In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Over the past few days, I've noted an anomaly: Maine is being hammered with COVID cases despite having one of the highest vaccination rates in the US: A week ago, I noted Maine was having a surge in COVID-related hospitalizations. This happened despite 84% of everyone over 12, 85.3% of everyone over 18, and 98.4% of everyone over 65 are at least partially vaccinated. M aine's policies on masking follow CDC guidelines . But here's a graph of Maine's COVID cases as of this morning: On the other side of the country, Los Angeles County's statistics show a remarkable difference: In contrast to Maine, only 77.9% of the population is fully vaccinated. While the county has an indoor masking requirememt, as opposed to Maine's recommendation, the effectveness of masks is at best debatable -- but given the disparity we see here, so should be the effectiveness of vaccines. In fact, LA County is even mooting dropping its mask mandate : “I’m very cognizant t...

I have a different take from nearly everyone else on the likely outcome of the debt ceiling negotiations now under way. Trump and most conserative commentators are claiming Mitch McConnell "folded" in offering thr Democrats a potentiazl way out of their debt ceiling dilemma. But as soon as I saw the offer, I thought this looked much more like a calculated maneuver. The two choices he gave were, first, to abandon the full $3.5 trillion reconciliation package in exchange for the Republicans not filibustering the debt ceiling. ' The other choice was a two-month extension of the ceiling, limited to current levels of borrowing, that would give the Democrats time to put together a deal that would allow them to extend the ceiling farther through reconciliation. This, I would think, is a version of Staff Work 101, in which the staff puts together a menu of options for the decisionmakers that steers them in the direction the staff wants them to go. Typically it's one opt...

I speculated last June that Dr Birx, who throughout 2020 had been a full co-spokesperson with Dr Fauci for the COVID establishment, announced her retirement when she no longer felt comfortable with the conflicts between her private behavior -- viz, her willingness to travel for holiday family gatherings in opposition to the policies she endorsed -- and the public example she was expected to set. Since she would soon turn 65, this was an easy out for her. At the time, I noted that her boss, Dr Francis Collins, was 71 and seemed to show no such inclination to let go, any more than Dr Fauci has at 80. But now Dr Collins has changed his mind and intends to retire by the end of the year. His reasons are the usual bormides: I love this agency and its people so deeply that the decision to step down was a difficult one, done in close counsel with my wife, Diane Baker, and my family. I am proud of all we’ve accomplished. I fundamentally believe, however, that no single person should ser...

I'm continuing to look at current public figures through the lens of what I learned working for incompetent tech managers. One of the key characteristics I began to see with all such incompetents was an inability or unwillingness to recognize the calendar. A deadline can be set many months away, and even a detailed project plan can be made and approved, but somehow people at that level of incompetence can't quantify days, weeks, or months and match those quantities to levels of effort. Let's look at the current tasks that face Sen Schumer as Senate Majority Leader. By general consensus, his most important one is raising the debt limit, which Treasury Secretary Yellen has been insisting must be done by roughly October 18, now less than two weeks away. But there's actually less time than that, because the Senate goes on recess next week. Schumer's problem is that he has a 50-50 Senate, with Minority Leader McConnell able to keep all 50 Republican votes in line...

What I learned from workling for incompetent tech bosses was that past a certain point, their credibility was shot with everyone. and they were either out the door, transferred, demoted, or kicked upstairs. Usually, though, that point was too late to save the business. It's starting to look as if Speaker Pelosi and President Biden have reached a similar point. Over the weekend, she set a new "deadline" of October 31 to pass the infrastruceure bill (BIF). In a "Dear Colleague" letter released on Saturday, Pelosi said that “more time was needed” to pass the infrastructure bill along with the larger, $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package after scrambling over the past two days to get enough votes. . . . “There is an October 31st Surface Transportation Authorization deadline, after last night’s passage of a critical 30-day extension,” Pelosi wrote. “We must pass BIF [bipartisan infrastructure framework] well before then – the sooner the b...

My uncle was a lieutenant in the Army in the mid-1950s. When he got out, he left his collection of manuals with my parents, where I found them in our attic. Among them was the Manual for Court Martial, which I eagerly studied. One of the offenses I discovered was Contempt Toward Officials, which struck me as so strange that I still remember it. Although the wording has changed slightly since the time I read it, the current version is probably very close: Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct. This immediately came to mind when I learned of Marine LTC Scheller's YouTube video : In August, Scheller posted a video denouncing senior military lea...

The thing that's struck me about the whole BIF-BBB drama of the past couple weeks is how much it keeps reminding me of the incompetence I saw at the tech companies I used to work for. The constantly repeating pattern is of organizations that have months to finish a project, but nothing gets done until the deadline is just days away. Then the bosses who let this happen cover it up with a frenzy of promises and happy talk until here's simply no option but to admit the whole scheme has collapsed. One little-noticed vignette came out this week when it was revealed that Sen Manchin gave Sen Schumer a written version of his $1.5 trillion top line in July -- but Schumer neglected to tell Speaker Pelosi about it until just this past week . Then Pelosi's response was just to continue the happy talk about how we're gettring closer and closer until even she was finally forced to give up the game. Why did Schumer not tell Pelosi about Manchin's top line in July? It seems t...