In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The period leading up to major holidays, especially the Fourth, doesn't have much actual news. The big subject over the past week has been the condo collapse in Miami. But there are other data points. NBC News, a stalwart of legacy media, caught a major Wuhan lab figure in an untruth : In March, Dr. Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan-based virologist who has been accused of conducting risky experiments with bat coronaviruses, flatly denied allegations that the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted studies with the military, an NBC News report said. But the network reported that it uncovered evidence linking Shi to military scientists. She collaborated with Ton Yigang, a military scientist, on coronavirus research in 2018 and then with Zhou Yusen, another military scientist in December 2019. Zhou who was listed as deceased in the footnote of an article published in 2020, the report said. The report said it could not confirm the cause of his death. For those who've been following th...

California had a modified limited reopening on June 15, with certain exceptions for transit, large events, and medical facilities. But even at Kaiser, though we still have to wear masks, the attitude is more relaxed, and the Polizei at the entry yelling "pull your mask all the way up!" are gone. A retail store I visit apologized that the building owner still wants masks there, but I can live with it. About a third of the people at mass wear them, but so far, it's at individual discretion. The Delta variant is an intereating case. Pretty clearly in the US, a fairly small minority has wanted renewal or continuation of masks and social distance due to the Delta variant. Los Angeles County has "strongly recommended" continuing masks and social distance, but detailed updates to the public health order as of June 28 are very limited. It's especially significant that CDC head Dr Walensky has reiterated that fully vaccinated people don't need to wear mask...

As I've said, I've got no dog in the fight over the Latin mass. There's no canonical requirement that I attend it, and I'm more than pleased with our novus ordo parish. I have, though, taken a contnuing interest in the fate of Anglicanroum coetibus . Pope Benedict XVI's constitution setting up a personal prelature for former Anglicans, which over more than a decade has not had a happy life. The latest controversy is over a second volume of its liturgy, covering the daily office and liturgy of the hours. Let's remember that the total world population of ordinariate members under Anglicanorum coetibus is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000, divided about evenly between the US and UK, with essentially miniscule and declining memberships in Australia and Canada. [A visitor reports that according to the latest official figures available from the 2020 Annuario Pontificio, the membership of the North American ordinariate is 6,040 while that of the UK is 1,85...

Yesterday I posted about the Hunter Biden venture capital firm's investment in a for-profit startup that worked with the Wuhan lab to perform gain-of-function research. The image above is a screen shot that comes from another Natalie Winters piece in the National Pulse , dated yesterday, where she refers to a 2018 presentation at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill by Ralp;h Baric, a close colleague of Peter Daszak, entitled “Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!” In yesterday's post I offered half-crazy speculation that anti-computer virus tech tycoon John McAfee was suspected of creating the computer viruses for which his company sold the antidotes only as a way to suggest such opportunities conceivably exist. Natalie Winters seems to be on a similar wavelength. The slide outlines what type of stocks and industries surged during the Ebola outbreak, which he uses to extrapolate financial advice on how to “make money in the next pandemic....

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...