The Recovery Continues

California had a modified limited reopening on June 15, with certain exceptions for transit, large events, and medical facilities. But even at Kaiser, though we still have to wear masks, the attitude is more relaxed, and the Polizei at the entry yelling "pull your mask all the way up!" are gone. A retail store I visit apologized that the building owner still wants masks there, but I can live with it. About a third of the people at mass wear them, but so far, it's at individual discretion.

The Delta variant is an intereating case. Pretty clearly in the US, a fairly small minority has wanted renewal or continuation of masks and social distance due to the Delta variant. Los Angeles County has "strongly recommended" continuing masks and social distance, but detailed updates to the public health order as of June 28 are very limited. It's especially significant that CDC head Dr Walensky has reiterated that fully vaccinated people don't need to wear masks:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday that fully vaccinated people are "safe" from the current variants and do not need to wear masks, doubling down on CDC guidance as some others call for a return to mask wearing.

The question of mask wearing has come back to the forefront given recommendations from Los Angeles County health officials, and from the World Health Organization, that even fully vaccinated people should continue to wear masks indoors in public as a precaution due to the rise of the highly transmissible delta variant of the virus.

But Walensky said that the CDC's guidance has not changed and that fully vaccinated people do not need to wear masks, echoing other health experts who note that the vaccines are highly effective even against the delta variant.

"If you are vaccinated, you are safe from the variants that are circulating here in the United States," Walensky said on NBC's "Today," adding it was "exactly right" that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks.

Let's get real. Dr Fauci has controlled the narrative for 18 months, and Dr Walensky, Fauci's boss but new to the job this year, has been letting him do it. But that she would make such a definitive public statement of CDC policy, with Fauci remaining silent on the issue, is new. In fact, Fauci's latest utterance has been nothing but a tautology:

Fauci declared that “When you have such a low level of vaccination super-imposed upon a variant that has a high degree of efficiency of spread, what you are going to see among under-vaccinated regions, states, cities or counties you’re going to see these individual types of blips. It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas.”

Two Americas, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Two Americas, the male and the female. Two Americas, those sleeping and those awake. It sounds as though Fauci has been given the word, and policy statements are now to be made by Dr Walensky. Fauci, if he chooses, may make general statements about how the world is, if anyone is interested.

I read this as an indication of Fauci's impending retirement.

What Was That Pope Francis Was Saying About Ritualism?

As I've said, I've got no dog in the fight over the Latin mass. There's no canonical requirement that I attend it, and I'm more than pleased with our novus ordo parish. I have, though, taken a contnuing interest in the fate of Anglicanroum coetibus. Pope Benedict XVI's constitution setting up a personal prelature for former Anglicans, which over more than a decade has not had a happy life. The latest controversy is over a second volume of its liturgy, covering the daily office and liturgy of the hours.

Let's remember that the total world population of ordinariate members under Anglicanorum coetibus is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000, divided about evenly between the US and UK, with essentially miniscule and declining memberships in Australia and Canada. [A visitor reports that according to the latest official figures available from the 2020 Annuario Pontificio, the membership of the North American ordinariate is 6,040 while that of the UK is 1,850. (At its highest to date, 2016, it was 3,500) Canadian membership probably accounts for about 250 of the North American total.] However, the liturgical authorities have issued two editions of the daily office, one for the US and Canada and one for the "Commonwealth", although Canada is in the Commonwealth.

This is, I think, a reflection of the way any attempt by any Christian denomination to respond to the decline of Anglicanism takes on a comic-opera quality. On the other hand, Anglicanism is no longer a subject that would even be worth the attention of a latter-day Trollope.

The current controversy surrounds the North American edition. According to Wikipedia,

The Divine Worship: Daily Office: North American Edition is printed by Newman House Press and was released in late 2020. The first printing of 500 books quickly sold out to parish communities, with further printings being announced shortly after. The first editions were bound in blue cloth hardcover and printed in red and black text.

The psalm translation is that of the 1928 Episcopal revision of the Coverdale Psalter. Permutations of the Coverdale Psalter are used in many Anglican Books of Common Prayer including the 1662 Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England and 1928 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church. Collects and other excerpts come from Divine Worship: The Missal, which itself sources from the Anglican Missal and other Anglo-Catholic texts.

Following the initial printing, several significant textual errata were noted, along with several dozen typographical errors. Among them, the latter half of the hour of None was missing. There were also complaints regarding specific omissions–such as prayers for popular English saints like Thomas Becket–as well as several popular hymns from the English Christian tradition. These concerns and other were anticipated to be in part addressed during the North American Edition’s second printing. The second printing was released in May 2021 and featured several corrections, including adding the missing portion of None. However, this new edition also introduced the omission of other portions of None–specifically the readings for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday–as well as errors in collects and commons.

Visitors have referred me to the Breviary and Divine Office Discussion Facebook group, as well as various Anglican ordinariate Facebook groups for examples of the complaints. One visitor suggests the Wikipedia entry aptly summarizes the objections, but another says

The Wikipedia account is quite restrained compared to the feedback on the two Ordinariate Facebook fora I lurk. Besides the many errors in the text, the binding has been criticised as unlikely to survive regular congregational use, and Canadians aren’t happy that they have to use an American-themed Divine Office when there is a “Commonwealth” edition in the works.

Apparently those in North America still dissatisfied with their edition of the daily office are now instructed to order a copy of the forthcoming "Commonwealth" edition. However, a commenter on that site remarked,

This is essentially the North American Ordinariate giving up, and asking its faithful to buy an office book from the UK that won't entirely match up with its own calendar. Furthermore, the UK edition uses unrevised Coverdale psalms, and the North American uses 1928 US BCP. You could not pray out loud from the UK edition at an Evensong in North America.

As a member of the [North Anerican ordinariate], and someone with years of publishing experience, I feel justified in saying that this is a ridiculous own-goal from the Chancery. There is a blueprint to follow to properly edit and publish a liturgical book, and at every turn Houston did not follow the blueprint.

One thing that interests me is that, with all the other issues occupying the diocesan Church, like eucharistic coherence, the continuing issues posed by COVID, the decline of vocations, and the overall decline in mass attendance, this little clique is focused on an enormous and unwieldy book of liturgy produced to gratify a tiny, insular faction of hyphenated Catholics.

I've got to say this, for all the skepticism I see over Francis's supposed agenda, when I look at what's gone on in the ordinariates, it drives me more and more to the view that the Holy Father actually has a point. He had some remarks to make about "ritualism" just last month. Two weeks ago, I cited his observation "prayer is not ritualism — the rigid end up in ritualism, always."

In a general audience on June 9, he expanded on this:

At the same time, a prayer that alienates itself from life is not healthy. A prayer that alienates us from the concreteness of life becomes spiritualism, or worse, ritualism. Let us remember that Jesus, after revealing his glory to the disciples on Mount Tabor, did not want to prolong that moment of ecstasy, but instead came down from the mountain with them and resumed the daily journey.

A visitor remarked of Bp Lopes, the North American ordinary,

I wonder if he hasn’t a mandate to screw everything up until Benedict dies. He can’t be that stupid.

I think the answer may be simpler -- we know them by heir fruits. The ordinariates are so tiny and insignificant, even in comparison with the Latin mass groups, that they haven't even attracted Francis's notice.

COVID And Money

Yesterday I posted about the Hunter Biden venture capital firm's investment in a for-profit startup that worked with the Wuhan lab to perform gain-of-function research. The image above is a screen shot that comes from another Natalie Winters piece in the National Pulse, dated yesterday, where she refers to a 2018 presentation at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill by Ralp;h Baric, a close colleague of Peter Daszak, entitled “Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!”

In yesterday's post I offered half-crazy speculation that anti-computer virus tech tycoon John McAfee was suspected of creating the computer viruses for which his company sold the antidotes only as a way to suggest such opportunities conceivably exist. Natalie Winters seems to be on a similar wavelength.

The slide outlines what type of stocks and industries surged during the Ebola outbreak, which he uses to extrapolate financial advice on how to “make money in the next pandemic.”

“I wanted to give you good news. There are winners out there, right? So if you ever want to be prepared and make money in the next pandemic, if that’s what you want to do, buy stock in Hazmat suit makers and protective clothing or companies that make antiviral drugs for that particular pandemic,” he notes.

Baric adds that the aforementioned sectors and stocks would “probably do pretty well” before highlighting that “there are actually mutual funds for pandemic preparedness.”

. . . “There is an opportunity for people to have political gain, financial gain, and personal gain during times of social upheaval, and that will probably occur,” he adds.

In yesterday's post, Winters uncovers a colleague of Ralph Baric who works with him as an assistant professor at UNC, Dr. Timothy Sheahan. Sheahan, with financial and professional conflicts, remains on the Lancet COVID task force from which Peter Daszak was recently recused.

Sheahan has worked alongside Baric for nearly two decades, including working at his lab while in graduate school and later teaching at the same institution: the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Prior to the current likely lab outbreak of COVID, Baric and Sheahen were working with the for-profit biotech company Gilead Sciences to test the drug Remdesivir to treat coronaviruses.

If nothing else, this paints a continuing picture of the close relationship between the virology establishment, which is already rife with personal and professional conflicts, and the for-profit drug industry, where the credentialed doctors and professors are routinely paid to work as consultants and researchers. Baric's 2018 presentation makes it plain that these figures are all acutely aware of the opportunities for personal aggrandizement that this enviornment fosters.

Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal,

Biden administration officials are cautioning that a 90-day review into the origins of the Covid-19 virus may not produce a definitive explanation as intelligence agencies take on the challenge of unraveling the global pandemic.

Spy agencies conducting the review have yet to find conclusive evidence that would settle the debate over whether the virus came from human contact with an infected animal or was leaked from a Chinese government virology lab, a person familiar with the efforts said.

Did anyone seriously expect any other outcome? The WSJ just spent x amount of staff time -- though probably far less than it would had it wanted a different outcome -- to establish yet again that opinions are divided, there are different theories, nobody knows how COVID started, and that'll likely never change.

The Legacy Media And The COVID Origin Story

There's a particularly annoying offshoot of the TV true crime show, the unsolved murder genre. In this, a crew revisits yet again the scene of the crime and the relatives, still weepy and ready to cry on prompt after 30 years, to rehearse the whole unsolved routine one more time. With nothing new and the case getting older and older, there's little entertainment value other than to prove the continuing popularity of watching people cry on camera. I've always thought the interlocutors get a bonus for each time they can do it.

The odd thing is that legacy media coverage of the COVID origin story, just weeks after it became OK to cover it at all, is already starting to look like an unsolved murder show. There are different thories about how the virus arose. One of them, unconfirmed, is that it was engineered in a Chinese lab. But the Chinese will never cooperate with investigations, so we'll never know. Ain't it awful? Bob Baloney is in Minneapolis, where he interviews the niece of a man who passed away in 2020. . . and the boo-hoo rolls.

The latest version of this is in the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall (why would I pay for nothing?), but I found a summary here.

A Journal investigation found China resisted international pressure for an investigation it saw as an attempt to assign blame, delayed the probe for months, secured veto rights over participants and insisted its scope encompass other countries as well.

China withheld data on potential early cases and delayed sharing information on animals sold at a market where the first cluster was found.

The question of whether a lab accident was the cause of the pandemic remains unanswered. [Does it, really?]

International pressure for a fuller inquiry into the origins of the virus grows.

Other efforts to trace the path of the pandemic continue.

And Bob Baloney is in Minneapolis. The one question that nobody in legacy media is asking is why the whole Wuhan bat lab seems to have been funded by US actors through Peter Daszak's eleemosynary foundation. the EcoHealth Alliance. This has been reported almost exclusively by independent researchers and independent media. They've done their work almost entirely via diligent web searches of public documents, something legacy journalists have stopped doing.

And I hate to say it, but we learned not long ago about another hinky guy who laundered payments through non-profits and took a skim off the top, Jeffrey Epstein. There are money trails that need to be followed and haven't been.

Legacy media, including the Wall Street Journal, isn't asking any of the people on the US side, Fauci; Collins; Daszak; Auchincloss, Fauci's assistant; Andersen; Baric; or any of the other figures about any of this, though they must surely know as much if not more than the Chinese. But in the meantime, all these people have smartened up and have stopped speaking in public, not only to keep the virus money flowing but to avoid indictment.

Now, thanks to Natalie Winters at The National Pulse, one of those who uses public documents for research, Hunter Biden of all people has come into the story.

Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners – an investment firm led by Hunter Biden – was a lead financial backer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that has partnered with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

. . . Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “PREDICT” project, which seeks to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.”

As part of this effort, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study relating to bat infectious diseases in China. “Sensitive and broadly reactive RT-PCR assays were performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,” the paper notes.

. . . Researchers from EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota have also collaborated on presentations on how to “live safely with bats” and studies linking emerging infectious disease outbreaks to wildlife trade facilities including “wet markets.”

But wait. Rosement Seneca isn't a medical non-profit, it's a venture capital firm that aims to make a profit. It funded Metabiota for the same reason venture capitalists fund any startup, in hopes it will be the next big thing and they can take it public and make a bundle.

So this says, even excluding Hunter Biden, there's big potential money in bat virus pandemics. Big US money that's somehow involved in everyone getting sick with new diseases. There's going to be more to this story.

Come to think of it, yet another hinky guy's been in the news lately, John McAfee. Back in the day, when he was an innovator in the computer virus field, people said computer antivirus was a racket. McAfee's people were suspected of creating the same computer viruses their product was meant to cure.

Big money in that. Look where it took McAfee. Just sayin'.

The Bishops Are Beginning To Reclaim The Narrative

Posters like the one above were all the rage in student apartments after Humanae Vitae in 1968 -- I have clear memories from that time. In an era of anti-authoritarian rage, the Catholic Church was having difficulty making its case at all. Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, made news at the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome by joking, "He no playa the game, he no maka the rules." Although Cardinal Cooke demanded an apology, the Church was clearly on the defensive. A generation later, it was hit by the pedophilia scandal.

For whatever reason, this marked a roughly 50-year period in which the Church had little control over its public narrative. It's notable that over the past year or so, the Church is regaining its public voice via its bishops, something that had been envisioned in Lumen Gentium. The Church took a lead in filing lawsuits against COVID lockdowns that specifically limited worship in 2020. The decison by the US bishops to draft a teaching document that would clarify the relationship between eligibility for communion and politicians who claim to be Catholic but advocate policies against Church teaching is a major step.

Indeed, I don't think public ridicule like the Paul VI poster would gain the same traction in the current environment. Instead, we now see Abp Cordileone issuing a strong and insightful reply to Democrat House members who object to the bishops' vote:

The history of Catholic immigrants to the United States and their descendants is exemplary of the American dream, and intertwined with the Democratic party. I myself am a typical example of this Catholic Democratic legacy. My grandparents were immigrants, arriving here dirt-poor from Sicily. My father grew up in his father’s trade and was a commercial fisherman; my maternal grandfather was a cement mason. They were classic working-class people. Both of my parents were registered Democrats—New Deal Democrats—their whole lives. What the Democratic party, with its vital support for labor unions, brought to our country at the time helped my family survive and thrive, and made possible even greater opportunities for my siblings, my cousins, and myself.

It was a bit disconcerting, then, when on June 18, sixty Democratic members of Congress, all Catholics, issued a significant “Statement of Principles” in response to a decision by U.S. Catholic bishops to develop a teaching document on the nature of the Eucharist and its proper reception. In their statement, the members of Congress argue that “the Sacrament of Holy Communion is central to the life of practicing Catholics, and the weaponization of the Eucharist to Democratic lawmakers for their support of a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion is contradictory.” They go on to “solemnly urge” the bishops “to not move forward and deny [lawmakers] this most holy of all sacraments” over one issue.

The statement raises many troubling questions. While I speak only for myself in this column, the public nature of the statement invites a public response and provides an excellent opportunity for candid dialogue. In that spirit, allow me to begin the dialogue. . .

Abp Cordileone isn't alone. Abp Gómez issued a pastoral letter that was read from the pulpit at mass this week declaring a jubilee year to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of Mission San Gabriel near Los Angeles, cited Pope Francis's view that St Junipero Serra is “one of the founding fathers of the United States”, and made it plain that the Church Serra brought to Los Angeles and California will continue in the public dialogue. In his June 16 address tp the USCCB, he said,

We have been living through some extraordinary times. We’ve seen a pandemic shut down our civilization, including the Church, for more than a year. We’ve lived through riots in our major cities, rising social divisions and unrest, and maybe the most polarized election our country has ever seen.

. . . There are forces at work right now in our culture that threaten not only the unity of the human family, but also the very truth about God’s creation and human nature.

Our Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has said, “This is the age of sin against God the Creator.”

Pope Francis has stressed the truth of these words and said, “The problem is worldwide! The exploitation of creation, and the exploitation of persons. We are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of God.”

. . . May [Mary] help us to keep our hearts humble and united in the service of Jesus, as we seek to continue the evangelization of our country and our continent in this moment.

In his address, he makes the point that the Church can't think exclusively in poliical terms, but it must engage in the public dialogue. I don't think I've seen a public stance like this, at least in my adult life. The Church has finally begun to leave the defensive and take the initiative. I think Bp Barron's campaign to reinvigorate the actual texts and intent of the Vatican II documents, as well as Pope Francis's clear stance against pre-Conciliarism, are another part of this development.

More Thoughts On Wokeness

While thinking about the whiter-than-white TV commercials I've seen lately, I ran into an essay by Victor Davis Hanson, "Why Are They Woke?". This outlines the fundamental contradictions in current elitist thinking:

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them.

It's worth noting that the picture of Gov Northam above dates from a 1984 yearbook, incongruously a full generation after the US Civil Rights movement. Northam appears in another yearbook from 1981 with the nickname "coonman". Yet this was while Northam was in post-Civil Rights formation to become a doctor, a member of the elite. There are similar implications in President Biden's routine slips and gaffes, like the one just this past week where he said, “It’s awful hard, as well, to get Latinx vaccinated as well. Why? They’re worried that they’ll be vaccinated and deported."

You don't have to dig too deep to realize Hanson has a point. Another point he makes is that claims of vocal leftists to be "Marxist" ring hollow.

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

I'm in complete agreement with Hanson's underlying theme here, that the political philosophy that motivates current establishment thinking is completely incoherent and in some ways just opportunism, but it also represents a return, or an attempt to return, to the post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction consensus accommodation illustrated in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), where the post-Civil War southern social structure is the result of an alliance between southern segregationists and northern philanthropists who subsidize and control southern states by endowing local colleges and universities, while ensuring that northern cities keep the blacks who migrate from the south in ghettos.

Thus a feature of the Black Lives Matter movement, a drive to "defund the police", victimizes almost exclusively the people who live in those ghettos. It also stereotypes blacks by equating them with the lumpenproletariat, whom Marx thought, according to Britannica,

are not only disinclined to participate in revolutionary activities with their “rightful brethren,” the proletariat, but also tend to act as the “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.”

That the BLM riots of 2020 were brought about by an alliance of the criminal class and angry elites corresponds remarkably well with this characterization. Che Guevara could be fashioned into a revolutionary martyr; George Floyd was never any such thing. And indeed, while Che was dangerous to world order, George Floyd, a feckless addict and petty criminal, was completely safe -- except, of course, to those who had to live around him.

The people the elites fear aren't the George Floyds -- they stay in their own enclaves, and they keep the poor down by victimizing them almost exclusively. The people they fear are Marx's "rightful brethren", broadly speaking the actual proletariat, the plebs, over much of the West a combination of the working and middle classes.

This is reflected in the abject terror the January 6 demonstation at the US Capitol fostered in the political class -- months and months of urban rioting in 2020 hurt only the poor and minority entrepreneurs. A day of protest at the seat of government was not in the script and a completely different matter.

I think this is because the elites recognize that the broad post-Reconstruction racial accommodation that formed a good part of the US social structure for 150 years is slipping away. Accusastions of "systemic racism" are, as Hanson pointrs out, projection from elites who've been comfortable with those arrangements all along and who in fact want them to continue.

Minorities are recognizing that their interests lie with a broad social order that supports a productive plebs made up of the working and middle classes, not a segregationist system that depends on a criminal class that victimizes the poor. Thus the elites, steadily losing the support of workers and minorities, must shore up their consituency with an unlikely alliance of petty criminals, feminists, Malthusians, trustfunders, and sexual deviates.

This doesn't seem like a recipe for success.

Why Are The Commercials So White?

My wife and I record the TV programs we like and watch them the following night so we can fast-forward through the commercials. Still, this is an imprecise exercise, and it's still possible to be slow to initiate the fast forward or stop it too soon, so you still see some, which continues to convince me that the commercials alone on TV will lower your IQ by 20 points. (This reminds me that once on a plane, surrounded by a family with screaming kids, I gently reminded the mother that "studies show that if you allow your children to scream, it lowers their IQ by 20 points." She became very flustered and immediately began to shush them.)

Anyhow, trying to fast-forward through the commercials last night, I inadvertently glimpsed several. It suddenly dawned on me that, save the very occasional token African-American, everyone on every commercial was white. And not just sorta-kinda white, uber white, Aryan white, blonde, clear-skinned, trim, prosperous, and smiling with perfect teeth. And it also dawned on me that this is the wokest epoch in US history in the wake of George Floyd, and black lives matter more than ever.

Except commercials -- and make no mistake, advertising is integral to the media monolith -- are whiter than ever. Not only that, but figures like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have been purged in this latest surge of wokeness. Where, for instance, is the 2021 version of O J Simpson, a high-profile black spokesman for a major national brand? There are black spokesmen for items like athletic shoes, but those are products heavily favored by blacks.

The most successful US black politicians in history, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, are of mixed race and trace no descent from US slaves. In effect, they're tokens twice removed. Meghan Markle married into the UK royal family, but again, she's not all that black to start with, and rather than marrying in, she seems more intent on pulling her husband out, despite every indication that the royals were more than happy with her.

And of course, the US president and first lady are also about as white as you can get, indeed, stereotypically if not pathologically obtuse, with Biden rising in politics as a southern-state segregationist. The press secretary is a white woman, but not just white, upper-class white from Greenwich.

I can't offer a whole lot of explanation here, except a lot of this isn't necessarily new. I went to high school in Bethesda, second only to Greenwich as an upper-class enclave, and the schools there were segregated in the 1960s, a decade after Brown v Board of Education. Many of my schoolmates made careers in government, law, and the academy and took their attitudes with them. If anything, the events of 2020 have marked a return of the old elites -- the post-Civil War robber baron elites, if you get down to it -- to power.

The comnmercials are just a strange data point.