In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

There can be few better arguments for the idea that Twitter is, or had been, a de facto agency for government censorship than the Biden administration's proposal for a new Disinformation Governance Board only days after Twitter's directors accepted Elon Musk's buyout offer. But the ramifications go beyond the predictable political alignments. Witness the reaction of the Never Trump Hot Air blog: Very encouraging that the new owner thinks it was bad form to silence a guy who had just incited a riot by conspiracy theorists at the Capitol and seemed capable of inciting a lot more amidst his mania to overturn the 2020 election. Trump can rest easy now knowing that his mic won’t be cut the next time he tries a coup, I guess. This report from the WSJ makes me consider a question to which only Elon Musk himself knows the answer. Namely, to what extent is buying a Twitter a business decision for him? Does he feel pure altruism in wanting to improve an influential communicatio...

Accordding to Wikipedia, The rope-a-dope is a boxing fighting technique in which one contender draws non-injuring offensive punches (sometimes while leaning against the rope of the boxing ring) to let the opponent tire themselves out. This gives the former the opportunity to then execute devastating offensive maneuvers to help them win. The rope-a-dope is most famously associated with Muhammad Ali in his October 1974 Rumble in the Jungle match against world heavyweight champion George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. It seems to me that the Ukrainian strategy, as well as defeat in detail, which I've discussed here , is also rope-a-dope. So far, I haven't seen any analysis of the war that covers this, which is an argument for staying away from sites like ISW and spending time on the reddit /r ukraine conflict site. Here is a thread there based on a Twitter thread that quotes a Russian's detailed account of his deployment in Donbas: . . . At the start of March the brig...

I spent the first part of my working career making red (or blue) marks like those above, and I thereby learned what Samuel Johnson meant when he said teaching is "intricate misery". If I discovered anything else in the process, it was that bad writing has a close relation to bad thinking, but I'm not sure if I can go much beyond that. This seems to apply to what passes for prestigious analysis of the current war in Ukraine, especially from the Institute for the Study of War. Let's take a passage from their April 26 update : Russian forces have adopted a sounder pattern of operational movement in eastern Ukraine, at least along the line from Izyum to Rubizhne. Russian troops are pushing down multiple roughly parallel roads within supporting distance of one another, allowing them to bring more combat power to bear than their previous practice had supported. This could actually be a good introductory sentence for several subsequent paragraphs giving specific insta...

So fat, I haven't seen any commentary that ties the events of the past two weeks together. April 14: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter April 18: U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle strikes down the federal mask mandate for airplanes and other modes of public transportation April 21: CNN announces cacellation of CNN+ April 22: Florida Gov Ron DeSantis signs bill revoking special Disney status in the state April 25: Twitter board unanimously accepts Musk buyout offer. In the space of a week and a half, the country took important steps to bring itself out of the 2020 moral panic. This included a major defeat for woke control of key news and entertainment and a near-final end to most COVID restrictions. There's been a lot of reaction to each individual event, especially the Musk takeover of Twitter, but nobody's seeing this as a much bigger milestone. If I were to go farther with the big picture, I'd say this is taking place in the context of the Ukraine war...

The meme above is from Roy, a guy I first met 40 years ago. To say he is something of a character is an understatement. His main post-retirement activity is to dress to the nines and take selfies at LA cultural sites, of which there are many, and post them on Facebook, so he's busy. Recently he's been taking maskless selfies on Metrolink trains to make the point that even before last week's order from Judge Mizelle, Metrolink staff had stopped enforcing the mask mandates, we must assume with the tacit endorsement of both their union and management. Last week I posted on what I speculated was Metrolink's dilemma when "Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the LA County health director, issued an order saying that despite the TSA's ceasing mask enforcement, with Amtrak and the airlines following suit, public transit in LA County must continue to enforce masking. Among the problems I saw in this was that Metrolink operates in four other counties besides LA, and a train t...

I'm still puzzled at the horrible quality of Ukraine war analysis. Here's a snippet of yesterday's assessment from the Institute for the Study of War : CORRECTION: ISW mistakenly reported on April 23 that Russian troops seized Lozova, Kharkiv Oblast, approximately 100km west of Izyum. Russian troops actually seized Lozove, Donetsk Oblast, approximately 35km east of Izyum. We apologize for the error. Every few days there's something like this. The authors listed at the top of yesterday's assessment are Mason Clark and Kateryna Stepanenko . Stepanenko is a Ukrainian name, and I assume that Ms Stepanenko is a native speaker and (at least presumably) famiiar with the country's geography. As far as I can see, this would be roughly equivalent to a California writer confusing Monterey, CA with Monterey Park, CA, locations 325 miles apart, an extremely sloppy error. I don't know what staff members at ISW make, but I've got to think whatever it is, it'...

Here's a headline at The New Republic: Biden Quits The Covid Fight . Some people -- quite possibly a strong majority -- would indeed be clapping, cheering, and tossing their masks in the trash for good. At TNR, not so much: On Monday, a Trump-appointed judge of questionable legal credentials and an appetite for fileting the English language struck down the CDC’s requirement that “a person must wear a mask while boarding, disembarking, and traveling on any conveyance into or within the United States.” Within hours, major carriers lifted the mask requirements, in some cases during flights, sandbagging passengers who’d taken comfort knowing their fellow passengers were masked. Now, there's an odd way of looking at it: somewhere in the back rows of Flight 572, hidden behind the passengers twirling their masks on their fingers and dancing in delight, is some grinch hunched over in his seat, sandbagged in the recognition that his fellow passengers were discarding their masks and...

On April 13, the CDC extended its airline and transit mask mandate for another 15 days, until May 3 . The decision was made in response to the increasing spread of the omicron subvariant in the U.S. and an increase in the 7-day moving average of cases, which have risen by around 25% over the last two weeks nationally. Certain states are seeing much larger increases in new cases. The CDC is following the science with this latest decision, says James Hodge, who directs the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University. "I believe that a two-week period is just enough to say we're watching very carefully," he says. "If we pull this mask mandate, we will have extended numbers of infections — that's not responsible and that's counter to the public's health." However, there has been growing pressure on the Biden administration to lift the mask rule. This in itself is contradictory: the reasons the public health expert quoted ab...

After four days, Philadelphia rescinded the indoor mask mandate it had suddenly reimposed. None of the corporate news outlets speculates on why the city reimposed it. but it's likely the authorities there expected it to kick off a domino effect where other blue jurisdictions would follow suit. Instead, the next day, a Florida federal judge ruled the airline and transit mask mandate unconstitutional. In the case of Philadephia reimposing an indoor mask mamdate, there at least is a minmimal consistency: if your business is within city limits, the mandate applies; if not, it doesn't, although there's little other justification -- what changes if Joe's Bar, 50 feet outside the city, doesn't require masks, but Bill's Bar, inside the city, does? Will there be any difference in the medical risks, which must be at the same minimal level in either case? The response of "Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the Los Angeles County health director in the image above, is eve...

I'm always fascinated by the continuing attempts to circumvent Fermi's Paradox, the problem that no matter how probable we calculate the existence of space aliens, they never quite show up. The latest, which is something that's actually turned up on the Science Channel in recent years, is that they're probably hiding in oceans of warm water under ammonia ice on [name a moon of Jupiter or Saturn, or maybe Pluto.] Via Instapundit, which is fond of this sort of thing, I found this: Forget Mars—Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of the most promising worlds in the solar system to look for alien life, in large part because it boasts a huge liquid ocean sitting below a sheet of ice. Although Europa is just one-fourth the diameter of Earth, its ocean may have twice as much water as our planet’s oceans combined. And where there is water, there is the chance for life as we know it to settle down. In fact, that's the whole argument. I used to admire that talent. My father, c...

I note a piece by Joy Pullmann in The Federalist, It’s Not Just Joe Biden. The United States Has A Potemkin Government : Joe Biden’s shameful performance at the White House Easter egg roll Sunday was another strong visual indicator that he is not really governing this country. And he’s not the only sham authority in this country — our nation is replete with them. The term “Potemkin village” arose in Russia to describe empty buildings set up as propaganda, to give a false impression of industry and life. The fake villages were intended to hide the regime’s mass mismanagement and infliction of suffering upon its own people. Ms Pullmann opens things up to an obvious parallel with her reference to Potemkin -- but she holds back! I did a search for "Putin" anywhere in the piece, and no such word was to be found. Yet the single point that every analyst of the Russia-Ukraine War (which I think is only a theater of the worldwide Plebe War) will agree about is that the entire Ru...

If you think about it, the story abut a federal judge striking down the mask mandate for airlines and other transit yesterday was pure dog-bites-man. Federal and state courts have been doing this throughout the course of the pandemic, with at best mixed results. In September 2020, Pennsylvania federal judge William S Stickman IV struck down state COVID restrictions on businesses and assembly, but an appeals court promptly stayed the order. This has been the story throughout the panic. The various measures imposed by governments, from lockdowns to business closures to social distancing to masking to vaccinations have all proved ineffective in curing COVID, but attempts to mitigate them via the courts have been inconclusive. The man-bites-dog in the story is that now nobody's going to try to stay Judge Kimball's ruling. It appears that the public is finally willing to accept that the pandemic is over, more or less. The airlines, which had been petitioning the CDC to d...

Here's what I can't figure out. President Biden, facing some of the lowest poll numbers of any president ever at this point in his term, has made transsexualism a signature issue, notwithstanding it's deeply unpopular even with people who are same-sex attracted: “There is a large body of silent opinion among gay men and many lesbians that deeply believes in [biological] sex differences, cherishes and celebrates the male and female bodies, and does not see gayness as connected to transgender experience,” gay rights author Andrew Sullivan wrote. “Gay happiness depends on our owning our own [male or female biological] sex, not denying it.” . . . The transgender ideology insists that government should deny the importance of biology in shaping people’s politics and personal lives. Instead, transgenderism asserts that government should champion each person’s chosen sense of “gender” — which is defined as their sense of feeling male or female. . . . The focus on fe...

I'm scratching my head. Throughout the Ukraine war, the phrase "defeat in detail" has been more or less entering my random thoughts before I fall asleep at night, proobably because I've always assumed it was generally recognized as a key to Ukraine's strategy in the current war. A quick and easy definition is at Encyclopedia.com : DEFEAT IN DETAIL. In the correct military sense—in the twenty-first as well as in the eighteenth century—this term means "the defeat in turn of the separated parts of a force." To avoid "defeat in detail," a commander keeps all his units within "supporting distance" of each other. The standard examples (as the one in the video above) include Napoleon's Piedmont campaign and the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg. Another less-cited example, which might be better from my point of view, would be Washington's overall strategy in the Revolution (which I believe Cornwallis himself conceded was a success usin...

News reports confirm that the Russian missile cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea was hit by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and heavily damaged; other reports on Twitter say that it has sunk. Meanwhile, Rumors are swirling in Russia about Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu having suffered a massive heart attack. Leonid Nevzlin, a former co-head of the oil giant Yukos, claims that Shoigu is in critical condition. He also says that 20 top generals have been arrested. pic.twitter.com/9kOJ1Ba0dx — Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) April 14, 2022 The Institute for the Study of War site has made no mention of the damage or sinking of the Moskva , nor has the Militaryland site , although I first saw references to this in the middle of yesterday afternoon. The Oryx site, however, has already confirmed the damage, though not the subsequent sinking. It's hard to imagine that this is not a significant blow to Russian prestige: in response to Sweden and Finland moving to NATO, the Russian response was...

I've been more closely following retired Gen Jack Keane, a frequent Fox talking head, since I discoverd he's the Chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, which I've been discussing lately. The ISW is pretty clearly a neoconservative think tank, and while its assessments of the Russo-Ukraine War have been remarkably obtuse, there can be little question that it's in frequent contact with generals who are in the Pentagon policy loop. But now Gen Keane in the video above is suggesting the Pentagon policy loop isn't necessarily the White House policy loop. In response to sound bites from Pentagon spokesman John Kirby saying, "We want the Ukrainians to win this war". Keane says, ... really the first time we've heard that from the administration, I'm actually convinced, I mean that's where the Pentagon leaders actually feel, but Secretary Blinken avoids the subject, the national security adviser does the same, and certainly the President o...