In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

While thinking about the whiter-than-white TV commercials I've seen lately, I ran into an essay by Victor Davis Hanson, " Why Are They Woke? ". This outlines the fundamental contradictions in current elitist thinking: Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them. It's worth noting that the picture of Gov Northam above dates from a 1984 yearbook, incongruously a full generation after the US Civil Rights movement. Northam appears in another yearbook from 1981 with the nickname "coonman". Yet this was while Northam was in post-Civil Rights formation to become a doctor, a member of the elite. There are similar implications in President Biden's routine slips and gaffes, like the one just this past week where he said, “It’s awful hard, as well, to get Latinx vaccinated as well. Why...

My wife and I record the TV programs we like and watch them the following night so we can fast-forward through the commercials. Still, this is an imprecise exercise, and it's still possible to be slow to initiate the fast forward or stop it too soon, so you still see some, which continues to convince me that the commercials alone on TV will lower your IQ by 20 points. (This reminds me that once on a plane, surrounded by a family with screaming kids, I gently reminded the mother that "studies show that if you allow your children to scream, it lowers their IQ by 20 points." She became very flustered and immediately began to shush them.) Anyhow, trying to fast-forward through the commercials last night, I inadvertently glimpsed several. It suddenly dawned on me that, save the very occasional token African-American, everyone on every commercial was white. And not just sorta-kinda white, uber white, Aryan white, blonde, clear-skinned, trim, prosperous, and smiling with perfe...

The New York Post revives a COVID origin question that had originally come up in May 2020 , that COVID may have escaped from the lab earlier than previously assumed. The story from May 2020 reported, A group of French athletes who competed in Wuhan back in October fear they may have brought the coronavirus back home — meaning that the deadly bug may have been around months earlier than first reported. The French delegation took part in the seventh edition of the World Military Games in Wuhan from Oct. 18 to 27 last year, just 20 days before the first confirmed case of coronavirus in China, the Sun reported. Wednesday's Post story says it wasn't just the French: Members of Congress are calling on the Biden administration to launch an investigation into whether an international competition in Wuhan, China, involving thousands of athletes from around the world in October 2019 was the ​world’s ​first coronavirus “superspreader” event, according to a report on Wednesday....

I note several stories that appear as puzzling data points, some or all of which may or may not be related. But if any of several are, something's going on. Warren Buffett has resigned as a director of the Gates Foundation . This may simply be because he's 90 and reducing his workload, or it may be in anticipation of what may come out in the Gates divorce case. The Lancet has acknowledged that Peter Daszak had a conflict of interest in items he published there . It has recused him from its commission investigating COVID's origins. Eventually EcoHealth Alliance will be forced to remove him as CEO, also due to conflict of interest. China is replacing its ambassador to the US with a man closer to Xi who has a harder-line style. This clearly has nothing to do with a rumored high-level defector. A new set of juicy stories has suddenly emerged from Hunter Biden's laptop, eight months after a first flurry. This clearly has nothing to do with rumors of...

A quick recap, via the AP : U.S. Catholic bishops overwhelmingly approved the drafting of a “teaching document” that many of them hope will rebuke Catholic politicians, including President Joe Biden, for receiving Communion despite their support for abortion rights. . . . The result of the vote — 168 in favor and 55 against — was announced Friday near the end of a three-day meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that was held virtually. . . . As a result of the vote, the USCCB’s doctrine committee will draft a statement on the meaning of Communion in the life of the church that will be submitted for consideration at a future meeting, probably an in-person gathering in November. To be formally adopted, the document would need support of two-thirds of the bishops. I brought up my calculator and found that 168 plus 55 is 223, the total number of bishops voting. 168 is 75% of 223, so this is some indication of which way a vote on a completed draft might go. My first, ...

A story from the weekend has Dr Fauci complaining to the New York Times that people call him Hitler . He insists this is not the case, he is not Hitler. "The more extreme they get, the more obvious how political it is ... ‘Fauci has blood on his hands,’" the infectious diseases expert said of his critics. "Are you kidding me? ... Here’s a guy whose entire life has been devoted to saving lives, and now you’re telling me he’s like Hitler? You know, come on, folks." This represents an escalation in Fauci's public defense, since earlier in the month he said only , "attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science." And I'm not aware of any public comparisons of Fauci to Hitler -- certainly not along the line of Trump or George Bush. So why bring it up? Fauci continues to insist that his e-mails reflect only a willingness to evaluate new data as it comes in -- at one point, he believed masks were ineffective, but data suddenly arrived conf...

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...