Bad Writing And Ukraine Analysis

I spent the first part of my working career making red (or blue) marks like those above, and I thereby learned what Samuel Johnson meant when he said teaching is "intricate misery". If I discovered anything else in the process, it was that bad writing has a close relation to bad thinking, but I'm not sure if I can go much beyond that.

This seems to apply to what passes for prestigious analysis of the current war in Ukraine, especially from the Institute for the Study of War. Let's take a passage from their April 26 update:

Russian forces have adopted a sounder pattern of operational movement in eastern Ukraine, at least along the line from Izyum to Rubizhne. Russian troops are pushing down multiple roughly parallel roads within supporting distance of one another, allowing them to bring more combat power to bear than their previous practice had supported.

This could actually be a good introductory sentence for several subsequent paragraphs giving specific instances, but it's followed only by a few sentences that are essentially unsupported:

Russian troops on this line are making better progress than any other Russian advances in this phase of the war. They are pushing from Izyum southwest toward Barvinkove and southeast toward Slovyansk. They are also pushing several columns west and south of Rubizhne, likely intending to encircle it and complete its capture.

They're pushing, and they're pushing, and they'll likely, but if they're so much sounder, why haven't they done it yet? The whole story of the eastern front so far has been that it's static. Contrast this assessment with yesterday's analysis from the Daily Kos, which I think is better written and probably more accurate, though less prestigious:

Russia continued making slow, grinding progress on Wednesday, taking five settlements, repulsed on six other approaches, and pushing into some of the larger towns. Ukrainian resistance is stiff.

I won’t belabor the point I’ve made repeatedly—how Russia [is] guilty once again of spreading its forces thin across way too many lines of attack. Yes, they’ve had some tactical victories, taking a town here or there, but they are still failing their strategic goal of taking the entire Donbas region and building a land bridge that extends all the way across Ukraine’s south, through Odesa, and on to Moldova’s Transnistria region.

Remember, Russia had loads of tactical victories around Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv. How’d that turn out for them strategically?

. . . It’s been two weeks since Russia announced their big Donbas offensive, yet Russia has managed to push only ~22 kilometers (14 miles) to the south and west. That leaves just another 240-320 kilometers (~150-200 miles) of roads to go to close the gap to the south (depending on the route), not to mention all the territory in the middle, which at around 5,000 square miles, would entirely fit the state of Connecticut.

The Daily Kos analysis is far more concrete and even asks pertinent questions, which the ISW analysis completely leaves out. Now, I'm interested in this war, and being retired, I have time on my hands, so I'm able to look around for the best information. In general, the ISW is currently unique in insisting the Russians have cleaned up their act -- but the question remains that if their operational pattern is now sounder, as the ISW claims, why aren't we seeing them benefit from it? This is effectively the point the Daily Kos is raising.

The ISW says the Russians are making "better progress", but there's no specific comparison. This is no different from claiming our detergent will get your clothes 50% cleaner. The Russian progress so far is actually similar to what we saw around Kyiv, which is the point the Daily Kos makes. There, we saw seesawing along a largely static front, followed soon enough by a complete Russian collapse.

It's worth noting that the lead author of the April 26 ISW post I've linked here as a bad example is again Frederick W Kagan, the Ivy Leaguer with a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history, and who as I noted more than two weeks ago, seems inclined not just to repeat conventional wisdom but to create it himself ex nihilo. There's been a school of thought that goes more or less, "Just wait. The Russians are going to regroup, recalibrate, and refit, and we'll see a real advance n the Donbas." But so far, other than an advance here countered by a retreat there, we still aren't seeing it, but Kagan is sticking to his guns, and I think he's even jiggering his analysis to accommodate it.

And this leaves aside the increasing reports that the US-NATO heavy artillery that had been moving to Ukraine over the past two weeks is reaching the front, along with the trained Ukraine units to use it. The best reports I've been able to find are still at the reddit r/ ukraine conflict site. They are anecdotal and often unconfirmed, but I think they're a good counterbalance to the more respectable but badly written and badly reasoned analysis elsewhere.

Boy, That Was Fast

So fat, I haven't seen any commentary that ties the events of the past two weeks together.

• April 14: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter
• April 18: U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle strikes down the federal mask mandate for airplanes and other modes of public transportation
• April 21: CNN announces cacellation of CNN+
• April 22: Florida Gov Ron DeSantis signs bill revoking special Disney status in the state
• April 25: Twitter board unanimously accepts Musk buyout offer.

In the space of a week and a half, the country took important steps to bring itself out of the 2020 moral panic. This included a major defeat for woke control of key news and entertainment and a near-final end to most COVID restrictions. There's been a lot of reaction to each individual event, especially the Musk takeover of Twitter, but nobody's seeing this as a much bigger milestone.

If I were to go farther with the big picture, I'd say this is taking place in the context of the Ukraine war. Again, few people are noting the effect of Volodymyr Zelensky as a world figure, although some are, interestingly in the context of the Aristotelian virtues, especially courage. For instance, at the UK Tablet,

The heroic struggle of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky against the tyrant Putin’s invasion of Ukraine represents nothing less than the return of noble manliness in our era. Improbably, he rose from portraying a Ukrainian president on a hit comedy series to becoming president in real life. His dressed-down khaki jacket and T-shirt shows solidarity with ordinary Ukrainians and has an Israeli feel. Don’t do what I ask because I’m president, he says. Do it because you’re Ukrainian.

, , , The idea of manly virtue has been discounted for many years now in our institutions of higher learning, frequently identified with “toxic masculinity” and other supposed threats to proper order. The caricature of manliness that our institutions now offer us is identified exclusively with barbarism and misogyny. . . . The classical standard for true manliness was still witnessed in modern democratic politics with leaders like Lincoln and Churchill. Though neither man was free of flaws, they had an inner compass that at their best moments guided what they aspired to be and how they governed. The emergence of Zelensky reminds us that such leaders can still emerge from the Western masculine ideal.

I've mentioned both Lincoln and Churchill in connection with Zelensky here. Churchill in particular was addressing a multinational audience, in particular due to the need for the UK to enlist American support against Hitler and Japan. Zelensky's task has been even bigger, to address the need first, for NATO and the West to abandon policies of appeasement toward Putin at all, and then for NATO and the West to man up against the fear that offending Putin by sending Ukraine heavy weapons would "start World War III".

His ability to do this, especially to move a weak, corrupt, and feminized US president who urged him to flee the country in the first hours of the invasion, gradually, first into not objecting to minimal aid to Ukraine (though apparently vetoing the transfer of Polish Migs), but eventually giving the US generals a free hand in providing whatever weapons and other assistance Zelensky requested, speaks for virtue at a classical and historic level. This is beyond David and Goliath; it's maybe, as a few have noted, more like Moses and Pharaoh.

Let's look at Wikipedia's account of how Elon Musk decided to take over Twitter:

On March 20, 2022, the Twitter account of conservative satire website The Babylon Bee was suspended for referring to U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender woman, as their "Man of The Year", which Twitter stated violated its policy on "hateful conduct". The Babylon Bee refused to delete the tweet in order to regain access to the account, and Twitter rejected their appeal. According to Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, the website was contacted by Musk shortly after the suspension to confirm whether they had been suspended, who mused that he "might need to buy Twitter". On March 24, Musk began tweeting statements critical of Twitter, polling his followers on whether Twitter adhered to the principle that "free speech is essential to a functioning democracy"

Wikipedia makes the point that as early as 2017, in response to a tweet suggesting Musk buy Twitter, he replied, "How much is it?", and Musk had been accumulating Twitter shares since January 2022, before anyone knew the name Zelensky. Nevertheless, it's hard to avoid the idea that Zelensky's leadership has created an atmosphere in which Musk could succeed in his bid, and certainly in which his bid could become viable.

The forces of wokeness have been in disorder since the middle of this month, but maybe even more significant, so has a certain segment of the Right. Tucker Carlson, who'd originally seemed likely to inherit Rush Limbaugh's mantle, has retained his anti-Zelensky position. The never-Trump Right is opposed to Musk's takeover of Twitter, as well as DeSantis's revocation of Disney's special treatment in Florida.

My take on Limbaugh is he'd have been pro-Zelensky, pro-Ukraine from the start. I'm really sorry we don't have his commentary now. More is happening than in Ukraine, but Ukraine is oddly driving the rest of it.

Just Say No

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 that starts in LA County usually finishes its run in one of the others. Can people take off their masks when the train leaves the county?

Roy provided a link to a clarification in his Facebook post:

Confusion in trains as riders in Orange County and Inland Empire asked to wear masks – again.

"I thought that was over" and "I don’t have one" were the most common phrases we heard at train stations along the Metrolink lines outside Los Angeles County. Earlier this week, riders heard they no longer had to wear masks after a federal judge struck down the Biden Administration's mask mandate on planes and other forms of public transportation stating that the mandate exceeded the authority of U.S. health officials.

However, Los Angeles County health officials are, again, mandating masks on public transit, citing a rise in COVID-19 infection rates. As a result, Metrolink officials are asking riders on its system, even in lines and stations not in LA County, to wear masks.

"We are not kicking people out if they are not wearing them," said Scott Johnson, director of Communications at Metrolink.

Johnson forwarded FOX 11 the following statement, explaining Metrolink's position:

"Following the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health issuing a Health Officer Order that masking in all public transit within LA County and in LA County indoor transportation hubs continues to be required, Metrolink is asking all passengers aboard Metrolink trains systemwide to once again wear a mask aboard all Metrolink trains.

Just as we did Monday when Metrolink followed a federal directive to lift the mask mandate, we will continue to monitor the situation and adjust as needed with passenger safety as the focus."

The back and forth is making it difficult for many riders we spoke to. Even those who prefer to wear masks, and had them, admit it can be confusing. One rider explained he and his wife just got off a plane, where they were glad to not have to wear a mask, and find that having to wear it on a much emptier train seems unnecessary. Still, many we talked to say they will comply, and plan on carrying masks on their person, regardless. Others say they will refuse, and stop catering to businesses that insist on it, be it a restaurant, and yes, even the train.

A basic principle that's being proven in all the COVID restrictions is that off-again-on-again eventually makes them unenforceable, especially when jurisdictions conflict. A bigger problem for LA County is that its order specifically listed one condition for ending it would be if the CDC ends its own mask mandate, which is effectively suspended anyhow just about everywhere but LA County and some New York area agencies. The current CDC extension is set to end on May 3, a week away.

I would guess that Metrolink was in a bind, as there must have been some type of discussion with the union on whether employees were required to enforce masking -- I assume this was never in the contract, and employees didn't want to continue to do it, especially if having to remove recalictrants from a train and risk of personal harm was involved. So Metrolink is publicly splitting the baby, saying they'll "ask" but not enforce, hoping it won't last long.

As of now, we have no news on whether the CDC intends to ask for yet another extension, but even if they do, in light of the fact that it's no longer enforced in most of the country, its days are numbered no matter what. Overall, in light of the damage the lockdowns and business restrictions did, it's probably just as well that the public health establishment has effectively destroyed its credibility for years to come. Let's face it, this has been the main contribution of Drs Fauci, Walensky, and Levine, as well as "Dr" Ferrer, to the general public welfare.

And Roy, of course, is right.

What's The Story On Ukraine?

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's too much.

The same ISW assessments had been predicting complete Russian victory in Mariupol "within days" throughout March and the first weeks of April, when the defenders in the Azov steel plant have continued to hold out and as of today are still being resupplied.

The question I have is whether the level of incompetence we see at the ISW also reflects a similar level in our intelligence and defense planning -- I assume staff at think tanks pass interchangeably into intelligence agencies, and this could well explain how the US utterly miscalculated the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Zelensky's ability to rally not just his own country but much of the West. The Mason Clarks and Kateryna Stepanenkos are presumably keeping up their mortgage payments in Bethesda nonetheless.

A New Yorker piece, Is the Russian Military a Paper Tiger? raises this question at least tangentially. The author interviews Joel Rayburn, a retired Army colonel now at a think tank, who suggests the whole Russian plan for invasion was unworkable from the start:

I think, over all, the campaign design was flawed from the start. It was an invasion force that was too small for the task, just in straight numbers—in the numbers of combat units, combat formations they were able to put on the battlefield. That task was essentially to dismember Ukraine and change the regime in Kyiv, and the force was too small for that purpose.

. . . What we can now see is that they simply do not have the institutional capacity to support offensive operations deep into enemy territory and aren’t able to give units supply and combat support of all kinds: artillery support, air support, air-defense support. With an already weak logistics base, it was an enormous mistake for them to chop their main offensive into four major axes that were widely geographically dispersed.

. . . And then they’re showing up on the battlefield in the axis of advance toward Kharkiv and Chernihiv and Kyiv with Cold War-era, non-modernized, armored combat vehicles—both infantry vehicles and tanks. And it’s like they took these things out of mothballs.

. . . What we’ve seen in action is a military machine on the Russian side that could not pull off a confrontation with any NATO power. So escalating into a confrontation with NATO would be suicidal for them. And I have to believe that they’re not suicidal. Imagine if that invasion force had stumbled into Poland instead. The casualties that we’re seeing now are high enough, but the entire invasion force would’ve been wiped out.

All well and good, but, er, even Col Rayburn is talking as though this was a surprise (and I assume his mortgage in Bethesda is up to date as well). Why was all this a surprise? US intelligence has made a point that it did in fact correctly predict Putin's invasion in late February -- but what about everything it's failed to predict since then? The mantra up until very recently was "we don't want to start World War III" by offending Putin in some way, like sending Ukraine heavy weapons or Migs.

Thankfully that's been dropped once the level of Russian incompetence became clear. But what caused our own massive miscalculation in the West? I wonder if these aren't the nieces, nephews, and Ivy League protégés of the same people who brought us the failure to predict the Soviet collapse more than a generation ago.

Some See The Glass Half Empty

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 now free to spread the virus unchecked. The airline didn't even have the decency to wait until the plane had landed and the passengers had disembarked to make the announcement!

In fact, this is now seen as a potential problem for the industry:

While we saw many videos of airline passengers joyously celebrating and tossing their face masks into trash bags when the mandate was lifted, not everyone was happy about it. In fact, some people began making preparations to cancel upcoming trips because of their fear of sitting on the same airplane as someone who is not masked up. But will those people be offered a refund for tickets that they had purchased in advance?

But it's worse than that. Consider the dilemma of the grinch on Flight 572, whose journey isn't over when the plane lands in Denver -- he has to transfer to another flight, and this one will now be full of the unmasked! He'll have no choice in the matter! Even if he demands a refund, he still has to find a way home! And let's say he decides to rent a car to finish his trip instead of flying with the unmasked. He'll still need to ride the shuttle to the rental agency, and likely nobody on the shuttle will wear masks, either! And that doesn't even solve the problem of the unmasked in the gate and terminal areas now that the TSA is no longer enforcing the mandate!

And it gets worse. Does Hertz still sanitize and fully disinfect its cars between each rental? Contrast that with the reaction of a flight attendant to the end of the mandate:

Since the beginning of COVID, the disposition of the customers has been pretty angry. They’d get on the plane upset. And for the first time, it felt like everybody was just very relaxed, which was shocking. Everybody was much calmer, much happier. It was bizarre, because I was like, Wow, this mask really was what was making all of these people mad. It was like people were just directly angry at me every time I went to work. I’ve been doing a lot of flying in and out of Florida these past few days, so I don’t know if that matters, but for the first time, the job has felt like what it was before COVID.

. . . We also kind of felt like it was time. Because at this point, people were coming on with the masks half on, and they were super annoyed if you were telling them to pull it back up. Definitely near the end it was worse, because people were just kind of tired of wearing the masks.

I think we can extrapolate from the flight attendant's remarks that people were angry because they knew from the start that the whole COVID thing was a charade, and the airlines and flight attendants had been tasked with being the tip of the spear in that theater of the Plebe War. The airlines became the prime movers in dropping the charade.

I feel bad for the guy at The New Republic, who sounds like he might even need to go into therapy to deal with people who are putting his health -- indeed, his life -- at risk by flying without masks. For some, it's going to be a hard process to get back to normal life.

Here's What I Don't Understand

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 above gives for extending the mandate is "a two-week period is just enough to say we're watching very carefully". This sounds a lot like mom and dad saying a two-week period for being grounded is just enough to send a message, or something like that. But in the next sentence, he says, "If we pull this mask mandate, we will have extended numbers of infections," which is different -- they're not just sending a message, they're keeping us from getting sick.

But the problem continues to be that while omicron is more contagious, it's not more fatal. People keep piping up that maybe the CDC should be using a metric other than "cases" if that's so, and the CDC never quite gets around to making the change. It keeps sounding more and more as if mom and dad want us to stay grounded but won't say why.

So in the middle of this 15-day extension of an extension. a federal judge throws out the whole mask mandate as unconstitutional. The airlines, which wanted to get rid of it, announced the decision in the middle of flights in the air, and passengers cheered, applauded, and threw their masks in the trash bags. The administration dithered and sent the decision on whether to appeal the judge's ruling to the CDC, which decided yes, it would ask the Justice Department to appeal. According to CNN,

The Justice Department on Wednesday appealed a ruling by a federal judge that struck down the mask mandate for mass transportation, following a recommendation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It is CDC's continuing assessment that at this time an order requiring masking in the indoor transportation corridor remains necessary for the public health," the CDC said in a statement. "CDC will continue to monitor public health conditions to determine whether such an order remains necessary. CDC believes this is a lawful order, well within CDC's legal authority to protect public health."

. . . The appeal means that the administration will head to a higher court to extend the mandate -- despite the fact that many airlines and public transit systems have already decided to make masks optional following the court ruling.

The Justice Department's appellate filings didn't immediately include a request for a stay seeking to put the court order on hold and reinstate the mask mandate, a standard move in emergency circumstances.

My sense is that even at the CDC, someone understood that enforcing the reinstated mandate would be seen by some large part of the population as arbitrary and would be met at minimum by large-scale disobedience, if not by renewed disturbances on airlines. In fact, nearly all the airlines and agencies that announced they would no longer enforce the mandate immediately following the judge's order have continued their policies of non enforcment after the CDC's reinstatement. (Yesterday my Facebook friend posted another maskless selfie on Metrolink, despite "Dr" Ferrer's order that Metrolink resume enforcing the mandate.) Indeed, CDC or no,

“With masks now optional, Delta will restore flight privileges for customers on the mask non-compliance no-fly list only after each case is reviewed and each customer demonstrates an understanding of their expected behavior when flying with us,” Delta representatives told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

. . . Separately, American Airlines AAL, -0.20% and United Airlines UAL, +1.20% have both indicated that they are willing to lift the bans they imposed now that masks are optional on flights.

So here's the rub. In reiterating the continuing need for masks in arbitrary circumstances, the CDC said it "remains necessary for the public health". But nobody's listening, and more important, as far as we can tell, nobody's getting sicker, which is simply proving that the mandate is arbitrary and unnecessary.

And as of now, the extension of the extension of the mandate is still scheduled to expire May 3, a little over a week away. If nobody but the LA County health director and some (but not all) transit agencies is observing it now, will that change if the CDC extends it again? The only justification for either extending the mandate or appealing the judge's decision is to preserve the CDC's ability to mandate masks in the future, but at this stage, the CDC and Drs Walensky and Fauci are simply confirming their status as national jokes. If there were a new COVID-22 epidemic tomorrow, the CDC already would have much diminished credibility to reinstate any sort of measures like thoae they've exhausted with COVID-19 no matter what.

Isn't this counterproductive?

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.