In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A couple of stories at the aggregators this morning reminded me that they don't just want us to drive electric cars. In Scientific American , In the U.S., people eat more protein than they need to. And though it might not be bad for human health, this excess does pose a problem for the country’s waterways. The nation’s wastewater is laden with the leftovers from protein digestion: nitrogen compounds that can feed toxic algal blooms and pollute the air and drinking water. This source of nitrogen pollution even rivals that from fertilizers washed off of fields growing food crops, new research suggests. Well, they sure know about nitrogen pollution in the Netherlands and the EU, huh? Dutch government proposals for tackling nitrogen emissions indicate a radical cut in livestock - they estimate 11,200 farms will have to close and another 17,600 farmers will have to significantly reduce their livestock. Other proposals include a reduction in intensive farming and the conversio...

I remember people claiming back in the initial days of COVID lockdowns that stay-at-home orders weren't so much intended as a public health measure but were actually a dry run to see how well they'd work for climate change "emergencies". But if you think about it, climate change is simply a cat's paw for something else as well, just as COVID has been. The real question is whether, irrespective of the specific excuse, the unelected administrative state can impose supralegal measures on the population at large. After more than two years of COVID controls, the answer appears to be only so far. As I noted on Wednesday, LA County was considering reimposing an indoor mask mandate, but it appears that strong behind-the-scenes opposition has headed this off : Los Angeles County will not be reimposing an indoor mask mandate for now after COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations appear to be trending downward, and the region may soon move back into the “medium” community...

On Sunday and Monday, I posted on Pope Francis moving Opus Dei from the supervision of the Vatican Dicastery for Bishops to the Dicastery for the Clergy, with commentary from a knowledgeable reader on how this reflects on the Vatican's overall interest in accountability. One issue arising from this move is the suspicion among Catholic traditionalists that Pope Francis opposes conservative movements in the Church, although my own view as a convert to Catholicism is that if for no other reason, it would be silly to become a Catholic on one hand while on the other insisting that the pope has things all wrong. Catholics current or potential have lots of options available that don't carry that contradiction, including any number that might potentially ease their consciences by claiming to be Catholic in some way or another. In any case, another Vatican move in recent days will stir this pot again. One of my last posts on the old blog covered a notice from the Australian ordi...

California, or at least part of it, has been seeing a resurgence of bien pensant opinion that we should be wearing masks, even though Drs Birx and Fauci have been publicly backing off their own previous endorsement of COVID measures. Contra Costa County, which includes both Oakland and Berkeley as well as very tony suburbs, tried to reimpose a mandatory indoor mask rule in June but dropped it after a few weeks. Los Angeles County has been threatening the same for two months now, but pressure against it has been building. Lame duck LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, who represents the uber-wealthy West Side and Hollywood Hills, had this to say about the growing opposition to a renewed mask mandate : "I'm particularly struck by the blowback from a number, though not a really significant number of sort of, 'snowflake weepies' about how oppressive it is to wear a mask." Kuehl has previously been a supporter of COVID restrictions that have been among the str...

For proof that the official response of the public health establishment to COVID was a debacle, we need to look no farther than the fact that states like Florida and Texas that didn't enforce lockdowns, masking, and other controls had statistical results no worse than those that imposed the strictest ones. Even the most visible spokespeople for such controls, Drs Birx and Fauci, have recently been backing off the recommendations they issued in 2020 and 2021, maintaining they never said vaccines prevented transmission and, now, masks didn't work because everyone wasn't wearing the right ones . So why didn't Dr Birx say vaccines didn't prevent transmission back then, or why didn't Dr Fauci tell everyone to get an N95 mask right off the bat? They're implying that things would have gone better if they'd been honest back then -- so why did they fudge things and make the pandemic worse? And of course, they're backtracking now because they recognize t...

As I hoped might happen, a visitor with more knowledge than I have of Opus Dei e-mailed me to provide additional context on his apostolic letter Ad Charisma Tuendum : This is mostly a canonical move that puts OD under the dicastery of clergy rather than under that of bishops. Under the bishops, OD wanted to be treated as its own diocese---just as a diocesan bishop makes an ad limina visit to the pope every 5 years, so did the prelate of OD. Now OD will give a yearly accounting of its activities (& not to the pope). Also, OD has to put together a constitution which OD has avoided all these years. OD has operated under its statutes in the public arena but behind closed doors the "members' of OD have been trapped by one instruction after another. (Interestingly, there seems to be no verification of when the statutes were approved by Rome, if they were.) There has been confusion about the 'members' of OD. As the code is written now, only clergy are members of...

As a Catholic covert, my views on Pope Francis are inevitably affected by our parish clergy, who as positive role models tend to disfavor sin and favor the Holy Father. They frequently cite unnoticed but productive remarks by the current pontiff in bulletins and homilies. Thus I'm reluctant to join the usual chorus of "ain't it awful" from other Catholics over this or that policy change, and that includes the most recent apostolic letter Ad Charisma Tuendum issued Friday. As someone with no particular insight into the Vatican political winds, I can't say much about what it means other than to quote the Catholic News Service : Saying he wanted to highlight the spiritual gifts of Opus Dei and its contributions to the Catholic Church's evangelizing activities, Pope Francis said it will now work with and answer to the Dicastery for Clergy, rather than the Dicastery for Bishops. . . . Francis also said the head of the personal prelature of Opus Dei "wil...