In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The photo above is of the avuncular Dr Francis Collins, former director of the US National Institutes of Health, who also happens to be a prominent Evangelical who has periodically argued that "rigorous science" poses no conflict with religious belief. But I suppose that depends on what the meanings of "rigorous science" and "religious belief" are -- and they certainly haven't stood in the way of Dr Collins getting the prestigious Templeton Award, notwithstanding his direct subordinate Dr Fauci has constantly insisted that the anti-religious COVID lockdown policies involving church closures are based on "science". In the context of the recent revelation that Dr Fauci in February 2020 commissioned an academic study that he then cited to refute the lab-leak theory of COVID's origin , it's worth revisiting a story that I first covered here last August , wherein Collins effectively ordered his subordinate Fauci and a colleague to s...

One intriguing indicator that we've reached the Morning After phase of the COVID moral panic is how the Overton Window, the permissible range of opinion on public issues, has changed almost instantly over roughly the past week. At the peak of the panic, the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak in China wasn't just a minority view, it was a pariah view associated with racists and conspiracy theorists. But as of this past Saturday, FBI Director Chris Wray told Fox News' Bret Baier this week that COVID-19 "most likely" came from a Chinese lab. . . . The Energy Department, which had been undecided on the origin of the pandemic, concluded that the coronavirus most likely spread due to a mishap at a Chinese laboratory, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and "key members of Congress." . . . Beyond the FBI and Energy Department, the National Intelligen...

As I reflected on yesterday's post about the deliberations in the UK over rounding up everyone's pet cat, it suddenly occurred to me that cat prohibitionism isn't a new phenomenon. There's been a long-term movement in the UK that insists that pet cats kill songbirds, which is thought to be something that must be curbed if not halted entirely, but more recently, a body of literature has grown in the US that insists that pet cats are an environmental hazard. At the link, Free-ranging domestic cats Felis catu s, from owned pets to feral cats, impact biodiversity through predation, fear effects, competition, disease and hybridization. Scientific knowledge regarding these impacts has recently increased, making it timely to assess the role of nature conservation legislation in this connection. . . . Many national authorities around the world are currently required, under international law, to adopt and implement policies aimed at preventing, reducing or eliminat...

Via Instapundit, THIS ERA WILL BE LOOKED BACK ON AS ONE OF MASS HYSTERIA AND OFFICIAL INCOMPETENCE: The U.K. Briefly Considered Killing All Pet Cats Early in the Pandemic . To be fair, that’s only because it was an era of mass hysteria and official incompetence. Plus: “The revelations have sparked astonishment from some on social media, with users sharing images of their own cats and vowing they would have put up a fight.” Meh. Most of them would have gone along. Many would have bragged about their compliance and shamed those who resisted. The link is to a story in TIME: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the virus, the U.K. government briefly considered asking the public to exterminate every cat amid fears that the pets could spread the disease. Lord Bethell, a former deputy Health Minister from 2020 to 2021, revealed the news Wednesday during an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News. . . . Bethell added in the Channel 4 Ne...

One thing nobody's covered lately is the strange tendency of Biden lawyers no longer to be Biden lawyers. I've already noted here that Patrick Moore, a former Obama White House counsel who appears to have been the key individual tasked with cleaning out President Biden's Penn Biden Center office and who had quietly notified the Justice Department of the classified documents, was no longer representing Joe Biden following the January 9 revelation of the find. Via that link, his first day at a new job with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office was January 18. More recently, one of Hunter Biden's high-powered defense attorneys, Joshua Levy, has just as quietly withdrawn from that case . Levy has removed himself from the case, reportedly due to infighting within Hunter’s legal team and specifically with Abbe Lowell, who was hired in December to defend Hunter and the Biden family from nine congressional probes, including money laundering and wire fraud. ...

I note another blog post from Fr Longenecker today, Quo Vadis Traditionalists? , in which he discusses options that might be open to traditionalists who may be frustrated by recent restrictions on the Latin mass. On one hand, I'm not sure of his definition of "traditionalist", and in that light, he's been clear to say he isn't one, which separates him from someone like Fr Zuhlsdorf. But Bp Barron also calls himself a "traditionalist" if by "tradition" one means "adherence to the Church's ecumenical councils, incluiding the Second Vatican Council". Fr Longenecker proposes avenues for Catholics who disagree with restrictions on the Latin mass: [W]hat will be the response of those Catholics who are devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass given Rome’s latest round of restrictions? Several things: Some will migrate to the SSPX. Others will seek out other forms of reverent, traditional Catholic worship– an Ordinariate parish, a By...

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...