In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...

Here in LA, we're just two days away from having most COVID restrictions dropped, and the outdoor mask mandate has been gone for weeks, but I still see a majority of people on the street wearing masks. Churches have been gradually returning to normal since the new year, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has just announced that things will be fuily back to normal (I assume this includes choral singing and missals in the pews, but we'll have to see) by June 20. Even so, some of our pew friends at pre-2020 mass are struggling for the courage to get back to in-person church. In other words, the moral panic of 2020 has had lasting effects even as the COVID pandemic is in full retreat. What have we learned since the release of the Fauci e-mails and related developments? The big one is the strange suggestion that by January 2020, Fauci and others in the loop were fully aware that a lab leak had released a highly contagious new virus on the world, and that US government agencies w...

Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 short story "Welcome to the Monkey House" depicts a dystopian future in which the world government runs ethical suicide parlors to control overpopulation. The idea of mass euthanasia as social policy began around the turn of the 20th century in the eugenics movement. It had a thorough beta test under the German National Socialist regime, with results many felt were a failure, but it has never quite fully disappeared from the overall conversation. Nor have neo-Nazi wackos been its chief proponents. The idea of population reduction -- and we're talking reduction, not just stabilization -- has been present in the environmental movement from the start. The problem is that when environmentalists start seriously projecting what's needed to achieve things like carbon goals, they begin to realize that electric cars and synthetic beef just aren't going to be enough to do the necessary job. Even if you get rid of all the cars and all the farting c...

This according to the Daily Caller . In a comic book world, this might be justified, but Trump himself is fully aware that the US deep state funded Wuhan gain-of-function research to the tune of at least $100 million, and probably more, since an estimate given by the NIH director is "hundreds" of millions . In April 2020 , according to Politico, The Trump administration has pulled funding for a group of scientists studying coronaviruses in bats and the risk of their spillover into humans -- the very kind of infection that started the COVID-19 pandemic -- according to EcoHealth Alliance, the New York-based nonprofit organization conducting the research. . . . In a statement, the EcoHealth Alliance said it wanted to know more about the NIH's reasoning. “For the past 20 years our organization has been investigating the sources of emerging diseases such as COVID-19,” the group said. “We work in the United States and in over 25 countries with institutions t...

Within a matter of a couple weeks, the Overton window of COVID's origin has shifted, from Facebook completely banning the lab leak theory to just about everyone saying, well, it's a possibility, and well, it does seem credible, but of course, it was just an accident, it wasn't deliberate. Wait a moment. Let's take a look at this kind of accident. On March 6, 1970, members of the Weather Underground were building a bomb in Greenwich Village when it accidentally went off, killing three. But that's OK, it wasn't deliberate, it was just an accident. On August 21, 1945, physicists playing around with the plutonium core of a nuclear bomb in Los Alamos mistakenly dropped part of its shield, causing a criticality incident that killed one physicist and exposed others to dangerous radiation. But that's OK, it was just an accident, it wasn't deliberate. Nobody seems to want to ask what's behind this kind of accident. It seems to me that in our examples, peo...

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 ...