In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

On April 13, the CDC extended its airline and transit mask mandate for another 15 days, until May 3 . The decision was made in response to the increasing spread of the omicron subvariant in the U.S. and an increase in the 7-day moving average of cases, which have risen by around 25% over the last two weeks nationally. Certain states are seeing much larger increases in new cases. The CDC is following the science with this latest decision, says James Hodge, who directs the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University. "I believe that a two-week period is just enough to say we're watching very carefully," he says. "If we pull this mask mandate, we will have extended numbers of infections — that's not responsible and that's counter to the public's health." However, there has been growing pressure on the Biden administration to lift the mask rule. This in itself is contradictory: the reasons the public health expert quoted ab...

After four days, Philadelphia rescinded the indoor mask mandate it had suddenly reimposed. None of the corporate news outlets speculates on why the city reimposed it. but it's likely the authorities there expected it to kick off a domino effect where other blue jurisdictions would follow suit. Instead, the next day, a Florida federal judge ruled the airline and transit mask mandate unconstitutional. In the case of Philadephia reimposing an indoor mask mamdate, there at least is a minmimal consistency: if your business is within city limits, the mandate applies; if not, it doesn't, although there's little other justification -- what changes if Joe's Bar, 50 feet outside the city, doesn't require masks, but Bill's Bar, inside the city, does? Will there be any difference in the medical risks, which must be at the same minimal level in either case? The response of "Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the Los Angeles County health director in the image above, is eve...

I'm always fascinated by the continuing attempts to circumvent Fermi's Paradox, the problem that no matter how probable we calculate the existence of space aliens, they never quite show up. The latest, which is something that's actually turned up on the Science Channel in recent years, is that they're probably hiding in oceans of warm water under ammonia ice on [name a moon of Jupiter or Saturn, or maybe Pluto.] Via Instapundit, which is fond of this sort of thing, I found this: Forget Mars—Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of the most promising worlds in the solar system to look for alien life, in large part because it boasts a huge liquid ocean sitting below a sheet of ice. Although Europa is just one-fourth the diameter of Earth, its ocean may have twice as much water as our planet’s oceans combined. And where there is water, there is the chance for life as we know it to settle down. In fact, that's the whole argument. I used to admire that talent. My father, c...

I note a piece by Joy Pullmann in The Federalist, It’s Not Just Joe Biden. The United States Has A Potemkin Government : Joe Biden’s shameful performance at the White House Easter egg roll Sunday was another strong visual indicator that he is not really governing this country. And he’s not the only sham authority in this country — our nation is replete with them. The term “Potemkin village” arose in Russia to describe empty buildings set up as propaganda, to give a false impression of industry and life. The fake villages were intended to hide the regime’s mass mismanagement and infliction of suffering upon its own people. Ms Pullmann opens things up to an obvious parallel with her reference to Potemkin -- but she holds back! I did a search for "Putin" anywhere in the piece, and no such word was to be found. Yet the single point that every analyst of the Russia-Ukraine War (which I think is only a theater of the worldwide Plebe War) will agree about is that the entire Ru...

If you think about it, the story abut a federal judge striking down the mask mandate for airlines and other transit yesterday was pure dog-bites-man. Federal and state courts have been doing this throughout the course of the pandemic, with at best mixed results. In September 2020, Pennsylvania federal judge William S Stickman IV struck down state COVID restrictions on businesses and assembly, but an appeals court promptly stayed the order. This has been the story throughout the panic. The various measures imposed by governments, from lockdowns to business closures to social distancing to masking to vaccinations have all proved ineffective in curing COVID, but attempts to mitigate them via the courts have been inconclusive. The man-bites-dog in the story is that now nobody's going to try to stay Judge Kimball's ruling. It appears that the public is finally willing to accept that the pandemic is over, more or less. The airlines, which had been petitioning the CDC to d...

Here's what I can't figure out. President Biden, facing some of the lowest poll numbers of any president ever at this point in his term, has made transsexualism a signature issue, notwithstanding it's deeply unpopular even with people who are same-sex attracted: “There is a large body of silent opinion among gay men and many lesbians that deeply believes in [biological] sex differences, cherishes and celebrates the male and female bodies, and does not see gayness as connected to transgender experience,” gay rights author Andrew Sullivan wrote. “Gay happiness depends on our owning our own [male or female biological] sex, not denying it.” . . . The transgender ideology insists that government should deny the importance of biology in shaping people’s politics and personal lives. Instead, transgenderism asserts that government should champion each person’s chosen sense of “gender” — which is defined as their sense of feeling male or female. . . . The focus on fe...

I'm scratching my head. Throughout the Ukraine war, the phrase "defeat in detail" has been more or less entering my random thoughts before I fall asleep at night, proobably because I've always assumed it was generally recognized as a key to Ukraine's strategy in the current war. A quick and easy definition is at Encyclopedia.com : DEFEAT IN DETAIL. In the correct military sense—in the twenty-first as well as in the eighteenth century—this term means "the defeat in turn of the separated parts of a force." To avoid "defeat in detail," a commander keeps all his units within "supporting distance" of each other. The standard examples (as the one in the video above) include Napoleon's Piedmont campaign and the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg. Another less-cited example, which might be better from my point of view, would be Washington's overall strategy in the Revolution (which I believe Cornwallis himself conceded was a success usin...