In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I ran into this op-ed at yesterday's Wall Steet Journal that somehow escaped their paywall, so I'm not sure how long it will be up. The thing that strikes me is that the author, R R Reno, who according to the thumbnail is editor of First Things , thinks something changed about elite schools after he graduated (but they were at one time fairly recently, i e, when he was an undergraduate, definitely OK places): I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities. That marks a change. A decade ago I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest. Today? Not so much. I went to the First Things website , and immediately I got a pop-up message from the same R R Reno, Editor, that informed me: First Things is firmly grounded in the truths that endure. We enter the fray of contemporary cultural and political discussions with the confidence that it is God above who oversees our victories and setbacks. This ...

The standard line of the COVID moral entrepreneurs has continued to be that we can't really drop the mask-and-social-distance routine, because there may be variants . Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned last week that the variants could fuel a new surge and that states should not rapidly relax restrictions. The question nobody is asking -- and I'm not sure why -- is, "If you're so concerned about more dangerous COVID variants, what can you do to assure us that the Wuhan lab isn't cooking these up itself?" The current position of the legacy media and the public health elite appears to be, "Well, of course, maybe the origin of the virus was a lab leak, or maybe it was still just a really, really sick bat. We don't know. Maybe the intelligence community can give us a clearer answer when it makes its report next fall." So, why has nobody asked whether the Wuhan lab is still getting US taxpay...

Except that in Watergate, nobody died. One big currernt similarity, though, is that calls go out for the resignation or removal of key figures -- in this case, Dr Fauci -- that are stubbornly, and even arrogantly, resisted by the administraion, until after months of pressure and successive revelations, they're finally removed. I lived through Watergate; to refresh my memory, I went to the timeline on Wikipedia . John Ehrlichman, whose photo is above, was one of the more annoying figures in the scandal. He was one of those who resigned or was fired from the White House on April 30, 1973, following months of demands for such action. He eventually served 18 months for perjury and conspiracy. I'm beginning to have a sense of inevitability to the departures of current, similar figures like Fauci, Collins, Daszak, and no doubt others whose names we hardly know. In fact, another similarity to Watergate is the constant emergence of new names and new details. For Watergate, which w...

One of the names that's faded in the COVID-Wuhan story is Dr Deborah Birx, who was something of a co-spokesperson for the public health elite with Dr Fauci until she was caught traveling to Delaware to celebrate Thanksgiving with extended family , in violation of CDC guidelines. After a few days of trying to scold the plebs about it, she announced her retirement . This is unusual for public figures caught in hypocrisy during the crisis. Others, like Govs Newsom, Whitmer, and Cuomo, have simply had their flacks make oopsie-type statements and scolded the plebs about their own mask wearing -- "the governor's inadvertent oversight is a reminder to all of us" blah blah blah -- but nobody remotely thinks of retiring. And it appears that for Dr Birx, this was no empty promise, she did retire and has taken a new corporate sinecure. Although she turned 65 just this past April, It's worth noting that her colleagues Drs Fauci and Collins never saw any particular urgenc...

When I posted about the frammis on Thursday, I came up with several questions that I thought would go to the base of the con: money was going to the Wuhan lab; someone benefitted from that money; if we find out who, we make some progress. Indeed, we're making some progress. The story is developing quickly, and information trickles out by the day. This story in Independent Science News provides what I think are productive clues about the money. For much of this year, [Peter] Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance garnered a great deal of sympathetic media coverage after its $3.7 million five-year NIH grant was prematurely cut when the Trump administration learned that EcoHealth Alliance funded bat coronavirus research at the WIV. The temporary cut was widely depicted in major media as Trump undermining the EcoHealth Alliance’s noble fight against pandemics. The termination was reversed by NIH in late August, and even upped to $7.5 million. But entirely overlooked amid the claims and...

I saw a remark at one of the news aggregators that Francis Collins, the Director of the Natioinal Institutes of Health in uber-elite Bethesda and the boss of Drs Fauci and Walensky, went on the PBS News Hour last night . The main subect of the interview was "vaccine hesitancy", which for Bethesdans translates into finding a way to force the conspiracy theorists to take the shot. But then, certainly by prearrangement, Judy Woodruff brought up the subject that until a week ago had been completely taboo: [D]o you think — I mean, is it the case that, looking back on that time early in the pandemic — this was early in 2020 — that the possibility that this virus came from that lab was just not taken seriously enough? Let's keep in mind that this guy is stratospheric in the deep state, if you can get your head around that -- it's a little like the backward hierarchy in The Screwtape Letters , where the higher up a demon is in hell, the lower down he is. Collins wou...

I've always been drawn to the vocabulary of the gamblers, pimps, thieves, and con artists in Jim Thompson's noir thrillers. In that world, "frammis" has a specific meaning, roughly the structure of the whole nefarious deal, the outline of the con. The Wuhan lab leak story is fast-moving, but I think I'm beginning to see the frammis here. In 2014, the Obama White House announced a "pause" in funding for the type of gain-of-function research that led to the Wuhan lab leak. According to the NIH at that time : The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced(link is external) today that the U.S. government will undertake a deliberative process to assess the risks and benefits of certain gain-of-function (GOF) experiments with influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses in order to develop a new Federal policy regarding the funding of this research. . . . “GOF studies” refers to scientific research that increases the ability of any of the...