In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

There's a particularly annoying offshoot of the TV true crime show, the unsolved murder genre. In this, a crew revisits yet again the scene of the crime and the relatives, still weepy and ready to cry on prompt after 30 years, to rehearse the whole unsolved routine one more time. With nothing new and the case getting older and older, there's little entertainment value other than to prove the continuing popularity of watching people cry on camera. I've always thought the interlocutors get a bonus for each time they can do it. The odd thing is that legacy media coverage of the COVID origin story, just weeks after it became OK to cover it at all, is already starting to look like an unsolved murder show. There are different thories about how the virus arose. One of them, unconfirmed, is that it was engineered in a Chinese lab. But the Chinese will never cooperate with investigations, so we'll never know. Ain't it awful? Bob Baloney is in Minneapolis, where he intervi...

Posters like the one above were all the rage in student apartments after Humanae Vitae in 1968 -- I have clear memories from that time. In an era of anti-authoritarian rage, the Catholic Church was having difficulty making its case at all. Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, made news at the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome by joking, "He no playa the game, he no maka the rules." Although Cardinal Cooke demanded an apology, the Church was clearly on the defensive. A generation later, it was hit by the pedophilia scandal. For whatever reason, this marked a roughly 50-year period in which the Church had little control over its public narrative. It's notable that over the past year or so, the Church is regaining its public voice via its bishops, something that had been envisioned in Lumen Gentium . The Church took a lead in filing lawsuits against COVID lockdowns that specifically limited worship in 2020. The decison by the US bishops to draft a teaching do...

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, ...