Vaccinations Aren't Going Well

It's getting minimal coverage in any media, legacy or independent, but the vaccination program doesn't seem to be living up to expectations. One sign is a letter we received this past week from the CEO of Kaiser Health Plan, a major provider, which is the one we use

At Kaiser Permanente, we care for more than 9.3 million Californians — and we’ve received only a fraction of the vaccine needed to vaccinate our health care workers and our members. At the time of this writing, we’ve received approximately 300,000 doses across the state and we’re acting quickly to vaccinate those who are eligible as soon as we receive the vaccine.

The shortage of vaccine doses and the uncertainty about the timing of vaccine availability worries everyone. The state of California must allocate the limited COVID-19 vaccine supply it receives from the federal government to 58 California counties and 9 multi-county entities, including Kaiser Permanente. We’re currently receiving a total of approximately 40,000 vaccine doses per week in California. We, like the state, are not permitted to purchase more vaccines directly from the manufacturer.

Kaiser's website says the current priority is their front line workers and those over 75 in care facilities. There's no indication of when this will be expanded at all, and the CEO says here it's out of his hands. It sounds to me as though he's had so many complaints he's had to write the letter.

LA County announced a week ago that it had expanded the priority group to those over 65 and designated certani large parking lots as vaccination sites. However, if there's a shortage of vaccines, I have no idea what it's like to try to visit one of those facilities -- and there must be a mountain of paperwork to fill out if you go.

Seems like LA media might want to make a trip to one of the parking lots to see how things are going, huh? So far, nothing.

An LA County health depoartment press release from Friday suggests things are going about the same as they are with Kaiser:

The week of January 18, the County received 168,575 doses, which is about 25,000 fewer doses than the previous week. And for this week, the County only received about 137,000 doses. Each week, there is an allocation from the federal government to the State that determines the number of vaccines allocated to L.A. County.

The message is the same -- it's out of our hands. You'd think Gov Newsom might be able to get on the phone, huh? Especially with the recall and all. Apparently not. And Pelosi and Harris are both from California, too.

I just don't know what to make of this story: the problem with media now is that nothing's completely trustworthy.

Members of the Biden administration somehow are unable to locate 20 million COVID-19 vaccine doses that went out recently, according to a report.

The White House Press Office has been strangely silent on the issue (and on other pressing issues) over the past several days, and the public is now finding out the most probable reason why that is the case.

According to Politico, they have also discovered that a vaccine stockpile has been mostly depleted due to the massive shipments having been sent out.

. . . “Responsibility for tracking them has been left up to states’ individual public health systems. The administration then only gets an update once the doses are actually administered and an official record is submitted, continued the source.

So the states and counties say it's out of our hands, while the federal government says it's out of our hands.

Meanwhile, although LA County allowed outdoor dining to reopen (in cold and rainy weather), it's forbidden TV screens in the dining areas. The reason is apparently to prevent people watching the Super Bowl while there. After all, they might start cheering and high-fivinig, and who knows how many deaths would reuult. There's a toll-free snitch line for you to report any of that.

But the vaccine is out of their hands.

What I Learned About Incompetence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Mysteries: Oak Island vs Amelia Earhart

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

Well, she got lost and sisappeared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back To The Big Short

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backing Off The Narrative?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What job?" asks the other.

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

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

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

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

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

East Of Eden: Why You Have To Read The Novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steinbeck is a highly underrated writer.

Newsom Lifts The Double Secret Lockdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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