In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

It seems to me that the Power Point slide above, or whatever it is, is no more than wishful thinking. The COVID narrative has been changing so fast -- lockdowns work, masks work, businesses need to close, you can't go to church, you can't go to the beach, you need to get the vax, the vax prevents transmission, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated, you need a booster, you need another booster, you won't get as sick if you're vaxxed -- all of these have seamlessly morphed into the next vademecum and the next set of excuses within months or even weeks. Given the failure of each successive policy, the course of COVID with none other than the President of the United States, the paradigmatic citizen suffering from the paradigmatic disease, is the perfect illustration of the current public health conundrum . Biden is quadruple-vaxxed and double-masked. He also took a round of Pfizer’s proclaimed “wonder drug,” Paxlovid, after becoming infected. Yet, he’s still COVID...

If Los Angeles is a bellwether, the "new normal" has gotten old. Last year, we were hearing that masks and social distance were going to be around forever. For instance, from the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners : The coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives in many ways. Among them is the "new normal" of wearing face masks around others for protection and to prevent the spread of the disease. This June, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez signed an Executive Order requiring the use of facial coverings in public. Following guidelines from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the order calls for the use of any facial covering that snugly covers the face and mouth, whether store-bought or homemade, and secured with ties or ear loops. Mayor Gimenez and County Commissioners have asked residents not use N95-rated masks, since these were critical supplies for health care workers, police, fire, emergency management, or other people engaged in li...

Following California's declaration of a public health emergency for monkeypox yesterday, Los Angeles County, not to be outdone, declared a monkeypox emergency of its own . L.A. County Board of Supervisors Chair Holly J. Mitchell introduced a proclamation declaring a local emergency over the rising cases of monkeypox. The action, which the board unanimously ratified, is an effort to bolster the county’s response to the outbreak. The day before, California declared a state of emergency because of the virus. . . . Monkeypox cases in L.A. County rose to 423 on Tuesday, up more than 80% from a week prior, according to the county health department’s count of confirmed and probable cases. The majority of cases have been confirmed in men who identify as part of the LGBTQ community, county data show. This comes only days after the county backed down on its threat to reimpose indoor COVID masking, which considering the county's standing as one of the most lockdown-friendly jurisd...

Yesterday, I ran into an unintentionally revealing quote from Dr Scott Gottlieb , former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and regular COVID talking head: “Now if monkeypox ‌gains a permanent foothold in the U‌nited States and becomes an endemic virus that joins our circulating repertoire of pathogens, it will be one of the worst public health failures in modern times not only because of the pain and peril of the disease but also because it was so avoidable,” Gottlieb wrote in a recent opinion-editorial for the New York Times. “Our lapses extend beyond political decision making to the agencies tasked with protecting us from these threats.” Gottlieb, who now serves on Pfizer’s Board of Directors and is a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, also judged that the U.S. government’s missteps in tackling monkeypox are similar to its failures to combat the coronavirus. “Our country’s response to monkeypox ‌‌has been plagued by the same shortcomin...

On Saturday, I asked in part whether elite environmental policies, which call for systematic reduction of agriculture due to climate change, will be applied to Ukraine once the current war is settled. In that case, Ukraine will have a dilemma. Historically it's faced reductionist threats from both east and west; Putin's current goal is to eliminate Ukraine as a national entity and, as a practial matter, to exterminate some proportion of its population. This is no different from Stalin's and Hitler's agendas. Will the agenda of the elitist West be little different, just driven in the name of environmentalism instead of nationalism? Another question in a different part of the world suggests elite agendas are running up against legitimate national interests elsewhere. A trend that's been taking place since the 1990s has been the corporate integration of the Canadian, US, and Mexican rail network, which has been to the most direct advantage of Mexico and its poorer ar...

I came up with that a few days ago, but little did I realize how quickly events would reinforce the perception : President Joe Biden announced Saturday that he would return to isolation after testing positive again for coronavirus. “Folks, today I tested positive for COVID again,” Biden wrote on social media Saturday afternoon. . . . The president’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, said in a letter to the public the reoccurrence of the virus was “rebound COVID,” something that takes place with some patients treated with PAXLOVID. Think about the manifold ramifications that emanate from this succinct announcement. First, the big guy has been fully vaxxed, and his masking, if not fully consistent, has been in general supererogatory. Second, a week ago, I quoted Dr Birx, who if not the pope of COVID is at least an influential cardinal: So that's why I'm saying even if you're vaccinated and boosted, if you're unvaccinated right now, the key is testing and Paxlovi...

A couple of stories at the aggregators this morning reminded me that they don't just want us to drive electric cars. In Scientific American , In the U.S., people eat more protein than they need to. And though it might not be bad for human health, this excess does pose a problem for the country’s waterways. The nation’s wastewater is laden with the leftovers from protein digestion: nitrogen compounds that can feed toxic algal blooms and pollute the air and drinking water. This source of nitrogen pollution even rivals that from fertilizers washed off of fields growing food crops, new research suggests. Well, they sure know about nitrogen pollution in the Netherlands and the EU, huh? Dutch government proposals for tackling nitrogen emissions indicate a radical cut in livestock - they estimate 11,200 farms will have to close and another 17,600 farmers will have to significantly reduce their livestock. Other proposals include a reduction in intensive farming and the conversio...