In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

On Monday, I posted about the failure of vaccine distribution in California. Yesterday, I noted that, rather than taking charge or even cheerleading for improved distribution, Dr Fauci is recommending we all wear two masks, apparently by implication instead of getting the jab. Looks like I've discovered a trend. According to this story . Americans over the age of 65 are eligible for COVID-19 vaccines in numerous states, but trying to get them has become a nightmare for many. Some older citizens have had to travel hundreds of miles to get their shots, and others say even securing an appointment is challenging. According to The Wall Street Journal, people in Texas are signing up on multiple lists in grocery stores and clinics hoping to get a slot. In Nevada, online registration bumps hopefuls from county websites to state websites and back. Only about 40% of the vaccines that have been distributed throughout the U.S. have been administered, and while 30 state...

So, OK. COVID has been out and about since late 2019, and as of a year ago, policymakers were beginning to say we needed to do something. Fine. Since then, the CDC, with state and local jurisdictions, has been flailing about for solutions, ranging from near martial law to laissez faire, but after a year's experience, inclduing red light-green light lockdowns and regional exceptions that amounted to experiments, we still have no idea of how to control the pandemic. It comes and goes as it pleases. We have several vaccines, but the federal government, at least according to the states, has been bungling distribution. Dr Fauci has been the point man for all this. He's now saying the CDC will maybe sorta-kinda say we've all gotta wear two masks now. B ut this is classic Fauci: Dr. Anthony Fauci said there’s no evidence showing two masks are safer than wearing one, despite saying otherwise last week. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s no data that indicat...

When I put my old Cold Case blog on inactive status, I said I'd provide updates there on news from the North American Roman Caholic ordinariate if the news was important enough. Yesterday I learned that the pastor of St Barnabas Omaha, one of the most important parishes in a very small diocese, has been removed for spending the entire parish endowment. Details are at the link. It's important to note that considerable leadership in maintaining religious observance in the US during the COVID crisis has come from the Roman Catholic Church. The Diocese of Brooklyn has brought an important case to the US Supreme Court, while Abp Cordileone has been vocal in insisting on relaxation of COVID restrictions in California. I suspect that Abp Gómez was also instrumental behind the scenes in persuading the Los Angeles County health department to allow indoor worship, when no other county under California "purple" restrictions has done this. The North American ord...

I've long been intrigued by the implications of the statement "the golden mountain does not exist". What it does is construct a credible assertion and then, just like that, say it isn't there. But I think it's also a first cousin to the remark that if someone hadn't existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. There are strange imputational byways in both cases. At the height of last week's GameStop controversy, somehow a rumor spread that White House press secretary Jen Psaki had a brother who was a portfolio manager for Citadel, a Wall Street firm involved in bailing out the short sale. A columnist at Red State decided to look this up . [B]ased on all available familial information I can find about Jen Psaki, she has no brother, much less one named Jeff or Jeffrey. She only has two sisters. . . . Here’s also a local Greenwich take (she’s from Connecticut) when she left the White House under Obama. “Psaki is the eldest of three dau...

It's getting minimal coverage in any media, legacy or independent, but the vaccination program doesn't seem to be living up to expectations. One sign is a letter we received this past week from the CEO of Kaiser Health Plan, a major provider, which is the one we use At Kaiser Permanente, we care for more than 9.3 million Californians — and we’ve received only a fraction of the vaccine needed to vaccinate our health care workers and our members. At the time of this writing, we’ve received approximately 300,000 doses across the state and we’re acting quickly to vaccinate those who are eligible as soon as we receive the vaccine. The shortage of vaccine doses and the uncertainty about the timing of vaccine availability worries everyone. The state of California must allocate the limited COVID-19 vaccine supply it receives from the federal government to 58 California counties and 9 multi-county entities, including Kaiser Permanente. We’re currently receiving a total of approxim...

I've been thinking a lot about another unacknowledged 20th-century classic, Gerald Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming (1971). In my view, the book's title is misleading, snce it has little actually to say about either psychology or compuyter programming. The reviews at the link, in fact, suggest it focuses on organizational behavior. I read it not long after it came out, around the time I refocused my career into IT. My main takeaway was his point that in a typical tech organization, one or two people have most of the necessary knowledge and skills, while everyone else does very little and refers any critical problems to the key people. In other words, "You're getting an 808? Check with Herb, he knows what do do." But as a practical matter, whether it's an 808, a blue screen of death, a system crash, a power outage, or a user error, Herb is the guy who has all the experience and job knowledge with the system and knows how to fix things....

Thursday night, the Conspiracies Decoded show on the Science Channel had a segment that asked, but never got around to answering, the perennial question, what happened to Amelia Earhart? Well, she got lost and sisappeared. So anyhow, they found a bunch of bones on an island she might have wound up on before World War II, but the bone doctor who looked at them at the time didn't think they belonged to a skinny female, and they got put in storage in some museum. They were rediscovered in 2019, but a DNA test said they still weren't Amelia Earhart, so the bone doctor was right. This was thin gruel indeed, and it probably wasn't worth even the segment on the show, but after all, it was Amelia Earhart, huh? Except it wasn't. The question I had was she had a guy with her on the flight, Fred Noonan, the navigator. Did anyone check those bones for Fred Noonan's DNA? Even if he wasn't Amelia Earhart, if it was Noonan's DNA, that could have solved the mystery....