In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...