In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The meme above is from Roy, a guy I first met 40 years ago. To say he is something of a character is an understatement. His main post-retirement activity is to dress to the nines and take selfies at LA cultural sites, of which there are many, and post them on Facebook, so he's busy. Recently he's been taking maskless selfies on Metrolink trains to make the point that even before last week's order from Judge Mizelle, Metrolink staff had stopped enforcing the mask mandates, we must assume with the tacit endorsement of both their union and management. Last week I posted on what I speculated was Metrolink's dilemma when "Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the LA County health director, issued an order saying that despite the TSA's ceasing mask enforcement, with Amtrak and the airlines following suit, public transit in LA County must continue to enforce masking. Among the problems I saw in this was that Metrolink operates in four other counties besides LA, and a train t...

I'm still puzzled at the horrible quality of Ukraine war analysis. Here's a snippet of yesterday's assessment from the Institute for the Study of War : CORRECTION: ISW mistakenly reported on April 23 that Russian troops seized Lozova, Kharkiv Oblast, approximately 100km west of Izyum. Russian troops actually seized Lozove, Donetsk Oblast, approximately 35km east of Izyum. We apologize for the error. Every few days there's something like this. The authors listed at the top of yesterday's assessment are Mason Clark and Kateryna Stepanenko . Stepanenko is a Ukrainian name, and I assume that Ms Stepanenko is a native speaker and (at least presumably) famiiar with the country's geography. As far as I can see, this would be roughly equivalent to a California writer confusing Monterey, CA with Monterey Park, CA, locations 325 miles apart, an extremely sloppy error. I don't know what staff members at ISW make, but I've got to think whatever it is, it'...

Here's a headline at The New Republic: Biden Quits The Covid Fight . Some people -- quite possibly a strong majority -- would indeed be clapping, cheering, and tossing their masks in the trash for good. At TNR, not so much: On Monday, a Trump-appointed judge of questionable legal credentials and an appetite for fileting the English language struck down the CDC’s requirement that “a person must wear a mask while boarding, disembarking, and traveling on any conveyance into or within the United States.” Within hours, major carriers lifted the mask requirements, in some cases during flights, sandbagging passengers who’d taken comfort knowing their fellow passengers were masked. Now, there's an odd way of looking at it: somewhere in the back rows of Flight 572, hidden behind the passengers twirling their masks on their fingers and dancing in delight, is some grinch hunched over in his seat, sandbagged in the recognition that his fellow passengers were discarding their masks and...

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...