Sunday, November 28, 2021

Remember The Scary Red Circles?

The map with the scary flashing red circles was all the rage in early 2020, and it was on the news shows along with predictions of mass graves in public parks. It was based on the Imperial College model, which was almost immediately discredited, and even the media got tired of it around the time the hospital ships in New York and LA harbors were sent back to port.

All of a sudden, it looks like the lizard people want to bring back the old panic. And a panic, or an attempted stampede, is what the Omicron variant appears to be.

What a small world we live in. The “Nu variant” scare you keep hearing about is coming from the same people and institutions that spawned the last COVID scare, and the one before that, and the one before that one, dating back all the way to the onset of COVID Mania.

. . . Just as with previous ruling class-fomented bouts of Hysteria-19, there is no statistical cause for alarm over this new strain, which is one of over 100,000 mutations of the coronavirus.

The “new strain” has hardly produced any lab confirmed cases, but a panicked narrative has already been seeded in the public. The U.K. in particular has driven the fear to new levels. The country has already added several African nations to its travel ban list, citing the new strain.

The same applies to the US:

United States' top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on Sunday that Americans should be prepared to do "anything and everything" to fight the spread of the new COVID-19 variant Omicron.

It is "too early to say" whether we need new lockdowns or mandates, Fauci told ABC News.

"You want to be prepared to do anything and everything," he said.

But the lizard people who are whispering in President Biden's ear have overlooked a change in the political alignment -- or maybe more accurately, they're misreading it. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins sees this, if not very clearly,

Mr. Biden, with the benefit of vaccines, has presided over more deaths now than Donald Trump, whom Candidate Biden practically labeled a murderer. He will be lucky not to see midterm ads reminding him of this. Unraveling here is a White House strategy that counted on Covid going away before the next election so it could claim its handwaving delivered us.

Two things are happening. The moral panic of 2020 was fed by the social uncertainties that put Donald Trump in the White House -- or maybe more precisely, the fear among those who profited from the post-1960s social settlement that this stability could be reversed. But the realignments are still taking place irrespective of Trump; for instance, the recognition among Latins that class identity is more important than racial identity; that the Latin working and middle classes have the same interests as the Anglo working and middle classes, and they're voting Republican like the Anglos.

Worse, Trump was never dead, and he's starting a comeback. But even there, he was only a talented amateur who took advantage of trends that had begun without him, and they'll continue no matter his individual political fate. Thus the current effort to reboot 2020 is going to be feckless.

The new Omicron attempted panic comes amid important US political developments: the January 6 commission, that was supposed to drive a final stake through Trump's heart when two impeachments couldn't, has tapered off into a joke that will end Liz Cheney's career. The jury system, with events like the Rittenhouse verdict, is refusing to knuckle under to the received narrative -- and the courts, in continuing to resist unconstitutionial COVID restrictions, are continuing to do the same.

The basic conundrum right now is that the prevailing strategies haven't worked. The graphs I showed yesterday indicate pretty clearly that no lockdowns, no mask mandates, and no vaccine mandates. work just as effectively as having them. Wearing two masks, as Dr Fauci briefly advocated, worked just as well as wearing no mask. People are catching on. Three shots will work about as well as four. Two will work about as well as three. None, it's starting to seem, works about the same as any. That which cannot continue must stop.