Global Hysteria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

More On Media, ER Use, And COVID

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trouble breathing

P>ersistent pain or pressure in the chest

New confusion

Inability to wake or stay awake

Bluish lips or face

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

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

The Plebs Must Be Punished

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

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

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

More California COVID Floundering

In a remarkably unserious move,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hospital Ship Kabuki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not sure if that's in him.

Ancient Aliens And Occam's Razor

One byproduct of my conversion to Roman Catholicism has been a much greater appreciation for Aristotle, who was a major influence on Aquinas and other Scholastic thinkers. An Aristotelian looks for causes. On the other hand, William of Ockham, a prominent Scholastic, established the Law of Parsimony, which says that entities should not be multiplied without necessity.

This brings us to the popular idea that at some time prior to written history, space aliens came to the planet and built the major ancient monuments in both hemispheres. This is a semi-Aristotelian view, since proponents are actually raising worthwhile and reasonable questions about causes. Why the widespread ancient interest in astronomy, which appears to have been remarkably precise? How was this information transmitted through generations without what we currently understand as writing?

Why do so many ancient structures in both hemispheres take the form of pyramids? Why are they precisely laid out according to astronomical orientation? Why are even those that aren't pyramids laid out accoding to the solstice?

It seems to me that these are all very good questions, that I think Aristotle and Aquinas would think well worth asking, although the information that raises them probably wasn't available in their time. On the other hand, Occam's Razor suggests that the current popular theory that ancient aliens brought technology to humans from outer space multiplies entities without necessity. We have absolutely no evidence of intelligent life anywhere but right here, despite enormous national treasure expended in space telescopes and Mars missions explicitly intended to discover just that.

I think back to my high school and college world history courses, and while they predate von Däniken and Chariots of the Gods, I have a sense that if I'd posed those questions in class, much less written about them in an assignment, even leaving out the space aliens, I would have been dismissed as impertinent and unserious.. Why? These are good questions. Just because space aliens are the only current systematic answer to them doesn't mean they can't be asked without reference to the aliens.

As I wander the web, I run across a number of related question groups that don't have good answers. They range from whether human settlement of the western hemisphere dates only from migration over the Alaskan land bridge less than 20,000 years ago, to how much European and Asian exploration of the western hemisphere took place before Columbus, to more recent and more mundance questions like just what went in at Oak Island before the late 18th century, because irrespective of pirate or Templar treasure, it's plain there was a lot of mysterious activity.

I guess I've always been a contrarian, so I like these questions. Even without clear answers, they're intriguing in themselves. As the opportunity arises, I want to start looking at them here, observing good Aristotelian principles like the Law of Parsimony.

The Metastasizing COVID Legal Morass

I've been following the Harvest Rock Church's case in Pasadena, CA since its inception last spring. As I covered here a month ago, the US Supreme Court sent the case back to the Ninth Circuit for reevaluation in light of its Diocese of Brooklyn action, which essentially signaled that it would find restrictions on attendance specifically tailored to churces a violation of the free exercise clause of the US Constitution. However, this didn't decide anything, it just kicked the issue back to the district court.

The consensus at the time was that Harvest Rock's attorneys would need to relitigate the whole issue back up from the trial court to the Ninth Circuit, and that's what's been happening. As of late last week, Harvest Rock and the state have been filing new briefs with the Ninth Circuit. The court has been asking interesting questions. As outlined here,

The Court of Appeals requested supplemental briefing by the parties to address whether (1) the LA County Order affects the case, (2) the churches still challenge the singing and chanting ban, and (3) the churches challenge includes the new Regional Stay-at-Home Order in addition to Gov. Gavin Newsom's "Blueprint."

These go to the heart of the matter. The first question is whether the LA County order affects the case. This is important, because the principal Harvest Rock church is located in Pasadena, which, althougb it's located in LA County, has its own health department. An LA County health department order does not affect Pasadena. For instance, the LA County health department in mid-December anounced that both worship services and protests were constitutionally protected and withdrew its prohibition against indoor worship, subject to vague rules. However, no other county in California has made any similar announcement.

In addition, the Pasadena health department did not apply the LA County health department's order banning outdoor dining, so it's still possible in Pasadena to eat outoors at a restaurant, but not anywhere else in LA County. But in Pasadena, you can't go to church indoors, although you more or less can now elsewhere in LA County. Thus the case does more or less apply to Harvest Rock, but there's another glitch, in that only the principal Harvest Rock church is in Pasadena, but it has branch churches elsewhere in LA County and elsewhere in the state.

I think the bottom line is that this whole thing is absurd and unenforceable, and the situation can change at any time if either the governor, local health departments, or any other local authority issues any new decree.

The second question is entirely new, and I haven't seen it raised anywhere else. A central point in COVID controls has been that singing or chanting in church is contagious, since people breathe harder when singing and thus spew germs. So even if indoor worship is allowed in individual jurisdictions, a ban on singing and chanting is still near universal. But Harvest Rock is now raising the issue that any ban on singing or chanting is aimed specifically at worship and religion and is a violation of the free exercise clause. Interesting indeed. There's no question that government here is regulating liturgy.

The third question is exactly which stay-at-home order is involved here. As of last summer, there was a color coded order based on COVID statistics that rated individual counties. But in early December, Gov Newsom imposed a whole new order based on regional ICU capacity that somehow overrides, supplements, coexists, or something with the color coded order. The question is exactly which decree Harvest Rock is violating by holding indoor services, none of which has been legislatively enacted -- State Decree I, State Decree II, the LA County Decree I, County Decree II, or the Pasadena Decree,,which conflicts with County Decree II?

Naturally, due process requires that an accusation be brought for violation of a speciric law umder speciric circumstances. By the same token, a petition for redress requires a speciric grievance against a speciric condition. The current panic is taking us farther and farther from these basic questions, which suggests to me once more that we're talking about a panic, not any serious health crisis.