US Supreme Court Partially Lifts California Ban On Indoor Worship

In a ruling that split the baby, the US Supreme Court yesterday issued an injunction pending appeal against California's ban on indoor worship over most of the state, but it left in place the ban on singing and chanting. According to The Hill:

In a 6-3 ruling, the judges held that the state can’t ban indoor worship, but it can cap indoor services at 25 percent capacity. The court also didn’t stop the state from enforcing a ban on indoor singing and chanting.

The court ruled in two cases brought against the state by churches — one by South Bay United Pentecostal Church and another by Harvest Rock Church — over restrictions in the state.

California had moved to bar indoor worship services and other indoor activities such as dining and movie screenings in areas designated as "Tier 1" — which covers most of the state — due to high coronavirus numbers.

Liberty Counsel, which represents one group of plaintiffs, explained on its site:

The injunction remains in place until further litigation is completed in the courts below and a petition for writ of cert is acted upon by the Supreme Court. Liberty Counsel will return to the lower courts to continue litigating the ban on singing and chanting.

. . . [T]he lower courts refused to properly apply the Supreme Court’s constitutional road map. While the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the injunction pending appeal against Newsom’s “Blueprint” Tiers 2-4, it upheld Tier 1 and the Regional Stay-at-Home Order, which imposed a complete ban on in-person worship. Tiers 2-3 placed a 100- and 200- person cap on all houses of worship despite the size of the building. Tier 1 banned ALL WORSHIP. The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel for Harvest Rock Church said it was bound to follow the recent panel decision in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, which was released on January 22.

Los Angeles County had already lifted the statewide Tier 1 ban on indoor worship on its own initiative, although the county continues to be in Tier 1. Although the Supreme Court (arbitrarily, it seems to me) now allows a 25% capacity limit, the LA County restrictions are somewhat more vague. It's doubtful that this will have a major impact on indoor worship as it's now held in LA County.

The chief benefit of the ruling is that it prevents Gov Newsom from unilterally rescinding any permission for indoor worship, which he did last summer after briefly allowing it. But since the court's ruling is a preliminary injunction pending appeal, arguments regarding the ban on singing and chanting will eventually also be heard when the case actually reaches the court.

But in general, there is no scientific support, in the form of statistical or peer-reviewed epidemiological studies, for the view that restricting indoor activities, including dining or worship services, or prohibiting singing and chanting, has any effect on COVID transmission. This is only to say that such studies don't exist, not that there's no effect. However, at this time, there's considerable variation among states and local jurisdictions on what's permitted, and there's no evidence that less restrictive measures have caused greater outbreaks of the disease.

The bottom line is that churches have a long way to go to get their choirs back, not to mention coffee hour, dinners, fundraisers, and Bible study.

The Global Pandemic Is Incompetence

On Monday, I posted about the failure of vaccine distribution in California. Yesterday, I noted that, rather than taking charge or even cheerleading for improved distribution, Dr Fauci is recommending we all wear two masks, apparently by implication instead of getting the jab. Looks like I've discovered a trend.

According to this story.

Americans over the age of 65 are eligible for COVID-19 vaccines in numerous states, but trying to get them has become a nightmare for many. Some older citizens have had to travel hundreds of miles to get their shots, and others say even securing an appointment is challenging.

According to The Wall Street Journal, people in Texas are signing up on multiple lists in grocery stores and clinics hoping to get a slot. In Nevada, online registration bumps hopefuls from county websites to state websites and back.

Only about 40% of the vaccines that have been distributed throughout the U.S. have been administered, and while 30 states now allow those over 65 to join the vaccine eligibility list along with healthcare workers and first responders, the process has left many of them frustrated.

So the problem isn't just California, it's national, and since the vaccines have a limited shelf life, if they aren't administered quickly, they go bad. But so far, there's no sense of urgency. Rather than name a task force to firgure out how we can tighten up the vaccine distribution, the Biden administration is back to emphasizing masks:

Biden administration officials are weighing sending masks to every American as they hope to nudge individuals to do their part in lowering coronavirus transmission rates.

White House chief of staff Ron Klain said in an interview with NBC News that administration officials are looking at using mask supplies that the government already has in its stockpile.

Klain said that the administration hopes to make an announcement on a potential move “in the next few days or next week.”

Whoop de do! Everyone's gonna get a free mask in the mail! Or will they maybe have to line up in parking lots to get one, like they way they're doing for the jab?

It sounds like people aren't buying this.

The liberal media told us that the election of President Biden was going to yank America out of its dark days plagued by the coronavirus, economic depression, and former President Donald Trump’s tweets, but a new survey shows that U.S. “satisfaction” has hit rock bottom.

In the latest Gallup survey, satisfaction is the lowest the firm has recorded, down to 39%. And the survey started in 2001 showed its steepest one-year plunge, down from 53% a year ago, before the virus swept through the world and when the Trump economy was sky-high.

Meanwhile,

The effort to force a recall vote against California Gov. Gavin Newsom is looking increasingly likely as more than 1.4 million signatures have been collected as of Thursday, according to the Recall Gavin Campaign.

The proponents of the recall effort hope to hit 2 million signatures by March 17th, but only 1.5 million are needed to trigger a mid-year election.

Newsom has been oddly quiet in recent days, when last summer he held a daily press conference on COVID. Wouldn't this be a natural chance for him to retake the narrative? Why couldn't he go out to the parking lots, shake hands, show his support for the seniors, and encourage the bureaucrats to do better?

The political advisors have tin ears, it would seem, both in Sacramento and Washington. For the leaders simply to acknowledge the problem and seem to act would work wonders. Not even that is happening.

We've Been In This A Year, And All Fauci Can Tell Us Is Wear Two Masks?

So, OK. COVID has been out and about since late 2019, and as of a year ago, policymakers were beginning to say we needed to do something. Fine. Since then, the CDC, with state and local jurisdictions, has been flailing about for solutions, ranging from near martial law to laissez faire, but after a year's experience, inclduing red light-green light lockdowns and regional exceptions that amounted to experiments, we still have no idea of how to control the pandemic. It comes and goes as it pleases.

We have several vaccines, but the federal government, at least according to the states, has been bungling distribution. Dr Fauci has been the point man for all this. He's now saying the CDC will maybe sorta-kinda say we've all gotta wear two masks now. But this is classic Fauci:

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

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

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

On February 27, 2000, almost exactly a year ago, the CDC said healthy people didn't need masks at all.

One day after the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first possible instance of Covid-19 “community spread,” CDC Director Robert Redfield is asked at a hearing on Capitol Hill whether healthy people should wear a face covering and responds, “No.”

Fauci echoed what was pretty clearly CDC policy the following month

A video circulating on social media shows Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), saying “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Fauci’s remarks were made on March 8, 2020 and do not represent his current stance on face coverings nor the updated guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The "fact check" tries to cover the CDC's rear end by saying it's not current policy -- but the fact is that the CDC changed its policy, and now it looks like it's going to change it again, going from no masks to one mask to two masks, apparently without any scientific support for any of those policies.

I've been moving toward a recognition that Trump was responsible for his own electoral defeat in certain critical ways. One of them was not firing Fauci. The guy has spent a year making wildly unsubstantiated pronouncements, contradicting himself within days, re-contradicting himself a few days after that, which is what we see now. This isn't what we need from public health authorities, but it's what we get.

A recent Republican post mortem suggests COVID was the issue on which Trump lost. Whether any incumbent could have won is a separate question. The problem for the current incumbent is that the CDC has been bungling vaccine distribution, and the message that Fauci is sending is that things are going to continue to be so bad we now need to wear two masks instead of one.

The guy needs to be fired and replaced with a competent public health professional.

Fake It Til You Make It

When I put my old Cold Case blog on inactive status, I said I'd provide updates there on news from the North American Roman Caholic ordinariate if the news was important enough. Yesterday I learned that the pastor of St Barnabas Omaha, one of the most important parishes in a very small diocese, has been removed for spending the entire parish endowment.

Details are at the link.

It's important to note that considerable leadership in maintaining religious observance in the US during the COVID crisis has come from the Roman Catholic Church. The Diocese of Brooklyn has brought an important case to the US Supreme Court, while Abp Cordileone has been vocal in insisting on relaxation of COVID restrictions in California.

I suspect that Abp Gómez was also instrumental behind the scenes in persuading the Los Angeles County health department to allow indoor worship, when no other county under California "purple" restrictions has done this.

The North American ordinariate hasn't even been a blip in this picture. Instead, it's spent a great deal of unproductive effort, and even profligate expense, in trying to inflate its own importance, mostly just among its members.

Like The Golden Mountain, Jen Psaki's Brother Does Not Exist

I've long been intrigued by the implications of the statement "the golden mountain does not exist". What it does is construct a credible assertion and then, just like that, say it isn't there. But I think it's also a first cousin to the remark that if someone hadn't existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. There are strange imputational byways in both cases.

At the height of last week's GameStop controversy, somehow a rumor spread that White House press secretary Jen Psaki had a brother who was a portfolio manager for Citadel, a Wall Street firm involved in bailing out the short sale. A columnist at Red State decided to look this up.

[B]ased on all available familial information I can find about Jen Psaki, she has no brother, much less one named Jeff or Jeffrey. She only has two sisters.

. . . Here’s also a local Greenwich take (she’s from Connecticut) when she left the White House under Obama. “Psaki is the eldest of three daughters of Jim Psaki, of Greenwich, and Eileen Medvey, of Stamford.” It also mentions only her two sisters, just like the obit. No brother.

No brother? OK, fine. But it sounds like, for the sake of some sort of narrative, it was at least briefly necessary to invent him. Why? Clearly there are Aristotelians out there looking for causes and at least venturing hypotheses. This particular hypothesis was tested and found wanting, but the question continues why a White House press secretary should instinctively seem to favor bailouts for the rich.

Actually, I think Greenwich is a clue -- her parents hail from Greenwich and nearby Stamford, according to the above account.

Greenwich in particular is noted for gated communities "Greenwich’s confidential communities feature world-class amenities such as private beaches and docks, polo grounds and elite clubs."

We don't know if Psaki's specific background includes this -- a quick web search gives its median income as $97,616, as opposed to Bethesda at $85,244, so it's definitely up there -- but it's not hard to conclude that she comes from a privileged, indeed entitled, background. No brother at Citadel needed -- but we could just as well invent him.

A second Red State columnist asserts

Jen Psaki is an objectively bad press secretary. It’s not because she’s a partisan, as all press secretaries are partisans. Rather, it’s because she’s constantly unprepared, can’t answer basic questions, and relies on the media lauding her for always needing to “circle back.”

Another commentator, Mark Dice, predicts she won't be in her job much longer. I'm less sure. It seems to me that if you need an up-to-the-second poster child for "incompetent", you could do worse than Psaki. But that says you shouldn't rule her out. The great conundrum of incompetence is its brute-force staying power. The Psalms cover this sort of thing, after all.

Incompetents are both a caucus and a very large constituency. When Gerald Weinberg spoke of the majority of IT staff who do little more than refer problems to the one or two competent people in their department, he was speaking, witttingly or not, of the incompetents. Psaki's permanently affectless expression speaks volumes. Her fellow drones in the press corps will be pulling for her.

When I worked in cubicle hell, the general perception was that the incompetent bosses were there because someone always wanted them there. It's only dire circumstance, maybe once in a couple of generations, that forces change -- in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the US armed forces were forced to institute "plucking boards" to identify and remove incompetent senior officers, because it was forced on them by exigency. But neither 9/11 nor the 2008 housing bubble forced anything like that on the finincial and political establishment

The bad news is that Psaki's there because influential people want her there. The potential good news is it's because they're incompetent, too.

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.