The Official COVID Panic Descends Into Absurdity

After four days, Philadelphia rescinded the indoor mask mandate it had suddenly reimposed.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 even crazier. In response to the judge's order, which has led airlines, Amtrak, and some transit agencies to rescind their mask requirements, she's said not so fast.

Public Health is issuing Health Officer Order to note that masking in all public transit within LA County and in LA County indoor transportation hubs continues to be required.

Per the revised Order, masking continues to be required to be worn by everyone, 2 years of age and older, regardless of their COVID-19 vaccination status, on public transit within the County. This includes wearing masks on commuter trains, subways, buses, taxis, and ride-shares. Masking continues to be also required in indoor transportation hubs including airport and bus terminals, train and subway stations, seaport or other indoor port terminals, or any other indoor area that serves as a transportation hub.

Public Health will reassess the indoor masking requirement when COVID-19 community transmission in Los Angeles County drops to the Moderate level, OR the CDC’s assessment is that an order requiring masking in the transportation corridor is no longer necessary for protection of the public’s health, OR within 30 days of this Order, whichever occurs first.

As far as anyone can tell, this exempts airlines, Greyhound buses, and Amtrak trains themselves, although you must wear a mask inside airports and railroad terminals. But here's the problem, just starting with taxis, Uber, and Lyft: the LA metropolitan area is big; lots of it is outside LA County. If I call a cab in Pomona, which is in LA County, to take me to Ontario Airport, which is six miles away but in San Bernardino County, at worst I'll need to mask up for just a few minutes until we cross the county line, when I can rip it off without penalty (and presumably without any added medical risk).

Indeed, Ontario Airport is a major regional hub but outside "Dr" Ferrer's jurisdiction, and neither the airlines nor the TSA has any interest in enforcing mask rules there. Her order is a futile gesture and largely unenforceable even inside the county -- how many Uber drivers will follow it?

The absurdity applies as well to trains on the Metrolink LA area rail transit agency, which serves Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange Counties as well as LA County. Although Amtrak trains, which cover several of the same routes, are completely exempt even within LA County, the county health order does cover Metrolink trains on the same routes -- except that those routes also leave the county to reach their own destinations. So a Metrolink train to Ventura, say, will require masks until it leaves Northridge, the last station in LA County on that route, but no masks will be required for the remainder of the run to Ventura in Ventura County.

For that matter, if I ride a Metrolink train from downtown LA to Van Nuys, both stations within LA County, I must mask up -- but if I ride an Amtrak train between the same two stations, I don't need a mask. (Indeed, Amtrak will honor my Metrolink ticket on that route.) The distinction is purely political with no public health jusification.

Except that, from what I see on Facebook, Metrolink staff had informally ceased enforcement of any mask rule weeks previous even to the Florida judge's order. But in theory, if Metrolink were to reverse itself, there would be no public health reason to enforce masking on on half of a train's route, although the train would have the same people breathing the same air on both parts of the route.

But let's go a little farther. In recent months, the CDC has been extending the airline and transit mask rule piecemeal. Just a week ago, it extended that rule only until May 3 as it puzzled over the latest subvariant of COVID.

When the Transportation Security Administration, which enforces the rule for planes, buses, trains and transit hubs, extended the requirement last month, it said the CDC had been hoping to roll out a more flexible masking strategy that would have replaced the nationwide requirement.

The mask mandate is the most visible vestige of government restrictions to control the pandemic, and possibly the most controversial. A surge of abusive and sometimes violent incidents on airplanes has been attributed mostly to disputes over mask-wearing.

In the wake of the Florida judge's order, the CDC now appears to want to order the Justice Department to appeal the order simply to preserve the CDC's ability to reimpose masking in the future. But whether the airlines, Amtrak, the TSA, or anyone else will actually resume enforcement is an open question, given the cheers and applause that followed the airlines' lifting of enforcement earlier this week. Any resumption would clearly result in renewed "abusive and sometimes violent incidents on airplanes", which do nothing but damage the airlines' public image, and those would take place in an environment that was supposed to end on May 3 in any case (if, that is, you can believe the CDC).

The bottom line is that even if, on May 4, a new, even more contagious and even more fatal variant of COVID were to emerge, there would be no actual public health basis for the CDC to reimpose any of the controls from the past two years, since none, lockdowns, shuttered businesses, social distance, capacity restrictions, masking, vaccine mandates, ever actually worked.

"Dr" Ferrer is proving the point that the controls are based entirely on "because we say so". This isn't a winning strategy. Even Philadelphia figured this one out.

Plan B From Outer Space

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, checking my homework assignments like "write a 250 word essay on ____", would complain that I'd fallen short with only 150 words. I'd answer that was all I had to say. "No," he'd reply. "You have to expand. You have to take what you've said and expand on it, keep expanding on it", as he made a gesture like the guy who expands on the size of the fish he's caught. That was one of the lessons I learned in my childhood, that I needed to be the kind of guy who could expand on things.

They sent me to an Ivy League school and wound up immensely disappointed that I never learned to expand on things. They thought that was the kind of thing you were supposed to learn there. They were probably right. I guess they could have consoled themselves that at least when they sent me there, learning how to do that was a lot cheaper than it is now.

But I always admired people who could do that. The author of the piece in the link has that ability that I never could master. He explains,

However, it might not be as daunting as we think. A new study published in Nature Communications on Tuesday reveals that the icy shell itself might be much more porous than previously thought. In fact, the ice might be home to multiple pockets of water that could be habitable to life as well.

The key to these new findings? Greenland. New data collected with ice-penetrating radar shows the formation of “double ridge” features in the Greenland ice sheet—features that are present on Europa as well. The researchers behind the new paper believe that the mechanism for how these double ridges formed in Greenland ought to apply to Europa—which would suggest that liquid water is more present on the Jovian moon than we could have ever dreamed of.

And all you need to create life is water, right? Just get some plain ol' H2O and let it sit in a pot for about 18 gazillion years, and voilà, life! Which runs up against Fermi's Paradox, that if it's so probable, why aren't we seeing it?

Actually, I've run into a fair number of articles lately that say there's little to say on the subject, like this one:

PERTH, Australia — The quest to find alien life in the cosmos has come up empty in one of the biggest searches to date. Researchers in Australia say their latest project scanned billions of stars and 144 known exoplanets for signs of alien broadcasts — but ultimately found nothing.

Or this one:

NASA has discovered more than 5,000 planets outside of our solar system – but so far, Earth is the only one that appears to have the right conditions for human life.

NASA said it has confirmed 5,005 exoplanets – or planets outside of our solar system. Most are in a very small region outside of our galaxy, the Milky Way. And by "small," NASA means within thousands of light-years. One light year is 5.88 trillion miles.

The closest known exoplanet to Earth, Proxima Centauri b, is about four light-years away.

Here's the conundrum. NASA doesn't come right out and say that a core objective is to find alien life, but it implies it strongly in the wording of its mission statement:

NASA vision statement is “to discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity."

. . . Evidence shows that NASA has been successful in satisfaction of the first component in this vision statement. The company prides of pioneering a wide range of discoveries such as the feasibility of life in other planets. Although this is futuristic, the most impactful discoveries comprise the ones that have an immediate and direct impact on the lives of people in the contemporary era.

How has NASA demonsrated "the feasibility of life in other planets?" Its own studies like the one linked just above suggest that gosh darn it, no matter how hard we look, we can't seem to find any. And how has this non-discovery had any "immediate and direct impact on the lives of people"? Well, I guess if you look at NASA's payroll, and the university payrolls supported by NASA grants, I guess you could say so. NASA's brought up generations of people who are able to expand on things.

Heck, some of them have gotten rich.

Potemkin Government And The Crisis Of Competence

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 Russian invasion can be characterized as incompetent, driven as far as anyone can see by an incompetent despot at the top, surrounded by incompetent yes-men.

If the US has a Potemkin government, what about the Russian Federation, whose predecessor invented the term? But the problem isn't just government. What about CNN?

Warner Bros. Discovery laid off CNN’s chief financial officer Brad Ferrer with Discovery’s current chief financial officer Neil Chugani as the media giant attempts to restructure the finance team, Axios reported Tuesday, citing five unidentified sources.

. . . While Warner Bros. Discovery moves to make CNN+, which has approximately just 150,000 subscribers, more profitable, executives within CNN see the streaming service as a possible lifeline for the network in years ahead, according to Axios. Had CNN+ been profitable, CNN’s long-term revenue would’ve increased given the boom around digital media, but things don’t seem to be turning out according to plan.

Hot Air has fujrther analysis:

There’s also a question of why CNN insisted on launching an expensive, dubious new platform so soon before the merger with Discovery. Axios claims that Discovery didn’t want to communicate internally with Warner Bros. before the deal for fear of attracting government interest, so they opted instead to say some discouraging things about CNN+ publicly in hopes that CNN would take the hint and postpone the launch. But they didn’t.

. . . The fact that WBD has now slashed marketing spending raises the possibility that they’re going to shutter it anyway, which would make this a “New Coke”-scale debacle.

But there’s another possibility, per Axios. WBD may try to bundle CNN+ with other streaming services it owns to sweeten the pot for consumers by broadening the variety of content available.

. . . HBO Max and Discovery+ alone include a lot of archived programming. Package them with a news service like CNN+ for an extra buck or two a month and cordcutters may find that hard to say no to, especially if CNN+ eventually includes CNN’s live newscast. That’s another key takeaway from Axios’s report today — WBD wants CNN to get back to hard news programming, to the point where they’re even toying with doing a traditional newscast in the 9 p.m. hour instead of bringing in a new opinion-ish host to replace Chris Cuomo. If CNN+ is already headed to the trash bin, I assume that’s where Chris Wallace will end up. But WBD may already have so much money sunk into the platform that they have to at least try to bundle it in order to recoup some of those expenses. CNN+ likely can’t survive independently, but maybe it can if it’s hooked up to HBO/Discovery life support.

In other words, the traditional corporate media and news model is falling apart. It almost sounds like Putin withdrawing from Kyiv to regroup and win the war in Donbas. But this fits with other developments in the COVID theater of the Plebe War:

Just days after President Joe Biden’s Centers for Disease Control ordered yet another extension of the federal mask mandate, a Florida judge ruled that the agency had no authority to impose it in the first place, saying that “our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.”

To public cheers, the TSA, Amtrak, the Washington Metro system, and other public transportation systems immediately ditched their mask requirements, even though the Biden administration is appealing the ruling in hopes overturning it. No one, it seems, trusts the CDC anymore.

But all of this comes as COVID cases appear to be on the upswing.

. . . So, Biden now faces a dilemma. Does he relent on mandates and get blamed for another spike in COVID cases? Or does he invite an intense hostility from a public that is sick and tired of being bossed around by the likes of Anthony Fauci?

. . . Biden and the rest of the left have been drunk on power ever since COVID hit the scene. They needlessly rushed in sweeping and destructive lockdowns, closed churches, hampered businesses, tried – illegally – to turn employers into vaccine enforcers, upended election laws at the last minute to help their friends get elected, shuttered schools, and made kids wear masks, despite the widely known harm those last two have inflicted.

And the left has given every indication that it won’t give up its newfound power willingly. Thus, the CDC announced on April 13 it was extending its federal mask mandate for another two weeks because … well, presumably because it wanted the mandate in place forever.

We may feel certain that whatever option Biden chooses, it will be about as effective as CNN or Putin. The problem is bigger than any of them individually.

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 drop the mask mandate, have announced they will no longer enforce it, and the TSA has followed suit at airports.

Amtrak as of today has announced,

While Amtrak passengers and employees are no longer required to wear masks while on board trains or in stations, masks are welcome and remain an important preventive measure against COVID-19. Anyone needing or choosing to wear one is encouraged to do so.

Metrolink, the Los Angeles-area rail transit agency, has announced it will no longer enforce a mask requirement, but I'd learned from a Facebook friend who took a selfie on a train without his mask last week that staff had not been enforcing the requirement for some weeks. However, most other California transit agencies say they're "waiting for guidance". In fact, this seems to be the case nationally. The impression I have, though, is that the administration won't pursue this:

An official with President Joe Biden’s administration said Monday evening that, given the ruling, the TSA would no longer enforce the mandate, which had applied to commercial aircraft, buses, trains, ferries and subway systems, as well as transportation hubs.

I noted as well last week that Philadelphia reinstituted an indoor mask requirement, but so far, no other local authority has followed suit. This is a contrast from 202l, when local agencies were quick to tighten their own restrictions in response to similar moves elsewhere but reluctant to loosen them when the variouis waves peaked.

Individual choices are lagging behind official relaxations. Although outdoor masking rules in Los Angeles have been gone for many months, ordinary people wearing masks on the street are still common, and although indoor masking hasn't been required since February, I would estimate that roughly half those attending Easter mass wore masks. On the other hand, we're at least back to shaking hands with our friends at the peace.

It looks, though, like we're in the final stages of the 2020 moral panic.

The Trans Conundrum

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 feelings also gives status-seeking K-12 teachers a righteous excuse to groom an effeminate young boy or an insecure girl (who may or may not grow up to be gay or lesbian) towards a transgender identity, complete with a lifetime of sterilizing drugs, surgeries, loneliness, and poor health.

The transgender view also creates a lucrative opportunity for drug companies, doctors, and surgeons to feel virtuous about reshaping children’s or teenagers’ bodies to mimic the appearance of the opposite sex, regardless of the trauma and damage being done to children.

This suggests the actual voters and financial support for transgender aren't young teens who may be struggling with identity -- after all, they're too young to vote -- but a growing culture of elites who profit from a problem they themselves create, indeed by telling the children and young teens what their problem is. By the same token, the movement to conceal from the parents of the children and young teens that they're being counseled to transition, and indeed may be receiving medical treatment for a perceived condition without the parents' consent, is an indication that there is nothing spontaneous or voluntary about transsexualism. It's programmed by people with a hidden agenda.

What's the underlying agenda? It probably isn't actually related to pedophilia or same-sex atrraction; the point being made by gay and lesbian activists is that they happen to be attracted to members of their own sex for sexual reasons, however disordered that may be from the standpoint of natural law. Gender dysphoria is being sold as an entirely different problem with an entirely different solution.

In fact, the solutions appear to be different based on the age of the patient. Post-pubescent men, even if they undergo hormone treatments, almost always retain their full sexual equipment and frequently appear to continue to have sexual relations with women; witness the trans men who sue to be incarcerated in women's prisons and then get the women inmates pregnant.

On the other hand, a prepubescent boy who is convinced by his teachers and counselors that he's trans is a candidate for puberty blockers and further treatment, including castration. Why?

Clearly the motivation behind this isn't being fully examined given the current state of the public dialogue. I would imagine that some part of the agenda is depopulation, but this would require a significant number of young males to be sterilized, and it's far from clear that even the most enthusiastic campaign of mass grooming can accomplish this.

But if the object is vastly to increase the number of castrated men, this could also have implications simply for keeping the overall population docile.

Another motive couid be antifeminism, to erase any idea of a separate female identity by in effect making females a version of males and perhaps eventually wiping them out once a more controllable means of reproduction can be devised -- recall that in the TV series Fringe, the Observers, technologically enhanced humanoids from the future, are an all-male race that is able to reproduce in an unspecified way. The fantasy, if nothing else, is out there.

The most we can say is that one of the least popular presidents in US history has made transsexualism a signature issue and claimed transsexuals are made in God's image. As battles in the Plebe War go, this is going to turn out about as well as the encirclement of Kyiv.

Defeat In Detail

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 using that term). But one that fits the definition in Encyclopedia.com even more closely is the current Ukraine strategy in the war with Russia.

The conventional wisdom so far has been that Ukraine's victory in the Battle of Kyiv is an entirely different matter from the putative upcoming battle in Donbas, in which the Russians will be (and this is never completely clear) either Gen Manstein or Gen Zhukhov and smash Ukraine with overwhelming numbers of tanks. Whichever, it's gonna be a big Russian victory or something.

This is in spite of what strikes me as the completely uncontroversial conclusion by the Institute for the Study of War that the forces Russia is trying to recommit to eastern Ukraine "remain degraded, and Russian forces will face challenges integrating units from several military districts into a cohesive fighting force".

In addition, the separate assessments at the Militaryland.com site contain remarks like, "The convoy of Russian army have been moving towards Izium for the third day, and it’s kinda a déjà vu to the Kyiv one." In general, the Russian strategy, insofar as a coherent one even exists, hasn't changed since Kyiv, and in fact, what we're actually seeing on YouTube videos and other press reports is a steady stream of small battles in both the Donetsk and Kherson regions like this one:

Military personnel of the Joint Forces successfully repulsed 6 attacks by the Russians and terminated 15 units of military hardware belonging to the aggressors on the Donetsk and Luhansk fronts on 14 April.

"On 14 April, Ukrainian defenders destroyed 4 tanks, 6 armoured personnel carriers, 4 infantry fighting vehicles and one artillery system belonging to the enemy."

Footage from what may be either this encounter or any number of similar ones on YouTube indicates that this sort of action, taken against a single column of Russian vehicles, amounts to destroying the combat effectivenss of an individual battalion tactical group, apparently dispatched independently and without supoport from others. Estimates of the number of BTGs in eastern Ukraine are from 35 to 50, and as the ISW keeps pointing out, these are already understrength and degraded. The Oryx site continues to catalog the destruction, abandonment, and capture of dozens of tanks, armored vehicles, and weapons each day. As of this morning, its number of such on the Russian side is 2899, and there's apparently a backlog in counting. The Russians are repeating the same failures but expecting a different result.

What we're actually seeing in eastern Ukraine and Kherson is simply a continuation of the Ukrainian strategy we saw in Kyiv, which is misreported as a "stalemate" punctuated by minor skirmishes -- until, unexpectedly, the Russians collapse and retreat in disorder.

Ukraine has so far been able tactically to push back the Russian invasion in detail, in effect a battalion tactical group at a time. Strategically, it's generally acknowledged that the Russian invasion relied on multiple separated parts of a force that were in fact not in supporting distance of each other, which so far has enabled the Ukraine resistance on both small scale and large.

I did a web search on "Ukraine" and "defeat in detail" and came up with only 534,000 hits, most of which date from before the current war. They threw me out of ROTC.

The Sinking Of The Moskva

News reports confirm that the Russian missile cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea was hit by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and heavily damaged; other reports on Twitter say that it has sunk. Meanwhile,

Rumors are swirling in Russia about Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu having suffered a massive heart attack.

Leonid Nevzlin, a former co-head of the oil giant Yukos, claims that Shoigu is in critical condition.

He also says that 20 top generals have been arrested. pic.twitter.com/9kOJ1Ba0dx

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) April 14, 2022

The Institute for the Study of War site has made no mention of the damage or sinking of the Moskva, nor has the Militaryland site, although I first saw references to this in the middle of yesterday afternoon. The Oryx site, however, has already confirmed the damage, though not the subsequent sinking. It's hard to imagine that this is not a significant blow to Russian prestige: in response to Sweden and Finland moving to NATO, the Russian response was to threaten them with naval forces:

#Russia will strengthen its borders in case of #Sweden and #Finland join #NATO and will deploy "significant naval forces" in the waters of the Gulf of Finland.

This was stated by Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev. pic.twitter.com/nEQaZU3l1K

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) April 14, 2022

The most complete coverage is at the Red State blog, which itself is a surprise, as US independent media hasn't had much interest in Ukraine. I think the story there has made a correct call:

The politics of the sinking of the Moskva will be seismic. The Moskva is the ship that called upon Ukrainian troops on Snake Island to surrender during the early days of the war and received the memorable response “Russian warship…go f*** yourself” and had a Ukrainian postage stamp designed in honor of the event.

I'm inclined to wait for other developments.