In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I'm an Aristotelian, and I look for causes. That Chris Cuomo would visibly press, and even berate, Dr Walensky on CNN over not updatimg the mask guidance Wednesday struck me as important, and I posted about it Thursday. But then, the CDC actually went ahead and revised its mask guidance, saying vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks or observe social distancing indoors. Beyond that, Joe Biden himself endorsed the guidance, announcing, Let me repeat: If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask. But neither President Biden nor Drs Walensky and Fauci are independent actors. Via the New York Times just yesterday, we learn that Biden dithers for weeks over decisions . Dr Walensky took public health advice from the teachers'union, not The Science: The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show....

When I worked in IT, I was in and out of both the security and contingency planning areas between the early 1980s and early 2000s. I was in at the start of both fields, and I followed them through the transition from IBM mainfrane to Unix and Windows networking. In light of my experience, I've had some big questions about the story we've been getting about the Colonial Pipeline hack. On one hand, a corporation is prudent to minimize the amount of public information it releases about its internal operations. On the other, based on what I read, I've got to think that at some point, the Colonial board of directors will need to clean house thoroughly. You don't pay $5 million ransom just like that, after all. The broad outlines of the picture so far are all we've been told: somehow, some freelance Russian hackers were able to disable the company's software that controls its pipeline operations, they demanded a ransom to have the system restored, and the company ...

Drs Walensky and Fauci have been taking heat in recent days over the lack of updates to CDC guidelines due to the rapid improvement in COVID statistics. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky was forced to defend her agency's guidance and even its integrity on Tuesday as Senate Republicans grilled her over CDC messaging on masks and other restrictions, arguing it's frustrating and unreasonable as more Americans get vaccinated. While the pressure in the Senate came from Republicans, it's more significant that pressure came from Chris Cuomo on CNN yesterda y. He rather sharply accused the CDC of "causing delays" and "doing the job too well, playing it too safe" in approving vaccines and updating guidance. Well, when you've lost Chris Cuomo, you've lost the lizard people. A bigger question is how Fauci managed to wangle things so his boss had to take that interview. The screen shot above shows how well Dr Rac...

Intrigued by the news of a "trraditionalist" Methodist denominaion breaking away from the UMC, I couldn't help but revisit the experience Anglicans had with the Anglican Church in America, which initially endorsed the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus but in practice actively discouraged parishes that wanted to enter the Catholic Church, and in at least one case, it sued to prevent the exit. What puzzled me was why anyone would accept the promises of an in-group in charge that those who wished to leave the denomination would be given safe passage under some sort of plan yet to be finalized or approved. I'm especially puzzled given the apparent timeline of Methodist events: in 2019, the UMC appears to have followed established canons whereby its overall governing body voted to retain its traditional definitions of marriage and sexuality. But by 2020, a body, or group of bodies, not constituting the governing body, somehow determined that this was unsatisfactory, and a ...

Over the past several weeks I've run into occasional references to something called the Global Methodist Church, which Christianity Today recently explained is the object of a proposal now scheduled to be taken up by the United Methodist Church's General Conference in 2022, Delegates are expected to take up a proposal to split the denomination called the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation. The proposal, negotiated by 16 United Methodist bishops and advocacy group leaders from across theological divides, would create a new conservative “traditionalist” Methodist denomination—that’s the Global Methodist Church—that would receive $25 million over the next four years. Individual churches and annual conferences could choose to join the new entity; otherwise, they’ll remain in the existing denomination by default. As might be expected, the potential split reflects differences over marriage and sexuality. The Britannica site says : In 2019, at a special s...

The late-night comedian Bill Maher the other day made one of his routine critiques of politicall;y-correct society : On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher lamented that “woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist,” and the left has become “the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go.” . . . After listing some examples of people on the right being more permissive on sex and drugs, and other examples of the right being morally strict, Maher stated, “We need to restore the natural order of things. I don’t want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid. Once upon a time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Well, now that’s us. I don't normally follow Maher, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. It turns out th...

California is currently thouight to be the most-improved US state for COVID, having reversed the late 2020 surge soon after the new year, with no new third surge as happened in the US northeast and Canada. But since Los Angeles County accounts for a quarter of the state's population, much of this success is attributable to LA County's performance. Although Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties are both in the least restrictive "yellow" tier, San Francisco's population is less than a million, while LA County's is over ten million. The chart above shows cumulative totals for LA County cases and deaths, as well as case mortality rate, since the start of the pandemic. While the numbers, being cumulative, don't go down, they do show how the spread of the disease has been mitigated. More important, the dark curve at the bottom of the graph, reflecting cumulative deaths, shows a much more gradual curve than the light pattern at the top, which is cases. The ov...