In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

One byproduct of my conversion to Roman Catholicism has been a much greater appreciation for Aristotle, who was a major influence on Aquinas and other Scholastic thinkers. An Aristotelian looks for causes. On the other hand, William of Ockham, a prominent Scholastic, established the Law of Parsimony, which says that entities should not be multiplied without necessity. This brings us to the popular idea that at some time prior to written history, space aliens came to the planet and built the major ancient monuments in both hemispheres. This is a semi-Aristotelian view, since proponents are actually raising worthwhile and reasonable questions about causes. Why the widespread ancient interest in astronomy, which appears to have been remarkably precise? How was this information transmitted through generations without what we currently understand as writing? Why do so many ancient structures in both hemispheres take the form of pyramids? Why are they precisely laid out according to astro...

I've been following the Harvest Rock Church's case in Pasadena, CA since its inception last spring. As I covered here a month ago , the US Supreme Court sent the case back to the Ninth Circuit for reevaluation in light of its Diocese of Brooklyn action, which essentially signaled that it would find restrictions on attendance specifically tailored to churces a violation of the free exercise clause of the US Constitution. However, this didn't decide anything, it just kicked the issue back to the district court. The consensus at the time was that Harvest Rock's attorneys would need to relitigate the whole issue back up from the trial court to the Ninth Circuit, and that's what's been happening. As of late last week, Harvest Rock and the state have been filing new briefs with the Ninth Circuit. The court has been asking interesting questions. As outlined here, The Court of Appeals requested supplemental briefing by the parties to address whether (1) the LA ...

It goes without saying that even fairly recent successful Hollywood films couldn't be made today. I've already talked about the Jason Bourne films that put the CIA in a darkly threatening and subversive light that's now a bit too topical. By the same token, the Dirty Harry series starring Clint Eastwood not only couln't be made now, but I wouldn't rule out cancel culture taking DVD copies off the market entirely. But recently I saw the third film in that series, The Enforcer (1976), which I think is by far the best and, like the Bourne films, retrospectively revealing. The first Dirty Harry flim, which had that title (1971), had a contemporary, San Francisco-based story, dealing with a Zodiac style serial killer. The second, Magnum Force (1973), wasn't so much rooted in current events and dealt with a police vigilante squad. But The Enforcer took a real issue by the horns, a terrorist group made up of upper-class twentysomethings allied with Lumpenprol...

The big year-end meme for 2020 was the dumpster fire, and this seems to have carried the implication that 2021 wouldn't be the same. I'm not sure why. No matter who is president, the worldwide COVID panic continues in full effect. I couln't get a haircut last week, and I won't be able to get one this week, either. And as barbers realize that government decrees make their business unpredictable, they're leaving it -- and this will be the case even after things get back to "normal". There'll simply be fewer barbers, hair salons, and sit-down restaurants. But insofar as people fought back, they made progress in 2020, and this still needs to be done in the coming year. In particular, the US Supreme Court ruling in the Diocese of Brooklyn case, while it hasn't been a magic bullet, has led to progress in free exercise of religion. We received this letter from our parish yestwrday: As you may have heard recently, places of worship are now permitte...

The new strain is about a gazilllion times more contagious than the old one, according to Boris Johnson. Actually, he didn't say gazillion. He said maybe 70%, but I don't think anyone asked him how contagious the old strain was, and nobody knows that anyhow, so gazillion is probably a more accurate indicator than 70%. The UK health toff says it's been out of control since September, and Boris put the south on Tier 4 lockdown (which is UK speak for "double secret" in the US), and you can see from the graph above how useful that's been. Except, also according to Boris, nobdy gets any sicker from the new strain than the old one. So the lockdowns are ineffective -- and if you think about it, if the new strain is even more contagious than the old one, the germs must be traveling in the breeze or over the internet or something, so if masks and social distancing weren't much help with release 1.0, how much help are they with 2.0? But the vaccine still works wit...

I think it's worth focusing on California lockdowns, which are oppressive in themselves, but as they say, what starts in California spreads to the rest of the country, and as we'll see below, there are rumbles to that effect. On December 29, when an initial double secret set of restrictions expired, California extended its effectively statewide regional stay-at-home order until mid January. These were based on an entirely new criterion, ICU capacity, and overlay an existing color-coded set of restrictions on individual counties. The bottom line is that in most parts of the state, schools are closed to in-person instruction, school athletics are suspended, restaurants are closed except for takeout, barbershops, hair and nail salons, and gyms are closed, and retail is limited to 25% capacity. The status of churches is in litigation, with indoor worship prohibited in most areas and outdoor worship subject to numerical limits depending on civil jurisdiction. (Los Angeles Coun...

A visitor sent me an e-mail reacting to recent posts on COVID, ERs, and hospitalizations About ER waits: We have a friend whose son is an ER nurse at Kaiser. The waits in ER are ridiculously long because people who test positive for covid are showing up BECAUSE they tested positive. No symptoms but the media has convinced us that we are all going to die of this virus that testing positive is a death sentence. Another reason waits are long at ERs is that some people can't get regular medical care from their docs so they end up at the hospital sicker than should/would have been. True stories I've been told: A young boy is feeling crummy. He goes to his pediatrician who tests him for covid (the only reason to feel sick, right?). The test is negative so the doc does nothing. Days later his parents are awakened with him vomiting uncontrollably & he's rushed to ER. His appendix has burst. Due to the misdiagnosis he is sicker than most with ...