Mounties Enforce The New Normal In Manitoba

As reported here, "Under new lockdown restrictions in Manitoba, no more than five people can gather in one location, including if they remain in their cars." However, a church in Steinbach, MB elected to hold a drive-in service in violation of the order. The RCMP, of all agencies, then blocked the highway leading to the church parking lot to prevent this.

From episodes like this, it seems like Canada is an order of magnitude crazier than the US on COVID restrictions, and the US is pretty crazy. But in the US, police agencies began to recognize even last spring that hauling moms off in cuffs for taking their kids to the playground was a bad look, and they dropped it. Now, poliec agencies back off this sort of thing, with the chiefs saying in one way or another that they don't enforce health orders.

Manitoba borders the US states of Minnesota and North Dakota and has had 16,483 COVID cases total, with 301 deaths. for a case fatality rate of about 0.02%. Manitoba's population is 1.359 million, which I believe gives a 2020 COVID death rate of about 22 per 100,000, which is roughly comparable to the overall 2018 Canadian death rate from seasonal flu and pneumonia of 23 per 100,000.

But this results in the national police being called in to block church attendance. Poor Steinbach, which with a population of less than 20,000 is the third largest city in Manitoba, seems to have become a focus for provincial indignation. "Steinbach late to recognize COVID-19 threat, some residents say," reads the CBC headline.

The Mounties blocked vehicle access to an anti-lockdown protest there Nov 14, while health officials issued fines to inividual protesters, apparently for not wearing masks or social distancing. In the US, enforcement of mask and social distance rules at protests is nugatory, and in fact, the epidemiological effect of non-socially distanced protests hasn't been publicized, if it's been measured at all.

Press coverage of COVID case rates in Canada appears to be even more hysterical than in the US. But we're looking at a global phenomenon that I'm beginning to think is basically a moral panic. I'll have more to say about this.

Another Free-Exercise Petition Goes To The Supreme Court

On Nov 23, the Thomas More Society announced that it had filed a petition for Writ of Certiorari with the US Supreme Court on behalf of South Bay United Pentecostal Church in San Diego. This is essentially a renewal of a petition for certiorari that the court deniedd in a 5-4 vote last May.

The announcement quotes special counsel Charles LiMandri, “Governor Newsom, in revising his reopening restrictions under his new California ‘Blueprint’ framework, has not only continued his disparate treatment of places of worship but has exacerbated the discrimination by targeting a core practice of South Bay’s religious expression – the ability to raise one’s voice to worship God in song." This has been a concern I've had since the start of lockdowns, that government assumes the ability not just to limit or prohibit attendance at religious services, but to regulate liturgical practice.

Choral singing, chanting, congregational responses, use of pew hymnals and missals, and processions have all been effectively banned, with no justification. Singing was banned universally due to anecdotal evidence from a single Mt Vernon, WA choir practice, when plain evidence from the Southern California megachurches that have not implemented COVID restrictions and continue to sing is that, even without masks, normal liturgical practice does not spread the disease.

The Nov 25 decision by the Supreme Court staying Gov Cuomo's esecutive orders indicates that the court will tend to strike down disparate treatment, especially in cases where any specific attendance limits are imposed on churches and synagogues, but no equivalent limits are placed on "essential" businesses. The Thomas More suit notes that Newsom's color-coded controls have no provision for returning to full liberty and only permit 50% church capacity at the lowest risk tier.

(In the Roman Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles, it appears that the diocese at least is no longer imposing numerical limits on outdoor mass attendance, although singing and other liturgical practices continue not to be used. Indoor masses are still prohibited. This is an indication of the vague and arbitrary nature of such controls.)

It interests me that, as flights delivering COVID vaccine begin, health departments have been making no announcements of how they plan to implement vaccinations, or how they may affect COVID restrictions going forward. It seems clear that authorities will be slow and very reluctant to relax controls, no matter the effectiveness of vaccines.

This is going to be a long and difficult fight. It's nevertheless encouraging that political authorities are forced to recognize that the population will not be docile going forward.

Canada Isn't The US

Toronto is less than a hundred miles from Buffalo, but I couldn't help but notice a contrast. Over the US holiday, photos and videos of Toronto police arresting restaurant owner Adam Skelly for trying to reopen his barbeque vent viral. Commentators saw at least eight units and ten officers on the scene, which was little short of a SWAT deployment. Skelly was unarmed and faced charges like operating a business without a license.

A week ago in Buffalo, three sheriff's deputies and a health inspector entered a gym to try to disperse members who were holding a meeting. It sounds as if the members had had some type of legal advice, as they shouted at the deputies that they were in effect conducting a warrantless search, and under the US Fourth Amendment, they were trespassing on private property. After some shilly-shallying and scolding from the health inspector, they were prevailed upon to leave the building and then the parking lot.

Nobody was cuffed and hauled away to jail like Skelly.

Skelly's public statements in the days prior to his arrest indicate this was an event he planned and staged for the express purpose of becoming a martyr. This is exactly why in general, US police agencies have avoided this type of confrontation, and many sheriffs and police chiefs have explicitly said they do not enforce health orders. I'm puzzled that Toronto authorities allowed themselves to be put into the situation of creating both a martyr and a leadership figure, when equivalent attempts to do this sort of thing in the US created folk heroes like Karl Manke, the Owosso, MI barber, and Shelly Luther, the Dallas salon owner.

(For that matter, although an internal review, a review by another police agency, and yet another review at the provincial level, of the May 4 violent takedown of the Lethbridge, AB Star Wars trooper were promised, I've found no reference to any such review being published or even conducted in the nearly seven months since that happened. Canada, I fear, isn't the US.)

Although the Los Angeles County health department just tightened its latest restrictions to prohibit any gatherings of people who aren't members of the same household, it explicitly excepted both protests and church services, which it said are "constitutionally protected rights". The addition of church as an express exception is completely new, and it reflects a well-founded fear of an active citizenry, as well as the newly rediscovered role of the US Supreme Court.

I don't believe I would be happy living in Canada.

Another Free-Exercise Case Goes To The Supreme Court

In yesterday's post, I mentioned a petition for injunctive relief that's gone to the court from a New Jersey SSPX priest and an Orthodox rabbi. I covered this case in its initial phase on my old blog here. In another case, Harvest Rock Church of Pasadena, CA has petitioned for injunctive relief pending appeal in its federal lawsuit against California lockdown orders. This is the same type of relief the court granted the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the New York synagogues Wednesday night.

One possible difference among the suits is that Harvest Rock Church has been deliberately violating the California orders, while as far as I can determine, the other churches and synagogues have not. An argument the Catholic diocese made in its case was that it had been following the existing rules prior to Gov Cuomo's red-light order, and in following those rules, it had seen no COVID cases. The court in its opinion recognized this argument in the diocese's favor.

Harvest Rock is in a different position, since it's one of three Southern California megachurches that resumed worship last May without masks or social distancing. All three claim that there have been minimal p;ositive tests among their thousands of attendees since that time, and apparently no hospitalizatins. (I assume that local media would cover more numerous positives or any hospitalizations heavily if they took place.) How the court will react to this difference remains to be seen.

It isn't entirely clear if in fact the New York synagogues had been violating previous, less restrictive COVID orders prior to Gov Cuomo's imposition of "red zone" orders. Certainly the implication of Cuomo's remarks, as well as press coverage, was that the Jews had somehow been wrecking things for everyone else and needed to be curbed, so this may have been an issue.

The conundrum at the basis of all COVID restrictions is that they don't seem to have any effect on testing rates in particular. The states with the tightest new restrictions had had stringent ones before the latest spike. Most of California already prohibited indoor church services and required masks and social distancing. Choral singing and congregational response were also prohibited. There have been equivalent, though looser, controls over most other acitivity, including retail shopping. In California, masks are ubiquitous.

Yet the response of civil authorites has been to scold the population for not being safe enough, when it appears that people have been following all appropriate guidelines, and in fact nobody seems to be asking why, if the guidelines are being followed, cases are spiking. If the only answer is to tighten controls still more, that will simply mean an indefinite renweed stay-at-home lockdown, which is in fact what's being threatened, with the implication that this is the fault of the citizenry, who will deserve it.

At the same time, the authorities seem generally to be aware that a new lockdown will probably result in civil unrest. In addiiton, If COVID control measures continue to be arbitrary and ineffective -- as they're more and more appearing to be -- this will damage the ability of health officials to control future epidemics. That so far, there's been no effective leadership in this area at either the state, national, or global level has been the unacknowledged crisis of 2020.

Supreme Court Stops New York Restrictions On Churches And Synagogues

This is being widely covered, for instance here, so I'm not going to go into specifics. On one hand, this is something that should have been done last May, when the court refused to hear similar California cases, at least psrtly on the basis that Gov Newsom loosened the restrictions once the suits were brought.

But that didn't deal with the reality that all such restrictions are subject to the governor's whim,. and six weeks later, Newsom simply reimposed the restrictions he'd lifted. Chief Justice Roberts in his dissent from the new ruling said that Cuomo had lifted the strictest restrictions as soon as the suit was filed, but the majority recognized that Cuomo, like Newsom, could pull the same ploy and issued an injunction against enforcing them, whether he'd temporarily lifted them or not.

For the court to deal with this has been overdue, since such extreme restrictions are in force elsewhee. The court''s decision noted inconsistencies in capacity limits for houses of worship vis-a-v9is other indoor activities. Whether this line of reasoning can be applied to other cases remains to be se4n.

In addition, the court noted that the houses of worship had not seen COVID cases under the prior, looser restrictions. This is one argument that the California megachurches that have not followed the governor's directives have made: for months, with thousands attending church services without social distancing, there has been negligible transmission. Whether this will affect their legal cases remains to be seen.

But at least this is a belated start.

The Thomas More Society has brought a very similar motion for injunctive relief to the Supreme Court in a New Jersey case. The New York restrictions were much more extreme -- limits of 10 or 25 attendees -- while the New Jersey restrictions are more common in other states, 25% of capacity up to a numerical limit. But the suit alleges that churches are being held to different standards from other activities.

We'll have to see what develops.

No, The Kraken Isn't Just Sleeping

The web has been pretty much empty of intelligent commentary since the Trump legal team's disavowal of Sidney Powell. There's a consensus among a few people like Rush Limbaugh and Robert Barnes that the November 19 news conference, in which Giuliani effectively endorsed Powell's unsubstantiated theory that Dominion voting machines switched millions of votes from Trump to Biden, only to fire her days later, was a disaster. But other questions need to be asked.

Trump won a close election with a popular vote minority in 2016. In 2020, he ran almost exactly the same strategy, which the Democrats anticipated, and lost a close election trying to win exactly the same states. Both years, he ran against weak, out-of-touch, sick Democrat candidates who campaigned far less than he did. The evidence we're starting to get, and the opinions of commentators like Alan Dershowitz, is that although there was vote fraud in 2020, it was what we've always expected from big-city machines, and it wasn't enough to overturn the margin of victory. What was the difference between 2016 and 2020?

Nobody's asking questions about this. Rather than mourn the dead kraken, why not try to figure out what went wrong and how we can fight going forward?

What was the difference between Trump and Reagan, who won a credible victory in 1980 but a landslide in 1984? Even George W increased his margin of victory in 2004 vs 2000. Trump seems never to have aimed in that direction, apparently expecting to carry the same states he carried in 2016, with only head fakes to Minnesota and New Hampshire. But he lost key states he'd carried in 2016, and the kraken, now dead, can't be blamed.

One thing that strikes me is that both Reagan and Bush Jr had solid and trustworthy advisers, Reagan with the "kitchen cabinet" who'd accompanied him from California. Reagan also had input from the Wall Street Journal, Arthur Laffer, William Buckley, and the National Review contingent at the time. Bush Jr had a cadre of neoconservatives, many from NR and WSJ, as well as Vice President Cheney. Those were wrong on Iraq, but their mistakes didn't come out before 2004. Junior had also been a frequent visitor at the White House with his father.

I suspect one thing that will come out about Trump is a complaint that was also made about Newt Gingrich, whose career prematurely flamed out in the 1990s. Gingrich, it was said, tended to take the advice of the last person who'd talked to him. I bet something like this happened with Trump. That Sidney Powell was able to hijack the post-election legal effort is probably a symptom -- she had a superficially good idea that she couldn't back up if anyone pressed her at all.

I think one answer is that Trump was a talented political newcomer. Robert Barnes suggests there might be a parallel with the election of 1824, where Andrew Jackson was edged out in favor of the lackluster John Quincy Adams, and Jackson made a comeback in 1828. But Jackson was 57 in 1824, while Trump is 74 in 2020. Robust as he is now, he seems tired in the wake of the election, and I don't think he'll be the same man in four years.

Trump was able to recognize political trends that he didn't create, and they won't go away when he leaves office. He wasn't surrounded by advisers and cabinet who could support and extend his vision. But the constant commotion among his staff, right up to the November 19 press fiasco, is an indication he didn't have a fully mature set of advisers, which took him down. Among his failed instincts in hindsight was his adoption of Dr Fauci as administration spokesman on the COVID crisis. Commentators pointed out that Fauci had a record of poor performance during the AIDS crisis, but apparently Trump had no Washington hands to give him insight on Fauci when he needed it.

Robert Barnes and Richard Baris make the point that no Bush, McCain, or Romney could carry Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. They had hard enough times with Ohio and Florida. There needs to be some serious rethinking among the next generation of Republican hopefuls. Pretending the kraken is just sleeping will only delay the necessary tasks.

The COVID Data Makes No Sense

We've entered a season in which governors and local health authorites are reimposing COVID controls, with Michigan in near-complete lockdown, while most other states are falling into line with curfews, typically stay-at-home orders with the usual exceptions between 10 PM and 5 AM or whenever. I haven't heard any clear explanation for why people should not move around after 10, with a lot of questions about whether the authorities think if people just don't go out to bars, the cases will drop.

The problem is that public health authorities don't actually know how COVID is transmitted, and when it's transmitted, why so many cases are asymptomatic. An article in the Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall, but Instapundit has an excerpt: "Western nations face a big challenge in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic: Ten months into the health crisis, they still know little about where people are catching the virus. . . . Jay Varma, senior adviser for public health in the New York City mayor’s office, said 10% of the city’s infections are due to travel, 5% from gatherings, and another 5% from institutional settings such as nursing homes."

“The vast majority of the remainder—somewhere probably around 50% or more [isn't this 80%?] -- we don’t have a way to directly attribute their source of infection,” Mr. Varma said. “And that’s a concern.” So by shutting down synagogues nnd churches, New York is by its own numbers addressing 5% of the problem. By New York's estimate, curfews intended to limit people going to bars address the same 5%. The same applies to banning Thanksgiving.

At this point,, the COVID virus has been out-and-about for roughly a year, but despite legions of highly-paid health experts on the case, we know little more about it than we did a year ago, and the remedies proposed are the same as those imposed early this year -- basically, masks and lockdowns. But at this point it's received knowledge that the states with the strictest regimes, like New York, Illinois, and Califonrnia, also have the biggest increases in cases.

But by imposing restrictions on behavior that by New York's informed estimate causes only 5% of the problem, those restrictions are guaranteed to have almost no effect -- and this is what we're seeing. For that matter, the empirical evidence we see is that the California megachurches that have defied restrictions there and continue to worship as before have had negligible infections. Why isn't anyone asking these quesstions?

On top of that, although infections have increased in recent weeks, many of these are asymptomatic, snd COVID death rates actually continue to decrease. For those hospitalized, treatments have become steadily more effective, and public figures who report infections, including President Trump, recover with mild symptoms.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the whole strategy of masks, capacity limits, social distance, and lockdowns is there to give an impression that government is doing something, but the frenzy is having little actual effect. The curfews are an attempt to appear to be doing something without causing outright social unrest, which is what reimposing full lockdowns is likely to do. The curfews themselves have resulted in viral videos emerging from incidents across the country like the one below in Buffalo:

The problem is that the public is increasingly aware that curfews do nothing to limit COVID, and the increasing cases will result in reimposed full lockdowns, right around Christmas. The authorites already have gotten plenty of messages that the result will not be good.