Canada Updates

Yesterday I noted that I'd been searching -- at least as of late last year -- for any news about a promised independent investigation of the violent takedown last May of a teenager dressed as a Star Wars trooper by Lethbridge, AB police. A Canadian visitor sent me a link to this story in the Calgary Herald dated December 21, 2020, seven months after the episode:

No criminal charges will be laid following an external investigation into the Lethbridge Police Service takedown of a teenager dressed as a Star Wars character in May.

Well, criminal charges are beside the point and would hve been unlikely. In the US, there's a charge for assault under color of authority, which is usually applied to race-related incidents. The Lethbridge cops, and their supervisors, were just really dumb, not criminal, and the question is whether they should be dealing with any issues requiring good judgment, which is what police jobs often require. So the external investigation skipped over the real question. But the story goes on,

[Cafe] owner Bradley Whalen[, who had hired the teenager to wear the outfit for a promotion,] told Postmedia on Wednesday that he wasn’t surprised by the results of the investigation.

He said he had problems with the process of a nearby jurisdiction’s police force taking up the investigation, with ASIRT’s involvement limited to ensuring the investigation was conducted independently and objectively.

“It was pretty much a joke,” Whalen said. “We know that they know that they did wrong.”

Whalen said he talked with Medicine Hat investigators once, and said neither he nor the employee had received any contact or apology from Lethbridge police.

He questioned why the investigation took more than half a year, with the outcome released days before Christmas.

“I didn’t expect anything else. I don’t know why it took so long. It’s just to make people wait and forget, I guess,” Whalen said. “They didn’t want anybody asking questions and they didn’t want anyone to be available for comment this afternoon.”

So the question of whether the whole episode was grossly mishandled, which it clearly was, and whether anybody will be held accountable, which they almost certainly won't, goes back to the good ol' boys in Lethbridge.

Regarding exactly what happened in the Burnaby, BC Canadian Tire store last Monday, the official version, thanks to the same Canadian visitor, is that the man who refused to wear a mask and was violently taken down by a group of store security guards was arrested for assault.

Be that as it may -- the police make arrests in such cases based on the credibility of witnesses on the scene, but the disposition of the case is then with the courts -- the actual video images we have show the man in a carotid hold from store security.

In the US, this hold, when used by police agencies, is extremely controversial. It is often categorized as "deadly force". The question in my mind is how a store security department, using low-end semiskilled personnel who often are not authorized to carry firearms, could contemplate the use of such a tactic at all. As of last Wednesday, news reports said the Mounties were asking the public for additional video of the incident.

But the Mounties certainly would know the place to go for video would be the Canadian Tire security department, which would have video coverage of the whole store, from multiple angles. Even to ask the public for their cell phone shots, when all the detectives have to do is go to the back office and see the store video, is kinda silly.

My view is whatever the obnoxious customer did, the store security staff grossly mishandled the situation and created bad publicity for the store. The goon trying to break the guy's neck in the photo, and his supervisor, should be fired.

The impression I have is that US police agencies are much more acutely aware of potential public scrutiny of their actions in these sorts of situations, and local news in particular is much more conscientious about followup. I'm not impressed by how Canadian public relations officers or local media handled either situation.

Hey, you guys up there, this is the 21st century.

It's Worse In Canada

David Freiheit of the Viva Frei YouTube channel is generally uneven, and even when he makes good points, you have to suffer through his vamping and mugging to get them. In the video above, the constant personal references or the whiny kids in the back seat are at least at a low enough level that you can sit through them to get the meat.

One thing that's puzzled me in general about the current phase of the COVID panic is that the late 2020 surge has largely abated worldwide, while the vaccine is being widely distributed everywhere. The chart for Canada at right reflects this. Even in California, Gov Newsom has relaxed the extra measures he imposed in December, and the Los Angeles County health department has gone even farther, allowing schools to begin reopening and allowing outdoor sports.

The attitude in the US, justified or not, is optimistic, especially given the vaccine, and in fact I think it will be very difficult for the authorities not to continue relaxing COVID measures here.

Why is it so different in Canada? The incident at a Canadian Tire outlet in Burnaby, BC, which Freiheit covers in his YouTube, is reported more fuily here with additional video. What we know from several video clips is that an obnoxious customer refused to wear a mask and refused to leave the store. Although the headline contains the allegation that the customer punched store security staff before being forcibly taken down and handcuffed, available video shows no punching before this occurred.

There are occasional incidents like this in the US, and while the antics of mask-Karens at supermarkets now and then provide amusement, nobody's been subjected to carotid holds, violent takedowns, and handcuffs. (Carotid holds in the US are extremely controversial even when used by professional, trained police officers. Store security likely hasn't received adequate training in such tactics -- the officers and their managers should probably be fired, notwithstanding any other outcome of the case.)

The store had in fact already called the Mounties, who were responding as the incident took place. As far as I can see, the security staff's response should have been simply to surround the customer without touching him for the few minutes it would take the Mounties to arrive and resolve the situation. I have a feeling this episcode will go down the memory hole just like the takedown of the Lethbridge, AB Star Wars trooper last May. (I've searched the web since then for the outcome of the promised independent investigation with no success. I e-mailed the Lethbridge paper as well, asking for any updates, but never received a reply.)

The odd thing is the contrast between how poorly the Canadian plebs is treated, vis-a-vis what appears to be the major carveout given to US TV shows produced in Canada. Two of the most popular reality shows on cable, Gold Rush and The Curse of Oak Island, are made in Canada. Nobody, but nobody, on these shows wears a mask, indoors or outdoors, with family or with outsiders or even casual visitors. The Laginas and other US figures in the Oak Island show were subject to 14-day qusrantine when they first arrived in Nova Scotia last summer, but Marty in particular clearly travels back and forth to deal with his other businesses in Michigan. He hasn't been quarantined since.

Indeed, footage shot llast summer for the show shows Nova Scotia locals being interviewed, as well as interior shots of a library, a pub, and a blacksmith shop, with no masks, no social distancing, no library or restaurant seats blocked off. (Libraries are still closed completely in California, by the way.) A tourist boat sailed around the island last summer full of passengers, no masks, no social distancing.

The same applies to Gold Rush in the Yukon. Parker Schnabel traveled to Alaska in one episode but clearly didn't have to quarantine on returning. Nobody, nobody, nobody wears a mask. For some reason, nobody connected with either show has been hospitalized or, as far as we can tell, even tested positive. Normally, just about every episode of these shows would be considered a superspreader event, but nobody's gotten sick at all.

Oh, Canada.

The Agenda And The Response

The piece at the UK Open Democracy website that I linked yesterday suggests that somewhere, there's a cohesive expression of an ultra-leftist agenda that includes abolition of the traditional family, abolition of private property, transsexualism, radical environmentalism, and probably much more, into which the current blue program of extended lockdowns dovetails.

I've got to figure that somewhare there's a book, at least, that lays this out. Some of it clearly comes from late 19th century free-love leftism that was popular in the UK for a few decades, while other parts are just recycled, romanticized Marxism-Stalinism. But radical environmentalism and outright transsexualim (as opposed to ordinary tolerance of homosexuality) are new. If anyone knows whether there's an influential published playbook that outlines the whole current program, I'd like to know about it. What's plain, though, is that the current US Congress, with very slim majorities, is intent on pushing a program that even Obama, with bigger majorites, wouldn't touch in 2008.

Meanwhile, in the face of increasing likelihood of a recall election this fall, Califonria Gov Newsom right now seems frozen at the controls, like Bogart playing Captain Queeg. The nature of the recall campaign -- at least, if the campaigners stay smart -- is beginning to take shape.

I think the start of it will be that you can't trust Newsom to promise anything over lockdowns, because his history over the past year has been red light-green light. Whatever he loosens, he'll tighten again six weeks later, with no perceptible effect on the virus. Even if things look good after the vaccine, there's no assurance he won't find some other reason to lock, things down again.

Another part of the COVID problem is he and his allies are draggging their feet about reopening schools. This is a national problem as well. It's just part of a reluctance on the part of the left to allow basic components of prosperity for the middle class -- they're gradually canceling the benefits of universal public education, first by destroying its quality, then by closing the schools and not reopening them

Second, Newsom and his allies are moving to eliminate fossil fuel for transportation and utilities while not preparing the electric grid for new demands. This will make cars more expensive, while making electricity unreliable, which will drastically lower living standards.

Third, in restructuring the economy away from fossil fuel, Newsom and his allies are destroying jobs far beyond what they've done in the lockdowns.

(Oh, by the way, Warren Buffett has quietly become a railroad magnate, with his BNSF benefiting hugely from the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. But it also means he expects to keep making money from carrying lots of oil. Does he know something we don't?)

I'm not going to harp on the transsexual agenda, except to note that to put Dr Levine in charge of public health is a bizarre decison. The Democrats have alligned themselves with a policy of allowing men into women's rest rooms. This won't go well, even assuming there won't be some highly publicized episode that illustrates the problem in some lurid way.

It looks to me as though the Newsom recall will be a test bed for 2022, and so far, Newsom is frozen at the controls. I don't see good ideas for him coming from Washington, though.

What's The Real Agenda?

I went googling for Dr Fauci's latest remarks and came up with intriguing questions. The screen shot above is from a CNN story, where Fauci is giving the current line on the New Normal, clearly endorsed by an upper-class white woman with The Look, in this case Dana Bash. It used to be that The Look went with a facial expression that at least affected a wide-eyed ingenue quality, but no longer: Ms Bash is trying on Big Sister, which we're going to be getting more of, I do believe.

Fauci, meanwhile, is blathering away with a self-satisfied smirk.

Asked by CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union" whether he thinks Americans will still need to wear masks next year, Fauci replied: "You know, I think it is possible that that's the case and, again, it really depends on what you mean by normality."

It's plain from the CDC news conference I referenced yesterday that Fauci isn't just speaking on his own account, the suits at the CDC are behind him. He speaks for the lizard people who are running the planet, it's pretty plain. But they've clearly been moving the goalposts all along. As part of my web search, I came up with this story from last October:

People will likely need to wear masks and follow social distancing guidelines through the end of 2021 and into 2022, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts said during a recent meeting, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

. . . “I feel very strongly that we’re going to need to have some degree of public health measures to continue,” he said.

“It’s not going to be the way it was with polio and measles, where you get a vaccine, case closed, it’s done,” Fauci said. “It’s going to be public health measures that linger for months and months.”

So a year ago it was 15 days to flatten the curve, but by last October it was through the end of 2021 and into 2022, but now it's morphing into all of 2022. The public service announcements, oddly, haven't dropped the original message: wear a mask. Socially distance. Stay home. There's no get the shot and we'll have done it. Why not?

The agenda, I've become more convinced, is wide-ranging social engineering, certainly including breaking existing social patterns. Here's an example of what's being mooted, from a UK site, but I think the idea is more widespread:

Nuclear households, it seems, are where we are all intuitively expected to retreat in order to prevent widespread ill-health. ‘Staying home’ is what is somehow self-evidently supposed to keep us well. But there are several problems with this, as anyone inclined to think about it critically (even for a moment) might figure out – problems one might summarize as the mystification of the couple-form; the romanticisation of kinship; and the sanitization of the fundamentally unsafe space that is private property.

How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health? Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly violence goes down: the W.H.O. calls domestic violence “the most widespread, but among the least reported human rights abuses.”

In this view, "stay home" amounts to a temporary measure -- and we're talking about "home" as couples or nuclear family units exclusively, not extended or multigenerational families, which are clearly part of the "public health" problem. At some point in the foreseeable future, the object will be to remake human relations completely.

The longer the measures in place can continue, the more they become a New Normal, the more easily traditional ties of friendship, family, community, and religion can be broken down. At least, that's the idea.

Fauci: The Pushback Increases

I was drawn to this exchange at the White House CDC COVID briefing Monday:

MODERATOR: Next we’ll go to Chris Megerian at Los Angeles Times.

Q Hi, everyone. I was interested in your thoughts on the messaging around the vaccines. There’s a lot of conversation about how you need to keep doing the same things even after you get vaccinated — you know, like wearing a mask, not seeing your family, things like that. Do you think that’s preventing people from being more enthusiastic about getting vaccines? And may we see that change in the future?

ACTING ADMINISTRATOR SLAVITT: Well, I’m going to invite both Dr. Walensky and Dr. Fauci to comment on that, and then — you know, and then I will as — I will as well, if there’s anything to add.

DR. FAUCI: Yeah, I — actually, let — I’ll start — well, whatever. (Laughs.) I’ll start off and be very brief and hand it to Dr. Walensky.

I don't know if video of this conference is available -- I haven't seen it -- but from the transcript, it appears that Fauci is basically playing cute here, vamping and mugging (Laughs), sending a message that this isn't a serious question, but he's briefly gonna toss it off pro forma. So he basically repeats the latest Fauci line, the vaccine sorta-kinda isn't like, say, the smallpox vaccine or the polio vaccine, no, you gotta keep acting as if you'll still get sick and kill grandma no matter what.

But the problem for the others is that this isn't a question from Fox, it's a question from the LA Times. The other white folks take the threat more seriously, and they circle the wagons.

ACTING ADMINISTRATOR SLAVITT: And let me just follow up, to make a broader point. The broader point that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky both alluded to is this: . . . I will tell you that people are interested in taking the vaccine in large numbers for the same reason people are interested in taking the vaccine for MMR and for the flu: because they want to live. They don’t want to be sick and they don’t want to die. And that is a very important benefit that people don’t often talk about quite as much but that the public, we believe, clearly understands.

So beyond that, what we’re able to do as a society — the scientific team is going to continue to study based upon prevalence, based upon vaccination levels, and based upon the data, and we’ll come out with more.

Fauci does his cute routine at the start, but you can tell that all of these white people are angry at that question. The ultimate answer is the American people are smarter than you, bub, and they want to live. Whew! Maybe they should try to be less defensive and less reliant on their privilege, huh?

The problem continues to be, of course, that Fauci's remarks are inconsistent from week to week and have nothing to do with "science". Public figures from Meghan McCain to Sen Rubio are beginning to push back against Fauci publicly. McCain and Rubio are not heavyweights, but the lizard people ridiculed them on Twitter and fact-checked them posthaste.

An attack on Fauci is an attack on the foundations of how things are right now. Interesting indeed.

In fact, the two media golden boys of COVID, Gov Cuomo and Dr Fauci, who've bantered with each other about just that on CNN, are starting to lose their luster. The plebs has been sruggling to get appointments for the shot for weeks -- and based on our experience and those of friends and relatives, it takes weeks of effort -- only to find the goalposts moved yet once more. Get two shots, no big deal, you're still not gonna have your relatives for Easter.

There's a limit. The irritation of the white folks at the CDC Monday is an indication they're feeling it.

By the way, I wonder why Sally Quinn thought Dr Fauci was actually a Dr Lancer. There's gotta be MeToo lurking in the background here.

Try To Be Less White

I had a real adventure trying to find a picture to illustrate this post. After a week of Mars rover specials on TV, plus the usual History Channel fare, I was beginning to realize the world is still run by upper-class white ladies who all look the same, because no matter how many transsexuals, blacks, Latins, Asians, or whatever else they have on the show to explain things, there's always -- always -- an upper-class white lady to endorse whatever is said, although the lizard people have given everyone else an approved script as well.

So, knowing what I was looking for, I started doing google image searches for "upper class wasp woman look", and sure enough, I got mostly picures of insects, with a few 19th century sketches of period fashion as well. I tried variations. "Understated elite look" brought, remarkably, ladies in bikinis. "Upper class look" brought ladies in big hair.

Finally, as a last ditch effort, I hit on it: "Sally Quinn". That was exactly what I wanted. I kept thinking of the woman I'd seen on the History Channel last night explaining McDonald's and fast food to everyone, though I'm not sure if a lady like that ever visits a fast food joint. But it was apparently important that an upper class lady with just that look explain fast food to the rest of us.

"Those white ladies are never going to go away," I told my wife.

"You're right," she said.

It was just the icing on the cake that in my search for pictures of Sally Quinn, back in the 1990s apparently she thought Dr Fauci was hot:

In 1991, Sally Quinn—doyenne of the Washington intelligentsia, who was then on a streak of popular novels—published “Happy Endings,” which climbed the bestseller list. Across 500-plus pages, Quinn unspools the juicy romance of a widowed First Lady who falls head over heels for a dashing and cutting NIH scientist. . . who goes by the name of Michael Lanzer.

Or better known by his real name: Anthony Fauci.

In the best Washington tradition, this sort of Washington insider novel is ghostwritten, with the Washington celebrity lending her name to the product for a big fee. This is the manufactured world these people inhabit.

Whiteness is in the news due to a recent flap over a Coca-Cola employee sensitivity program that instructed the hired help to abjure whiteness:

The tips to “be less white” included: “be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble, listen, believe, break with apathy,” and “break with white solidarity.”

Another slide tells viewers that in order to confront racism, they must understand “what it means to be white, challenging what it means to be racist.”

But neither Dr Fauci nor Sally Quinn will change their ways. In fact, they'll lecture the rest of us on our whiteness, implicitly using themselves as examples of good white people.

A Romanian YouTuber on the channel Romanian TeeVee got it right, I think: the Try To Be Less White campaign is directed at the plebs, who've been subjected to racial hiring quotas since the 1970s. It's all meant to get the plebs, black, white, yellow, brown, whatever, to squabble with each ofher while the white people in charge deliberately lower their living standards.

The business of masks, wind power, and artificial beef are all on the white people's agenda.

Mars And The Living Desert Problem

I keep thinking back on the Mars mission special I watched a week ago. A space probe professor type made a remark that, to the great disappointment of all the space probe professors, Mars looked like the Sonoran desert or something. Well, not actually. the 1953 Disney film The Living Desert simply contradicts that characterization. The Sonoran desert doesn't look much like Mars at all.

What appears to be the conventional wisdom promoted in the current media discussion of life on Mars is that, given liquid water and t amount of time, life will appear in some microbial form and evolve from there. The quantity given for t is at most a billion years, because that's the time span Mars is supposed to have had liquid water. Where they got that isn't explained, but let's grant it.

I went to Wikipedia's timeline of life on Earth. I recognize that all these estimates, a billion years for water on Mars, 4.4 billion years ago for the first liquid water on Earth and so forth, are subject to all sorts of challenge, but we're dealing with conventional consensus here, so these numbers will work for our purpose.

Wikipedia indeed says the first liquid water appeared on earth about 4.4 billion years ago. Then it gives a range of 3.9 to 2.5 billion years ago as the dates when the first living cells emerged. So taking the most optimistic estimates in these ranges, from 4.4 to 3.9 billion years ago was what it took for any sort of cell to result from radiation bombardments and such -- half a billion years. Of course, it could have been as long as 1.9 billion, so that would have been too long if Mars had liquid water for only a billion years, as they said on TV. But whatever.

But then the timeline gives 2.8 billion years ago as "Oldest evidence for microbial life on land in the form of organic matter-rich paleosols, ephemeral ponds and alluvial sequences, some of them bearing microfossils." In other words, this is the primordial soup of popular imagination. But in that case, t, the time value for how long it took for microbes that could leave fossil evidence to emerge from plain liquid water, is 1.6 billion years, which is longer than Mars is supposed to have had liquid water.

But these numbers apply to Earth, not Mars. Mars is colder and has less atmosphere. How this affects the equations in which t is a factor we have no idea, but the fact is that over almost 200 years of evolutionary science, nobody has come close to developing an equation that quantifies or predicts what the value tor t is in water * t = life. Nor even DNA * t = beneficial mutation.

I think it goes without saying that nobody at McDonald's would suggest a multibillion-dollar investment in a project where a bunch of professors went looking for a random formula that would generate a new secret sauce in, oh, a billion years. But this is the sort of wild speculation that's caused generations of consensus among policymakers that we send successive probes and rovers at enomous national treasure looking for something for which there is likely no fossil evidence even if it happened.

I don't know what would happen to me as a freshman in college geology class if I raised quesitons like this. If I were lucky, the prof would think I showed promise but needed discipline, and he wasn't going to destroy my career just for youthful aberration. But I might not be lucky. Bluto, after all, didn't go to class. That might be why he turned out OK.

If you want more of something, you fund it. We keep geting more of this stuff.

Dr Fauci Says We Can Hug Our Family Members At Home If We've Had The Shot

According to Fox News,

White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that it's "very likely" that family members who have been vaccinated against coronavirus can safely hug each other.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director explained that what vaccinated individuals can safely do with family members and in a public setting differ greatly.

If an individual is vaccinated and with another person who is vaccinated, the things they can do are "much, much more liberal in the sense of pulling back on stringent public health measures," Fauci said during an interview on MSBNC with host Andrea Mitchell.

But wait a moment. Last August he said people could hook up on Tinder, and that was even before the jab:

"[I]t's what's called relative risk," Fauci said. "If you're willing to take a risk — and you know, everybody has their own tolerance for risks — you could figure out if you want to meet somebody."

. . . "If you're looking for a friend, sit in a room and put a mask on, and you know, chat a bit. If you want to go a little bit more intimate, well, then that's your choice regarding a risk," Fauci said.

So let me see. Just this past week, what he seemed to be saying was that if they've both been vaccinated, your toddler can hug mama, or something like that, as long as it's in private. (I assume doing it in public would set a bad example.) But last August, if you wanted to hook up wth a stranger, no vax involved, that was up to you. Is there one rule for swingers and another for the nuclear family, or what?

But people are starting to notice that anything like a policy statement from Fauci should be written in wind and running water:

Remember that line 'you can still spread it even if you get vaccinated? What kind of anti-science crapola is that? On top of this illogical tripe, we have ever-changing narratives coming from the so-called expert class that is driving all of us insane (via NBC News):

A growing body of evidence suggests that the Covid-19 vaccine can slow the spread of the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday. Whether vaccination can prevent transmission of the virus is “the looming question,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a White House coronavirus response team briefing. “If a person gets infected despite being vaccinated — we refer to that as a ‘breakthrough’ infection — does that person have the capability of transmitting to another person?”

“There have been some studies that are pointing in a very favorable direction,” he said, adding that these studies will have to be corroborated by additional research.

Fauci highlighted two recent studies that looked at a person’s viral load — that is, how much virus he or she has in the body — and transmissibility.

The main problem is that for Fauci, talking to the media is like singing in the shower. He likes to hear himself, and that's about it. If he contradicts himself week in and week out, that's not a bug, it's a feature.

On serious matters of public policy, the government needs to have a clear and consistent message. The White House and the CDC need to be on the same page. But Fauci isn't even the CDC, though he has a high-paying job there, he's just running off at the mouth on his own account, with an official position to give him a platform for it.

This is where the Trump White House communications office fell down badly. Fauci should have been told to coordinate all remarks via the White House in his official capacity, and if he didn't, he should have effectively had his mike turned off. The Biden White House is making the same mistake -- if anything, it's worse. At least Dr Birx had the sense to retire once xhe embarrassed herself.

The Mars Rover And The Dinosaurs

The other day I was browsing the web for news of the lunar rover's landing. What I noticed was that the TV broadcasters were all reading from the same script, apparently approved by the Bilderbergs, but even more jarring was they were all wearing the same rictus that North Korean broadcasters affect to celebrate Dear Leader's birthday. This was a major, major event.

The reason for this latest multibillion-dollar excursion, as indeed the expressed reason on the TV specials for all the previous ones, is to find evidence of life on Mars. And this has been a national effort not too far in scope from the Manhattan Project. Somehow our way of life, or democracy, or civilization or something, hangs in the balance. Wha? To me, as I would guess to vast numbers of other people, whether the rover landed on Mars was about as critical as whether Tom Brady won the Super Bowl.

So I thought back to the TV special I saw last weekend about the mission. I won't cite which one, I think they were all scripted by the Bilderbergs and said the same things. Mars once had water. Then the water went away after a billlion years. But a billion years is long nough for microbes and such to evolve. After all, what you need for life is water and other stuff. Leave water around long enough and let lightning and volcanes stir things up, and voila, microbes.

So the Perseverance rover is gonna use its little shovel and stuff and dig up the microbes, or at least the microbe fossils, and basically prove the above standard wisdom.

But this actually illustrates the problem of the dinosaurs. In the mid 19th century, as dinosaur and other fossils were discovered, this posed questions about the age of the Earth. If dinosaurs existed a gazillion years ago, this meant that conjectures, ostensibly based on scripture, that the Earth was created 6000 years ago were incorrect, although scripture itself mentions no such number and has nothing specific to say on the subject. This was a problem largely for Evangelicals at the time, but mainstream Christianity has never been much disturbed by it.

But the dinosaurs over time became a much bigger problem for Darwinians. Fossil evidence cuts both ways. If life evolved via a process of random natural selection that started with simmering primordial soup, with speciation a very gradual process where rats turned seamlessly into guinea pigs and so forth, why do we have sudden cancellations of whole biological orders? If things got warmer or cooler, why didn't we just get fat dinosaurs with fuzzy scales or something? Instead, the whole idea just suddenly didn't work any longer, and although there are still cockroaches, there aren't any dinosaurs at all.

This is the origin of the big asteroid theory of Earth's history. At some point, an asteroid left a crater that created Yucatan, and that explains why the dinosaurs didn't just evolve their way along. (Wha?) In other words, the dinosaurs have actually been a bigger problem for the secularist theory of life than they were for certain schools of Evangelical thought. They're what might be called a metaproblem.

Mars represents a similar metaproblem for secularism. The first Mars probes that sent back photos were the start for this branch of the problem. It could be theorized that life might have evolved separately on Mars even given the climatic conditions we surmised were present on the planet -- after all, microbes thrive on Earth in extreme cold at low oxygen levels. But the first Mars photos showed there was no persuasive evidence that any such thing had ever taken place there.

Nor has any subsequent probe or rover proven anything else. This is probably the inspiration for the name Perseverance. They're gonna persevere at this search, presumably until they can find the evidence they want. If this one, or the next one, or the ome afer that, finds even a fossil bacterium, wham, that'll prove it. Life is not unique. Humans are not unique. The whole theistic scriptural project has been a huge evolutionary dead end.

Well, good luck. But we shouldn't kid ourselves about the nature and objective of this incrediblly huge boondoggle.

The Campaign Against Human Nature

The photo above appears regularly as a Facebook ad. What's begun to occur to me is that there's been no change in the COVID narrative. There's simply no information on how to sign up for a shot, where you cqn go, what the lines are like, or whatever -- in fact, Mayor Garcetti closed many sites last week for lack of vaccine, but there's no info on whether they've reopened or what this week's supply is like.

I went to Kaiser yesterday for a shingles shot, which was hard ebough to go through, what with an entitled medicql staff taking its time to do any tasks at all. But the tech asked me if I had any intention of getting a COVID shot. I said of course, but we can't get them from Kaiser. In fact, my wife fianlly got an appointment next month at Rite Aid, but Kaiser still says they're just doing front line workers and over-75,

So I'm not sure if the lizard people even want us to get the shot. I see a lot of opinion that they and the Bilderbergs want to give us the shot so we'll be genetically modified or something, but in fact, whoever does run the planet isn't moving all that fast to do it. Biden says the minarities don't know how to sign up, and apparently he's copacetic with that. In fact, nobody's running ads showing specifically how to sign up to anyone, black, white, or zebra.

And the background noise for some weeks has been that, two shots or not, everyone's got to keep wearing a mask until whenever. This is not a temporary measure any longer. I keep thinking of a homily I heard on line six or eight months ago sayng people need to see faces, people need to gather, people need to have friends and family. This all goes against human nature.

Meanwhile, the prophet Bill Gates is saying two shots won't be enough, but also, we need to move to synthetic meat. You can bet that one guy who won't have to eat synthetic meat will be the prophet Bill Gates. But if he speaks for the Bilderbergs or the lizard people, it's getting plainer by the day that these folks have the object of lowering living standards for everyone, or at least everyone but themselves. But the Biblical message is that people should prosper.

I wasn't a regular Rush Limbaugh listener. I think his health had been declining for several years. He used to say we aren't here just to debate these people, we have to defeaat them utterly.

He had a point.

Dr Fauci On The Take? How Could This Be???

Yesterday I speculated that Dr Fauci, in the course of overstaying his 15 minutes of fame, could potentially fall victim to revelations of kickbacks or MeToo. But my wife pointed out that his million-dollar prize for "defending science" was exactly a payoff, in the same way that Hunter Biden's recent book deal, which involves an undisclosed payment for a manuscript that will inevitably be ghostwritten, is a payoff to both Hunter and his dad.

Well, a hooker is paid a speciric fee for a particular sexual act, and this is against the law. An excort is paid for a particular amount of time, in which activities are not specified, and this is perfectly legal. The same principle is at work here.

So what was Dr Fauci paid for? He already earned $417,608 in 2019, the highest paid employee in the US government. (That amount probably doesn't account for other lagniappes, bonuses, deferred compensation, and the like) A milllion bucks is chump change, but so far, I haven't seen any mention that he plans to donate it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Well, Alan Dershowitz, about as impartial an observer as they come, said just the other day that he thought COVID cost Trump the election, though he wasn't sure if any incumbent could have won it under those circumstances. And Fauci was the face of COVID, complaining to the press throughout the year that Trump wasn't listening to him.

Right. Go on a cruise. Don't bother with a mask. Wait a moment. Flatten the curve. Socially distance. Stay home. Wear a mask. Wear two masks. Trump was rightly skeptical, and Fauci should in justice have been fired, but whether it would hve helped Trump is still unknown.

But someone clearly thought Fauci beat Trump and gave him a million bucks. That's still chump change. As Frederick T Gates said to John D Rockefeller after Gates negotiated the sale of Rockefeller Steel to JP Morgan, "Mr Rockefeller, thank you is not enough."

For Dr Fauci, it sounds like a million bucks was enough. That sums up Fauci..

Dr Fauci, Acclaimed Scientist

In yesterday's news:

Dr. Anthony Fauci has won the $1 million Dan David Prize for “defending science” and advocating for vaccines now being administered worldwide to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

The Israel-based Dan David Foundation on Monday named President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser as the winner of one of three prizes. It said he had earned the recognition over a lifetime of leadership on HIV research and AIDS relief, as well as his advocacy for the vaccines against COVID-19.

In its statement, the private foundation did not mention former President Donald Trump, who undermined Fauci’s follow-the-science approach to the pandemic. But it credited Fauci with “courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition during the challenging COVID crisis.”

“As the COVID-19 pandemic unraveled, (Fauci) leveraged his considerable communication skills to address people gripped by fear and anxiety and worked relentlessly to inform individuals in the United States and elsewhere about the public health measures essential for containing the pandemic’s spread,” the foundation’s awards committee said, praising Fauci for “speaking truth to power in a highly charged political environment.”

What I've seen of Dr Fauci, which I've discussed frequently here, is that his public statements are frequently contradictory, and in fact they frequently acknowledge that there is in fact no scientific basis for his pronouncements. In general, his positions confuse "science" with secluarist materialism and have nothing to do with a viewpoint that encourages experimental confirmation, reproducibility of results, or peer review.

Meanwhile,

The partisan campaign arm for House Democrats has been raising money from a "Thank You” card for infectious disease physician Dr. Anthony Fauci, raising ethical questions about using a government official to endorse political activities.

Former President Trump was often accused by Democrats of abuse of the Hatch Act, which prohibits civil service employees in the executive branch of the federal government from engaging in some forms of political activity. However, the Hatch Act contains broad exceptions for the president and vice president, exceptions which would not extend to Fauci, who serves as chief medical advisor to President Biden.

The DCCC ad includes a photo with Fauci standing and speaking from the podium in the White House press briefing room with the official White House logo prominently displayed. "Thank You, Dr. Fauci!" the site reads. "Sign the card to thank Dr. Fauci for his work." When a user clicks through and enters in an email address to sign the digital "card," a fundraising page comes up and asks users to donate.

Fauci is just another public phony in a long line, at this point probably starting to overstay his 15 minutes of fame. I suspect his narcissism will catch up with him at some point, with some public disclosure of kickbacks, groping, or whatever else to send him back to obscurity.

The basic contradiction in Fauci's public persona is that he's a timeserving deep-state bureaucrat who's been elevated to a position of greatness where he doesn't belong. Inevitably there's a regression to the mean.

2021: The Year Of Incompetence?

If 2020 was the year of the dumpster fire, I'm beginning to wonder if 2021 won't be quite so bad, mainly because things are shaping up where the people who are trying to make things bad for us in the plebs are incompetent. Let's take a few current events, the Trump "impeachment", the TJ Ducklo "resignatiom", and Gavin Newsom.

It's hard to figure out just what the Democrats and a few Republicans had in mind with trying to "impeach" a president who'd already been voted out, who was completely out of the government at the time the "trial" occurred, and over which the chief justice, presumably an authority on its constitutionality, apparently declined to preside. The foreordained result was acquittal, which surprised no one but Speaker Pelosi, who lost her temper.

They narrowly beat Trump in November. The best I can surmise is that the Democrats deeply feared the potential for Trump running again in 2024 -- but as the conventional wisdom goes, thngs can happen next week that change everything, why spend so much energy and prestige on what might or might not happen in 2024? And of course, the Republicans who were squishy on the "trial" probably ended their careers.

If Pelosi and Schumer were trying to make things bad for the plebs,, they didn't display competence in the attempt.

Now let's look at TJ Ducklo. (I'm not sure what I'd do if I had a surname that reminded people of a duck. It's possible, given the report of his threats against a Politico reporter, that he compensates for the unserious name by trying to terrify people, which I guess is one strategy, though it didn't work out for him here.)

I've already noted that his boss, Whte House press secretary Psaki, has quickly earned a reputation for incompetence herself, and she certainly lived up to it in l'affaire Ducklo. First, it comes out that Ducklo threatened, insulted, and abused Tara Palmeri in a profanity-laced rant. only weeks after the president assured his staff that doing this would get them fired on the spot. (Palmeri, acrtually, comes off in her public persona as not much more serious than Ducklo. This whole thing just looks like a spat among the high school social set.)

So press secretary Psaki's reaction, rather than to follow the announced policy and fire duckboy on the spot, is to ask him to apologize or something, which he doesn't quite do. So then, certainly under pressure from other high school movers and shakers, she announces duckboy is to be suspended, without pay, for a week. When that doesn't work, duckboy finally resigns a few days later -- doubtless, as some commentators have suggested, with the assurance there's a prestigious job for him at CNN or someplace like that.

But, as other commentators have also suggested, the one thing they never did was what Biden said they would, fire duckboy on the spot. This was all a tiff between the prom king and the prom queen anyhow. The White House staff and press corps came off yet again as an incestuous cabal of the unserious.

Last we have Gov Newsom and his asociates, who appear to have been caught napping by the recall campaign, which as of this writing has almost certainly achieved the required 1.5 million signatres and will likely reach 2 million by next month's deadline. For weeks, Democrat insiders had been dismissing the effort, simply repeating the mantra that "no Republican has won statewide office in 16 years". Nevertheless, the last governor to be recalled was a Democrat, and he lost to a Republican.

Now the story has shifted. Newsom is polishing his image. I think he needs more than polishing at this point. There are a couple of problems for Newsom even if he beats back the recall effort. The first is that the campaign, which at this point is likely to take place, will be expensive and drain Democrat resourcres for 2022.

The second is that a recall election differs from a regular gubernatorial election in that there's no primary, there's just a range of candidates against one incumbent. The winner just needs a plurality, assuming the governor is recalled. This means that, depending on how the campaign shakes out, other candidates can split Newsom's vote, even if they're Democrats.

Insiders, who'd been dismissing the recall up to a few weeks ago, have already said it's now too late to stop the election. It doesn't look so far as though Newsom has thought to do much more than polish his image.

You don't get figs from thistles. Nor do screwups very frequently accomplish what they set out to do, however nefarious their intent.

Incompetence On Display

One of the first things I learned more or less in adolescence is that there are no surprises in politics, especially for someone at the level of the US House Speaker. The result of Impeachment 2.0 was never in doubt. She could bully her party in the House to vote for impeachment, but the Senate was going to follow its own rules, and it was understood from the start that there would never be the votes to convict.

So why was Speaker Pelosi so angry with Mitch NcConnell? He was playing the game. In fact, I have a sense that most political leadership recognizes slmost all the time that they and their opponents are playing a game by an established set of rules, and scripted outrage is part of the whole show.

What Pelosi did was pretty clearly not scripted. It was an angry rant over an outcome that was never in doubt. It was made all the more feckless by being delivered through a mask in a lisping mumble.

The ncouraging thing is that these people are in fact incompetent.

Anglican Stuff

I may have been premature in placing my old blog on inactive status. Over the past week or two, there have been important developments in the field I'd been covering there:

• The pastor of an important parish in the US ordinariate, St Barnabas Omaha, was removed for financial mismanagement, placing that parish's survival in question
• The Anglo-Catholic parish that in 1976 started the whole idea of a Roman Catholic personal prelature for disgruntled Episcopalians, St Mary of the Angels Hollywood, CA, appears to have lost the income producng property that sustained it and will probably not survive
• The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that established the personal prelatures for the disgruntled, the idea that originated in Hollywood, is now threatening to close the one in Austrailia for lack of growth and lack of money.

I have a post on the other blog covering this last development.

Why Is Newsom Quiet?

Amid news that the national Republican Party has donated $250,000 to the Recall Newsom campaign, I've already noted that Gov Newsom has been remarkably passive. It's plain that the vaccine campaign is faltering, with Mayor Garcetti calling the number of dosess delivered to Los Angeles "unacceptable". Both Garcetti and Newsom are on the same side -- why isn;t Newsom taking the same line?

By the same token, statistics show California is actually administering less than 70% of the doses it receives. I assume the others expire on the shelf. Where's Newsom? According to the Sacramento Bee,

Democrats, meanwhile, are circling around the governor as he goes on the defensive. Last month he lifted stay-at-home orders across the state and is pushing hard for a deal with the Legislature on reopening schools. In recent weeks, he’s been traveling to vaccination super sites around the state to promote his work on the coronavirus pandemic, one of the key points of criticism for his administration.

The problem is that the teachers' unions don't want to reopen, and Newsom isn't going to buck them in any serious way. Visiting vaccination sites would work if it were better publicized, and if he took the line that he's working to end the lockdowns and masks, but that's not the party line. The Biden program is that this will go on indefinitely.

In an appearance at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Biden told staff “You know that wearing this mask through the next year here can save lives, a significant number of lives.”

Mumbling through his own mask, Biden also blamed President Trump for the vaccine roll out being delayed.

“While scientists did their job in discovering vaccines in record time, my predecessor – I’ll be very blunt about it – did not do his job in getting ready for the massive challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,” Biden said.

Even for people who've had both doses of the vaccine, the line is now that they've still got to wear masks -- in fact, it sounds like they've got to wear two masks now.

So far, I'm also not aware of any statement from Newsom on last week's Supreme Court decision overturning the California ban on indoor worship. The problem overall is that the Blues are displaying no indication that they want anything but a new normal, masks, distancing, continued restrictions on restaurants and churches, restrictions on travel and assembly, with the goalposts constantly moving.

The Republicans are starting to wake up, while the Democrats are stuck on Impeachment 2.0. They seem to be fixated on a potential Trump run for president in 2024, while the issues that elected him in 2016 are still out there. Anything can happen to Trump, but the issues remain, and smart politicians will seize on them. Upcoming news cycles will inevitably feature the Newsom recall, focusing on how he, and by association Biden, have done nothing but make things worse since the 2020 election.

The $250,000 from the national party to the recall campaign is, as observers have noted, little more than a token amount. But it's well invested.

Mayor Garcetti Shuts Down LA Vaccination Sites

Via Fox News,

Los Angeles is temporarily shutting down several city vaccination sites in the coming days after it burned through its limited allocation of first doses for Moderna’s vaccine.

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti made the announcement during a briefing Wednesday, noting that the city distributed 98% of all doses received. The closure will affect sites at Dodgers Stadium and the other four non-mobile vaccination sites on Friday and Saturday, with reopenings eyed for Tuesday or Wednesday.

"This week we only received 16,000 new doses. 16,000," Garcetti said during the briefing. "That’s about the number of doses we give out every single day. That is unacceptable."

The week’s allocation is a reduction of 90,000 doses from the week prior, the mayor said.

However federal officials involved with the COVID-19 response struck an optimistic tone this week, with the Biden administration claiming vaccine supply has increased from 8.6 million doses delivered to states weekly, to 11 million, or a 28% total increase across the first three weeks. Garcetti said that overall increase has yet to trickle down to Los Angeles.

My wife said, "Garcetti must not like Newsom," since the problems with vaccine distribution are among the issues behind the Recall Newsom campaign. Garcetti might almost be characterized as questioning the credibility of CDC statistics, too.

But the problems in California, as I've posted recently, go beyond a single shortage of a single vaccine in a single week. The state has generally announced that everyone 65 and older is "eligible" to receive the vaccine, but actually setting up an appointment is effectively impossible, and anecdotal accounts suggest at least some vaccination sites apply a de facto racial test to applicants.

Gov Newsom has been oddly passive in response to reports that the recall petition will easily surpass the 1.5 million signature requirement to place it on the ballot. It's hard not to assume that if he were even to express a credible interest in breaking the vaccination logjam, he could beat the recall. Last summer, he had daily press onferences on COVID. Why can't he simply resume those and at least seem to want to solve the issues?

Part of the problem appears to be the party line: things are great! Everyone's eligible! We're in COVID paradise! Here's Dr Fauci:

As vaccine demand continues to far outpace supply, the nation's leading infectious disease expert made a stunning prediction. "By the time we get to April, that would be what I call for lack of better wording, open season. Namely, virtually everybody and anybody in any category can start to get vaccinated," Dr. Anthony Fauci said.

But vaccination sites still need doses and that's a big problem for Maryland. "We need more damn vaccines," Governor Larry Hogan said. "We have no control whatsoever over this supply problem."

The CBS story at the link is skeptical, at leaat by implication:

Mr. Biden announced the U.S. had just signed contracts for 100 million more doses each of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. The vaccines would arrive by the end of July, he said.

So Fauci, the administration's front man for COVID, says everyone will be "eligible" by April, but Biden says there won't be supply before July. This sounds a little like life in the former Soviet bloc -- everyone's "eligible" for a car and an apartment, they just need to get on the 16-year waiting list. People didn't buy that.

If Newsom and Biden were serious public figures, Fauci, who contradicts himself weekly, would be out of the picture, and both Newsom and Biden would be giving daily updates. Even the media seems less willing to cover for them.

Double Mask Double Talk

Yesterday, the CDC updated its masking guidelines. We've been in this pretty much a full year, the pandemic surges and wanes, and the CDC's answer is we need to wear two masks now instead of one, since nothing else has worked.

After months of demands for federal health officials to update mask recommendations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced new guidelines Wednesday that include wearing well-fitting face masks or two masks at a time to help curb the COVID-19 pandemic.

The updated guidance follows the release of new research from the CDC which tested various masks in a lab setting and found evidence that combining a cloth mask over a surgical mask could dramatically reduce both the spread of the virus to others and exposure to the virus oneself.

So over the course of a week, he CDC has done "new research" into whether two masks are better than one? Exactly a week ago, Dr Fauci was saying there was no scientific evidence, just do it.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said there’s no evidence showing two masks are safer than wearing one, despite saying otherwise last week.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s no data that indicates that that is going to make a difference,” Fauci said during a video livestream interview with the American Federation of Teachers.

. . . His comments come after saying last week that wearing two face masks “likely” provides more protection than wearing just one mask.

I just can't imagine a bunch of CDC lab techs suddenly putting in 20-hour days, working through Super Sunday, to conduct thousands to tests on what masks worn in what combination are safer -- but this is the clear implication of Fauci's remarks. In fact, the implication of the CBS story in the link is that the CDC suddenly did this "after months of demands". Right.

The fact is that over much of the past year, an enormous majority of people have worn masks. In California, you can't buy gas, shop for groceries, go to the post office, go to church, or get a haircut without a mask. Even joggers, who are technically exempt, wear them. The big exception appears to be public transit, where mask rules aren't generally enforced, but this is a government function, oddly enough, when almost everythihng else is enforced privately.

But with 98% of the citizens wearing masks 98% of the time, the virus waxes and wanes irrespective. Nobody gets to ask Dr Fauci why two masks instead of one would change this, but if someone did, I'm sure he'd answer it's "just common sense". But then, why not enforce 12 feet social distance instead of six? Is that "not common sense", maybe because it's just more obviously absurd than wearing two masks? It sounds like they're making things up as they go along.

The new rules about how to wear them, too, srrike me as something made up to sound good. Two disposable masks won't do it. It has to be a disposable mask under a cloth mask, not over it. What about two cloth masks? They don't say. But if I have two cloth masks, will that work? Would a black one need to be outside a red one? These are sartorial restrictions, a new dress code for the new normal, to go along with liturgical revisions and de facto bans on fornication.

I just don't know if anyone will start enforcing the new rule -- two masks required to enter -- or if the mask monitors will also deny entry to someone wearing just two disposable masks. We'll have to see. Citizens will likely cooperate rather than cause a hassle if it happens.

What happened to the vaccine, by the way? Everyone's getting their shots now, right? If the vaccine's gonna solve the problem, why are they talking about two masks now, when everyone's gonna have their vaccine soon?

The Vaccine Is Turning Into A Disaster

So I'm seeing headlines about Statement on crossing state lines for vaccine, COVID-19 vaccine lines growing across states, HOLLYWOOD ELITE CUTTING LINES, and so forth.

My wife stopped by a local Subway, and the lady behind the counter, seeing my wife was a member of the eligible over-65 cohort, asked if she'd gotten her shot yet. My wife replied that we've checked, and there's so far no realistic way we can get one, even though we're eligible. The lady behnid the counter said she had a friend who paid to get it, but then he bragged about it, and now he's under investigation.

I've done web searches on whether there's a black market in the vaccine. A few articles say there "could" be one, but it's only for the wealthy, and anyhow, it's Trump's fault. But the Subway lady's friend doesn't sound like he's rich and powerful -- at minimum, he wouldn't be investigated if he were. So it seems like stuff is happening, but the media isn't covering it, at least not yet.

My wife sent me a link to a vaccine tracker from a local news station. As of this morning,, this is what it shows:

Two things don't seem to fit. One is that California's populatoni is 39.5 million. If roughly 4.9 million doses have been administered, this is 12% of the population. That would be pretty good if it were the case. But the state is still in Phase 1a of the target population, which is those over 75 and front-line workers -- and by the account at least of the Kaiser health plan, they're still working on this group. But those over 75 in California number only 1.7 million. And they're not done with these yet.

Nevertheless, LA County and other areas have lowered the eligible age to 65. There are 1.9 million Californians between 65 and 74. This gives a total of 3.6 million Californians over 65. According to the tracker with today's data, this is far below the 4.9 million doses the state says it's administered, but the situation on the ground appears not to relfect this -- again, Kaiser says that due to shortages, it isn't even done with the over 75s.

The 4.9 million total doesn't distinguish between first and second doses, and we don't have a good count of how many "front line" workers are in this total. But it does seem like, if 4.9 million doses have actually been administered, the state should be much farther along than it seems to be.

This leaves out the separate question of why the tracker says 7.4 million doses have been received, but only 4.9 million have been administered. The story nationally seems to be that some number of these are going bad on the shelf. In California, this could be fully a third of those delivereed. Sonebody needs to ask questions.

This story from San Francisco may provide some additionial insight:

Hing Yiu Chung lives in a racially diverse San Francisco neighborhood hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. While vaccines have been difficult to come by, the 69-year-old got one by showing proof she lives where she does.

She had to wait in line for two hours with other seniors, some who were disabled or leaning on canes, for a chance at a couple hundred shots available each day through a local public health clinic in the Bayview neighborhood.

. . . The experience wasn’t ideal, but targeting vulnerable ZIP codes is one way San Francisco and other U.S. cities and counties are trying to ensure they vaccinate people in largely Black, Latino and working-class communities that have borne the brunt of the pandemic. In Dallas, authorities tried to prioritize such ZIP codes, which tended to be communities of color, but backtracked after the state threatened to reduce the city’s vaccine supply.

The implicatoin is that an Asian woman is lower priority than black or Latin, unless she can show she lives in a neighborhood with enough blacks and Latins.

An LA County press release suggests a similar implicit policy is in force here:

About 25% of all vaccine doses were administered to White residents, 25% to Latino/Latinx residents, 18% to Asian residents, and 17% to residents who identify as multi-racial. African American /Black residents have received only 3.5% of all administered doses highlighting a glaring inadequacy in the vaccine roll-out to-date. Examining data on vaccinations of residents 65 and older indicates that 20% of this age group have received at least one dose of vaccine. However, we are alarmed by the disproportionality we are seeing in who is receiving the vaccine; American Indian/Native Alaskan (9.3%), Black/ African American (7.2%), and Latino/Latinx residents (14.3%) have lower vaccination rates than White (29.4%), Asian (18.2%) and Pacific Islander residents(29.4%). This early data shows us that we need to make it much easier for American Indian/Alaska Native, Black/ African American and Latino/Latinx residents and workers to be vaccinated in their communities by providers they trust.

So far, it's hard to avoid thinking that even if we showed up at a vaccination site, we'd be subject to a racial test. But if there are so many millions of doses coming in, why is there such a shortage? And why is there apparently a black market, and not just for the super-wealthy?

The Cardboard Cutout Super Bowl

The 2021 Super Bowl ratings, like the 2020 election results, were delayed. When they finally came out, they reflected the continuing decline of the Super Bowl as a media event. According to the New York Post,

CBS announced on Tuesday morning that 96.4 million viewers watched the game across all their platforms, “including the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports and NFL digital properties, Buccaneers and Chiefs mobile properties, Verizon Media mobile properties and ESPN Deportes television and digital properties.”

. . . Last season’s Super Bowl, a Chiefs victory over the 49ers on Fox, averaged 102.1 million viewers across all platforms.

Some in the elite, who apparently weren't paying close attention, complained that the fans in the stadium were clearly not social distancing. Even though the ones in the stadium could be excused, since they were cardboard cutouts, it does strike me as a valid point -- if corporate policies require employees attending Zoom meetings from home to wear masks on the call just to set an example, why can't the cardboard cutouts do the same?

Nevertheless, it was clearly a national scandal that the flesh-and-blood fans watching in the Tampa bars were in fact neither socially distanced nor wearing single masks, let alone two.

So much for the mayor’s order requiring masks at Super Bowl parties. Videos went viral on social media, showing throngs of mostly maskless fans and packed sports bars as the clock inside Raymond James Stadium ticked down on a hometown Super Bowl win for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

But it's also worth noting that past Super Bowls featured notable ads like the Apple 1984 and a halftime show with a wardrobe malfunction. The most notable event this year was the Jeep ad featruring a 71-year-old Bruce Springsteen calling for unity, which became a near universal laughingdtock.

Now, if you have never been receptive to Springsteen’s patented brand of rock’n’roll transcendence, or if you are skeptical of the working-class fixations that helped turn him into one of the most famous musicians on Earth, then this commercial will not convince you otherwise. In fact, this might be how you have always seen him: Here he is preaching a vague message of unity while standing far removed from any actual human beings. He is speaking to a promised land that maybe never actually existed. He looks impossibly well-maintained even though he wants you to think he’s weathered and worn from years of manual labor. He is selling you a car.

The style of sports-media hype that was once the Super Bowl is gradually but perceptibly losing its apppeal. At least the Jeep commercial didn't have Bob Dylan.

The Zuhlsdorf Problem

I'm a convert to Roman Catholicism in late adulthood. This means I have no practical memory of the pre-Conciliar Church. I came in after 20 years or so in various Anglo-Catholic environments, and I was led to believe, especially under the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, that the transition would be minimal -- at worst, a few months of catechetical touchup on Sunday afternoons before we'd be received justlikethat. The people who proposed this, including Jeffrey Steenson, were unfortunately deluded, and the sad disappointment of the North American ordinariate reflects this.

I had no choice but to become a convert to the post-Conciliar, diocesan Roman Catholic Church once the process envisioned by Steenson and others failed in the case of our Anglcan parish. On that basis, one must assume I saw merit in becoming Catholic outside any special provision for Anglicans. And if I saw enough merit in post-Conciliar Roman Catholiicism, and had no practical memory of any sort of life as a pre-Conciliar Catholic, for me to take a position that the Catholic Church of the past several generations has it all wrong would be absurd.

So the recent controversy over what appears to be Fr John Zuhlsdorf's loss of priestly faculties in the Diocese of Madison, WI doesn't really affect me. Zuhlsdorf is a media priest in what is something of a Catholic tradition, including Fr Coughlin. However, unlike Coughlin and other figures like Ven Fulton Sheen or Fr Dwight Longenecker, he has no direct pastoral responsibilities within the Church organizaion and supports himself via indepedent fundraising and speaking tours.

He had a patron and protector in Bishop of Madison, WI Robert Morlino, until Morlino's sudden passing at age 71 in 2018. By that time, I'd become increasingly skeptical of Zuhlsdorf, and I simply wondered how he might eventually fare under a new bishop not predisposed in his favor. According to Wikipedia,

In January 2021, Zuhlsdorf became involved in a public dispute over his execution of a live-streamed exorcism against participants in the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count. He said he had received the permission of his local ordinary, Bishop Donald J. Hying, the bishop of the Diocese of Madison, to celebrate the exorcism as it related to the election. However, Hying disputed that statement, saying he had granted permission to Zuhlsdorf to pray the exorcism against the COVID-19 pandemic, and not for political activity.

As a lay convert to Catholicism, my impression nevertheless is that bishops grant priestly faculties within their dioceses to priests from outside the diocese, as is the case with Fr Zuhlsdorf, but they can withdraw those faculties at any time, which makes such priests no longer able to give the sacraments within that diocese. As far as I can tell, this is a path of least reistance for any bishop confronted with controversy over a priest who has faculties within the diocese but is not incardinated there.

For instance, Cdl Cupich of Chicago, faced with two "extern" priests from Latin America who'd been ministering in his diocese but were arrested for lewd conduct in Miami in 2018, simply withdrew their faculties and rid himself of the problem, just by sending them home. Although Bp Hying, Morlino's successor in Madison, had nice things to say about Zuhlsdorf, this is simply what he was doing as well, as far as I can tell.

For a priest to become involved in a contoversy over an unpopular political matter and expect the support of a fairly new bishop is at best imprudent. I suspect Zuhlsdorf already had reservations over what his status would be in Madison under Hying and was perhaps unconsciously forcing a resolution by livestreaming an exorcism. He certainly had to be aware that this sort of thing would inevitably place Hying under pressure -- indeed, it would probably do the same with Morlino had he lived to that point.

What I've learned about the Church since becoming Catholic is that the Church is an organic whole, and a great deal of its function is based on various kinds of authority. Zuhlsdorf, as far as I can see, is promoting a view that doesn't encourage Church unity, and his most recent actions seem almost deliberately intended to provoke authority. The link to the National Catholic Reporter above quotes him:

"The near future right now looks pretty grim, in the secular realm and in the Church. The battle is coming. Trotsky said that you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you," he wrote on Jan. 15.

But I'm not sure what he and his story bring to the current crisis, which has little to do with Latin masses and much more to do with the nature and limits of secular, not religious, authority.

The 1984 Apple Super Bowl Commercial: How Things Have Changed

In 1984, Apple was Apple, and the Super Bowl was the Super Bowl. Steve Jobs ran the commercial to introduce the Mac, and the Super Bowl was the place to introduce it. The theme of the ad was that the Mac would show how 1984 wouldn't be like 1984. How things have changed. Just for starters, the female hammer thrower in the ad would mow have to be a transsexual guy, just to show how woke Apple is.

But I have no reason to think ratings for this year's Super Bowl won't continue to reflect declining interest in the game, what with narcissistic, ultra-privileged, multimillionaire players taking a knee during the anthem mostly just to insult the fans for being racists.

Beyond that, Apple's changed. Jobs launched the Think Different campaign in 1997, a generation ago. "[H]e claimed specifically that 'you always had to be a little different to buy an Apple computer.'" Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if Apple still even sells computers. It sells phones with computers in them, but the product now is simply mass market music and entertainment. Nobody buys Apple to think different.

In fact, Apple's now Big Tech. It participates in cancel culture, dropping products like Parler from its app store if in fact they do anything actually to encourage such a trend as thinking different. Jobs's widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is described by Wikipedia as

an American billionaire heiress, businesswoman, executive and the founder of Emerson Collective, an organization that, among other investing and philanthropic activities, advocates for policies concerning education reform, social redistribution and environmental conservation.

This lady does anything but think different, and in fact she wants everyone else to think just like her.

And the Super Bowl has been changing for some time. Back in 2001 -- with Think Different, this was a generation ago -- Snopes.com had to debunk a claim from 1993 that Super Bowl Sunday was the biggest day of the year for spousal abuse.

The claim that Super Bowl Sunday is “the biggest day of the year for violence against women” is a case study of how easily an idea congruous with what people want to believe can be implanted in the public consciousness and anointed as “fact” even when there is little or no supporting evidence behind it.

But that this would be such a credible fantasy suggests that the Super Bowl played a much greater role in the national consciousness than it does now. I think it's related in a peculair way to the current hysterical notion that Super Bowl parties could become COVID superspreader events, with the CDC issuing detailed guidelines for parties to prevent such n occurrence,

Except that I don't believe anyone has, ever, identified any single COVID superspreader event, despite clains that anything from choir practice to Trump rallies to Thanksgiving dinners could be such. But LA County is convinced that if restaurants allow TVs to broadcast the game, everyone'll start cheering and spewing droplets.

This is, in many ways, an indication of how much has changed, and how far out of touch our elites have become. c