I'm Going To Start A Series Of Posts On The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus

A visitor to my old blog sent me a cri de coeur on the situation at the cathedral of the North American Catholic ordinariate for former Anglicans, which I've published with comments at the old blog. It's been very good for me to become more detached from the ordinariate, of which I was never a member in any case, as I've steadily become more assimilated into the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church via a well-run parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Two things strike me. One is that my own experience of being Catholic has educated me in the meaning of this passage from the Vatican II constitution Lumen Gentium

Often the Church has also been called the building of God. The Lord Himself compared Himself to the stone which the builders rejected, but which was made into the cornerstone. On this foundation the Church is built by the apostles, and from it the Church receives durability and consolidation. This edifice has many names to describe it: the house of God in which dwells His family; the household of God in the Spirit; the dwelling place of God among men; and, especially, the holy temple. This Temple, symbolized in places of worship built out of stone, is praised by the Holy Fathers and, not without reason, is compared in the liturgy to the Holy City, the New Jerusalem. As living stones we here on earth are built into it.

It goes without saying that Protestant denominations do not recognize this in any but a figurative sense. It's also been hard for me to see members of the North American ordinariate projecting any real sense of this, nor any indication that Bp Lopes sees any responsibility to educate his flock about this.

And beyond that, his flock, having entered this new spiritual environment, seem still to be unhappy and disgruntled people -- the complaint in the link is just the most recent of the long succession of those I've received.

And perhaps related to this condition is the remarkable number of clergy scandals and removals the ordinariate has had, among well under a hundred priests, and in less than ten years.

This convinces me that even if there may still be detectable brain waves, the heart is dead. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I'll make a series of posts on it.

More On The Dalton School Kerfuffle

When I posted Sunday on rhw headmaster's resignation at the uber-elite Dalton School, I thought it would be an easy short post on a day when I'd be preoccupied with installing my new desktop. But then yesterday I heard that Megyn Kelly, of all people, had gone public with scolding the headmaster, and a few people had noticed, so I wondered what else was up.

Let's keep in mind that Kelly is still presumably rich following her settlements with Fox and NBC, and at least arguably still famous, though she's past her sell-by date. But she destroyed her career doing as the lizard people told her to do in 2016, trying to ambush Trump, so I'm not sure why she's hanging around. The elites don't like her, and she doesn't like them -- unless they continue to fawn over her, which they aren't doing.

It turns out that Kelly has had a running Twitter feud with New York elite schools and New York itself since last year. She pulled her kids out of the equally tony Collegiate and Spence Schools, for wokeness, but remember that she went on Bill Maher to talk about it. It ain't about the kids.

Then I found a long piece in Vanity Fair from last Thursday, only days before the Dalton head's resignation, which clearly indicates that the conflict had been brewing for some time. And it sounds more and more like a tempest in a teapot.

The public blowup came in December, splashed across the pages of the New York Post: A handful of teachers at the Dalton School, one of New York City’s elite Upper East Side private schools, had written an eight-page, 24-point thought-starter document that aimed to reimagine Dalton’s approach to diversity and inclusion, bringing it more in line with the progressive facade it has long worn.

But this was just at Dalton, which as the srory implies had somehow been lagging behind the woke trend. Megyn herself came out last fall, according to the Maher story linked above:

Kelly first announced this decision in November 2020, citing as the catalyst the school’s curriculum which had “gone off the deep end” in terms of its left-leaning ideology, though critics have highlighted Kelly’s controversial past as an indication that she may be overreacting or deflecting from more important issues. One highlight from Kelly’s career in controversy was defending blackface costumes on Halloween, which lead to her termination from NBC.

So this is starting to look more and more like an intramural controversy among people who appear to be in the elite but are deeply insecure about it. A key indicator that they've arrived, among this particular set, is their kids' expensive private schools. So they're basically playing ain't-it-awful among themselves over things like the price of beachfront estates in the Hamptons. With a lot less effort, they could do a little research and networking and simply find a good school outside that social orbit, but they'd have to drop the mental habit of relating everything in their lives to that social orbit.

And of course, if they sent their kids to some school that just focused on real education, they'd lose the chance of getting them into Harvard. Which for the kids' sake would be all to the good, but that's not who we're dealing with.

So in the Twitter thread in which Megyn scolded Dalton, someone followed up:

Knew this one was coming. He totally deserved it, but I wonder if the board was just upset at all the publicity.

I'm afraid the issue is less that the kids are having wokeness shoved down their throats because it's a bad thing than it's OK if the plebs's kids have it in plebs schools, but our kids don't deserve it, because they're special.

California's Approach To COVID

Above is a typical table of the type that can be found on the LA County Health Department website. It's updated daily. It appears that LA County's policies conform with California state policies. It's plain that LA County is carefully recording race, ethnicity, and poverty data on COVID cases. In general I would have questioned this before the current crisis, but what we see in just the death data is an indication of where the problems lie.

If you run vaccination clinics in poor Hispanic areas, you are going to do far more good with each shot there than in an affluenmt white area. That's all there is to it. So I quote from a recent LA County health department press release:

Testing results are available for nearly 6,272,000 individuals with 18% of people testing positive. Today's daily test positivity rate is 1%, the lowest test positivity rate since the beginning of the pandemic. The test positivity rate peaked over 20% in late-December during the surge.

Nearly 5,400,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to people across Los Angeles County. Of these, nearly 3,500,000 were first doses and more than 1,900,000 were second doses. As of April 9, 71% of L.A. County residents 65 and older received at least one dose of the vaccine. In total, 41% of the County’s population 16 and older have received at least one dose of vaccine.

Los Angeles County expanded the number of sites offering vaccination services across the county from 566 locations last week to 709 vaccinations sites across the county this week; 266 sites are in the hardest hit communities. Vaccination sites across the county had capacity to administer nearly 734,000 doses this week. This week, 323,470 total doses were allocated to Los Angeles County.

There's an emerging consensus that California's COVID statistics are the best in the US. I simply don't know if other states are following similar policies. It does seem to me that the CDC ought to have data eqwuivalent to LA County's or California's for every state, and it ought to be asking whether every state, especially those that are now problem outliers like Michigan, are handing vaccinations the same way.

Clearfly s "preferential option for the poor" is a good strategy for society in general here.

I spent the weekend getting and installing a new desktop, as my old one died. I'm back up and fully running.

Panic Dissipating?

An item in this morning's news caught my eye: the head of Manhattan's uber-elite Dalton School is resigning, apparently due to pressure from parents who objected to his woke agenda.

Keep in mind that the true indicator of social standing isn't whether you went to an Ivy, it's the private secondary school you attended. The parents of those students have money and influence. Wokeness so far has been a form of preemptive submissioin by media, university, and corporate elites. If Dalton parents are dropping the program, this is an acknowledgement that it isn't working out for those elites.

In January, an anonymous group of parents wrote a letter objecting to Dalton’s new guidelines.

“Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘de-centering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class,” the letter read, according to the NY Post.

“Wildly inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity-training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum,” the parents added in their letter.

By February, the school’s director of DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) Domonic Rollins stepped down “in pursuit of other opportunities.”

The big takeaway here is that this isn't your grandfather's PTA. Not only did they complain, but they had the juice to get people fired.

The Questions Nobody Is Asking

Right after I posted yesterday, I found a piece on Yahoo News that asks questions nobody else has been asking.

After enduring a steep, nationwide surge over the holidays — followed by a decline in cases that was just as steep and just as widespread — America has entered a strange new phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

How strange? Just look at the wildly uneven outbreaks unfolding right now in California, Florida and Michigan.

Nationally, the pace of vaccinations continues to accelerate, with an average of 3 million doses being administered every day. Yet the spread of variants such as B.1.1.7 — a strain that’s more contagious and deadly than earlier versions of the virus — is accelerating too. As a result, cases have started to level off or even inch up nationally, and experts are debating whether a so-called fourth wave is upon us.

It’s a race between the vaccines and the variants, they say.

But the truth is a bit more complicated — and perhaps a bit less scary. Zooming in on California, Florida and Michigan helps explain why.

These big states have some things in common. All three previously experienced large waves of infection. All three have at least partially vaccinated about a third of their residents, with California at 35 percent, Michigan at 31 percent and Florida at 31 percent, in line with the U.S. overall. And all three appear to be rife with variants; nationwide, Florida, Michigan and California currently rank No. 1, No. 2 and No. 6, respectively, in the number of B.1.1.7 cases detected to date.

Yet their COVID-19 outbreaks couldn’t be more different.

These are the same questions I've been asking, and they're among those not being put to Dr Fauci.

I'm having computer hardware issues, so posting may be sporadic until they're resolved.

The Public Health Establishment Is In Disagreement Over Vacccines

Buried deep in a CNN story about the Michigan COVID surge, I found this:

Though the virus appears to be spreading unchecked in those under age 59, those with a few months of vaccine eligibility (age 60 and up) have an impressively stable (and low) infection rate. This makes Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's plea to President Joe Biden for more vaccines all the more logical though, as the administration pointed out when they rejected Whitmer's request, giving more vaccines to Michigan will mean fewer for the surrounding (and other) states.

This bears out the view expressed by the LA County health department that the vaccines are in fact highly effective. But if, as the story says, Michigan has vaccinated in the neighborhood of 25% of its population, roughly the same as other states, this raises the question of whether Michgan has been vaccinating the right people. California for the first several months of vaccine distribution specifically targeted those most likely to become infected, which showed immediate effects. If Michigan is vaccinating a lot of people -- affluent suburbanites, for instance -- who aren't likely to get sick, it's wasting time and vaccine.

Beyond that is this story at MSN:

The political dynamics have changed markedly in recent weeks as vaccination rates have grown, warmer weather has returned, and the public and business owners have become increasingly vocal about reopening schools and loosening restrictions around social gatherings.

“I think we have a real compliance issue if we try to go back to the sort of restrictions that were in place in March and April of last year,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Mike Zabel, a Democrat who had supported previous shutdown orders by Gov. Tom Wolf, a fellow Democrat. “I don’t think there’s any appetite for that in Pennsylvania at all.”

. . . Other governors also are staying on course to reopen society as they simultaneously expand vaccine eligibility, potentially complicating President Joe Biden's efforts to conquer the pandemic.

Thus it isn't just states like Texas and Florida that are ignoring the CDC, it's states with continuing surges like Michigan and Pennsylvania. They're becoming more aware, I think, of continuing legal and electoral challenges to strict orders that seem less and less effective.

But this raises another issue, whether the CDC is actually working against solving the problem. There's no question that Drs Walensky and Fauci advocate indefinite masking and social distance, no matter how effective the vaccines prove. A tweet thread by Dr Vinay Prasad of the University of California at San Francisco outlines the problem:

CDC messaging on restrictions post vax has been a mess

The q is not: is there 0% change of spread after vax (ans: almost surely no)

The Q is: do precautions have a reasonable ARR (w/ real compliance) post vac? (ans, also almost surely no)

My sense is that the effectiveness of vaccines, properly targeted, crept up on the CDC in particular. I think it's significant that nobody (UPDATE: Yahoo News finally noticed) has mentioned the case of California, which as far as I can see has been unique in specifically targeting the most vulnerable populations, indeed with incentives to meet quotas in the poorest areas. Doing this in the first months of vaccine distribution had spectacular results.

On the other hand, before the vaccines became available in mid December 2020, even though California had something like 98% compliance with masks and distancing, those measures clearly had no effect on the late 2020 surge there -- as they had no effect anywhere else.

Nor would I rule out the CDC deciding to "pause" all the vaccines, putatively to avoid inevitable bad reactions, but actually to extend the crisis. But I don't think they'd have supprt even among their colleagues.

I think the lack of a united front among the CDC, blue governors, and other health authorities suggests the panic is slowly waning, and the public is losing patience with efforts to extend it. Things will improve when Drs Walensky and Fauci begin to recognize their 15 minutes of fame has expired. Michigan

The Death Of Limbaugh And The 2020 Moral Panic

I've frequently discussed the 2020 dumpster fire here as a "moral panic", an upheaval in public opinion similar to the Salem witch trials or the day-care Satanism wave of the 1980s, a widespread fear that some ill-defined evil threatens the well-being of society. Observers suggest that moral panics stem from underlying social insecurity, with particular issues and "devils" serving only as what an Aristotelian would call efficient or proximate causes, not the underlying reason.

I'm now thinking that the single event that drove the whole 2020 moral panic, before the COVID lockdowns, before the George Floyd riots, was Rush Limbaugh's announcement of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Let me make it plain that, while I often found Limbaugh entertaining, I was never a dittohead, and I think in recent years he'd lost his sharp satirical edge, though he almost never had three hours of material to fill a three-hour show, and it was often padded with predictable bloviation.

But I had a sudden moment of epiphany the other night as I watched a TV program on, of all things, Swanson's TV Dinners. One of the analysts made a telling point, that TV Dinners became enormously popular at a time when there were effectively three TV networks that created a cultural consensus, which included the enormous cultural change of people watching television at dinner hour in the family room, eating frozen pre-prepared food off "TV tables". This trend took off like a rocket in the mid to late 1950s, and by 1968, Lyndon Johnson is alleged to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

This is yet another of the remarks LBJ may or may not have uttered, but reflect a perception of cultural trends that suggests that if he didn't say them, he should have. Walter Cronkite was a dinner-hour TV Dinner talking head that somehow reflected a single national consensus, driven by a de facto single national media.

The national media figure who began to undermine that 30-year media consensus in the late 1980s was Rush Limbaugh. By 2009, public exchanges between Limbaugh and Barack Obama cemented Limbaugh's stature, as in presidential remarks equivalent to LBJ's, Obama said, "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," The Guardian at the link noted,

He is the highlight of the rural American lunch hour, and his strong, confident voice can be heard in mechanic's shops, petrol stations and barbershops every day. He is – as he claims – an excellent broadcaster, a shameless and skilful self-promoter and a mover and shaker among the conservative elite.

Note the reference to Limbaugh suggesting, as with Cronkite, a dominant presence at mealtimes and in US culture, as well as a presidential acknowedgement of each figure's importance.

But it's also now recognized that Limbaugh had an impact on media equivalent to the TV Dinner's impact on American eating habits. According to the Poynter Institute,

Rush Limbaugh was more than a talk radio host. He was a key element in the development of the highly partisan journalism and other media that envelop us today.

Limbaugh’s talk radio program was not possible until the Federal Communications Commission relaxed the fairness doctrine. That policy, which began in 1949, was rooted in the idea that radio and TV stations were “public trustees” and as such should serve the entire nation and on the local level serve the communities to which they were licensed. The doctrine required them to air competing views on important issues. The idea was for broadcasters not to take sides.

. . . Along came President Ronald Reagan who, like other conservatives, didn’t like the fairness doctrine. The feeling was that news media lean liberal and the marketplace should determine content. With the support of FCC Commissioner Mark S. Fowler, the commission announced in 1987 that the government would no longer enforce the fairness doctrine. The commission reasoned that with the rise of cable television there were lots of viewpoints available to the public that did not exist when only print and over-the-air broadcasting were the only conduits to the public.

Now of course, pace LBJ, Walter Cronkite wasn't middle American at all. Cronkite's style was stentorian, patrician, Episcopalian, Brooks Brothers. Limbaugh was irreverent, Evangelical, a late-blooming college dropout, former disc jockey and low-level football flack who'd bucked his family tradition of becoming a lawyer. Limbaugh was the middle American, not Cronkite.

When Cronkite met his reward, nobody much cared, he was part of a bygone age by then, predeceased by the likes of John Cameron Swayze, Douglas Edwards, and Chet Huntley. They hadn't changed anything much, since Americans kept watching the nightly news over their TV dinners even as the talking heads changed -- but the talking heads were saying what they were told to say anyhow, which didn't change over that time.

The problem with Limbaugh was that he changed a great deal, and whether he passed away didn't cancel those changes out. He was an early pioneer of independent media, and he simply created a whole new market. When he announced his cancer diagnosis and Trump awarded him the Medal of Freedom during a State of the Union, the lizard people simply woke up and realized that, attack Limbaugh as they might, he'd be gone soon enough, as he was, but he was the guy who'd squeezed the toothpaste out of the tube, and they weren't going to be able to push it back in. He'd given the plebs a voice, not lectured them as their better.

This is the source of the elites' panic and desperation. The nodes of the panic, masks and social distance, riots by the urban underclass threatened by disappearance of the destructive policies that sustain it, and the corporate attempts to restrict speech, are all results of the social uncertainty created by media no longer under elites' complete control.