As Roosevelt Was To Polio, Biden Is To COVID

I came up with that a few days ago, but little did I realize how quickly events would reinforce the perception:

President Joe Biden announced Saturday that he would return to isolation after testing positive again for coronavirus.

“Folks, today I tested positive for COVID again,” Biden wrote on social media Saturday afternoon.

. . . The president’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, said in a letter to the public the reoccurrence of the virus was “rebound COVID,” something that takes place with some patients treated with PAXLOVID.

Think about the manifold ramifications that emanate from this succinct announcement. First, the big guy has been fully vaxxed, and his masking, if not fully consistent, has been in general supererogatory. Second, a week ago, I quoted Dr Birx, who if not the pope of COVID is at least an influential cardinal:

So that's why I'm saying even if you're vaccinated and boosted, if you're unvaccinated right now, the key is testing and Paxlovid. It's effective. It's a great antiviral.

Except that this was in the context of how the vaccines don't work, but now the sure thing, the key, is Paxlovid. It's effective. It's a great antiviral. Except if you give it to the President of the Unitred States, well, er, you might get a rebound effect, which takes place with some patients. Sure helps build the credibility of the public health authorities, huh?

Third, let's recall that two years ago, the COVID panic-hype had many people believing that a positive test was practially a death sentence. The authorities were reassuring those who were flooding the emergency rooms over positive tests that actually a positive test didn't mean a whole lot, they should only go to the ER if they were having trouble breathing and stuff. This fussing over a mere positive test is an aftershock of that panic, which was cynically generated for clickbait and to increase the screen time of the anointed talking heads.

In fact, this episode exposes the dishonesty of the public health establishment at the start of the pandemic, when contrary to past practice, they equated "positive test" with "case", when in the past, a "case" (as in the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic) was a person who had been hospitalized with symptoms. This inflated the perceived prevalence of the disease, which had the short-term effect of spreading panic, but over the longer term created an underlying sense that the Birxes and Faucis were lying to us.

Two years ago, if the president tested positive, they'd have been figuratively dusting off the bier so he could lie in state, though probably in a lead coffin. That Trump could catch the 'rona and recover only months later had a deeply reassuring effect. Now, Brandon's second positive test is a trivial event worthy of a trivial guy.

Next, that Biden should effectively return to the basement studio of COVID quarantine is just another reminder of how he won the 2020 campaign and the persistent sense that something was hinky about that whole exercise. It simply allows Trump, who is gradually returning to public discourse, to repeat a probably counterfactual but figuratively resonant claim that the election was "stolen". Biden apparently will have no strategy to counter this beyond renewed retreat to his Delaware basement.

This is why we seem to be feeling a need for more optimistic, confident leadership. President Zelensky is to the current European crisis as Victor Laszlo was to Casablanca, a thoroughly commendable fellow, but in the background and not really what we need to solve the bigger problem. Victor Laszlo was actually a problem Major Strasser should have been able to deal with but couldn't quite manage. The West needed someone more like Roosevelt to solve the bigger problem.

Let's face it, Joe Biden can't even solve COVID. The real problems now are Russia and China. Going forward, this isn't going to work.

"People Eat More Protein Than They Need To"

A couple of stories at the aggregators this morning reminded me that they don't just want us to drive electric cars. In Scientific American ,

In the U.S., people eat more protein than they need to. And though it might not be bad for human health, this excess does pose a problem for the country’s waterways. The nation’s wastewater is laden with the leftovers from protein digestion: nitrogen compounds that can feed toxic algal blooms and pollute the air and drinking water. This source of nitrogen pollution even rivals that from fertilizers washed off of fields growing food crops, new research suggests.

Well, they sure know about nitrogen pollution in the Netherlands and the EU, huh?

Dutch government proposals for tackling nitrogen emissions indicate a radical cut in livestock - they estimate 11,200 farms will have to close and another 17,600 farmers will have to significantly reduce their livestock.

Other proposals include a reduction in intensive farming and the conversion to sustainable "green farms".

As such, the relocation or buyout of farmers is almost inevitable, but forced buyouts are a scenario many hope to avoid.

Inevitably,

Dutch farmers dumped manure and set fire hay on fire along major highways Wednesday, prompting traffic jams in central and eastern parts of the Netherlands, in protest over government plans to reduce fertilizer use and livestock numbers.

Wait a moment. Ukraine has applied to join the EU, and the EU apparently views this favorably and is expediting the application. But isn't Ukraine's agriculture the key to avoiding a global food crisis?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, now in its fourth month, is preventing grain from leaving the "breadbasket of the world" and making food more expensive across the globe.

Russian forces' blockade of Ukrainian ports, destruction and alleged theft of the country's grains and agricultural machinery, and shells and mines now strewn across its fields are threatening to worsen shortages, hunger and political instability in developing countries.

So the EU thinks the Netherlands has too many farms, but not that far away, if the world doesn't get enough Ukrainian farm products, there's going to be a crisis. What will happen when the Russians are inevitably kicked out of Ukraine, and Ukraine is in the EU. Is the EU going to reduce the number of Ukrainian farms? How's that all going to work?

Meanwhile, in California,

It appears that the “Climate Change Mitigation Strategist” on the California State Water Resources Control Board has stepped down, making a splash with a resignation letter that blames Governor Gavin Newsom and his administration, as well as his own colleagues, for California’s inability to manage its climate crisis.

In his resignation letter, he says,

Sadly, this state is not on a path towards steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, massive construction to alleviate the housing crisis, quickly and permanently reducing agriculture to manage the loss of water to aridification, and reducing law enforcement and carceral budgets and reallocating resources to programs that actually increase public health and safety.

"Quickly and parmanently reducing agriculture" is part of the whole progressive-reset agenda that hasn't had much attention, but it's there. And California is the top US state in agricultural revenue, 11.63 percent of the total. Exactly what these people intend to do with the people who work directly on farms, sell to farmers, transport farm products, and provide other support, is unclear -- but the same people would also like to eliminate another key part of the California economy, oil and natural gas.

California's natural gas and oil industry supported 1,059,000 total jobs across the state’s economy in 2019. California ranked among the highest states for the percentage of total economic contributions by the natural gas and oil industry, generating $199.3 billion toward the state’s gross domestic product—including $94.4 billion added to total labor income.

If Newsom has been dragging his feet on this agenda, that's certainly good news. The problem overall is that the philosopher-king wannabes have an overall agenda that at least in its end state proposes drastic reductions in the world standard of living, only decades after market and commercial progress succeeded in raising that standard and putting billions of people into a relatively prosperous new middle class.

I've only started to try to get my head around this.

Apparently Only So Far

I remember people claiming back in the initial days of COVID lockdowns that stay-at-home orders weren't so much intended as a public health measure but were actually a dry run to see how well they'd work for climate change "emergencies". But if you think about it, climate change is simply a cat's paw for something else as well, just as COVID has been. The real question is whether, irrespective of the specific excuse, the unelected administrative state can impose supralegal measures on the population at large.

After more than two years of COVID controls, the answer appears to be only so far. As I noted on Wednesday, LA County was considering reimposing an indoor mask mandate, but it appears that strong behind-the-scenes opposition has headed this off:

Los Angeles County will not be reimposing an indoor mask mandate for now after COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations appear to be trending downward, and the region may soon move back into the “medium” community level of virus spread, officials announced Thursday.

. . . The county entered the high level on July 14, prompting County Health Director Barbara Ferrer to warn the public about a possible indoor mask mandate being issued to slow the spread.

And while L.A. County remains in the “high” community level based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s indicator, Ferrer said local officials will wait to further analyze data based on its own, more current, metrics.

“Since most of our local data trends have just begun to decline, we decided to take a closer look at the hospital admissions rate using our own data … so that we can get a more precise sense of where we might be headed,” Ferrer said Thursday.

Wait a moment. Up to now, CDC data had been the gold standard. If the CDC says it's true, it's true. This was the basis for Gov Newsom's red light-green light routine throughout 2021, for instance. Nobody claimed they needed to "further analyze data" back in 2021. Back then, if the CDC said you were widespread, you were widespread, and indoor businesses were shut. Now, well, we need to study things more. Maybe it'll get better by itself, let's not overdo things here. At the same link,

The threat of returning to the mandate stirred up controversy. Several cities, including Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Long Beach, and most recently El Segundo, had announced this week they would not enforce any mandate.

Additionally, two [of five] members of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors had indicated they opposed the reinstating of a the region-wide mask mandate.

In an open letter, Supervisor Kathryn Barger said “masking mandates lack empirical evidence to back their effectiveness, are unenforceable, polarizing, and take a huge toll on the social-emotional well-being of children and youth.”

It appears there was a massive back-channel campaign against restoring the mandate, given Supervsior Kuehl's remark about the "snowflake weepies" who were opposing it. Sounds like the snowflake weepies won the day, and I would guess the supervisors put a lot of pressure on "Dr" Ferrer to decide she needed to look more closely at the data before they themselves would be pressured to vote against reimposing the mandate, which would likely put Ferrer's own job at risk.

In other news,

Fox News host Tucker Carlson jokingly announced plans to rename monkeypox 'schlong COVID' after a woke official deemed the existing moniker racist.

Carlson announced the results of a Twitter poll on his Fox News show Thursday night, saying: 'So, monkeypox is about the coolest name ever for a disease.

'But they are changing the name because racism or something.'

'So, we had a vote,' Carlson then said: 'There was no ballot harvesting. You can trust our counting. And the new name for monkeypox is now officially – and we’re declaring it – schlong COVID. That won our audience election result with about 40% of the vote. So, let Rochelle Walensky at the CDC know.'

Public health authorities need to be thinking about the implications if their deliberations begin to be the topic of late-night humor. I think even Drs Birx and Fauci had begun to recognize people were fed up, and the political authorities in deep-blue LA very reluctantly realized it was time to shorten "Dr" Ferrer's leash. At some point, the same authorities need to recognize that they went just a bit too far with COVID, and the current self-parody with monkeypox is threatening long term damage to their credibility.

Australian Ordinariate To Receive A "Visit"

On Sunday and Monday, I posted on Pope Francis moving Opus Dei from the supervision of the Vatican Dicastery for Bishops to the Dicastery for the Clergy, with commentary from a knowledgeable reader on how this reflects on the Vatican's overall interest in accountability. One issue arising from this move is the suspicion among Catholic traditionalists that Pope Francis opposes conservative movements in the Church, although my own view as a convert to Catholicism is that if for no other reason, it would be silly to become a Catholic on one hand while on the other insisting that the pope has things all wrong. Catholics current or potential have lots of options available that don't carry that contradiction, including any number that might potentially ease their consciences by claiming to be Catholic in some way or another.

In any case, another Vatican move in recent days will stir this pot again. One of my last posts on the old blog covered a notice from the Australian ordinary that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican dicastery that supervises the Anglican ordinariates, had becomed concerned about the viability of the Australian ordinariate, the smallest and shakiest of the three erected under Anglicanorum coetibus. This concern was reflected in a January 21, 2021 letter from Msgr Reid that I attached to that post, which set particular conditions that would need to be met by January of this year; if they weren't fulfilled, the dicastery would send a letter to the Australian Catholic Bishops Council "asking counsel regarding the future" of the Australian ordinariate.

A visitor has sent me an update on this situation:

It was later explained that this deadline had been extended owing to COVID but now it appears that there will be follow-up (see letter below). Commenters on Facebook are treating this as part of Pope Francis’s alleged crackdown on traditionalists but in that case, of course, the OOLSC [Australian ordinariate] would not be the only Ordinariate subjected to a visit and a Visitor so obviously sympathetic to the project as Bp Lopes would not have been chosen. There has been no official update on communities’ compliance or otherwise with Msgr Reid’s original directive, but scattered comments from OOLSC members on Facebook seem to indicate that nothing has changed, financially or demographically.

Here is the letter (click on the image for a larger copy):

The original deadlines set in the January 2021 notice were meant to be met by January of this year, but presumably in light of COVID and the particularly stringent controls imposed in Australia, the threatened letter asking counsel regarding the future of the ordinariate from the ACBC has apparently been deferred. Nevertheless, there will now be a Visitor Apostolic to review the situation. The Visitor appointed is Bp Steven Lopes, the ordinary of the North American ordinariate, which is the largest and most successful of the three, but that is only in relative terms. He will be joined by two others whose identities are yet to be announced, and the visitation schedule is also yet to be announced.

For that matter, what it will decide, and how the decision will be made, remain completely obscure.

The visitor also forwarded a screen shot of typical social media commentary on this development (click on the image for a larger copy):

I spent nearly ten years running a blog that covered the history and progress of Anglicanorum coetibus, and I stopped it in some measure because I concluded the whole question had never reached the level of importance where it was worth my time. This suggests to me that even the Vatican is beginning to ask this question. I think the Australian ordinariate is only the weakest link, and eventually this question is going to be raised over the whole effort.

It's a big mistake to attribute this to animosity from Francis.

In LA, The Masks Come Off Over Masking

California, or at least part of it, has been seeing a resurgence of bien pensant opinion that we should be wearing masks, even though Drs Birx and Fauci have been publicly backing off their own previous endorsement of COVID measures. Contra Costa County, which includes both Oakland and Berkeley as well as very tony suburbs, tried to reimpose a mandatory indoor mask rule in June but dropped it after a few weeks. Los Angeles County has been threatening the same for two months now, but pressure against it has been building.

Lame duck LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, who represents the uber-wealthy West Side and Hollywood Hills, had this to say about the growing opposition to a renewed mask mandate:

"I'm particularly struck by the blowback from a number, though not a really significant number of sort of, 'snowflake weepies' about how oppressive it is to wear a mask."

Kuehl has previously been a supporter of COVID restrictions that have been among the strictest in the US. In December 2020, demonstrators surrounded her home in Santa Monica when she voted to ban outdoor dining at restaurants but promptly went out the same evening to dine at an outdoor restaurant:

LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, who represents Santa Monica, ate at a local restaurant just hours after voting to ban outdoor dining and saying doing so is “probably more dangerous in terms of contagion than any other kind of business.”

On Tuesday, November, 24 Kuehl along with two other Supervisors voted to suspend outdoor dining for three weeks in Los Angeles County due to rising COVID-19 cases. The ban passed with a 3-2 vote.

“Outdoor dining is probably more dangerous in terms of contagion than any other kind of business,” Kuehl, a Santa Monica resident, said at the Tuesday meeting. “The servers are not protected from us, and they’re not protected from their other tables that they’re serving at that particular time, plus all the hours in which they’re working.”

That evening, however, Kuehl ate outside at Santa Monica restaurant Il Forno, as confirmed by Barbara Osborn, Director of Communications for the Supervisor.

If it's as dangerous as she claimed, why on earth did she risk her health and her life to do it one last time? In any case, she was first elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2014 and had been subject to a three-term limit, which would hsve ended in 2026. It is not entirely clear why she announced last month that she would not run for reelection in 2022, although she is currently 81, but her positions on COVID, as well as her public conflicts with County Sheriff Villanueva on homeless encampments, may also have convinced her that reelection might not be a sure thing. Oddly, there has been no serious coverage of her decision.

Previous restrictions have not played well in the county, and although there's an existing mask mandate on transit, neither Amtrak nor the Metrolink commuter rail agency has enforced it since the spring. In addition,

The local governments in several cities in Los Angeles County, including Beverly Hills, Manhattan Beach and Long Beach, have already said that they would defy a county mandate on masks, reports NBC Los Angeles.

Additionally, neighboring Orange County's Healthcare Agency said in a statement that the would not be implementing a mask mandate.

My guess is that a substantial part of the population anywhere in the US is simply done with COVID and recognizes that masks are, and have been throughout, useless in controlling the pandemic. Nevertheless, even without a mandate, my estimate is that roughly half of those who attend Sunday mass wear them, and a remarkable number still wear them on the street. If LA County or any other jurisdiction is serious about limiting transmission, they should take Dr Fauci's advice and require everyone to wear N95 masks, properly fitted.

And of course, if they're in a restaurant, they should remove the N95 only briefly when they take a bite and quickly replace it while they chew. But as Supervisor Kuehl has already pointed out, even this is highly dangerous.

The fact is that nobody, starting with Supervisor Kuehl, actually takes any of this seriously. On one hand, it's kabuki. On the other, it's a sign of assent. As with Darth Vader, it shows you take orders. The wealthiest seem to want things back like they were in 2020.

The Politicization Of Public Health Continues Notwithstanding

For proof that the official response of the public health establishment to COVID was a debacle, we need to look no farther than the fact that states like Florida and Texas that didn't enforce lockdowns, masking, and other controls had statistical results no worse than those that imposed the strictest ones. Even the most visible spokespeople for such controls, Drs Birx and Fauci, have recently been backing off the recommendations they issued in 2020 and 2021, maintaining they never said vaccines prevented transmission and, now, masks didn't work because everyone wasn't wearing the right ones.

So why didn't Dr Birx say vaccines didn't prevent transmission back then, or why didn't Dr Fauci tell everyone to get an N95 mask right off the bat? They're implying that things would have gone better if they'd been honest back then -- so why did they fudge things and make the pandemic worse? And of course, they're backtracking now because they recognize that if they're right, in failing to do so then, they damaged the credibility of their colleagues and their institutions for the next public health emergency.

But as far as I can see, nobody's learned a thing. They're following the discredited COVID playbook with Monkeypox:

Despite a WHO panel not having consensus on labeling the sickness a global health emergency, WHO leader Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus directed the organization to declare it a “public health emergency of international concern.”

“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission, about which we understand too little, and which meets the criteria” Tedros told the press.

The disease, which primarily spreads among men who have sex with men, joins both COVID and polio as the other diseases designated as international emergencies by the global health organization.

COVID and polio, of course, affected the population at large, and both could be fatal, while polio could also be massively disabling if it didn't kill people. But according to NBC News,

No one has died of monkeypox infection outside of Africa during this outbreak. And for many people, the disease is relatively mild and resolves on its own in a few weeks without any need for medical intervention.

And of course, people outside one particular demographic have almost no chance of contracting it. At the same link,

Now infectious disease specialists are developing an increasingly refined understanding of the predominant conduits of monkeypox transmission, as well as the typical disease course patterns.

“These data point clearly to the fact that infections are so far almost exclusively occurring among men who have sex with men,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, of the new study, which was published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. “And the clinical presentation of these infections suggest that sexual transmission, not just close physical contact, may be helping spread the virus among this population.”

Even those who aren't gay adult males apparently contract it because they're in the same household. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Two children have tested positive for monkeypox in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed Friday.

One is a toddler from California; the other is in an infant who is not a U.S. resident and was 'transiting through' Washington D.C. Neither had contact with each other.

. . . It is thought both children likely caught the virus from 'household contacts'.

Dr Rochelle Walensky said the children both had contact with gay or bisexual men — the community where most cases are being detected in the current outbreak.

But the WHO isn't backing down:

World Health Organization (W.H.O.) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus took the “unprecedented” measure this weekend of ignoring the agency’s special advisory committee to declare the spread of monkeypox a “public health emergency of international concern” – despite his lack of medical background and his own admission that the risk of it spreading was “moderate” at worst.

. . . Concerns regarding Tedros’ actions on monkeypox posit the opposite problem – that he overreacted to a situation, even as the medical experts tasked with assessing the risk did not believe it merited the label of public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).

. . . “Stigma and discrimination can be as dangerous as any virus,” Tedros declared. He added that the fact that the disease was not spreading widely among a generalized population did not diminish the PHEIC, but rather meant “that this is an outbreak that can be stopped with the right strategies in the right groups.”

So, what are the right strategies in the right groups? Oddly, this isn't clear -- the group for which the right strategies would apply is clearly identifiable, but, well, if we identify them, we'll increase stigma and discrimination or something. This is the conundrum, which is entirely political:

During the China Flu pandemic, we were shamed for leaving our homes, going to the beach, opening schools, gathering to worship God, standing together, hugging, attending funerals, visiting nursing homes, allowing a mask to slip under our nose, and showing up at a political rally that didn’t involve burning and looting (because health officials assured us burning and looting do not spread the virus).

During the coronavirus pandemic, and for two whole years, every facet of normal life was condemned as the equivalent of committing mass murder.

. . . Now there’s monkeypox. . . [ellipsis in quote]

But there’s no behavior-shaming…

Even though, according to what we now know. . . [ellipsis in quote]

Gay sex is the chief spreader of monkeypox.

. . . If the government had a single standard when it comes to spreading a virus, gay bars and bathhouses would be shuttered, police would be knocking on doors to break up gay sex parties, the media would celebrate a costumed Specter of Death walking through gay neighborhoods, gay men would be told to stay home, and any gay gathering would be smeared across the media as a selfish superspreader event attended by serial killers.

But that’s not happening, and it shouldn’t happen, but that’s what happened for two years to those of us who are not among the left’s protected class.

I think the point here is that Monkeypox is mostly the occasion of public-discourse kabuki: there will be the usual denunciation of stigma and discrimination, but as with AIDS, even closing bath houses will be a tough call if it's ever made at all -- and unlike Monkeypox, AIDS killed people. The subtext will continue to be that gays are a special protected class, and that's about it. Nobody's gonna demand that gays wear not only condoms but hazmat suits during sex, but if Dr Fauci has his way, the rest of us will be back not just to masks but N95 masks.

People aren't stupid, and they see pretty clearly what's going on. Dr Birx at least had the sense to skedaddle as soon as she was caught celebrating a normal Thanksgiving with her family. Dr Fauci is playing the odds that the public health establishment won't need to fight a real epidemic with its credibility badly damaged, at least during his lifetime. For that matter, the odds are that Dr Walensky will be fired before that happens, too. But that's the game they're all playing.

Let the next generation fix the problem they've created. .

A Visitor Clarifies Pope Francis's Move On Opus Dei

As I hoped might happen, a visitor with more knowledge than I have of Opus Dei e-mailed me to provide additional context on his apostolic letter Ad Charisma Tuendum:

This is mostly a canonical move that puts OD under the dicastery of clergy rather than under that of bishops. Under the bishops, OD wanted to be treated as its own diocese---just as a diocesan bishop makes an ad limina visit to the pope every 5 years, so did the prelate of OD. Now OD will give a yearly accounting of its activities (& not to the pope). Also, OD has to put together a constitution which OD has avoided all these years. OD has operated under its statutes in the public arena but behind closed doors the "members' of OD have been trapped by one instruction after another. (Interestingly, there seems to be no verification of when the statutes were approved by Rome, if they were.)

There has been confusion about the 'members' of OD. As the code is written now, only clergy are members of OD, but it very apparent with this letter that ONLY clergy are members. OD has been able to cloud that distinction by pointing to its position in the hierarchical structure of the Church---kinda like it's a worldwide diocese. One of the consequences of that distinction has allowed OD directors to tell those who wanted to leave OD that they only way they could do so without incurring mortal sin was to be released from their contract by the prelate. (ODers don't take vows or make promises; they have a contract with OD. Contracts are not a part of religious or diocesan life so it's a curiosity that's been allowed. Hopefully, this new letter will clear things up for those on the outside, as well as, for those on the inside.)

I don't know if you've seen some of the concerns being voiced by those attached to the Tridentine Mass. They're afraid this is one more way Francis is going to keep them from perpetuating the rite they feel they have a right to. This takes away any possibility of orders like the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter to continue its ability to exclusively say the TM. There is a lot of conspiracy surrounding this letter. (Francis has been clear for a while that he would like to see the Church united in the Mass of Vatican 2. Best of luck to him. I'm afraid his stand is making the TMers more intransigent.)

I don't know if you've heard this take on the letter, but I saw it mentioned in an article. Some who are affiliated with the ordinariate are fearful that Francis is coming for them next. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around people who want to be Catholic but want to keep their former litugrical practices. How would it be if an entire Calvary Chapel decided to convert & wanted to keep their worship as it was but just insert the consecration somewhere? (I know the Anglican rite isn't like that: it's just for absurd comparison.) Probably the saddest reality for the ordinariate is the amount of disaffected Catholics who have wandered (or run) to an ordinariate parish because they don't want to deal with their local parish....liturgical abuses or not.

So broadly, there are two issues here. One deals with the legal basis of Opus Dei practices, especially those which have been characterized as "cult-like". Over the medium-to-long term, it looks like Opus Dei will need to provide a more transparent, legal, and constitiutional basis for its activities, which strikes me as a justifiable move. The second issue applies to Catholic "restorationists" or "pre-Conciliarists", who tend to interpret any move Francis makes as detrimental to their interests.

I think the visitor is correct that this is a canonical move related to the unique standing of Opus Dei as a personal prelature and directed toward placing it on a more solid constitutional foundation subject to review and accountability. Francis has issued separate policies related to the Latin mass, and other than his stated overriding goal of preserving the Second Council, there is no relationship between the two moves. (I can't disagree with Bp Barron's point that you can't get a higher Catholic authority than an ecumenical council.)

As I pointed out yesterday, Opus Dei and the Anglican ordinariates are juridically different animals, and insofar as the military ordinariates are on a canonically more solid foundation, so are the Anglican ordinariates. The threat against the Anglican ordinariates is primarily one of failed execution. The first generation of mostly married former Anglican clergy who were grandfathered in via instant ordinations has begun to retire, but there's been no second wave of celibate candidates in formation sufficient to replace them.

Our diocesan parish for some years has had a number of the archdiocese's vocation staff in residence, and this has given me an opportunity to learn a little about how the process works in a successful diocese. Vocations come from supportive, actively Catholic families and sympathetic parishes. Candidates are normally formed throughout adolescence by parish clergy and diocesan vocation staff even before they enter seminary. (There are exceptions, but they're exceptions.)

The Anglican ordinariates aren't necessarily made up of those families, and especially if the groups attract mainly the disgruntled, they aren't those sorts of parishes. And that leaves out the need for full-time diocesan vocation staff. If for no other reason, I don't see much of a future for Anglicanorum coetibis, notwithstanding the posture of the current pontiff or his successors. Opus Dei has nothing to do with this.

Pope Francis And Opus Dei

As a Catholic covert, my views on Pope Francis are inevitably affected by our parish clergy, who as positive role models tend to disfavor sin and favor the Holy Father. They frequently cite unnoticed but productive remarks by the current pontiff in bulletins and homilies. Thus I'm reluctant to join the usual chorus of "ain't it awful" from other Catholics over this or that policy change, and that includes the most recent apostolic letter Ad Charisma Tuendum issued Friday. As someone with no particular insight into the Vatican political winds, I can't say much about what it means other than to quote the Catholic News Service:

Saying he wanted to highlight the spiritual gifts of Opus Dei and its contributions to the Catholic Church's evangelizing activities, Pope Francis said it will now work with and answer to the Dicastery for Clergy, rather than the Dicastery for Bishops. . . . Francis also said the head of the personal prelature of Opus Dei "will not be made, nor will he be able to be made" a bishop.

Msgr. Fernando Ocáriz, who was elected prelate of Opus Dei and approved by Francis in 2017, said that while the first two prelates of Opus Dei were bishops, "the episcopal ordination of the prelate was not and is not necessary for the guidance of Opus Dei."

Francis said his decision was meant "to strengthen the conviction that, for the protection of the particular gift of the Spirit, a form of government based more on charism than on hierarchical authority is needed."

. . . Francis noted that his new constitution on the Roman Curia gives the Dicastery for Clergy responsibility for relations with personal prelatures, "of which the only one so far erected is that of Opus Dei."

Opus Dei is a highly controversial topic. In my old blog on Anglicanorum coetibus, I had occasion to look into the early career of Cardinal Bernard Law, who during his years as a Harvard undergraduate in the late 1940s was associated with an early Opus Dei group. Although his subsequent rise in the US Church was via the conventional diocesan path, he remained close to his Harvard schoolmate William Stetson, also a member of that group, who became an Opus Dei priest and some type of regional authority in the prelature, although its specific organizational details are at best obscure.

Cardinal Law's earlier career paralleled the rise of Opus Dei, and it's hard to think he didn't have some involvement in its establishment as a personal prelature, especially considering his relationship with Stetson. At the same time Opus Dei became a personal prelature, Law was also working behind the scenes with dissident Episcopalian clergy to establish what he hoped would become another personal prelature, this one for dissident Anglicans/Episcopalians who wished to become Catholic. As I wrote in 2020,

Law, an extremely ambitious man whom I've heard intended to succeed John Paul II as pontiff had it not been that John Paul outlived Law's expectations, was an opportunist and may have hoped that an Anglican personal prelature could in some way leverage his rise in the Church.

As it played out, a special provision for disgruntled Anglicans did finally emerge in the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus of 4 November 2009 under Pope Benedict XVI. However, it was as a personal ordinariate, rather than a personal prelature. According to a Vatican document clarifying the status of the personal ordinariates,

just as the Military Ordinariates are described in the Apostolic Constitution Spirituali militum cura as specific ecclesiastical jurisdictions which are similar to dioceses (Ap. Cons. I § 1), so also the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus describes Personal Ordinariates for the faithful coming from Anglicanism as juridically similar to dioceses (Ap. Cons. I § 3).

. . . . Nor can these Personal Ordinariates been considered as Personal Prelatures since, according to can. 294, Personal Prelatures are composed of secular priests and deacons and, according to can. 296, lay people may simply dedicate themselves to the apostolic works of Personal Prelatures by way of agreements. Members of Institutes of Consecrated Life or of Societies of Apostolic Life are not even mentioned in the canons concerning Personal Prelatures.

The Ordinariates for the faithful coming from Anglicanism are therefore personal structures in as much as the jurisdiction of the Ordinary, and consequently also of parish priests, is not geographically defined within the territory of an Episcopal Conference like a particular territorial Church, but is exercised “over all who belong to the Ordinariate” (Ap. Cons. V).

As I said above, Opus Dei is highly controversial. Visitors to my former blog sometimes urged that I take on Opus Dei as well as the Anglican ordinariates, but, other than being briefly acquainted with the late Msgr Stetson in connection with Anglicanorum coetibus, I never had direct experience with Opus Dei. In addition, Los Angeles Abp José Gómez, a highly successful and respected figure in the US Church, rose via Opus Dei, and I have no disagreement with him.

Nevertheless, a web search brings up numerous links to sites and news accounts that accuse Opus Dei of cult-like practices. Whether Francis's intent in moving Opus Dei under the supervision of the Dicastery for Clergy might be to promote reforms that could minimize such controversy is a matter beyond my competence. It's also beyond my competence to say whether this move could reflect any disposition by the Holy Father to modify the current structure of the Anglican ordinariates, although these have proven to be a disappointment at best -- but they're juridically different from Opus Dei.

"I Knew These Vaccines Were Not Going To protect Against Infection."

Fox ran a remarkable interview with Dr Deborah Birx yesterday evening:

DR. BIRX: I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines, and it made people then worry that it's not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization. It will. But let's be very clear: 50% of the people who died from the Omicron surge were older, vaccinated. So that's why I'm saying even if you're vaccinated and boosted, if you're unvaccinated right now, the key is testing and Paxlovid. It's effective. It's a great antiviral.

Wait a moment. Wasn't it just this past January that the US Supreme Court blocked an OSHA order requiring 80 million workers to be vaccinated or lose their jobs? Haven't the US armed forces still been firing service members who don't get vaxxed, except that it's become abundantly clear that the vax doesn't work? But now Dr Birx says she knew about that all along.

And it turns out that the newest vademecum isn't to vax at all, it's something called Paxlovid. It's effective. It's a great antiviral. Well then. That'll sure work, huh? In fact, they're giving it to President Brandon as he powers through his 8+ hour workdays with the virus. By the way, how's he doing?

On Thursday, the White House announced that Biden had come down with COVID, and they gave out some information. The White House tried to stifle any questions about where Biden might have gotten the virus from, claiming that wasn’t important, even though one has to consider it for things like contact tracing and who he might have been in contact with. On top of that, what was very abnormal was that we weren’t hearing from Joe Biden’s doctor, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the person who is treating him.

Instead, they trotted out White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus coordinator, neither of whom is treating Joe Biden. Even the perpetually incurious, liberal White House media found this odd and asked why they were having to play “telephone” to get any information that was being fed through the White House. Why wasn’t the doctor speaking about Biden’s condition?

. . . Jean-Pierre shared that Biden said he was still working more than eight hours a day. . . . in the two days before his trip to Massachusetts earlier this week, he had nothing on his public schedule and the White House couldn’t give any real explanation for that other than to say that “he was in meetings.” Uh-huh. Given that he later came down with COVID, I wonder if he wasn’t feeling well at that point. But because they’re not straight with us, it’s harder to get at the truth.

Another story goes farther:

What is the Biden team trying to hide?

If Joe Biden has COVID, he should be doing all he can to rest and recover. Instead, his team is trying to convince us that everything is normal; they said he’s working an eight-hour day. Heck, I don’t think he worked an eight-hour day when he was well.

But he should be taking it easy and not working when he’s sick; he’s 79 years old. But they had him sitting up in a suit for a remote meeting and quite frankly, to me — who has been covering him for a while and is used to how he normally looks — he looked awful.

He looks like he’s not well, and out of it, not absorbing anything that’s being said; his eyes just have sort of a vacant look.

What's so unusual about that? But there's more. Vice President Harris joined in trhe comedy:

[E]very once in a while not even their minders can explain away something their bosses said and/or did, which brings me to the appearance Harris made Friday at the National Urban League annual conference.

As we previously reported, one of the first things Harris did when she walked onto the stage was to take her mask off and hug Birmingham, Alabama Mayor Randall Woodfin, who was also maskless.

The problem with this is that Biden, as we all know, has COVID, and Harris is considered a “close contact” of Biden’s. Because of that, she is supposed to be masked when she’s around other people per the CDC’s guidlines, you know, the ones we common folks are supposed to follow according to them.

. . . Refreshingly, during the Friday press briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Biden COVID Response Coordinator Ashish Jha were grilled by multiple reporters as to why Harris wasn’t masked when the CDC very clearly says that she should be. . . . At one point he got so desperate he tried to bow out by saying he really couldn’t comment on something he hadn’t personally seen. He even looked to Jean-Pierre for assistance but she ended up deferring right back to him because she couldn’t explain it, either[.]

Nobody in the loop takes any of this COVID stuff seriously. Exactly why it fell on Dr Birx to announce the vax didn't work as they claimed is a bit puzzling -- she's been out of the government for more than a year and is warming a seat in a well-paid sinecure. I suppose it if were Dr Fauci who let the cat out of the bag, there'd be demands that he quit or be fired, but Dr Birx is already out.

Nevertheless, the whole charade is wobbling to a stop.

COVID, Biden, And The Fuddy-Duddy Factor

The annoucement that the First Fuddy-Duddy has caught the 'rona was accompanied by wags on social media who reminded us that one of the symptoms is brain fog. The White House issued the photo above that looks like it was carefully composed to show that Brandon is hydrating properly. has his whole dysfunctional family in his thoughts, and, apparently, is even about to read some books. That in itself should show how phony the whole tableau is.

Contrast this with Franklin Roosevelt lending his prestige to finding a cure for polio via the March of Dimes, even though his administration normally kept the fact that he'd had the disease himself very quiet. A big problem for his successor is that he insisted throughout last year that if you're vaxxed and boosted, you can't catch COVID. So instead of being the champion of the cure, Brandon is the case in point that the health authorities have had it wrong throughout. Biden himself variously said duriing a July 22, 2021 town hall,

If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die. . . . You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

When challenged after the event, he said,

It may be possible, I know of none where they’re hospitalized, in ICU and or have passed away so at a minimum I can say even if they did contract it, which I’m sorry they did, it’s such a tiny percentage and it’s not life threatening.

So now, fully vaxxed and fully boosted, he's the poster boy for his own bloviation. Roosevelt was the man of fortitude and foresight, Biden is the man of fuddy-duddy and brain fog. Roosevelt is to polio as Biden is to COVID, which says a great deal about both Biden and COVID.

The problem goes beyond Biden, the problem is that the public health authorities have been losing prestige over their pronouncements that have been overtaken by events throughout the pandemic. The gradual recognition during 2022 that the vaccines and boosters now have no efficacy in preventing infections, while at the same time infections are less and less serious, vax or no, is only the most recent blow to the authorities' credibility. That began with "15 days to flatten the curve", after all.

"Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the Los Angeles County public health director, has been threatening to reimpose indoor masking for the last two months.

Mandatory indoor mask-wearing could return to Los Angeles County in a matter of weeks, possibly by the end of June, absent a downturn in the rate of new COVID-19 cases and virus-related hospitalizations, the county's public health director said Thursday.

But the end of June came and went with no new indoor masking order. And while she's been threatening to reimpose indoor masking at the end of this month now, she may be about to let this deadline pass as well:

Los Angeles Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer today gave Angelenos a ray of hope on the looming prospect of a universal countywide mask mandate next week.

While caveating her statement with “I think it’s highly likely we could stay in High” — meaning the CDC’s High community category — “should we start seeing steep declines in our [case] numbers next week, because we know hospitalizations are this lagging indicator, we are likely to want to take a pause on moving too quickly on indoor universal masking. Because if our cases start a steep decline, it’s likely that our hospitalizations will take a steep decline [two weeks later].”

. . . Earlier in the day, an alliance of Los Angeles County business groups today called on health officials to abandon plans for the mask mandate, saying the move would be “heavy-handed” and a burden on businesses that will be forced to enforce the rule.

It would, of course, be absurd for health officials to order indoor masking, only to see any justification for it disappear in a matter of weeks. Beyond that, it'd become more and more accepted that most masks are ineffective in stopping transmission, while each new COVID variant is more contagious but less dangerous. And whatever LA County does is unlikely to be emulated elsewhere, while states like Texas and Florida continue to show that masking has no effect on the disease.

The public health authorities are finding there are limits to crying wolf, and COVID is no longer sexy. That Biden would contract it this late in the game is the best possible indication of that.

Monkeypox Hype

It looks like we're back to the political conundrum of the early 1980s with the spread of AIDS. It was recognized that AIDS was a disease spread almost entirely through sexual contact, and beyond that, it was spread via promiscuous sexual contact among gay males. This reflected badly on gays, especially when the discussion focused on institutions like bath houses and unsanitary things that went on there. On the other hand, gays argued that if the government didn't make finding a cure and vaccines a priority, this discriminated against gays.

Thus there was a media-driven messsage that AIDS wasn't a gay disease, anyone could catch it, although the circumstances advanced to prove this were limited to cases like contaminated blood in transfusions. Nevertheless, I remember consternation at my then Episcopalian parish about whether it could be transmitted via the communion vessels. This sort of public hysteria advanced the interests of the gay lobby, but it also advanced the interest of the public health establishment in creating a more general attitude that epidemics should be the cause of panic.

So we move forward 40 years to Monkeypox, which is clearly being advanced in the media as the next big epidemic. Thus via CBS News:

Clinics that treat sexually transmitted diseases — already struggling to contain an explosive increase in infections such as syphilis and gonorrhea — now find themselves on the front lines in the nation’s fight to control the rapidly growing monkeypox outbreak.

After decades of underfunding and 2½ years into a pandemic that severely disrupted care, clinic staffers and public health officials say the clinics are ill-equipped for yet another epidemic.

“America does not have what it needs to adequately and totally fight monkeypox,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. “We are already stretched to capacity.”

Note the words "struggling . . . on the front lines in the nation's fight" blah blah blah. It's World War II! The whole nation is struggling! Dr Scott Gottlieb furthers the narrative on Face the Nation:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Give us a sense of the scale of this because the CDC numbers are out. They say they're only eight women within that. No children. You're saying this is a pandemic? That's not a word the administration is using yet, what level of emergency are we at?

DR. GOTTLIEB: Yeah look, and I think they're going to be reluctant to use the word pandemic, because it implies that they've failed to contain this. And I think at this point, we've failed to contain this. . . . I think the window for getting control of this and containing it probably has closed, and if it hasn't closed, it's certainly starting to close. 11,000 cases across the world right now. 1,800 cases, as you said, in the US. We're probably detecting just a fraction of the actual cases because we have a very, we had for a long time a very narrow case definition on who got tested. And by and large, we're looking in the community of men who have sex with men and STD clinics. So we're looking there, we're finding cases there. But it's a fact that there's cases outside that community right now. We're not picking them up, because we're not looking there. This has spread more broadly in the community. I wouldn't be surprised there's thousands of cases right now.

MARGARET BRENNAN: It's a little chilling to hear you say containment has failed. I've heard you say that before with COVID.

DR. GOTTLIEB: Well look, this isn't going to explode like COVID. This is a slower moving virus, which is why we could have gotten control of this if we had been more aggressive up front, and we made a lot of the same mistakes that we made with COVID with this - having a very narrow case definition not having enough testing early enough, not deploying vaccine in an aggressive fact- fashion to ring vaccinate. But now this is firmly embedded in the community.

So the narrative is being shaped -- it's already out of control. Well, maybe not as bad as COVID, but it's gonna be like COVID! We haven't been doing enough! It's probably too late! And of course, this isn't just gay men, it's just that we haven't tested enough straights and women! Just wait! It's embedded in the community!

Again, as with AIDS, two groups benefit from this narrative. The first is the public health establishment, which has benefited enormously in both funding and prestige from driving public policy in the COVID pandemic, and it would like to continue to do this. The second group is the gay lobby, which secures priority for public health spending on diseases that spread primarily among men who have promiscuous sex with men. This is done in some measure by making misleading claims about how such diseases aren't sexually transmitted, and that anyone can catch them.

Thus the reaction is predictable:

Demonstrators in San Francisco protested Monday against what they called the federal government’s “failure” to provide enough monkeypox vaccine to prevent the outbreak from becoming a major problem, particularly in the gay community.

The disease, which is transmitted through prolonged and intense physical contact, often results in a fever and in unsightly blisters. It is rarely fatal, but is uncomfortable and can last for several weeks.

. . . Demonstrators in San Francisco were concerned that the Biden administration had failed to provide enough vaccines to prevent the monkeypox virus from becoming endemic within the community, noting that a vaccine had been developed in 2019 but was then “ignored.”

Kabuki

In Politico yesterday,

White House officials plotting the administration’s post-Roe response are weighing a narrow public health directive aimed at safeguarding nationwide access to abortion pills, three people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.

The Biden team has zeroed in on that authority in recent days. They consider it the most feasible of the White House’s limited options for protecting abortion rights, and have concluded that it could have the most immediate on-the-ground impact while also quelling Democrats’ demands for stronger action.

In addition to trying to circumvent the Dobbs decision with an abortion public health emergency, there's also been an idea of circumventing Sen Manchin's rejection of the Green New Deal by declaring a climate emergency:

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that President Biden won’t declare a climate emergency this week, but that doesn’t mean he won’t do it eventually.

“He’s going to take, as I said, additional climate actions in that vein tomorrow, and he’s going to continue — he’s not going to just stop with the actions of tomorrow, but I would not plan [an] announcement this week on [a] national climate emergency,” Jean-Pierre told reporters during a press briefing.

“Everything’s on the table. It’s just not going to be this week on that decision,” she added.

But here's the problem:

Sometimes, the media presses and asks some good questions. They did that on Tuesday, asking why wasn’t there anything on Joe Biden’s public schedule for the past two days. The scramble from first, National Security Council coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby and then, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, to try to cover for Biden was something to behold.

Co-Press Secretary John Kirby says Biden has been “quite busy” the past few days despite having ZERO public events on his schedule. pic.twitter.com/2VlGtHlDU0

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 19, 2022

Kirby claimed that just because there weren’t things listed on the public schedule didn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of work going on. Then he passed the buck to explain things to Jean-Pierre. That didn’t go any better.

“What, exactly, has he been doing yesterday and today?” a reporter asked.

. . . “So, he’s been in meetings,” Jean-Pierre claimed, blinking furiously and not looking directly at the reporters. “I was scheduled to meet with him today,” she said, saying he was meeting with senior staff. She also said that they may have seen him briefly with Jill Biden and the First Lady of Ukraine. “He’s been very busy dealing with the issues of the American people and meeting with his staff, senior staff,” she argued.

Nevertheless, there ain't gonna be a climate emergency this week. And if "Dr" Jill is right, he's just so busy he can't seem to get around to either Dobbs or the climate:

“[The President] had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment,” the First Lady reportedly told about two dozen people at a private home.

Jill Biden referenced gun violence, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and opposition to signature legislation within his own party as examples of unforeseen obstacles her husband has contended with.

“He’s just had so many things thrown his way,” she reportedly said. “Who would have ever thought about what happened [with the Supreme Court overturning] Roe v. Wade? Well, maybe we saw it coming, but still we didn’t believe it. The gun violence in this country is absolutely appalling. We didn’t see the war in Ukraine coming.”

In other words, things like Dobbs and Build Back Better going south have made the big guy so busy he can't even deal with Dobbs and Build Back Better going south. I think this actually gives Hunter, the First Crackhead, a certain level of gravitas now that he's been quoted as calling his stepmom a "selfish, silly, entitled [moron]" (more ior less). But it's not just Dr Jill who's selfish, silly, and entitled. It sounds like it applies to the whole family.

They're all coasting. So, of course, is Speaker Pelosi.

"The Speaker Does Not Own Any Stocks."

I've already pointed out the Pelosi family's insistence that "Madam Speaker doesn’t even drink alcohol!", but now we have a new whopper to add to the list. According to Fox Business,

Nancy Pelosi's office responded to her husband's controversial computer chip stock trades ahead of Congress' vote on the semiconductor industry.

FOX Business reached out to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office for comment about her husband’s recent stock trades, particularly inquiring about Paul Pelosi's million-dollar purchase of stock in a semiconductor company as Congress is slated to vote on a $52 billion subsidy to the industry as part of a bill to increase U.S. manufacturing of computer chips to make the country less reliant and more competitive with China.

"The Speaker does not own any stocks. As you can see from the required disclosures, with which the Speaker fully cooperates, these transactions are marked ‘SP’ for Spouse. The Speaker has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions," Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, said in a statement to FOX Business.

And of course, Joe Biden has never discussed Hunter's business dealings with the First Crackhead. According to the International Business Times,

Through his various business ventures, [Paul] Pelosi has accumulated a net worth of $120 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

. . . The businessman is the founder of the San Francisco-based real estate and venture capital investment and consulting firm Financial Leasing Services. Through the company, he and his wife have amassed a personal fortune of more than $100 million.

Pelosi also has shares in a number of major companies, including Apple, Facebook, Walt Disney, Comcast, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and the real estate group Russell Ranch.

His biggest investment reportedly came in June 2021, when he purchased around $4.8 million worth of shares in Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Not much is known about Paul Pelosi or his family, but there are intriguing hints in hs Wikipedia entry:

Pelosi was born and raised in San Francisco, the youngest in a family of three boys. His father was John Pelosi, a wholesale druggist. He attended St. Ignatius High School and graduated from Malvern Preparatory School in Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor of science (BS) in foreign service at Georgetown University, during which he met his future wife, Nancy D'Alesandro, who was attending a Roman Catholic women's college, Trinity College, in Washington, D.C. He earned an MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University.

Graduating from an exclusive prep school is an important social marker, as is studying for the foreign service -- the US State Department was then, and continues to be, an institution for the socially connected. In the wake of his May arrest for drunk driving, it emerged that in 1957, he was responsible for his brother's death in a sports car accident:

Paul Pelosi was just 16, a high school sophomore, when his sports car flipped over in February 1957 in Northern California.

A newspaper report at the time said Paul, a high school sophomore, would be cited for misdemeanor manslaughter. In the end there was no court case and he was exonerated by a coroner's jury.

. . . The crash occurred at 2:40 am on February 22, 1957. Paul had picked up his brother from a girlfriend's house in San Francisco and the siblings decided to go on a joyride rather than go straight home.

David Pelosi, a freshman at the College of San Mateo, was dead on arrival at the hospital.

So Paul had a sports car, and it's hard to avoid thinking his dad had connections that could fix things with the coroner's jury. His wife-to-be, Nancy D'Alessandro, according to the Washington Post,

came from a prominent Italian-American family. Her father, Thomas J. D'Alesandro Jr., also known as Old Tommy or Tommy the Elder, was [a] flamboyant and legendary machine politician, a Roosevelt Democrat. . . . Big Tommy served 22 consecutive terms in public office, from state delegate to city councilman to U.S. congressman to Baltimore mayor, followed by a low-level appointment from President John F. Kennedy to something called the Federal Renegotiation Board.

One of Pelosi's five brothers, Thomas J. D'Alesandro III, Young Tommy, served on the Baltimore City Council and became the city's mayor as well.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the marriage of Nancy and Paul at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore on September 7, 1963 was an important event for two prominent Italian-American families. The couple moved to San Francisco in 1969, where Paul’s brother Ronald Pelosi was a member of the City and County of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. According to Wikipedia, Ron Pelosi

was a member of the San Francisco City Planning Commission, and of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 1968 to 1980, of which he was president from 1978 to 1980. He was chairman of the board of the San Francisco Employees' Retirement System and was on the boards of directors of the Association of Bay Area Governments, Golden Gate Bridge District and the League of California Cities.

He was also married to Barbara Newsom, an aunt of California Gov Gavin Newsom, from 1966 to 1977.

This is a remarkable story of people who've gotten by on political connections for generations. The Speaker doesn't drink, and she doesn't own any stocks.

That's Their Story, And They're Sticking To It

It turns out that I'm not the only one who hasn't bought the Institute for the Study of War's line that the Russians undertook an "operational pause" over the past week. The Daily Kos, whose reporting on the war is among the best, had this to say this morning:

Russia is stalled, pretending it is undertaking an “operational pause.” In reality, Russia is 1) exhausted from the [Donbas] effort, 2) still unable to cross the Donetsk river north of Sivers’k, 3) having to extend its supply lines, something they suck at doing, and 4) dealing with HIMARS’ systematic destruction of supply depots, dramatically exacerbating those supply problems.

Yesterday, CNN reported,

While Russian forces fire at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk in preparation for the next stage of full-scale fighting in the war, the country's defense ministry in Moscow on Saturday ordered commanders to take action to prevent Ukrainian strikes on Russian-held territory.

"(Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu) gave the necessary instructions to further increase the actions of groups in all operational areas in order to exclude the possibility of the Kyiv regime to launch massive rocket and artillery strikes on civilian infrastructure and residents of settlements in Donbas and other regions," the ministry said in a statement.

. . . The order comes in response to a sharp rise in Ukrainian attacks far behind the front lines using recently acquired western howitzers and artillery.

Yesterday, I noted the ISW's reference to this same announcement, which it characterized as, "The Russian Defense Ministry announced that the Russian operational pause has concluded on July 16, confirming ISW’s July 15 assessment." But CNN quotes this announcement, presumably in translation, and neither CNN nor the ISW links to the original text. It puts me on my guard, though, that CNN doesn't seem to regard the announcement as the end of an "operational pause", but more like what the Daily Kos sees as a change in battlefield conditions.

Meanwhile, the ISW this morning says,

Russian forces are continuing a measured return from the operational pause and conducted limited ground attacks in Donetsk Oblast on July 17. As ISW has previously noted, the end of the Russian operational pause is unlikely to create a massive new wave of ground assaults across multiple axes of advance despite Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s public order for exactly that. . . . Russian forces continued to set conditions for resumed offensives toward Slovyansk, shelled settlements along the Izyum-Slovyansk salient, and otherwise conducted artillery, missile, and air strikes throughout Ukraine. The Russian Ministry of Defense notably did not claim any new territorial gains on July 17. ISW continues to forecast that the end of the operational pause will be characterized by a fluctuating and staggered resumption of ground offensives.

But we're back to the question everyone seems to have had all along: even the ISW agrees the Russians never stopped shooting. Where was the "operational pause"? The ISW has been replying that, well, US doctrine (!) says you can't stop shooting, because then the enemy will know you're having an operational pause, and you can't make the enemy think that, so you have to keep shooting to fool them. Or something.

So throughout this discussion, the ISW has been saying in effect, there's been an operational pause, but it doesn't look like one, because the Russians have had to make it look like they're trying to continue to advance. Of course, they haven't advanced over the past week, despite they've been trying to look like that's what they're doing, but now that they've officially ended the "operational pause", they're gonna start moving. By fits and starts. Or maybe they won't. But anyhow, they've officially ended their operational pause. That's what Sergei Shoigu says, so it's true.

Frederick W Kagan, whose name appears on almost all these reports, was one of the major architects of the Iraq boondoggle. This drove me to see what I could find via web searches, and it turns out there's a lot of material on Kagan and his wife, Kimberly, from the late Bush and early Obama eras. Here's just a start, from 2008, Too Many Kagans, Too Little Knowledge:

Fresh from his assertion that the Iraq civil war was “over” a week ago, here’s Fred–plus added bonus attraction Kimberly–Kagan reinforcing their profoundly warped view of Iraq in the Weekly Standard. There are several truly disingenuous, and flat out misleading, things here:

1. The promulgation of the myth that Maliki’s Folly was to clean out “terrorists” rather than a violent election-year ploy to clear out his legitimate Sadrist political opposition.

2. Perpetuation of the myth that effective Iraqi Security Forces actually exist and aren’t primarily composed of (a) pro-Maliki and pro-Hakim militias and (b) former Iraqi soldiers more interested in making a living than in fighting. (Add: No acknowledgment that U.S. troops in the field simply do not trust their Iraqi counterparts…Oh, and I should also add: Some of the most “effective” ISF units are Kurdish pesh merga militias.)

It goes on. The best I can conclude is that Kagan and his wife make a good living from getting things wrong, and they're able to keep doing this despite an atrocious track record because they have -- connections.

I'm not sure how much time I should spend tracking this stuff down. It depends on whether anyone who matters, as opposed to news outlets nobody takes seriously, currently listens to the Kagans. Whether they're just naturally stupid, or whether someone is paying them to be this stupid, is an interesting question. My antennae are up.

The Glass Is Half Empty

I've had a running commentary on the Institute for the Study of War and the conundrum of how they seem to have so many highly credentialed experts to write their Russian campaign assessments who manage to say so little. This is particularly intriguing as we seem to be entering an inflection point in the Russo-Ukraine War, since by all accounts, not only have the highly publicized HIMARS artillery systems reached combat, but all the other Polish Krabs, French Caesars, German Panzerhaublitzen, and US M270 advanced artillery systems as well. If these have begun to be effective, we should be seeing results by now.

The problem is that the ISW has been putting all its money on, first, a Russian offensive pause to regroup, resupply, and rethink, and then second, a renewed resumption of the offensive following this pause. A big problem with this theory, as I've pointed out, has been that reports differ on whether there has actually been such a pause, despite Russian official announcements. (These people all have degrees in Russian studies and speak Russian, yet they seem to believe implicitly in Russian official announcements. I majored neither in German nor Teutonic Studies, and my German won't win me any prizes, but I think I know Germans better than they know Russians.)

As I noted, on July 6, the ISW reported on the initial Russian announcement of an "offensive pause", followed immediately by an objection from the governor of Luhansk that there had been no such thing. They've spent the past ten days basically arguing with the governor of Luhansk, who I've got to assume doesn't need a degree in Russian studies to hear the rumble of artillery. At the same time, the ISW has had almost nothing to say about either the arrival or any observable effect of the new NATO weapons on the battlefield.

This report from July 15 is a recent sample of the ISW line:

Russian forces are likely emerging from their operational pause as of July 15. Russian forces carried out a series of limited ground assaults northwest of Slovyansk, southeast of Siversk, along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway, southeast of Bakhmut, and southwest of Donetsk City. These assaults may indicate that Russian forces are attempting to resume their offensive operations in Donbas. The assaults are still small-scale and were largely unsuccessful. If the operational pause is truly over, the Russians will likely continue and expand such assaults in the coming 72 hours.

Contrast this with an equivalent assessment from the UK Ministry of Defence fom July 16:

Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 16 July 2022

Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/CkouEyTZAD

🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/Z0M9tGmMN7

— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) July 16, 2022

There's no reference to a deliberate "pause", but an observation that "Russian offensive operations remain reduced in scope and scale", whatever the cause. There is also an observation that "Ukrainian defence has been successful in repulsing Russian attacks since Lysychansk was ceded and the Ukrainian defensive line was shortened and straightened." One thing I've noticed in the current phase is that Ukraine has kept much more of a lid on battlefield reports, especially concerning the use and effectiveness of the new NATO weapons, but especially if there has been no deliberate Russian "offensive pause", which I think it's likely there hasn't been, the reduced scope and effectiveness of the Russsian campaign must be attributable to the new weapons.

As of this morning, however, the ISW declares that the "offensive pause" is at an end:

The Russian Defense Ministry announced that the Russian operational pause has concluded on July 16, confirming ISW’s July 15 assessment. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu ordered Southern Group Commander General of the Army Sergey Surovikin and Central Group Commander Colonel General Alexander Lapin to increase offensive operations on all axes on July 16, but the tempo of the resuming Russian offensive will likely fluctuate or stutter over the coming days.

So what's going to change? The Kremlin says the generals have been ordered to increase operations, but it's likely they won't have much success, at least according to the ISW. How does this differ from the UK MoD assessment, especially if we take out the idea of an "offensive pause"? The situation on the ground continues, but the Kremlin's announcements are irrelevant. This is what the principle of parsimony would suggest, and it's what I would comment on a student paper that took the long way around on this question, but then, that's why I quit grading student papers nearly 50 years ago.

Oddly, it looks like the ISW has finally been dragged kicking and screaming to a similar conclusion. In the next section down, they acknowledge:

Ukrainian HIMARS strikes against Russian ammunition depots, logistics elements, and command and control are likely degrading Russian artillery campaigns.

And indeed, huffing and puffing, they struggle to catch up with recent history:

Ukrainian officials confirmed that American-supplied HIMARS arrived in Ukraine on June 23. Ukrainian operators have been using the HIMARS to strike multiple Russian targets – notably ammunition depots – since June 25. The destruction of these ammunition depots has likely degraded Russian forces’ ability to sustain high volumes of artillery fire along front lines.

Gee, d'ya think? But if they've been blowing up supply depots with HIMARS since June 25, why do you think Russia announced its "operational pause" on July 6? I'm with the UK MoD that sees this as kabuki for the domestic audience. On the other hand, Frederick W Kagan earned a B.A. in Soviet and East European studies and a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet military history, both from Yale University. You can read more at the Wikipedia entry, including the part about his close involvement with the US occupation strategy in Iraq, his close relationship with the squirrely David Petraeus, and the unanswered questions about what he owes defense contractors or what they owe him.

With the Yale degrees and all, is he really as dumb as the ISW assessments he writes make him look, or does he just have an interest in being selectively dumb? By the same token, Kagan himself has Yale advanced degrees, but the other names on the assessments are bright young things with only non-Ivy BAs who look a great deal like the pampered and docile domestic pets who staff the tech firms. I give them credit, they're writing what they're expected to write so they'll have careers inside the Beltway and homes in Bethesda.

But why have the ISW's assessments been so consistently defeatist since the start of the war? Something's going on here.