In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The only detailed account of a COVID hospitalization I've found is by a YouTuber in the Bakersfield, CA area named Mark Clay McGowan. McGowan is a retired railroader who normally posts on railroad subjects and local history, and he's a bit of a cousin in style to Mike Rowe. I followed him for that reason. However, on November 18, he put up a YouTube post from his hospital bed explaining that over the prior weekend, he'd been to the ER, diagnosed with viral pnseumonia and sent home. But the following Monday, his family, feeling he'd worsened, took him back to the ER, where he was diagnosed with COVID and admitted. He's been in the hospital ever since, posting YouTubes of his experience avery few weeks. I tried to link his November 18 post directly here, but YouTube won't let me do it. It is in fact harrowing. Above is a screen shot, and if you have the fortitude, you can watch the whole thing via this link. I've been hesitant to post on this, because un...

At right is the latest table showing LA County COVID case mortality rates from the county health department site . Click on the image for a larger copy. One story that's come out over the slow holiday news cycle is Boris Johnson's extension of Tier 4 lockdowns in the UK and the French closing their border with the UK due to some sort of "new" COVID strain . British officials have now estimated that “VUI – 202012/01” is as much as 70 percent more transmissible — a number that is based on modeling, but not yet confirmed in lab experiments. A later study, published on December 23, suggested a smaller, but still dangerous number: that the British mutation is 53 percent more contagious. Though there is no evidence to-date that the strain causes a more intense illness or leads to a higher fatality rate, faster transmission does mean more cases, which can lead to a higher hospitalization rate. Where is Peter Sellers when we need him? ...

California's problem is simple: it has at this point the strictest COVID measures in the US, but this has done absolutely nothing to control the spread of the disease. Gov Newsom and Mayor Garcetti have been making noises about even stricter lockdowns after the holidays, but barbershops, hair salons, gyms, bars, and restaurants have been closed, social gatherings forbidden, with 10 PM curfews in place, since roughly Thanksgiving. Newsom assured us at that time that these measures would "flatten the curve" but the curve just contnues to shoot upward. This means that about the only thing the state and counties can do more is to close all "non-essential" retail, which is already at a 25% limit. LA County has allowed churches to worship on its initiative, but it could revoke this at any time, subject to court action. Closing "non essential" retail would put California with the UK's Tier 4, the strictest i n the world. I assume this would have exactly ...

He has a history of misspeaking, but every time he's caught at it, he does what narcissists do -- he tries to convince you that he didn't tell a lie, he was actually doing you a favor, but you just didn't see it. Just before Christmas, he explanied that his latest whapper was because we aren't ready for the truth. Dr. Anthony Fauci has long cited 60% to 70% as the level of COVID infection/vaccination the country would need to achieve herd immunity — for the disease to fade and life to return to normal, writes the New York Times' Donald G. McNeil Jr. "I n a telephone interview," McNeil continues, "Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goalposts." "He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks." Fauci's confession: "When polls said only about half of all Americans would...

Notwithstanding, the Heritage Foundatioin has a constantly updated page with links to stories covering all known incidents of moral entrepreneurs and politicians violating their own orders. Merry Christmas to all!

I mentioned yestrday that the bad-clown-in-the-day-care moral panic, which began about1983, didn't end until the Waco massacre ten years later. This is because Janet Reno, who was Bill Clinton's attorney general from 1993 to 2001, built her career as Florida state attorney by bringing well-publicized day care toddler rape cases, and she approved the FBI's disastrous final raid on the Branch Davidian compound when she was told children were being abused inside. The McMartin preschool case in California sticks most prominently in memory of that period, but the moral entrepreneurs and prosecutors in that case never prospered. Janet Reno was a different matter. According to Wikipedia, During Reno's tenure as state attorney, she began what the PBS series Frontline described as a "crusade" against accused child abusers. Reno pioneered the "Miami Method,""a controversial technique for eliciting intimate details from young children and in...

News of new regional lockdowns in the UK has begun to reach US outlets . I'm even less able to talk insightfully about the UK than I am about Canada, so I don't intend to go into detail, except insofar as the UK situation gives what I think is a comparative view of the global moral panic. But as a distant observer, it does seem to me that the UK public throughout the 20th century was willing to take a lot more abuse from its political class, from the First War, through the Depression, Second War rationing, and postwar socialist austerity than the US public would ever have allowed, and apparenly this now continues. Just sayin'. A vistior forwarded to me a message from someone in the UK who isn't with the program: Greetings from Tier 4. We had the body bags delivered yesterday with instructions. We have to hang a white sheet out of the window when someone dies and they will be collected. Another 5 neighbours died yesterday. The rest have left for the co...