In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The late-night comedian Bill Maher the other day made one of his routine critiques of politicall;y-correct society : On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher lamented that “woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist,” and the left has become “the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go.” . . . After listing some examples of people on the right being more permissive on sex and drugs, and other examples of the right being morally strict, Maher stated, “We need to restore the natural order of things. I don’t want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid. Once upon a time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Well, now that’s us. I don't normally follow Maher, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. It turns out th...

California is currently thouight to be the most-improved US state for COVID, having reversed the late 2020 surge soon after the new year, with no new third surge as happened in the US northeast and Canada. But since Los Angeles County accounts for a quarter of the state's population, much of this success is attributable to LA County's performance. Although Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties are both in the least restrictive "yellow" tier, San Francisco's population is less than a million, while LA County's is over ten million. The chart above shows cumulative totals for LA County cases and deaths, as well as case mortality rate, since the start of the pandemic. While the numbers, being cumulative, don't go down, they do show how the spread of the disease has been mitigated. More important, the dark curve at the bottom of the graph, reflecting cumulative deaths, shows a much more gradual curve than the light pattern at the top, which is cases. The ov...

As of this past week, both Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties fell into the state's least restrictive "yellow" tier of COVID restrictrions. The counties currently in "yellow" are otherwise sparsely populated and rural, but LA County alone, with over 10 millon people, accounts for about 25% of the state's population. As I've noted, other counties are likely to follow LA into the "yellow" tier within weeks. I have lots of questions. The first is that LA County's aggressive vaccination program has led the state, putting a quarter of California's population in the least restrictive tier. But it's done this with about 40% of the county's population "fully vaccinated" , two weeks after their final dose. It would seem that LA County, one of the hardest-hit areas of the state, is approaching herd immunity. But received opinion, as in the New York Times , is dismissing such ideas: “People were getting confused a...

The other day, Washington, DC Mayor Bowser imposed a new control as part of her "reopening" protocols: no dancing at weddings. Two things immediately struck me. First, her poorest constituents, those who keep her in office, tend not to have weddings at all. Second, those who most notably do dance at weddings are the Jews. Thus do decrees cut across the social order. We actually know next to nothing about how COVID is transmitted, and banning dancing may have no effect. There must now be plenty of Jewish weddings in Texas and Florida, and I read of no new outbreaks there. But this actually illustrates another of the points Edward Feser makes in the essay I linked Wednesday : Gnostic moral practice veers between the extremes of puritanism and libertinism. Initially this might seem puzzling, but it makes perfect sense given the Gnostic’s other commitments. On the one hand, given the Gnostic hatred of the created order and of conventional moral and social life, what th...

It should be no surprise to regular visitors that I'm on several of Bp Barron's e-mail lists. Last week I received this announcement from his Word on Fire Institute: Meet the new Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture at the Word on Fire Institute Oxford and Yale Educated Former Episcopal Priest Andrew Petiprin Contemplates Catholicism and Popular Culture for the Word on Fire Institute Petiprin, the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture, analyzes media through the lenses of philosophy and theology [Irving, TX] – The Word on Fire Institute, the arm of Bishop Robert Barron’s apostolate focused on educational and evangelistic formation, is pleased to highlight the work and accomplishments of its Fellows. Each Fellow brings unique gifts and a track record of noteworthy service in the fields of theology, apologetics, cultural renewal, and more. Andrew Petiprin’s work is shaped by his pastoral heart and his admiration for great art as found i...

In yesterday's post, I talked about Jordan Peterson's belated and puzzled response to the collapse of main line Protestant academic culture, something that took place largely in the 1960s and 70s. By concidence, I ran into an essay by the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser that appeared this past January in Catholic World Report, The Gnostic heresy’s political successors . It talks about the academic side oif the culture that replaced main line Protestantism, gnosticism. Feser defines gnosticism as follows: First, it sees evil as all-pervasive and nearly omnipotent, absolutely permeating the established order of things. You might wonder how this differs from the Christian doctrine of original sin. It differs radically. Christianity teaches the basic goodness of the created order. It teaches that human beings have a natural capacity for knowledge and practice of the good – the idea of natural law. . . . Second, the Gnostic mentality holds that only an elect who h...

Jordan Peterson has recentlly begun to reenter the public forum following lengthy recovery from a life-threatening health crisis. As part of the reentry, he's done a second YouTube encounter with Bp Barron, which is linked above. The thing that strikes me most in the encounter is how little Jordan Peterson has changed. The guy has had as difficult a struggle against addiction and other health issues as I can imagine, but he's exactly the same Jordan Peterson who engaged Bp Barron in their first encounter in 2019. This is to say that he continues to be a product of the mid-20th century academic culture -- and I might go a little farther to say that since he was formed in part as a Harvard professor, it's mid-20th century Ivy League academic culture, precisely what I was exposed to in the 1960s. And this puzzles the heck out of me, the guy has simply not changed. Peterson's outlook is a largely inchoate melange of Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, Orwell, and whate...