In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A piece by Emily Oster from Monday in the Atlantic, home of David Brooks and Francis Fukuyama, Let's Declare A Pandemic Amnesty , has attracted a certain amount of comment. Ms Oster, an economics professor at Brown University, points this out in her piece to establish her credentialed membership in the elite, which is the platform from which she makes her proposal: In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. . . . Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic...

Yesterday I asked why the Pelosi San Francisco home didn't have even the sort of doorway alarms that come with ordinary suburban home security systems. I got a partial answer in this morning's news . According to the Washington Post: The U.S. Capitol Police had cameras outside the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but they were not monitored, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Capitol Police saw the flash of police lights on the camera, rewound the video and saw the break-in, according to the sources. It is unclear whether or not the cameras should have been monitored at the time. Just the News has a slightly different version : A live security video feed at the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi caught the suspect in the recent assault on her husband Paul Pelosi, but no one from the U.S. Capitol Police was watching, sources told Just the News. U.S. Capitol Police did not return numerous requests for comment on Tuesday. A source reveal...

The one inference I made in yesterday's post that was completely correct was that Chief Scott of the San Francisco Police Department was not promoted for his communication skills. His statements following the incident at the Pelosi home were vague and required at least two subsequent clarifications, themselves vague and confusing. The criminal complaint filed yesterday by the FBI , in contrast, provides a consistent narrative that for now seems credible, although it in itself raises other questions, in particular why there was in fact so little security at the Pelosi home in light of the Speaker's position in the line of presidential succession. The criminal complaint is based in part on interviews with Paul Pelosi himself, one in the ambulance immediately after the attack, as well as police body cam footage. These were available to Chief Scott and his staff before he issued any public statement and could have been used to much better effect than they were. Our institutions...

The photo above is an illustration of the type of body cameras worn by officers of the San Francisco Police Department. In current technology, police body cameras activate automatically, often when officers exit their police vehicles. They can't be turned off. I'll get to this below. One thing you learned as a fan of Live PD , which following its cancellation by A&E has been cloned and resuscitated as OP Live by the REELZ network, is that police departments that allow camera crews to ride along inevitably assign the crews to their best officers. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn't, since bungled arrests, episodes of brutality, or community relations disasters would all be caught on tape, while conversely, it's to their credit to have a courteous, diverse, effective patrol force on full public display. My wife and I have watched these shows long enough, since some of the departments have participated in them over many seasons, to see som...

As of this morning, the lid looks to be well and truly down on the Paul Pelosi home invasion-hammer attack story. This must surely be the case if the first call he placed after his DUI accident last May was to the family fixer, after which we heard nothing that wasn't thoroughly massaged, cleaned, and spun. But never fear, J Edgar's here. That means we can be pretty sure we've learned all we're ever going to hear, despite the truly hinky narrative that trickled out Friday and Saturday. Recognizing that we're dealing with something like the fog of war here, with garbled and incomplete reports based on misunderstandings, the story that's initally emerged just doesn't add up, start to finish. Here's what's implied about the start: Suspect David DePape, 42, had broken into the home in the wee hours of Friday morning, demanding to see the powerful lawmaker, who was out of town, according to police. I think if we were more careful, though, the...

One of yesterday's stories caught my eye , but not for the reason it was reported. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Thursday was caught on a hot mic saying Democrats are “going downhill” in Georgia. Schumer was speaking in a huddle with President Biden on the tarmac about the midterm elections ahead of the president’s trip to New York. “The state where we’re going downhill is Georgia,” Schumer told Biden. “It’s hard to believe that they will go for Herschel Walker.” Republican commentators found this delicious, since it's an indication of where the November elections are headed. But the whole vignette raises a different question for me. We must assume Sen Schumer is referring to internal Democrat polling, which is generally thought to be more reliable, in part because it's paid for and thus more expensive than the free stuff you get from the media. But information has value. Valuable information is protected the same way we protect valuable mercha...

In yesterday's post, I mentioned the puzzle of the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition, in which the rail magnate Edward Harriman sponsored a major scientific investigation of Alaska's coast. Nobody has so far been able to explain just why he did this -- the suggestion in yesterday's Wikipedia link was that his doctor said he needed a break. But Alice Roosevelt Longworth is said to have described Harriman as "a little brown man who never seemed to play", so it would be in character for him to turn for what others might seem to be a vacation into just an opportunity for a different sort of work. Pierpont Morgan, a contemporary of Harriman and an equivalent figure, took an interest in Alaska at roughly the same time. The Kennicott [correct original spelling] copper deposit was discovered in July 1899, and by 1906, in response to the copper discovery as well as coal deposits not far away in south central Alaska, the "Alaska Syndicate," was formed in ...