In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As of yesterday, Los Angeles County, one of the major holdouts on loosening COVID restrictions throughout the pandemic, dropped its indoor masking rule . County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said that given the CDC revision of the county's classification, a new Health Officer Order will be issued that removes the county's long-standing mandate for people to wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status. That move will put the county in alignment with the state, which dropped its mask mandate on Tuesday. Mask-wearing, however, will continue to be "strongly recommended,'' particularly in crowded settings or while interacting with people at higher risk of severe illness from the virus. Masking will continue to be required in higher-risk settings, including health care facilities, transit centers, airports, aboard public transit, in correctional facilities and at homeless shelters and long-term care facilities. It's still likely to take yea...

I'm seeing a certain amount of defeatism over Ukraine's predicament, from sources ranging from the never-Trump Red State site to the UK YouTuber demirep/granniopteryx . Part of this, I think, is the difficulty some people are having getting their heads around the bigger picture. For instrance, as the meme above suggests, I think the short-lived Canadian state of "emergency" and Putin's invasion of Ukraine are two symptoms of a bigger trend, the closing window of opportunity that had existed during the COVID moral panic. Let's recall that the short-lived "emergency" Trudeau declared was layered upon state after state of "emergency" already declared by federal governments, provinces, states, counties, cities, towns, and local health departments in North America and everywhere else throughout the COVID panic, which as we speak are still being overtaken (or not) by events. For instance, the US Senate voted just yesterday 48-47 to cance...

A writer for Red State, a never-Trump Salem Media outlet has nevertheless recognized the real merit of Zelensky's March 2 address to Ukraine , calling it "the greatest speech of our era", which is not empty hyperbole. He went to the effort of transcribing much of it from the subtitles on the screen: During this war, we have had more unity than for over thirty years before. At first, we were equally scared, then we felt equally painful, and now we do not care. Except for victory. Except for the truth. Except for peace. Except for the tranquility we want to achieve. Except for the lives of our people, for when we are worried. Except for Ukraine. During this time, we have truly become one. We forgave each other a lot. We started loving each other. We help each other. We are worried for each other. Yesterday morning on Freedom Square we were all Kharkiv residents. Then the enemy destroyed us all by striking at residential buildings in Borodyanka. We were all bombed in K...

I've seen the occasional remark that someone would rather have had President Zelensky deliver the US State of the Union than President Brandon, but actually going a little farther, it seems like we'd do better with Zelensky in the Oval Office on a day to day basis as well. He isn't native born, but on the other hand, based on what I hear, his English is better than President Brandon's. Maybe there's a loophole. The simultaneous translation of the speech above, an address to Ukraine on the morning of the war's seventh day, has Churchillian echoes, not least because it's utterly without bombast. He's speaking realistically about the situation on the ground and making the entirely justified observation that the Russian invasion has unified Ukraine the most it's been in 30 years, given the country a national purpose and national consciousness, and indeed acknowledging the place of Jews in that national identity. It's a piece of rhetoric well worth...

With the US trucker convoy in Washington as President Biden is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address, the US media, at least, has shifted its attention back to Washington, although US media reporting on Ukraine has been bad across the spectrum anyhow, legacy or independent, left or right. A few things have been lost in the confusion, such as the remarkable sequence above in which Biden has no answer to the question of whether he underestimated Putin and variously smirks, stares blankly, and picks his teeth. The establishment media figure George Stephanopoulos asked Press Secretary Psaki over the weekend about Biden's mental capacity : "The president is approaching his State of the Union in a pretty difficult political position right now, 37% approval rating, Democrats trailing badly in the midterm polling," Stephanopoulos said. "A majority in our recent poll out this morning even question the president’s mental capacity. How is he going to turn...

One of the big things that strikes me about the current Ukraine war is how legacy media, especially in the US, has failed to cover it. There is neither an Edward R Murrow nor a Bernard Shaw in Kyiv. UK media has been somewhat better, but the best reports are from a combinationi of third-world outlets, independent YouTubers, and even the Ukraine government news agency. Ukraine in particular is running material without contradiction from the Russians: Ukraine has paraded captured Russian soldiers in dozens of online videos as Moscow finally admitted its forces have sustained heavy losses after pictures showing bodies of Kremlin fighters emerged. Footage posted online show tied up 'demoralised and exhausted' Russian prisoners of war captured after they failed to break through Ukrainian defences in Kyiv and Kharkiv over the weekend. Several of the videos were posted on a Telegram channel set up on Saturday by Ukraine's Interior Ministry called 'Find Your Own'...

When I was in graduate school, I studied with professors who styled themselves Aristotelians, but in hindsight, they were just poseurs. When I became Catholic and began to look seriously at Aquinas, I began to understand how a real Aristotelian thinks, but at the same time, I realized that I actually began thinking as a real Aristotelian when I left graduate school and went into tech. A good Aristotelian looks for causes. One of the first bits of wisdom I picked up from my tech mentors was that in tech, things don't "just happen"; you can't say, "well, the program just crashed". The program crashed for a reason. So I've been reflecting for days on Prime Minister Trudeau's reversal of his emergency declaration. It didn't "just happen". It happened for a reason. On Thursday, I listed several possible reasons , and a visitor has helped me sort through their likelihoid. Of potential opposition to the emergency declaration among either...