In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've already posted here about the schism dividing the United Methodist Church over same-sex marriage and the fact that Methodists are already fully eligible to enter the Roman Catholic Church as intact parishes with their clergy under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus . This is, at least in theory, an option available to the thousands of UMC parishes that are investigating disaffiliation and joining a more conservative denomination. However, I concluded in that post that this isn't what William James would call a "living option" : [L]et us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option...

During March 2020, the hospital ship Comfort was ordered to New York, and the Mercy was ordered to Los Angeles as part of the federal government's initial response to the COVID pandemic. On March 16 of that year, President Trump declared a national emergency, and under the theme "15 days to slow the spread", he endorsed the quasi-national lockdowns ordered by state and local health departments, which famously lasted much longer than 15 days. The moral panic took firm hold, although within a fairly short time, the public was made aware that the model under which the lockdowns were ordered and the hospital ships dispatched was "so highly flawed it never should have been relied upon for policy decisions to begin with." As the "morning after" phase of the panic slowly dawns, we're gradually learning details of how the authorities tried to cover up the consequences of their initial policy errors. Yesterday's New York Post carries this story: ...

Has anyone else noticed that recently, every time John Kirby appears at a White House press conference, Karine Jean-Pierre stands at his shoulder? This appears to date from a kerfuffle last September, when according to the New York Post, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was left stunned Friday when a reporter asked if his frequent briefing room appearances meant that he was the “second press secretary” and undermining Karine Jean-Pierre, the first woman of color to be chief White House spokesperson. The head-turning inquiry came from Cameroonian journalist Simon Ateba — who was selected by Jean-Pierre to ask Kirby a question, despite previously sparring with Kirby on a similar topic. Note that according to the Post, the moment was scripted. “The reason I’m asking is because almost everywhere I go, I have black people telling me that the reason you’re at the White House is to undermine the first female black [press] secretary,” added Ateba, of Today N...

Via the New York Post, this is a photo of members of the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, which has at least provisionally claimed responsibility for the UFO brought down by an Air Force F-22 over Yukon Territory. (Grammatical side note: certain areas, notably Ukraine, are incorrectly paired with a "the". It's correct to refer to geographical areas that don't correspond to state entities with that designation, as "the Rockies", "the Caribbean", and so forth. However, to say "the Yukon" is incorrect, as it is a definite government entity, as is Ukraine. We don't say "the Arizona".) Here's a thought experiment. The NIBBB has a website and appears to be an incorporated group with a bank account, among other things. What if the US Secretary of Defense were to have an aide contact the NIBBB and, purely as a public relations gesture, ask the NIBBB to tell him what their balloon cost and offer to reimburse them ...

In yesterday's news: On March 13, 2017, less than seven weeks after concluding his second term as vice president, Joe Biden announced the founding of the Biden Institute at his home state’s University of Delaware (UD). According to the announcement, part of Biden’s “vision for the institute is an annual conference at UD, similar to the World Economic Forum or the Aspen Institute.” . . . Prior to hosting the Biden Institute, UD had never disclosed any funding from China. One year later (and just two months after the Penn Biden center opened its D.C. office), anonymous donations from China to UD skyrocketed. The first payment came in April 2018 in the amount of $3,204,070 from an anonymous donor in China. In December 2018, another anonymous donation from China arrived for $1,869,515. A third anonymous China-linked payment, for $624,904, arrived in December 2019. In 2020, the year that Biden was campaigning for president, anonymous Chinese state-linked entities sent three more pa...

I subscribe to COVID skeptic Alex Berenson's Substack, and it's worth noting that pretty much his entire take on COVID from Day One has been vindicated. The whole regime, masks, lockdowns, social distancing, no church, school closures, work-from-home, universal vaccination and universal boosters, has proven not just ineffective but in many cases counterproductive. Overall public health in terms of life expectancy and the effects of delayed non-COVID care has declined. Is it over, tbough? I'm not sure. One thing I've noticed is that the little stickers and calibrations on sidewalks and floors that reminded people to stay six feet apart have largely disappeared. This suggests to me that there was a program to power wash them away at some point, probably in the middle of the night, but I went looking for web images of the process on the web -- just a guy in municipal coveralls, say, with a spray wand whooshing away the footprint stickers from a sidewalk -- and came...

Lost in the weekend's news about UFOs and space aliens was this item, covered best as usual in the UK Daily Mail : The Secret Service has been accused of a 'cover-up' over its alleged involvement in a police investigation when Hunter Biden's lover dumped his gun in a trash can near a school in 2018. Judicial Watch, a justice watchdog nonprofit, announced on Friday that it received 487 pages of Secret Service (USSS) records over the incident, and says the documents cast further doubt over the agency's claims that it was not involved. Hunter's lover and brother's widow, Hallie Biden, left his .38 handgun at the top of a trash can at Jansens supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware in October 2018, sparking a police probe. The reemergence of the story is due to new confirmation of Secret Service involvement in the cleanup, even though Joe was out of office at the time, and Hunter wasn't a protectee as a family member. Via a Freedom of Information Act req...