the infectious diseases expert said of his critics. "Are you kidding me? ... Here’s a guy whose entire life has been devoted to saving lives, and now you’re telling me he’s like Hitler? You know, come on, folks." This represents an escalation in Fauci's public defense, since earlier in the month he said only , "attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science." And I'm not aware of any public comparisons of Fauci to Hitler -- certainly not along the line of Trump or George Bush. So why bring it up? Fauci continues to insist that his e-mails reflect only a willingness to evaluate new data as it comes in -- at one point, he believed masks were ineffective, but data suddenly arrived conf...

The Fox News segment above from last Friday raises a little-noticed issue that's also been puzzling me: why had a pretty wide spectrum of US actors been funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab? The segment begins with China raising an issue that was bound to come up -- they're saying don't blame us, this is a US funded project. It covers this starting at abouit 2:55. but Laura Logan also makes the point that gain-of-function research had been a Fauci agenda item for a long time, even before it moved to China. This sent me to searching the web. I found this article from November 2015 in Nature : An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks. . . . The findings reinforce >suspicions that bat coronavirus...

Two data points in yesterday's news struck me in the wake of rumored reports of a Chinese defector with the goods on the Wuhan lab leak. The first was this story in The National Pulse , which has been consistently ahead of the game in its reports on COVID's origins and funding. Google.org, the charity arm of the tech behemoth, has also been funding studies carried out by EcoHealth alliance researchers including Peter Daszak since at least 2010. The decade-plus relationship is evident in a 2010 study on bat flaviviruses, which lists Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance Vice President Jonathan Epstein as authors, that thanks Google.org for funding. A 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, which was authored by Daszak, similarly declares it was partly “supported by Google.org.” And a 2015 paper focusing on herpes, which lists EcoHealth’s Daszak and Epstein as authors, reveals it was “supported by funding from the US Agency for International Development’s Eme...

One of the aggregators has a headline that eventually traces back to a story at the RedState blog saying it's "confirmed" that a high-level Chinese counterintelligence official, Dong Zingwei, defected this past February and in part provided information that COVID was in fact a lab leak. It's no coincidence that the still from Topaz above has a big mirror overshadowing the scene, and neither legacy nor most of independent media seems willing to cover the story, so it is what it is. This is actually the third supposed Chinese "defector" in recent months, the other two being Yan Limeng and Wang Liqiang . RedState has been the main reporter on these as well. The RedState report on Dong says, RedState’s sources confirmed that the defector is, in fact, Dong, that he was in charge of counterintelligence efforts in China, and that he flew to the United States in mid-February, allegedly to visit his daughter at a university in Califo...

Via the UK Daily Mail, I learn of another round in the debate about space aliens : A group of astronomers are pushing back on humanity's preoccupation with communicating with aliens beyond our galaxy, warning that alien contact could result in 'the end of all life on earth,' physicist and science writer Mark Buchanan wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed. I think the last time I brought up space aliens here, it was to cite Fr Sam, the smartest man I've ever met, who spoke in a homily about a question he raised in a session with seminarians: if we encounter space aliens, should we offer them baptism? This is all a reminder to me that there's no real science or philosophy in the current talk about life on other planets. Fr Sam has this right. Nobody else does. I was watching a TV show about the European Space Agency's Mars rover mission, which made the point that the agency is spending a billion euros to send a new-model rover to Mars for the...

Although our priests have been predicting this development for a while, the actual announcement comes as something of a shock (click on the image for a larger copy). Although there've been gradual loosenings -- indoor celebrations allowed, then no need for reservations, the choir gradually expanding, nevertheless, pews have still been roped off with six-foot calibrations in the aisles, and masks were required with temperatures taken on entry. No missals, no singing. Last week, one of our pew friends was still wearing two masks, not one, as Dr Fauci had instructed. I'll be interested to see how he responds this Sunday. California mostly reopened on Tuesday, fully three months after other states like Texas. But it's worth noting that the UK, whose COVID performance has been equivalent to the US after vaccinations, got cold feet over a June 21 reopening and has pushed it back to July 19, although this may not involve lifting mask requirements even then. Meanwhile, Canada ...

I said in yesterday's post that I wasn't sure what Pope Francis meant by "rigid" when he spole of rigid priests. This morning, looking for something else, I went to Church Militant and found an informative post, "Rigid" Seminarians. (I was originally looking to find the rad-trad take on the reported non-eucharist of President Biden from Francis, but intriguingly, Church Militant carries no mention of this.) The post actually clarifies Francis's meaning quite helpfully: [H]e offered [seminarians in Ancona] advice on four aspects of their seminary experience: the human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral dimensions. He extended his definition of rigidity to include "ritualism," saying "prayer is not ritualism — the rigid end up in ritualism, always." . . . Regarding the intellectual life of a seminarian, Pope Francis advised them to study hard to encounter and "proclaim [their] faith and proclaim Christ." He ...

There's been lots of speculation recently, for instance here , that Pope Francis is on the verge of revoking Summorum Pontificum . I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm a Catholic convert to the post-Conciliar Church, and I've never been to a Latin mass (if you leave out the one my mother took my sister and me to in the 1950s). Beyond that, our pastor turned my view of Pope Francis on its head a couple of years ago, when he gave a homily on the passage in John 21 where the risen Christ recommissions Peter on the shore of a lake. He said the Peter we see in that account reminds him a great deal of the Holy Father we have now: often impulsive, even clumsy, but utterly genuine. Francis is the pope we have, just like all the others. My takeaway at this point is that as a convert, I need to avoid trying to be more Catholic than the pope. We have a highly successful novus ordo parish. We came into the Church via another parish that was less successful, though I've h...

In court, a jury instruction you often see is that if a witness is shown to have lied in one part of his testimony, the jury is entitled to doubt his veracity about any other part of his testimony. This is one reason I'm scratching my head about all the public statements key figures in the Wuhan scandal keep making, when people in their situation should be maintaining a low profile. This applies to Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, which bundles grants from US agencies and allocates them to Chinese virology labs. In a post last week , I noted that Daszak has insisted he didn't fund gain-of-function research that made viruses worse and more contagious, when he's on video explaining that gain of function is exactly what those labs do. Now, over the past weekend, Sky News Australia found video of live bats in cages at the Wuhan virology institute, when Daszak had previously denied this was done: A member of the W.H.O. team investigating the origin of the pan...