In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Poor Dr Fauci. He's overstayed his 15 minutes of fame by a considerable margin, but now, even if he's booed, nobody notices. Not only that, but on Thursday, The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the nation should move away from restrictive measures such as quarantines and social distancing and focus on reducing severe disease from Covid-19. In new guidelines released Thursday, the agency no longer recommends staying at least 6 feet away from other people to reduce the risk of exposure -- a shift from guidance that had been in place since the early days of the pandemic. These developments come on the heels of the LA County health department deciding that, on second thought, we should just never mind about a renewed indoor masking mandate, even though the link to the CDC announcement says this actually isn't the CDC's position: "It also continues to recommend that people wear masks indoors in about half the country." That would actually i...

What intrigues me is how little anyone is bringing Watergate up at all in the Mar-a-Lago contoversy. It occurred to me just yesterday how much Watergate added to our daily vocabulary, from the suffix -gate to characterize any scandal (like Irangate, Travelgate, Troopergate and Whitewatergate) to expressions like "stonewalling", "modified limited hangout", "deep throat", "[expletive deleted]", "what did he know and when did he know it", and more. I'm sure part of it is this only got into motion 50 years ago as we speak, and most of the first-hand participants are long departed, while even reporters and commentators who might have covered it early in their careers are retired. Nor does it help that something like Mar-a-Lagogate doesn't trip off the tongue. On the other hand, I lived through it as a full adult while my intellectual faculties were still being formed in graduate school, and in fact as I followed it closely, it ...

By the way, the Watergate burglary took place 50 years ago this past June. I was studying Milton's prose in graduate school at the time, and I never believed anyone could get hooked on The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. How wrong I was. Now I'm starting to get a real sense of deja vu. Sorting through this morning's news and commentary, I think there are three important items. The first, and likely most consequential, is Judicial Watch's motion to unseal the Mar-a-Lago search warrant : The public has an urgent and substantial interest in understanding the predicate for the execution of the unprecedented search warrant of the private residence of a former president and likely future political opponent. . . . [N]o official explanation or information has been released about the search. As of the filing of this motion, the public record consists solely of speculation and inuendo. In short, the historical presumption of access to warrant materials vastly outweig...

The official White House position on the Mar-a-Lago raid is this: “What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.” Members of the public who haven't just fallen off the turnip truck will nevertheless say it depends on what the meaning of "definitively and for sure" is, and indeed, those who follow true crime will add that the more redundancies people pile onto their denials, the greater the likelihood that they're false. Others have certainly said that if the above is in fact true, it's proof that someone else is running the show -- but of course, neither assertion necessarily contradicts the other. It's time to update my estimate of what's going on in the First Fuddy-Duddy's head. My view all along has been that his problem isn't medical, and a medical diagnosis from a distance ...

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...