What I Learned About Incompetence

I've been thinking a lot about another unacknowledged 20th-century classic, Gerald Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming (1971). In my view, the book's title is misleading, snce it has little actually to say about either psychology or compuyter programming. The reviews at the link, in fact, suggest it focuses on organizational behavior.

I read it not long after it came out, around the time I refocused my career into IT. My main takeaway was his point that in a typical tech organization, one or two people have most of the necessary knowledge and skills, while everyone else does very little and refers any critical problems to the key people.

In other words, "You're getting an 808? Check with Herb, he knows what do do." But as a practical matter, whether it's an 808, a blue screen of death, a system crash, a power outage, or a user error, Herb is the guy who has all the experience and job knowledge with the system and knows how to fix things. Everyone else is basically there to refer things to Herb. This, as I think Weinberg understood, has nothing to do with either psychology or programming.

I spent some part of my career working in IT for a large utility. I got a good deal of education on these issues there. I was working on and off as a 1099 contractor, not a W-2 employee, although I was an employee there. The company was going through one of those reorgs where everyone basically has to reapply for their own jobs, which shold have in theory resulted in a reborn company where the deadwood had been trimmed away. Fat chance.

The exhilirating thing about working as a contractor is that you're coming into an organization based on an expectation that you're actually competent in a particular area, basically a temporary Herb, or maybe a little more like the Western gunslinger who's hired to do a particular dirty job and move on. I remember walking down a corridor behind two contractors who'd been with that utility for a while, and I overheard their conversation about how the reorg was proceeding.

"What I don't understand," said one to the other, "is that in case after case, they're taking the absolutely most valuable people in each area, and those are the ones they're pushing out."

A few weeks later, they called me into the little room where they told me there would not be a place for me in their dynamic new organization and escorted me out of the building. (I handed them my pager with a smile.) They referred me to the placement consultants, who were set up in a nearby hotel. When I went in to see a lady, she said, "Well, this is a surprise. I saw your resume, and I was convinced you would definitely not be one of those who'd be asked to leave." At least I'd already had an indication of how things were happening, huh?

The bottom line is that in most organization, incompetence is baked into the system. Even if the organization goes through the motions of reform, the incompetents actually form a powerful consituency that's able to perpetuate itself.

You might ask, "Wait a moment. How can a company survive if it screens out all the competent people and just keeps incompetents? Won't this catch up with them?"

That's one of the points in The Big Short. The system will hang on, seemingly forever. Incompetence is a huge constituency all its own. I'm not sure if Gerald Weinberg fully understood his own point.

Two Mysteries: Oak Island vs Amelia Earhart

Thursday night, the Conspiracies Decoded show on the Science Channel had a segment that asked, but never got around to answering, the perennial question, what happened to Amelia Earhart?

Well, she got lost and sisappeared.

So anyhow, they found a bunch of bones on an island she might have wound up on before World War II, but the bone doctor who looked at them at the time didn't think they belonged to a skinny female, and they got put in storage in some museum. They were rediscovered in 2019, but a DNA test said they still weren't Amelia Earhart, so the bone doctor was right. This was thin gruel indeed, and it probably wasn't worth even the segment on the show, but after all, it was Amelia Earhart, huh?

Except it wasn't. The question I had was she had a guy with her on the flight, Fred Noonan, the navigator. Did anyone check those bones for Fred Noonan's DNA? Even if he wasn't Amelia Earhart, if it was Noonan's DNA, that could have solved the mystery. Looks like nobody thought of that. After all, Noonan wasn't Amelia Earhart.

I muttered to my wife that George Putnam, her huaband, was probably happy to be rid of her.

Earhart has become a totemic symbol of the emancipated woman who spreads her wings and flies, but the end of the story where she gets lost and disappears is problematic. Thre has to be some sort of plot twist tht makes this OK, so a mystery is needed here. Maybe she was secretly spying on the Japanese or something, huh?

The problem is that the emancipated Earhart had to rely on Putnam's money -- he owned the Lockheed Electra she disappeared in. Putnam was one of th greatest publicists and promoters of his day, Axxording to Wikipedia,

A significant event in Putnam's personal and business life occurred in 1928. . . . Because of his reputation for working with Lindbergh, he was contacted by Amy Phipps Guest, a wealthy American living in London, who wanted to sponsor the first-ever flight by a woman across the Atlantic Ocean.

Guest asked Putnam to find a suitable candidate, and he eventually came up with the then-unknown aviatrix, Amelia Earhart. . . . Putnam had undertaken to promote Earhart in a campaign that included lecture tours and mass-market endorsements for luggage, Lucky Strike cigarettes (this caused image problems for her, and McCall's magazine retracted an offer) and other products.

So Earhart was basically the creation of a man, and not just any man, but a member of the post-Civil War moneyed elite. Ferdinand Lundberg would not be surprised. In fact, she was never more than a media-induced fantasy, and let's face it, she was going to have to disappear at some point right around then. She was 40 and not likely to sell much more luggage or cigarettes.

So Earhart's is a phony mystery promoted by the lizard people from the start. But let's face it, the hype can last only so long. Someone' rediscovered some old bones that still aren't hers, but it's now worth only a segment on a B-list TV show.

Contrast that with a TV mystery that's been extremely popular for nearly a decade, The Curse of Oak Island. There's a rich guy involved, Marty Lagina, but as far as I can tell, he's new money. Beyond that, he's a charming guy, nothing slick about him, and everyone on the show wears safety vests abd hard hats like railroaders or construction workers. Yeah, there are archaeologists and so forth with college degrees, but they're supporting characters.

The guy we love to watch is Gary Drayton. Nothing upper class about him at all. Mike Rowe would be at home if he were to visit.

Maybe this is part of what has the lizard people in such a snit.

Back To The Big Short

All the glee over the GameStop short squeeze in the past several days actually reminds me of a very good recent film, The Big Short (2015), We have it on DVD and watch it at least once a year. It's a fictionalized version of a true story about various contrarians and outsiders who foresee the 2008 housing crisis and in effect short the US economy via the housing market.

The 2021 short squeeze actually reverses the circumstances of The Big Short, since in the current case, the forces of dark financial consensus are looking to clean up by shorting GameStop, expecting its price to go down, while the contrarians and outsiders see an opportunity to confound the establishment by buying up GameStop stock, forcing the big boys to buy it back at inflated prices.

In The Big Short, the outsiders and contrarians realize the housing economy is a bubble and find a way to short the market, expecting it to go down when the establishment expects prices to rise forever. But the message is the same. A sympathetic group of not-quite little guys outsmarts a monolithic consensus supported by backroom cronyism and old-boy loyality.

Unfortunately. the ultimate message of the film is that the little guy suffers. The outcome of the 2008 crisis, played out during the election, was that Democrats and Republicans worked in concert to make sure this would happen. In 2021, I don't see much difference.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday it “shouldn’t be a surprise” that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was paid to speak to Wall Street, including a hedge fund involved in the GameStop populist investing struggle.

Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chairman, was paid $810,000 by hedge fund Citadel for three events in 2019 and 2020, according to disclosure forms.

The firm reportedly infused $2 billion into Melvin Capital Management, a hedge fund hammered by losses in the GameStop struggle waged by smaller investors.

2021 isn't the Great Reset. 2021 is return to business as usual, or maybe an attempt to do so, The COVID lockdowns figure into things this time -- they didn't have to work this hard at enforcement in 2008.

Backing Off The Narrative?

I've followed Angelo Codevilla for 20 yers, since he outlined the tension between the "ruling class" and the "country class". His most recent piece suggests the lizard people, or whoever it is, have decided to back off the COVID lockdowns.

But as much as the oligarchs enjoyed COVID powers and dreamt of segueing them into a “new normal,” they knew that America could not be locked down forever.

They especially knew, were they to unseat Trump and become responsible for the country, their charges that he had failed to stop the pandemic would come back to haunt them. “Why can’t you stop it?” would be the natural question they would have to face as the virus did what airborne viruses do: spread. Hence, after January 20, dismounting the COVID tiger, albeit gingerly, became the order of the day.

He cites in particular California Gov Newsom's lifting of his regional supplementary lockdown on Monday. After Codevilla wrote, New York Gov Cuomo made a similar move, though he waited some days to do so after telegraphing it last week.

I'm not sure this signals any sort of beginning-of-the-end for the lockdowns. The restrictions both Newsom and Cuomo lifted were supplemental impositions over and above those that had been in effect, and remain so now, over much of 2020. For instance, I can (for now) legally get a haircut in Califonria, but barber shops are still essentially restricted to one customer at a time, no matteer how many barbers or chairs are in the place, so the barbers are still losing money, and customers have to scramble to book appointments.

And both Newsom and Cuomo are weak men with histories of vacillation. If either the media or the lizard people tell them to clamp down again, they'll do it. In addition, while Los Angeles County has allowed some measure of indoor worship since December, the rest of the state does not, and LA County can prohibit it again at any time based purely on someone's whim.

It reminds me of an exchange someone reported to Scott Adams a while ago. Two people are driving n a car. One asks, "I wonder how much that job pays."

What job?" asks the other.

"The job where you change the traffic lights from red to green."

That job pays what the governors of New York and California are paid. It's not a good sign that Dr Fauci is now musing about making people wear two masks. So far, he hasn't advocated doubling social distancing to 12 feet, but it's probably not a good idea to give him ideas.

The YouTube commentator Hard Bastard, one of the best, has family background in Jehovah's Witnesses and sometimes draws parallels with cult behavior in society at large. The other day he noted that the Kingdom, unlike observant Christians and Jews, has endorsed government prohibitions on group gatherings, indoor worship, and proselytizing door to door. (Indeed, Hard Bastard says since Witnesses are not saved by the Blood of Christ but instead by going door to door, this is a critical ocncession for them to make.)

Hard Bastard concludes that Jehovah's Witnesses are deeply impressed by the opportunities for control the COVID crisis has given petty authorities, and they endorse it.

I don't think this is going to go away anytime soon. It's worth noting that Trump had no strategy to deal with the lockdowns all last year, he erred gravely in elevating Dr Fauci as an authority, and in my view, it's a mark against his record. For now, nobody has a coherent strategy. This is urgently needed.

East Of Eden: Why You Have To Read The Novel

Because I'd been thinking about East of Edem lately, my wife and I watched the 1956 Elia Kazan film on DVD over the weekend. It's unquestionably one of the greats, but because Kazan limited its scope to the last third of the novel, there's an enormous gap in the portrayal of Adam Trask, Caleb's father, that leaves an important issue unexplained.

As I've said, East of Eden covers a swath of what might be regarded as recent memory as of the early 1950s, much like Middlemarch in the early 1870s. a 65-year period between the Civil War and World War I, three generations of the Trask family. Kazan leaves the patriarch, Cyrus Trask, completely out.

The problem is that, like Middlemarch, East of Eden has secrets, and a key one is buried in Cyrus Trask's career as a professional Civil War veteran who becomes some sort of Washington, DC fixer -- exactly what he does isn't specified, except that although Cyrus loses track of his son Adam, he leaves both Adam and his brother a substantial inheritance.

Exactly where this money came from isn't explained, and it's likely a secret to everyone but Cyrus (and presumably those who paid him off). One problem is that Caleb's father, Adam, was a drifter who'd had problems with the law until the inheritance came along, when, just like that, he was able to buy a ranch in California and become a respectable gentleman farmer.

Although the film refers vaguely to the very brief marriage of the psychopathic itinerant prostitute Cathy Ames to Adam, the fact is that after Adam buys the ranch, he's been effectively living a fantasy, asking no serious questions about Cathy or what became of her, and certainly no questions about the inheritance that brought him prosperous respectability. In fact, it's implied that the ranch never paid off, and Adam's sale of it and the family's move to Salinas was probably a result.

The film covers none of this backstory. It provides context, though, to Adam's ill-conceived scheme to freeze lettuce and ship it back east, a bubble that bursts in a matter of hours when the shipment is delayed and the lettuce thaws. Caleb, holding his father in great respect, develops a scheme to speculate on the price of beans in the runup to the US entry into World War I and restore his father's wealth to him -- without understanding that the money his father had invested had itself come from a highly questionable source. Caleb's profit came much more honestly than his father's (and we can't completely ignore a context in the Parable of the Talents, either).

Poor Caleb. I've been there. But Kazan, for whatever reason, completely omits this irony.

So the central event of the film, the birthday party in which Adam rejects Caleb's gift as coming from war speculation, insisting Caleb return it, is actually a manifestation of Adam's general moral fog, refusing to recognize his wife is madam of a nearby brothel and refusing to recognize the source of his own wealth and respectability, insisting on his own moral purity in the face of ordinary conmmercial activity around him -- commercial activity at which he's been a failure, something even Caleb doesn't fully understand.

This isn't in the film, and you don't see it unless you've read the novel. In fact, maybe unless you've read it several times.

Steinbeck is a highly underrated writer.

Newsom Lifts The Double Secret Lockdown

On December 9, Gov Newsom issued a completely new regional lockdown order based on prospective ICU capacity that covered most of California. This was over and above an existing color-coded lockdown order that was itself draconian, limiting family gatherings and prohibiting indoor restaurant service.

The new order went farther, banning haircuts, manicures, facials, outdoor restaurant service, and most travel. This was effectively the same as the lockdown imposed between March and May 2020, with some added permission for limited "non-essential" retail.

I've callled this the double secret lockdown. Yesterday, Newsom lifted it, with little notice -- he telegraphed it only the night before, when the California Restaurant Associatioin released a letter from him giving them a heads-up. Newsweek, clearly unhappy he'd done this, nevertheless pointed out the contradictions:

Up until this week, California has been under one of the harshest lockdowns across the country. But Governor Gavin Newsom moved to reverse those orders amid an effort to recall him from office.

Despite no significant improvement for the state's overwhelmed intensive care units (ICU), public health officials announced Monday that regional coronavirus stay-at-home orders across the state will be lifted, allowing restaurants to immediately resume outdoor dining.

. . . {T]he state's coronavirus dashboards shows that two regions currently remain nowhere near the required 15 percent. ICU capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is at 1.3 percent, and the number of hospital beds available in Southern California, the state's hardest-hit region, remains at zero.

The lack of improvement in the state's coronavirus figures raises question as to why Newsom would begin lifting orders now, as the parameter he set hasn't been met everywhere.

Newsom caught a lot of criticism for easing restrictions mildly last May, with much handwringing in the media over whether he'd done it "too soon". Subsequnt experience seems to indicate that the disease does what it does, irrespectivve of lockdowns. Los Angeles County locked down before Thanksgivinig with dire wanings of what would happen to grandma over turkey, but cases soared throughout the holidays nonetheless.

That Newsom would loosen things now even without any improvement in ICU capacity suggests he may be recognizing on one hand that lockdowns are futile. On the other, he may be responding to pressure, given the continuing success of the recall campaign in gaining the million-and-a-half signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.

The proble,m is that Newsom is unreliable. When a lawsuit by San Diego area churches objecting to closed worship services got to the US Supreme Court in May, Newsom allowed them the same weekend, and the court declared the issue was moot and refused to hear the case. Newsom then closed churches again six weeks later.

This can happen again at any time. But Newsom can as easily declare that the stars and planets make barbers, restaurants, and churches unpropitious and shut things down again any time it suits him. Lawsuits insisting there is no rational basis for existing continued closures -- for instance, of indoor gyms or indoor dining -- are stalled in the courts. An astrological basis for new lockdowns would have the same de facto authority, it would seem.

The whole environment of red light-green light at the authorities' whim is incredibly destructive. A big problem is that the elites, including the media, are effectively insulated from its effects. Newsweek, which nobody reads, thinks this sort of thing needs to continue.

Lawsuits need to continue, even if Newsom strategically relaxes restrictions in hopes of making them moot. Precedents need to be etablished. So does the recall Newsom campaign -- even if he lifts this or that as expedient, he needs to be out to keep him from doing this forever.

John D Rockefeller Saved The Whales

I watched Bp Barron's Sunday homily yesterday, in which, beyond discussing the reading from Johah himself, he urged listeners to go to Fr Mapples's sermon from the 1955 film of Moby Dick on YouTube. I've embedded it above. I would have embedded the whole film as well, but YouTube won't let me, as it's age-restricted. (There are gruesome scenes of actual whales being killed, which probably carry out Melville's purpose more than that of the Hollywood version.)

The actor portraying Fr Mapples is Orson Welles, by the way.

I had been thinking about Moby Dick anyhow. I think I've read it five times, once as an undergraduate, once in grad school, and three times since then. I'd set it aside for some time, as I'd begun to have my doubts about how serious Melville actually was as a writer. (Joseph Conrad annotated a copy of Moby Dick and thought little of it.) On the other hand, I've had almost ten years of Catholic Bible study, and this has made me conscious of how familiar Melville, along with many of his comtemporaries, was with scripture on even a casual basis, and this brought me back to reconsidering the novel once again.

Melvillle was a nominal Presbyterian, but I'm not sure if he was ever observant. Nevertheless, Moby Dick begins with a reference to the Abraham saga in Genesis, contains a sermon about Jonah quite early, and ends with a reference to Job's servants who survive calamities only to bring the news to Job. And all of Moby Dick is a reference to Job 40:25, "Can you lead Leviathan about with a hook, or tie down his tongue with a rope?"

The plot device, as well as the dominant metaphor of the book, though, is that the whales have begun to recognize that they're being hunted to extinction, and they've begun to change their behavior as a result. Not only are they resorting to large herds for mutual protection, but they're retreating to more distant oceans, and ultimately, like Moby Dick himself, they're turning on their tormentors. Melville suggests this is a human violation of both the natural and divine order.

The real-world twist here is that effectivly one man, John D Rockefellr, developed a system for refining and marketing kerosene, a product of mineral petroleum, that became cheap enough to replace whale oil for lighting in the post-Civil War period. For that matter, Standard Oil kerosene was cheap enough that it became the first stage of improved living conditions in the poorest parts of the world.

Not the narrative we want to hear.

The Narrative Has Shifted, But Nothing's Changed

A press release from the LA County health department on Friday read, in part:

Key COVID-19 Indicators Trending in the Right Direction in L.A. County

New cases are considerably lower this week, with a decrease of 30 percent in the seven-day average of daily cases from last week. The test positivity rate has also dropped to 12.7 percent. On January 1st, the test positivity rate was 20.8 percent; this is a reduction of 39 percent in three weeks. On November 1st, just before our surge began, the County’s test positivity rate was 3.8 percent.

Nevertheless,

While we have come a long way this week with community transmission, we have a long road to go and must continue to practice infectious control measures: wear a face covering and maintain physical distance when out of your home.

blah blah blah. What stands out for me is that while there's now lots of happy talk, there's no indication of any prospective change in the most draconian lockdowns we have in much of the world, and more significantly, no news on when the ordinary plebs can get vaccinated. (The Archdiocese of Los Angeles's position, by the way, is that the vaccine is moral, and Catholics should get it, sooner rather than later.)

While certain large parking lots have been designated vaccination stations, they're apparently amied largely at the uninsured. There's no news on where we can get shots at Kaiser.

This parallels President Biden's announcement that “there is nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic over the next few months.” This marks a radical departure from the variations on "15 days to flatten the curve" that we've heard over the past year -- but again, there's no accompanying indication that, although this amounts to an admissiom that existing policies haven't worked, anything will be done to change them. If it doesn't matter whether you can get a haircut in California or not, why not let us get a haircut?

In fact, I've seen commentary that, with some parts of the world locked down about as tightly as they can be, there's no practical next move available to authorities. This is probably at the root of curfew orders in places like Quebec and France: authorities feel the need to look like they're doing something, no matter how feckless the measures they impose.

I sort of hope this is an indication that the panic is entering a late stage, in which it begins to dawn on more people that we're reactng to an overrated threat. If the most effective measure against it, vaccination, isn't being pursued as the highest priority, something's badly out of whack.

I think what we're seeeing is incompetence at very high levels. Officials have backed themselves into a position they can't easily unwind. I wouldn't rule out an end game not much different from the Waco massacre, which was the tragic set of blunders that ended the Satanic day care panic in 1993. I pray about this stuff.

The Abolition Of Women

Yeesterday I brought up one cause of the 1980s day care Satanism panic, the underlying social tension resulting from wives and mothers working outside the home. This is actually one factor in the amorphous populist rebellion represented by Trumpism, the fact that middle-class incomes have been stagnant since the 1970s. The economic need for two-income households has been a direct result, and one source of Trump's support was his advocacy of policies that would raise middle-class incomes.

In fact, I recall a Wall Street Journal editorial in the 1970s recognizing the issue in a backhanded way, patting the US economy on the back for its ability to grow at all, given the numbers of women it had sudddely had to absorb into the workforce. But was this because women suddenly chose en masse to take outside jobs, or because they had to? And if the latter, why? The Journal didn't go into this, and given its contemporary never-Trump posture, will not now.

Women entering the job market in significant numbers has been a phenomenon since World War II. Before then, as a family friend explained it to me decades ago, "Nice girls didn't work in offices". Well, since then, nice girls do lots of things. This has had unintended consequences, none of them good for women. The most recent is the ability of men to identify as women and at least try to assert what in the past would have been regarded as female privilege. The incoming administration has officially endorsed this trend in the person of Dr Rachel Levine. Just a generation ago, this was a comedy routine.

I think the aspirational end point of this trend is some sort of recognition that women, if they aren't completely unnecessary, can be placed in a permanently subordinate role, because, with surgical, hormonal, and cosmetic enhancements, men can take over all their functions save reproduction (and they're working on that one). The highly preceptive TV series Fringe foresaw this with the all-male technologically enhanced race of humanoids from the future, the "observers". However they actually did it, it's plain from the show that only a father was involved.

It's a matter of great interest to me that the almost-forgotten 20th century commentator Ferdinand Lundberg had something to say about this, as far back as 1947. I want to stress again my view that Lundberg is a literary performer, not a sociologist -- but John Milton as a pamphleteer was a writer, not a social theorist, and the same applies to Solzhenitsyn, who was neither a historian nor a reporter in The Gulag Archipelago. With Marynia F Farnham, a psychiatrist, Lundberg wrote Modern Woman: The Lost Sex:

Lundberg and Farnham conclude that once women are forced out of the home by male aggression and advancing technology, women are emotionally and psychologically susceptible to neurosis. Once women leave the home, they lose their sense of emotional security, their ability to readjust to changing environments, and their ownership of femininity and sexuality. This confusion and instability is magnified by the "irreconcilable" demands of industrial society - capitalism, Communism, Fascism, democracy, and other political forces expect different reactions from women and become "both cause and effect...of widespread modern unhappiness."

More specifically, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex focuses on the effect of unhappiness and neurosis on female sexuality, approaches to motherhood and childbearing, and the development of modern feminism.

According to the Wikipedia entry at the link, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex was a bestseller at the time and highly influential, to the extent that it inspired Betty Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique in opposition to it. However, the Wkipedia entry here incorrectly describes Lundberg as a sociologist. His own entry describes him as a journalist and author and, in his later years, a professor. He collaborated here with a psychiatrist, which would have been desirable, since he was trying to outline the causes of what he saw as psychological dysfunction, but unfortunately, Farnham was a Freudian, which is now a largely discredited school of psychiatry.

But of course, Lundberg in 1947 was also writing a generation before hormonal birth control, whose availability has only served further to separate women from a biological reproductive function. The trend, which neither he nor Farnham could foresee, will be to continue removing female privilege -- separate men's and women's toilet and shower facilities benefit women, not men, as do women's sports programs. The current mainstream Democrat agenda is to eliminate both.

Such trends must certainly be driving the current forces of panic and hysteria, in both directions.

East Of Eden And The Annus Horribilis

As an Aristotelian, as I've said here, my job is to look for causes. The project I don't seem able to put down for the time being is to look for the causes of 2020, one of the chief features of which was the COVID crisis and what I think is an associated moral panic, which appears to me to far outwigh the actual medical issues of the disease.

The last clear moral panic, as far as I can see, was the Day Care Satanism panic of the 1980s, most clearly exemplified by the McMartin Preschool case in the Los Angeles area. I was prompted by an offhand remark in a recent TV special on the case that moral panics reflect underlying social tensions, and in that case, the real issue was changes in family life and child care caused by wives and mothers working outside the home. (Although this had become acceptable following World War II, it wasn't until the stagflation and fuel crises of the 1970s that it became economically much more essential.)

Then, for reasons I can't fully articulate, I began binge-watching YouTube lectures by Michael Neiberg, a Warld War I historian at the US Army War College. His overriding theme is that World War I had causes that the Versailles Peace Conference failed utterly to solve, and many of the unrealized solutions, like the disposition of the Ottoman Empire, remain urgently with us.

So in the middle of the night I sat up and said "There's a book that deals with the status of women and the family and World War I. It's Steinbeck's East of Eden." It deals, of course, with a great deal else, and I've read it carefully twice over the past 20 years or so. Elia Kazan saw a great deal in it for his 1955 movie version, but apparently Kazan said he understood the novel better than Steinbeck did, and he covered only the last secton of the book, which centers on Caleb Trask's discovery that his mother was not dead, but a madam in a nearby brothel.

For a time after my first reading, I tended to agree. But my wife and I were lucky enough to see an entirely new stage production of East of Eden by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 2015. I assumed at first this would just be based on the Kazan film, but I was wrong -- it dealt much more with the middle section of the novel. the psychopathic woman Cathy's marriage to Adam Trask and her abandonment of the family. That made me see there's more to the book than what Kazan saw.

Like other broad-brush novels that treat of recent memory in their era, like Middlemarch, East of Eden speaks by implcation of other issues, like the causes of US entry into World War I -- Prof Neiberg would, I suspect, not disagree with Steinbeck's depiction -- and the decline of the brothel as an American institution. (By 1952, the year of the novel's publication, they were as much a period curiosity as ragtime or player pianos.) This has wide implications for the status and role of women and the maintenance of social order. The local sheriff, who knows the secrets, is a key figure throughout.

So the longer I live, the more I think East of Eden is an important book, in my increasing view up there with, say Moby Dick (John D Rockefeller, by the way, saved the whales), Middlemarch, and War and Peace. Steinbeck and another underrated 20th century author, Ferdinand Lundberg, are a path to understanding the underlying issues that led to our just-past Annus Horribilis.

Marty Lagina: Smart Rich Guy

Yesterday, I twlked about s really dumb multibillionaire, Jack Dorsey. Today I want to talk about Marty Lagina, who so far doesn't seem to be a multibillionaire, but he's a much smarter rich guy nevertheless. Lagina, who is the senior figure on the Curse of Oak Island show, is in effect a star, but it's pretty well implied that he also approves the project plans and signs the checks. The publicly available estimate of his net worth is $100 million, altough he didn't make this money off TV appearances.

It looks like he got rich on fracking in the 1990s, which was smart, . But according to the link,

His company Terra Energy was a pioneer in extracting natural gas from shale around the mid-west in the 1990s. Marty eventually sold Terra Energy to a company called CMS Energy for $58 million. He then launched a new company called Heritage Sustainable to focus on wind power. Heritage is currently planning to build 60 wind turbines in Missaukee, Michigan. That will make Marty the largest wind-energy producer in the entire state of Michigan and one of the largest overall producers in the mid-west. He believes he can eventually power 25% of Michigan's power by wind and wants to replicate that process around the country.

So, let's parse this out. He made a bundle in fracking when it was hot and new, but I would guess that he could see a downside coming from the anti-fossil fuel lobby, so he sold the franchise while it was still relatively uncontroversial. And what did he get into? Why, wind power, of course.

I've got to assume he's politically very savvy, since wind power is the creature of government policy, and utilities are tightly wired into state politics. Most people who get rich leverage it off some version of government licensing or other favor, and it looks as if Lagina's main assets are in green energy -- and I assume he's doing well in it.

If his objective in life was to get rich, he's behaving consistently/ On top of that, he's acting the way the rich have mostly learned to act since the early 20th century -- use your public relations people to keep you out of the news, not in it. He's a public figure on the Oak Island show, which gives him a brand that he can use to his advantage, but he's otherwise low key, and his family is even lower.

What piques my curiosity more than anything else is how Oak Island fits into the picture. Lagina is clearly a savvy operator. He recently said he thinks there's a 40% chance that there was ever a "treasure" in the Oak Island money pit, and only a 20% chance that any of it is still there -- and he said that means he's more optimistic than he was when he started out.

Yet he bought the whole island, and it looks like he's a major player now in the Nova Scotia economy -- Irving Equipment, which does many of his big excavation projects, gives him lots of freebie hats and jackets. It looks like the province gives him whatever permits and waivers he needs.

He's a businessman. There's got to be something in it for him. Off the top of my head, I've got to assume he has a piece of Prometheus Entertainment. The green energy thing likely dovetails with other ambitions in media -- but we'll have to see.

He's a smarter guy than either Zuckerberg or Dorsey.

Cracks In The Facade

Ferdinand Lundberg said that industrialist families tend to work in combination, and I would say that's generally true, but Lundberg at the time he published The Rich and the Super-Rich in 1968 was still living in a culture dominated by the post-Civil War robber barons' desendants. The major industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lumber, mining, steel, railroads, oil, and automobiles were still staples of the economy, with air transport on the rise. Computers still used punch cards.

One of Lundberg's main theses, in fact, was that more recent fortunes made from the 1920s onward were mostly hype, and few new industrialists of the 1950s and 60s started from scratch -- their opportunities arose because their families were already wealthy, and a closer look would show that modern fortunes were often smoke and mirrors. This was before the rise of authentic new multibillionaires like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates.

While the super-rich do often work in concert when it suits them, and some of the great fortunes have had staying power, this doesn't cancel out the fact that some multibillionaires are more successful than others, and some are phony products of PR. Rockefeller Sr is reported to have said, on learning the actual value of Pierpont Morgan's estate, "And to think he wasn't a wealthy man". This is likely the case with the current group of arrivistes.

This brings me to Jack Dorsey. He's best known as CEO of Twitter and most recently for banning Trump from the platform while he was still in office. The problem is that both Twitter and its much larger companion app Facebook basically sell advertising over the internet, which neither controls. They folllow the old broadcast model, in which access is "free" or at fairly low cost to individual users, who select their own programming.

The advantage for Twitter, Facebook, and the many similar products is that, unlike newspapers or traditional television, markets are much more clearly identifiable, since the apps can gain much more information about individual consumer preferences, which makes it possible for advertisers to target them much more granularly.

The difficulty for this business model is that, unlike traditional broadcast, there are few barriers for new competitors to come into the market. TV and radio need government licenses to operate, which are few and expensive to get. A new clone for Facebook or Twitter needs far, far less. And when the magnates behind them, like Dorsey and Zuckerberg, become tone-deaf and ill-tempered, it's easy for their customers to switch to just another "free" app.

This is why the traditional big fortunes were made in fields like railroads, lumber, steel, old media, and mining, where barriers to entry could be erected. Dorsey and Zuckerberg need to play whack-a-mole with each new competitor.

So there are smart multibillionaires and dumb ones. I think this is something Lundberg only partly understood: he was in an age when, by the early 20h century, the robber barons had come to understand the value of public relations, and the advertising and PR fields were working effectively in a stable environment. Traditionl print and broadcst media had well-established markets with well-developed public stereotypes and high barriers to entry.

The current environment is nothing like that. This is probably another component of the social tensions behind the current global panic.

Parler, Bezos, Dorsey, Zuckerberg, And The Rich And The Super-Rich

I've said here before that Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today is one of the most important literary works of the 20th century if considered in the same genre as Milton's prose or Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. (It's available in pdf here.)

Lundberg's thesis was that US politics are dominated by an exclusive combine of wealthy families who manage centers of corporate and social power in the Fortune 500, the Ivy League, foundations, the federal govenment, and other institutions. I think he would have found no surprises in the saga of Parler, the social media upstart, over the past week. According to the Wall Street Journal,

In a complaint filed Monday in Seattle federal court, Parler alleged that Amazon Web Services kicked the company off its cloud servers for political and anti-competitive reasons. The conservative social network founded in 2018 exploded in popularity among supporters of President Trump after the November U.S. election.

“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus. It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter , ” according to the complaint, which also accused Amazon of breaching a contract between the parties.

Amazon said Saturday that it would cut off Parler because it wasn’t confident in its ability to sufficiently police content on its platform that incites violence. The company said while it would no longer provide web services to Parler after Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time, it would preserve the platform’s data and help it migrate to different servers.

In related moves, Google and Apple removed the app from their stores. It was plain that the tech bilionaires regarded Parler as outside the bounds of received opinion and felt entitled to remove it. If it removed a potential competitor, so much the better.

But the recent crop of the super-rich, such as Bezos, Dorsey, and Zuckerberg, differ from the robber-barons and their descendants who were Lundberg's targets. The arrivistes, if they have descendants at all, won't be producing Rockefeller Jrs, Nelson Rockefellers, or Averell Harrimans. Those families, as well as their associates, struck me as magnanimous in the classical sense, endowing public institutions and undertaking public service.

The current crop strikes me as a group of petty, cowardly, small-minded men, not in the same league as Lundberg's rogues gallery, thuogh they may be just as influential, at least for now -- but this may be part of what's at the root of the social tensions behind the currnt global panic. These folks are terrified of Trump, it's plain, or they wouldn't be trying to engineer a bill of attainder against the guy.

The problem is that Trump was an opportunist who saw an opening. He didn't create the opening. Whatever becomes of Trump -- and I think 2024 is too far in the future for any sort of prediction -- the trend will still be there, and it will still be something that can be understood through Lundberg's insights.

The Collapse Of Conservative Opinion

A news item yesterday was American Thinker's retraction of allegations against Dominion Voting Systems that it acknowledged were "completely false". But this wasn't the end of the story. At the same time, alhough apparently for reasons umrelated to Dominion, the site deleted its comment section. And although there doesn't seem to have been an announcement, the site no longer carries ads.

My reaction to this is somewhere between "no great loss" and "good riddance", and I characterize myself as conservative. I used to visit it now and then, but I never did during the 2020 election cycle. The pieces there showed no particular insight and usually amounted to just preaching to the choir. In fact, the site has a lot in commom with the other currently popular sites like Breitbart, Red State, Conservative Treehouse, and so forth -- it runs hysterical headlines about days-old news and reiterates same old-same old viewpoints. What we aren't seeing, at least so far, is any attempt to regroup after\ the Trump defeat, recalibrate, and recover.

This brings me back to what I think is a key year, 1976, and what conservatives did to prepare for a Reagan victory in 1980. In the 1970s, I read both Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal, especially its editorial page. (I voted for Carter in 1976, but by 1980, I'd dropped Rolling Stone and voted for Reagan.) WSJ at the time was intellectually stimulating: it nurtured supply side economics, while Benjamin Stein wrote for them as well. It tackled current issues like the fuel crisis and stagflation with innovative policy recommendations that worked when Reagan applied them.

So far, I'm seeing nothing like that in the wake of 2020. If there were an equivalent of Robert Bartley's Journal now, it would be publishing influential critiques of COVID policy and serious discussions of Persian Gulf stragegy. Instead, it's simply gone never-Trump, which isn't what we need. Let the Democrats self-immolate over Impeachment II and start to ask serious questions about why Trump couldn't expand his base and why he lost with an unimaginative replay of his 2016 campaign.

Nobody's doing this. The most respectable conservatives right now appear to be unserious people like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. Rush Limbaugh is on his deathbed, figuratively at least, but he's always suffered from the need to fill three hours a day when there's only 20 minutes of good material.

How to address issues like big tech censorship is a separate but related question. It seems to me that there are two parts to it. One, as only a few commentators have pointed out, is that Parler neglected a basic business duty by not planning for contingencies. If your business requires a vendor to supply servers, as Parler did with Amazon, you absolutely need to have a backup vendor, and not just in your Rolodex -- you need to have someone on contract, and you need to test yuur ability to recover on the backup, like twice a year. Yeah, Amazon can break its contract on a whim, but a hurricane or earthquake can take them out, too. Parler was an amateur show on that basis.

The other question is the income stream. Talk radio hosts now and then speak of their problem getting out of the painkiller-and-erectile-dysfunction ad market, where many are stuck. Most of the conservative web sites rely on hysterical clickbait headlines to pay the bills. Some of these people need to work out a better ad strategy.

The same applies to YouTube, since the YouTubers are mostly doing this as their main job and supporting themselves by letting YouTube sell ads for them. If YouTube doesn't think ads on their channel will sell, they won'tt run them. This is no different than if you were trying to sell stories to the Saturday Evening Post back in the day. Some YouTubers are willing to experiment, and many are doing the essential business task of planning for contingencies.

But the fact remains that old venues like National Review and the WSJ are no longer markets for innovative thinking, while the list of commentators who've flamed out over the past several years, like Jonah Goldberg and Michael Medved, is lengthening. Dr Sebastian Gorka is not a credible replacement. Buckley is long dead.

The Dog That Isn't Barking

So we've had two of the most respectable blue politicians, Gov Cuomo and Mayor Lightfoot, announce that lockdowns don't work and economies must reopen. There are headlines of a "narrative shift" with the appearance in Newsweek, which nobody has read for decades, of a respectablke study that says lockdowns don't work.

So, where is the groundswell of opinion that says, "What came over us? Of course lockdowns don't work. We're destroying the economy! I hereby decree that schools immediately return to in-person classes, sports resume, restaurants and bars reopn!" Er, no. Not happeing. Gov Cuomo, in whose power it is to say those very words, has been silent. He may as well decree that the rain stop, or start, as the case may be. The lockdown is a force of nature over which he has no control, it would appear.

I more or less expected this, though I'm not sure what the reasons for it are. One might be that Cuomo and Lightfoot are holding their economies hostage for bailouts. That lockdowns would create a situation where closing "non-essential" businesses would severely reduce tax revenues was known from the start. While Republicans had some measure of control, the federal government wasn't going to go far enough to restore these revenues by gifting them to the states and cities. With Democrats in control, this is much more likely. The message that's actually being sent is hurry up and bail us out, or. . .

There are two implicaations here. One is that, although government workers generally are deemed "essential", some, in the Department of Redundancy Department and elsewhere, have had their pay reduced. Federal bailouts will restore them to full pay and bring the arrears up to date as well. We may rely on that.

The second issue is all the "non-essential" workers who won't be in that privileged class. At this point, all they've had is some measure of unemploymennt -- that is, if they're eligible; many aren't for variouis reasons -- and ex gratia payments of $600, $1200, or $2000, whatever it is, every six or eight months. This is not enough to sustain people. Exactly what governments are going to do to address this if they choose to continue lockdowns indefinitely is a vexed issue, and it's by no means clear.

David Freiheit of the Viva Frei YouTube channel is beginning to recognize these issues as they relate to the Quebec lockdown-cum-curfew:

The curfew is reinforcing a new social arrangement, whereby government workers in particular are "essential" (and bus drivers continue to drive empty buses at full pay), while those not in the elite are screwed. He doesn't expand on this, but it's worth considering that the lowest class, on public assistance, continues to receive public payments. The wealthiest and those lucky enough to have pensions, are largely unaffected. The people who are badly hurt are those in the middle, the plebs.

Oh, by the way, journalists and opinion writers are "essential" and even get to work from home -- including the hacks who write for the conservative sites. They're pretty much fine with all this, too, left, right, or center.

Meanwhile, the US states show no special urgency in distributing vaccines. The people who matter don't see a problem. Even the right wingers are still just mourning the kraken.

So, Which Is It?

An unintended consequence of the 2020 electoral cycle is that it's put full responsibility for handling the COVID crisis in the hands of Democrats. This is another parallel I see with 1976, where Democrats took over in the face of worsening inflatoin and a fuel crisis and were incapable of handling them, which led to a Reagan landslide in 1980.

This morning's headline is that Chicago Mayor Lightfoot is "seeking to reopen Chicago’s bars and restaurants for indoor service as soon as possible". The public rationale is that alllowing indoor drinking and dining will provide a "safer outlet" for people who will otherwise, apparently, make their hookups elsewhere. I assume that's what's meant by "cut down on underground parties where attendees do not social distance or wear masks".

I suspect the real reason is that the city can't tax underground parties. I think Gov Cuomo was slightly more ingenuous when he said, “we are looking at months of shutdowns and the economic, mental and spiritual hardships they bring. We need to act now." I think it's starting to sink in that even with a Democrat congress and executive in Washington, there's no way any federal bailout can remedy the tax deficit the blue states and cities have brought on themselves.

In a move that hasn't been generally reported, Pennsylvania allowed a three=wek ban on all indoor dining to expire on January 4. This in itself is unusual, since California has simply renewed an equivalent three-week ban on even outdoor dining, with no relaxation in sight.

However, restrictions on alcohol in Pennsylvania (served only with meals, none after 11 PM, all visible drinks removed after midnight) continue. As seems to be the case with COVID curfews, this appears to be intended in practice to discourage fornication -- you'd better have your hookups arranged before 11, and you've gotta buy them dinner.

Well, as long as we get the tax money, we can still do something about the fornication as well, huh?

The problem for Mayor Lightfoot specirically is that she's up against "scientific" targets Pritzger has imposed on the state, and neither Chicago nor Cook County is anywhere near them. The targets -- under 6% testing positivity rate, for instance -- have been as a practical matter unattainable. Similar tasrgets in California have all but the most rural parts of the state locked down.

The difficulty is that all such targets are simply decrees, never passed by a legislature and never negotiated through any political process. Normally, lobbying groups for restaurants, food service unions, and others would have a chance to balance their interests against public health. This isn't happening here.

In effect, those who petition for redress must approach the emperor, or at best gain the ear of the emperor's mother, or possibly Cardinal Schmidlap. Clearly this is what's beginning to happen here, but it's all now intramural, with Trump out of the picture and Fauci ascendant. I would imagine someone is going to have to come to Fauci with an offer he can't refuse, and maybe then he'll let Cuomo reopen "safely". I assue "safely" means in a way that responsibly limits above all the opportunities for fornication among the plebs.

Good luck. I don't think this is going to work.

Global Mask Pushback?

The photo above is from a January 4 anti-mask protest at the Westfield Century City mall, where protesters caused disturbances in variouis stores at the upscale venue in the Beverly Hils-West Los Angeles area. Videos of the event went viral, although it doesn't appear that large numbers were involved. Nevertheless, just yesterday the Hollywood Reporter belatedly covered it:

Amid the last gasps and bellows of the Trump presidency, it seems no place is immune to recent spikes in outgoing MAGA madness — not even deeply blue Los Angeles County. Over the past few weeks, numerous sites across the city have been converted into ideological battlegrounds pitting maskless, Trump-supporting agitators against, well, everyone else, even as more than 7,000 people are hospitalized for COVID-19 around the L.A. area and ambulances are being told not to bring in patients unlikely to survive.

. . . But the ugliest event has to be the action that occurred at Westfield Century City on Jan. 4. As seen in videos posted to social media, a dozen or so provocateurs converged at the mall for seemingly one purpose: to openly defy and verbally ridicule the mask-wearing mandates that nearly every private business in L.A. has been following for the past several months. Participants — several of whom were wearing MAGA paraphernalia — can be seen browsing the aisles of stores as they shout down anyone who requests that they put on a mask.

I'm not sure how big this movement is. Certaiinly ordinary citizens, like it or not, wear masks as required, and generally they aren't allowed into stores or churches without them anyhow. In LA, masks are effectively universal. However, that the Hollywood Reporter should be bashing anti-maskers a week after a fairly small protest suggests the media elites are nervous. Maybe they should be. People aren't happy about moving goalposts and indefinite lockdowns, especially when civil authorities appear to be slow-walking vaccine distribution.

In the UK, HSBC Bank has threatened to close accounts of customers who refuse to wear masks in its branches.

HSBC bank has told its customers that wearing masks inside its branches is mandatory and those who refuse could see their accounts closed.

The warning comes as a further 1,234 deaths from Covid-19 were recorded in a single day.

It's notable that both the Hollywood Reporter and the UK press cover the issue of masks with hysterical references to death counts, although the question remains if masks are in fact near universal -- which in fact they are -- and lockdown rules are draconian -- we must assume that any customer in a UK HSBC branch is now there due only to direst exigency -- the death rates continue to spike.

Why hasnb't media anywhere begun to ask this question?

And why are the UK powers that be nervous enough to threaten anyone who thinks of entering premises maskless? The January 6 US Capitol riot seems to have focused the Hollywood Reporter's mind on what could happen if the political authorities don't find a better solution to the COVID crisis.

Global Hysteria Update

In another update to the story of how much worse the COVID hysteria is outside the US, the video above from Montreal YouTuber David Freiheit of the Viva Frei channel outlines arrests and fines being imposed on Quebec citizens for violating an 8 PM - 5 AM COVID curfew. What interests me is that, as in the UK, local law enforcement is doing this.

In the US, both police unions and police command structures have been near unanimous in announcing they enforce legislatively enacted statutes, not temporary executive orders or health regulations. As a result, governors have had to call on resurces under their direct control, such as state highway patrols, and health departments have had to rely on food inspectors, to do enforcement of COVID orders, which limits their reach.

The next question is one that I don't see asked seriouisly very often. which is what effect a curfew is intended to have on the pandemic. The germs presumably spread 24/7, and people are less active at night anyhow, since they aren't racoons. The speculation I see is that it's meant to limit people going to bars. If so, I assume this is actually a disguised ban on fornication, which goes along with a disguised implicit ban on most liturgy in churches, which is also near universal.

Well, if you close the churches, how else can you control fornication? Seems reasonable to me.

But I'm less concerned with the "ain't it awful" part of the story than the question of why this is happening. If governments feel they have to control both liturgy and fornication, which it's hard to avoid thinking, then we're talking about a superstitious response to what's in effect an invisible crisis. And let's face it, the bogeyman isn't COVID.

The US Congress is focused on impeaching Trump after he's left office. We must assume this is a substitute for what, up to modern times, would be the headsman's block. Ths was prefigured by the Kathy Griffin meme at the tme of his election. But given its intent as cearly expressed by advocates of the move, it's meant specifically to end his public career, which strikes me as not an impeachment, which is constitutional (and would be if he were still in office), but a bill of attainder, which is not. But whatever becomes of that particular action, it's limited to the US and a particular figure, Donald Trump. But since Trump will be out of office before any impeachment move can be made to remove him, this stikes me as an action as superstitious as banning fornication or controlling liturgy.

But again, this superstitious panic is a worldwide phenomenon, and as I've covred it here, it's worse at least in Canada and the UK. It says something for US institutions that at least so far, there've been no $1500 fines for being out after 8 PM here.

What's the source of the panic? It can't be COVID, that's an invisible cover for another invisible enemy.

Cuomo: "We will have nothing left to open"?

There were lots of headlines yesterday over an Andrew Cuomo tweet, which incorporated remarks in his New York State of the State address.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for the economy to reopen following strict lockdowns in New York that crippled businesses.

“We simply cannot stay closed until the vaccine hits critical mass. The cost is too high. We will have nothing left to open. We must reopen the economy, but we must do it smartly and safely,” he tweeted Monday morning.

Even so, left, right, and center, these are the news writers who brought us the kraken. The report in the link above says Cuomo "laid out a plan to stop the spread of the coronavirus while addressing the financial struggles in the state". Er, where? Based on my reading, the speech was nothing but a series of bromides aiming to make the right noises, but I saw absolutely no specifics.

Remember, all the lawsuits are plaintiff v Cuomo. As is the case with nearly every lockdown in nearly every state, the instigator is the governor's emergency orders. All that's needed to end or loosen a lockdown is for the governor to rescind or modify one or another emergency order. The health officials do his bidding.

What's missing from Cuomo's announcement is any specific order to end by any specific date. Anything other than that is just making noises. Meanwhile, according to the New York Times,

Across New York State, medical providers in recent weeks had the same story: They had been forced to throw out precious vaccine doses because of difficulties finding patients who matched precisely with the state’s strict vaccination guidelines — and the steep penalties they would face had they made a mistake.

On Saturday, state health officials responded to the outcry over discarded vaccines by again abruptly loosening guidelines as coronavirus cases continued to rise.

The story suggests there's a vague sense of urgency, but even there, there's no indication that any restriction will be lifted as any vaccination program becomes effective. According to CNN, this is a national problem.

Out of the more than 22 million doses of vaccine that have been distributed to hospitals and pharmacies so far in the United States, only about 6.7 million people have received their first dose, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There's no one reason for the slow rollout or doses going unused; experts say it was never going to be easy to begin a mass vaccination campaign during a pandemic. It takes time to vaccinate and monitor large numbers of people, and some facilities are staggering staff vaccinations to avoid having too many health care workers out at once.

The supply and demand don't always line up. Some in the highest priority groups -- health care workers and and long-term care facility residents -- don't want the vaccine, or at least, not yet. At the same time, the American Medical Association on Friday said it was "concerned" that some health care workers not employed by hospitals or health care systems face difficulties accessing the vaccine.

So naturally, the news -- left, right, and cetner -- focuses on impeachment.

Global Hysteria

Just so as not to obsess over the idea of impeaching a US president after he's left office (when it seems to me the mature adult reaction would be more or less to say "good riddance, let's go on with life"), I draw your attention to the video above frm a UK YouTuber who discusses a case of UK police who've imposed a £200 fine on two ladies who took a walk and bought coffee while socially distanced.

The exact circumstances aren't clear, largely because I can't understand the accents of those speaking on the video, but it appears that a central issue is that the ladies are allowed to leave their homes only once a day for exercise, but the police had been watching them and appear to have detected that this is the second walk they've taken today.

In the US, thank a merciful Providence, law enforcement has made it clear that it does not see this type of activity within its responsibility, and generally US civil authorities haven't specified how often we're allowed to take a walk, although Mayor Garcetti has said walks must be of an essential character.

But let's not get too comfortable. Miya Ponsetto, the SoHo Karen who hysterically accosted a black teen in a hotel lobby thinking he'd stolen her phone, was arrested and brought back to New York from California to face an assortment of charges. Accounts suggest as many as four NYPD officers were detailed to do this.

But this leaves aside that big question I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on: even if Trump's response to the election was ultimately erratic and even delusional, why not just keep an eye on the guy, get him focused on packing to leave, and help him to the helicopter Wednesday week?

It sounds as thuogh the US congress will instead be spending some weeks or months trying to remove him from office when he'll already be gone, except that even if the House predictably votes to impeach, it seems pretty remote that the Senate would vote to remove anyhow. This goes beyond kabuki. This is hysterical psychodrama.

Aristotelians look for causes. The received wisdom about moral panics is that they result from underlying social tension. Since early 2020, hysteria has been visible -- the run on toilet paper came the first week in March, before any lockdowns were imposed. This suggests to me that people sensed something was up even before then, and there was an instinctive expectation that there would be some type of counterproductive government decree no matter what -- and they'd better be ready.

People aren't stupid. The underlying tensions were already there, and COVID just happened to come along at the right time. The deacon who gave the homily at yesterday's mass made a point I've been seeing for some time now: people thought 2020 would go away with the new year, but it hasn't. The underlying tensions are still there. You'd think, for instance, that with a COVID vaccine available, the civil authorities would be acting quickly to distribute it and plan for concurrent easing of restrictions.

No, they're slow-walking distribution and acting as though the lockdowns will just continue. Vaccine isn't the solution.

This is a global phenomenon, not limited to just the US, so Trump alone isn't the issue, and he's going away, but cearly he still needs to be exorcised. The Democrats won an election, but they're still unhappy.

Why?

More On Media, ER Use, And COVID

I had another e-mail from the visitor who commented on crowded emergency facilities a week or so ago, this time referring in particular to a CNN story that covered a hospital in Apple Valley, CA Rural hospital staff devastated by Covid-19 patients:

A couple things about this piece: Apple Valley is hardly rural; we are one of three large-sized cities in the high desert. We have three hospitals of varying sizes.

It's interesting that some people are arriving by foot -- there is a bus stop right by the ER. (Not to belittle their symptoms, but those sick must not be at death's door.)

In the "good ole days" the ER at St Mary's was overrun. I dislocated my shoulder 20+ years ago & had to wait three hours to be seen. (I speculate that is why St Mary's has instituted a new policy for pregnant women that come into the er. They are immediately whisked up to the OB ward to be seen instead of sitting amongst the er-ers. In fact, when I took a pregnant woman there last year, we passed people on gurneys in the hallways as we made our way to OB.)

It's interesting with the CRUSH of c-19, that there was time for a camera crew, interview, nurse & doc to take time to do this vignette.

Do the Nat'l Guard form up every day before heading into work? (There's a Guard unit bldg on the next block. I wonder why they don't take care of that there?)

. . . Isn't it interesting that some are calling 911 for transport to a hospital for a TEST?! UBER has got to be a cheaper alternative!

An ambulance ride costs thousands of dollars, usually not covered by medical. If you watch Live Reacue, you see that people are aware of this and choose their treatment options accordingly. Live RescLue, with three hours of real-time fire and EMT calls each week, has only very rarely covered a COVID-related call.

The only one I can think of, in Paterson, NJ, involved EMTs donning hazmat suits to enter an apartment to treat someone who was reported as having it, but the outcome was at best unclear. The chief on scene said he was proud of his unit's training in how to do this, but it's pretty much the on;y such respone the show has ever carried.

The previous e-mail from the visitor carried a report from medical relatives that people were jamming ERs due to having received only positive COVID tests. My wife sent me a press release from the LA County health departme that indirectly makes the same point:

You should seek immediate emergency medical attention if you, or a person you know, exhibits the following symptoms:

Trouble breathing

P>ersistent pain or pressure in the chest

New confusion

Inability to wake or stay awake

Bluish lips or face

If you, or a person you know develop these symptoms, go to an emergency room or call 911.

The very roundabout implication seems to be that if you don't have those symptoms, you don't need to go to the ER. This is just one example of the generally very poor public communication from the health authorities during the crisis. It's almost as though they benefit by having public misunderstanding stress the system.

The Plebs Must Be Punished

The situation is fluid, but the powers that be are effectively making sure last year's dumpster fire burns uninterrupted. As of today, Trump has 11 days left in office, and there's no indication that he'll order anyone to seize the White House to keep him inside. Yet, amid calls to invoke the 25th Amendment, there's apparently serious talk of a second impeachment. Just the process of debate on the House floor and scheduling a vote will presumably take enough time to make the whole thing moot come January 20.

This is kabuki and an apparent acknowledgement that the US Congress has nothung important to do. Pelosi's position seems to be just an extension of her tearing up of Trump's State of the Union message last winter. With close majorities in both houses following a contentious election, the majoity's position seems to be unified mostly around the position that the plebs must be punished for voting in some proportion for Trump.

This isn't leadership. There's currently a vacuum.

More California COVID Floundering

In a remarkably unserious move,

California public health officials issued an updated travel advisory Wednesday, discouraging non-essential into and out of the state.

The new advisory replaces the pre-holiday advisory that asked travelers coming into California to self-isolate for 14 days. As of Wednesday [Jan 6], the California Department of Public Health says those coming back into the state should self-quarantine for 10 days.

. . . That 10-day period does not apply to health care workers and emergency responders coming in to help the state’s struggling hospital system.

Residents are also being asked to avoid traveling to places in the state that are more than 120 miles from their homes, or to other states or countries.

That recommendation does not apply to residents who have to travel for things like work, study or immediate medical care, or those who routinely travel out of the state or the country for essential reasons.

So let's parse this out. Two weeks ago, the self-quarantine period was 14 days, now it's ten. Science told us to change it. However, this is not enforced -- neither the hotels nor the airlines, which badly need the business, check your Ausweis or your interstate travel authorization, much less law enforcement, which has washed its hands of this. But if they did, if you told them you were under the gotta-do-it-anyhow exception, they'd wave you right through.

Before Wednsday, I could drive as far as Fresno to watch trains, but now I can drive only to San Diego or Bakersfield, but of course, that's non-essential travel, so if I actually needed to drive to Fresno today, I could still. do it. Except,, unless I've come to their attention for something else, the Fresno County Sheriff's Office won't give two flips about it either way.

How will any of this prevent a single case of COVID anywhere in the state? Is there an adult asking this sort of question of any of these people?

There are, though, informed adults around, they just aren't making the decisions.

San Francisco’s indefinite extension of its stay-at-home and 10-day quarantine orders prompted a University of California-San Francisco infectious disease specialist to speak out.

It may actually increase the spread of the novel coronavirus because more people will gather indoors, where scientists have long known the threat of infection is highest, Monica Gandhi, medical director of the HIV Clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, told CBS San Francisco.

Mayor London Breed’s order is not data-driven and is likely to backfire with the public, she said:

She believes a data-driven approach would safely allow outdoor dining with some mitigation protocols and limited indoor gym capacity:

“We never reached those hospitalizations or ICU capacity concerns that the state had set as metrics for this degree of shutdown,” she said. “And then to continue it indefinitely, as kind of our New Year’s present to San Francisco, didn’t make sense to me.”

. . . The mayor is at risk of losing public trust, however, according to Gandhi. She believes a data-driven approach would safely allow outdoor dining with some mitigation protocols and limited indoor gym capacity:

It's increasngly plain that California leadership is driven by a need to look like they're doing something, but their options are limited, because any furher lockdowns will either be ignored or lead to civil unrest. Thus the measures they're enacting in new decrees every couple of weeks are effectively nugatory. This can't continue, but it's reflective of a problem that's reached the national level.

Hospital Ship Kabuki

Last week, LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn wrote to Gov Newsom asking that he try to get the Navy hospital ship Mercy back to LA, although it went largely unused when it was sent here last spring.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn has written a letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom supporting SEIU 721’s request for additional healthcare workers in Los Angeles County hospitals in response to the surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations. Hahn is also requesting that Governor Newsom call on federal partners to dispatch the USNS Mercy hospital ship to the Port of Los Angeles.

“Our SEIU healthcare workers are exhausted and our hospitals are overwhelmed. They need backup,” said Supervisor Janice Hahn. “This surge is the crisis that we dreaded all along. We need as much support as we can get for our healthcare workers and we need the USNS Mercy back in the Port of Los Angeles.”

As far as I'm aware, Gov Newsom hasn't replied to the request, and in fact the Mercy is in drydock up in Portland and won't be serviceable for some months. Supervisor Hahn is engaging in kabuki for the benefit of her special-interest donors.

On the other hand, Hahn is also exploiting the leadership vacuum higher up. Gov Newsom has had almost nothing to say for several weeks, other than to extend the latest lockdowns.But California has been slow and inefficient in distributing vaccines:

As of Tuesday [Jan 5], California had administered 456,980 vaccine doses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — just 23 percent of the 2 million doses the federal government has distributed to the state. California Department of Public Health figures varied slightly, reporting a somewhat smaller 1.8 million doses allocated and 459,564 administered, or 26 percent.

. . . By comparison, nearly 1.4 million doses were distributed to Texas, of which 451,210, or 33%, were administered, the CDC reported. Florida administered 264,512 doses, or 23%, out of 1.2 million distributed. New York administered 299,428 doses, or 32%, out of 934,925 distributed.

It appears that Newsom is overwhelmed by COVID, while the Recall Newsom movement seems to leave him with few options if he maintains his present course of continued lockdowns but no improvement in statistics. Why doesn't he simply take a highly visible role in making sure the faccine gets out? That would solve the problem while portraying him as someone who should be kept in office to do an important job.

Not sure if that's in him.