In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

On April 21, 1986, Geraldo Rivera hosted a hugely-publicized, hugely-rated live syndicated event entitled The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults. Rivera and a crew of workers broke into a secret vault underneath Chicago's Lexington Hotel, where the famous gangster used to run his criminal organization, in hopes of finding a stash of his ill-gotten gains or maybe even dead bodies. Famously, the two-hour special wound up uncovering virtually nothing. The big news last night was that the FBI executed a search warrant on Donald Trump's office in his home at Mar-a-Lago . Eric Trump said his father, Donald Trump, had nothing in a safe they claim the FBI breached as part of a raid of the former president's Mar-a-Largo resort on Monday. The second son of the 45th president said he was with his father in New York City when they found out about the search, and he indicated that it was indeed related to records that Donald Trump brought back with him to his resort in Florida...

On Saturday, I talked about a loose constellation of Great Reset beliefs that some combination of human population growth and increased human prosperity threatens the climate. As I've looked futher into this, I've come to see that there are two schools of thought on overpopulation among radical environmentalists, the "hards" and the "softs". However, I don't trust the "softs" a bit. The "hards" are best represented by Paul R Ehrlich, the grand old man of population control. In a Stanford University press release from the 1990s, he and two co-authors announce: Until cultures change radically, the optimum number of people to exist on the planet at any one time lies in the vicinity of 1.5 billion to 2 billion people, about a third of the present number, three California ecologists estimated in an article published in the journal Population and Environment. Paul and Anne Ehrlich of the Center for Conservation Biology at ...

Yesterday, August 6, was the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, which began the chain of events resulting in the Japanese surrender in World War II. When I was an Episcopalian, more often than not, this anniversary would be the occasion of a politically correct, self-abnegating homily from the rector on the presumptuousness of the US in claiming to be the world's policeman, blah blah blah. I think at least some in the pews -- I would have been one of them -- simply gritted their teeth and tried not to listen very closely. More recently, after I'd become Catholic, I ran into an essay in the Catholic Herald by the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser, whom I normally respect a great deal, Weigel’s Terrible Arguments , which is directed at George Weigel's position that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified because invading Japan itself would have been bloodier than the bombings. Instead, Feser argues that destruction of entire cities under Catholic te...

I was drawn to some remarks by Democrat Sen John Hickenlooper on CNN discussing the $369 billion BBB-lite bill: It’s the beginning. It’s the beginning of a long, forced march that we’re going to have to all work together on. But it allows us to imagine a successful outcome. I mean, the modelers are telling us that they think it will reduce greenhouse gases — greenhouse emissions by 40% by 2030. That’s 80% of what President Biden committed to during his campaign, and everyone thought that, oh, you’ll never get there. Well, now, all of a sudden –.” In many ways, these remarks are a strange mixed metaphor. They allude to Mao Zhedong's Long March, the first step in his rise to power, which consisted of an extended retreat by Communist forces in 1934-35. The bitter struggles of the Long March, which was completed by only about one-tenth of the force that left Jiangxi (about eight thousand of some hundred thousand), would come to represent a significant episode in the history ...

It seems to me that the Power Point slide above, or whatever it is, is no more than wishful thinking. The COVID narrative has been changing so fast -- lockdowns work, masks work, businesses need to close, you can't go to church, you can't go to the beach, you need to get the vax, the vax prevents transmission, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated, you need a booster, you need another booster, you won't get as sick if you're vaxxed -- all of these have seamlessly morphed into the next vademecum and the next set of excuses within months or even weeks. Given the failure of each successive policy, the course of COVID with none other than the President of the United States, the paradigmatic citizen suffering from the paradigmatic disease, is the perfect illustration of the current public health conundrum . Biden is quadruple-vaxxed and double-masked. He also took a round of Pfizer’s proclaimed “wonder drug,” Paxlovid, after becoming infected. Yet, he’s still COVID...

If Los Angeles is a bellwether, the "new normal" has gotten old. Last year, we were hearing that masks and social distance were going to be around forever. For instance, from the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners : The coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives in many ways. Among them is the "new normal" of wearing face masks around others for protection and to prevent the spread of the disease. This June, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez signed an Executive Order requiring the use of facial coverings in public. Following guidelines from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the order calls for the use of any facial covering that snugly covers the face and mouth, whether store-bought or homemade, and secured with ties or ear loops. Mayor Gimenez and County Commissioners have asked residents not use N95-rated masks, since these were critical supplies for health care workers, police, fire, emergency management, or other people engaged in li...

Following California's declaration of a public health emergency for monkeypox yesterday, Los Angeles County, not to be outdone, declared a monkeypox emergency of its own . L.A. County Board of Supervisors Chair Holly J. Mitchell introduced a proclamation declaring a local emergency over the rising cases of monkeypox. The action, which the board unanimously ratified, is an effort to bolster the county’s response to the outbreak. The day before, California declared a state of emergency because of the virus. . . . Monkeypox cases in L.A. County rose to 423 on Tuesday, up more than 80% from a week prior, according to the county health department’s count of confirmed and probable cases. The majority of cases have been confirmed in men who identify as part of the LGBTQ community, county data show. This comes only days after the county backed down on its threat to reimpose indoor COVID masking, which considering the county's standing as one of the most lockdown-friendly jurisd...