Why Is Newsom Quiet?

Amid news that the national Republican Party has donated $250,000 to the Recall Newsom campaign, I've already noted that Gov Newsom has been remarkably passive. It's plain that the vaccine campaign is faltering, with Mayor Garcetti calling the number of dosess delivered to Los Angeles "unacceptable". Both Garcetti and Newsom are on the same side -- why isn;t Newsom taking the same line?

By the same token, statistics show California is actually administering less than 70% of the doses it receives. I assume the others expire on the shelf. Where's Newsom? According to the Sacramento Bee,

Democrats, meanwhile, are circling around the governor as he goes on the defensive. Last month he lifted stay-at-home orders across the state and is pushing hard for a deal with the Legislature on reopening schools. In recent weeks, he’s been traveling to vaccination super sites around the state to promote his work on the coronavirus pandemic, one of the key points of criticism for his administration.

The problem is that the teachers' unions don't want to reopen, and Newsom isn't going to buck them in any serious way. Visiting vaccination sites would work if it were better publicized, and if he took the line that he's working to end the lockdowns and masks, but that's not the party line. The Biden program is that this will go on indefinitely.

In an appearance at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Biden told staff “You know that wearing this mask through the next year here can save lives, a significant number of lives.”

Mumbling through his own mask, Biden also blamed President Trump for the vaccine roll out being delayed.

“While scientists did their job in discovering vaccines in record time, my predecessor – I’ll be very blunt about it – did not do his job in getting ready for the massive challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,” Biden said.

Even for people who've had both doses of the vaccine, the line is now that they've still got to wear masks -- in fact, it sounds like they've got to wear two masks now.

So far, I'm also not aware of any statement from Newsom on last week's Supreme Court decision overturning the California ban on indoor worship. The problem overall is that the Blues are displaying no indication that they want anything but a new normal, masks, distancing, continued restrictions on restaurants and churches, restrictions on travel and assembly, with the goalposts constantly moving.

The Republicans are starting to wake up, while the Democrats are stuck on Impeachment 2.0. They seem to be fixated on a potential Trump run for president in 2024, while the issues that elected him in 2016 are still out there. Anything can happen to Trump, but the issues remain, and smart politicians will seize on them. Upcoming news cycles will inevitably feature the Newsom recall, focusing on how he, and by association Biden, have done nothing but make things worse since the 2020 election.

The $250,000 from the national party to the recall campaign is, as observers have noted, little more than a token amount. But it's well invested.

Mayor Garcetti Shuts Down LA Vaccination Sites

Via Fox News,

Los Angeles is temporarily shutting down several city vaccination sites in the coming days after it burned through its limited allocation of first doses for Moderna’s vaccine.

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti made the announcement during a briefing Wednesday, noting that the city distributed 98% of all doses received. The closure will affect sites at Dodgers Stadium and the other four non-mobile vaccination sites on Friday and Saturday, with reopenings eyed for Tuesday or Wednesday.

"This week we only received 16,000 new doses. 16,000," Garcetti said during the briefing. "That’s about the number of doses we give out every single day. That is unacceptable."

The week’s allocation is a reduction of 90,000 doses from the week prior, the mayor said.

However federal officials involved with the COVID-19 response struck an optimistic tone this week, with the Biden administration claiming vaccine supply has increased from 8.6 million doses delivered to states weekly, to 11 million, or a 28% total increase across the first three weeks. Garcetti said that overall increase has yet to trickle down to Los Angeles.

My wife said, "Garcetti must not like Newsom," since the problems with vaccine distribution are among the issues behind the Recall Newsom campaign. Garcetti might almost be characterized as questioning the credibility of CDC statistics, too.

But the problems in California, as I've posted recently, go beyond a single shortage of a single vaccine in a single week. The state has generally announced that everyone 65 and older is "eligible" to receive the vaccine, but actually setting up an appointment is effectively impossible, and anecdotal accounts suggest at least some vaccination sites apply a de facto racial test to applicants.

Gov Newsom has been oddly passive in response to reports that the recall petition will easily surpass the 1.5 million signature requirement to place it on the ballot. It's hard not to assume that if he were even to express a credible interest in breaking the vaccination logjam, he could beat the recall. Last summer, he had daily press onferences on COVID. Why can't he simply resume those and at least seem to want to solve the issues?

Part of the problem appears to be the party line: things are great! Everyone's eligible! We're in COVID paradise! Here's Dr Fauci:

As vaccine demand continues to far outpace supply, the nation's leading infectious disease expert made a stunning prediction. "By the time we get to April, that would be what I call for lack of better wording, open season. Namely, virtually everybody and anybody in any category can start to get vaccinated," Dr. Anthony Fauci said.

But vaccination sites still need doses and that's a big problem for Maryland. "We need more damn vaccines," Governor Larry Hogan said. "We have no control whatsoever over this supply problem."

The CBS story at the link is skeptical, at leaat by implication:

Mr. Biden announced the U.S. had just signed contracts for 100 million more doses each of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. The vaccines would arrive by the end of July, he said.

So Fauci, the administration's front man for COVID, says everyone will be "eligible" by April, but Biden says there won't be supply before July. This sounds a little like life in the former Soviet bloc -- everyone's "eligible" for a car and an apartment, they just need to get on the 16-year waiting list. People didn't buy that.

If Newsom and Biden were serious public figures, Fauci, who contradicts himself weekly, would be out of the picture, and both Newsom and Biden would be giving daily updates. Even the media seems less willing to cover for them.

Double Mask Double Talk

Yesterday, the CDC updated its masking guidelines. We've been in this pretty much a full year, the pandemic surges and wanes, and the CDC's answer is we need to wear two masks now instead of one, since nothing else has worked.

After months of demands for federal health officials to update mask recommendations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced new guidelines Wednesday that include wearing well-fitting face masks or two masks at a time to help curb the COVID-19 pandemic.

The updated guidance follows the release of new research from the CDC which tested various masks in a lab setting and found evidence that combining a cloth mask over a surgical mask could dramatically reduce both the spread of the virus to others and exposure to the virus oneself.

So over the course of a week, he CDC has done "new research" into whether two masks are better than one? Exactly a week ago, Dr Fauci was saying there was no scientific evidence, just do it.

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.

I just can't imagine a bunch of CDC lab techs suddenly putting in 20-hour days, working through Super Sunday, to conduct thousands to tests on what masks worn in what combination are safer -- but this is the clear implication of Fauci's remarks. In fact, the implication of the CBS story in the link is that the CDC suddenly did this "after months of demands". Right.

The fact is that over much of the past year, an enormous majority of people have worn masks. In California, you can't buy gas, shop for groceries, go to the post office, go to church, or get a haircut without a mask. Even joggers, who are technically exempt, wear them. The big exception appears to be public transit, where mask rules aren't generally enforced, but this is a government function, oddly enough, when almost everythihng else is enforced privately.

But with 98% of the citizens wearing masks 98% of the time, the virus waxes and wanes irrespective. Nobody gets to ask Dr Fauci why two masks instead of one would change this, but if someone did, I'm sure he'd answer it's "just common sense". But then, why not enforce 12 feet social distance instead of six? Is that "not common sense", maybe because it's just more obviously absurd than wearing two masks? It sounds like they're making things up as they go along.

The new rules about how to wear them, too, srrike me as something made up to sound good. Two disposable masks won't do it. It has to be a disposable mask under a cloth mask, not over it. What about two cloth masks? They don't say. But if I have two cloth masks, will that work? Would a black one need to be outside a red one? These are sartorial restrictions, a new dress code for the new normal, to go along with liturgical revisions and de facto bans on fornication.

I just don't know if anyone will start enforcing the new rule -- two masks required to enter -- or if the mask monitors will also deny entry to someone wearing just two disposable masks. We'll have to see. Citizens will likely cooperate rather than cause a hassle if it happens.

What happened to the vaccine, by the way? Everyone's getting their shots now, right? If the vaccine's gonna solve the problem, why are they talking about two masks now, when everyone's gonna have their vaccine soon?

The Vaccine Is Turning Into A Disaster

So I'm seeing headlines about Statement on crossing state lines for vaccine, COVID-19 vaccine lines growing across states, HOLLYWOOD ELITE CUTTING LINES, and so forth.

My wife stopped by a local Subway, and the lady behind the counter, seeing my wife was a member of the eligible over-65 cohort, asked if she'd gotten her shot yet. My wife replied that we've checked, and there's so far no realistic way we can get one, even though we're eligible. The lady behnid the counter said she had a friend who paid to get it, but then he bragged about it, and now he's under investigation.

I've done web searches on whether there's a black market in the vaccine. A few articles say there "could" be one, but it's only for the wealthy, and anyhow, it's Trump's fault. But the Subway lady's friend doesn't sound like he's rich and powerful -- at minimum, he wouldn't be investigated if he were. So it seems like stuff is happening, but the media isn't covering it, at least not yet.

My wife sent me a link to a vaccine tracker from a local news station. As of this morning,, this is what it shows:

Two things don't seem to fit. One is that California's populatoni is 39.5 million. If roughly 4.9 million doses have been administered, this is 12% of the population. That would be pretty good if it were the case. But the state is still in Phase 1a of the target population, which is those over 75 and front-line workers -- and by the account at least of the Kaiser health plan, they're still working on this group. But those over 75 in California number only 1.7 million. And they're not done with these yet.

Nevertheless, LA County and other areas have lowered the eligible age to 65. There are 1.9 million Californians between 65 and 74. This gives a total of 3.6 million Californians over 65. According to the tracker with today's data, this is far below the 4.9 million doses the state says it's administered, but the situation on the ground appears not to relfect this -- again, Kaiser says that due to shortages, it isn't even done with the over 75s.

The 4.9 million total doesn't distinguish between first and second doses, and we don't have a good count of how many "front line" workers are in this total. But it does seem like, if 4.9 million doses have actually been administered, the state should be much farther along than it seems to be.

This leaves out the separate question of why the tracker says 7.4 million doses have been received, but only 4.9 million have been administered. The story nationally seems to be that some number of these are going bad on the shelf. In California, this could be fully a third of those delivereed. Sonebody needs to ask questions.

This story from San Francisco may provide some additionial insight:

Hing Yiu Chung lives in a racially diverse San Francisco neighborhood hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. While vaccines have been difficult to come by, the 69-year-old got one by showing proof she lives where she does.

She had to wait in line for two hours with other seniors, some who were disabled or leaning on canes, for a chance at a couple hundred shots available each day through a local public health clinic in the Bayview neighborhood.

. . . The experience wasn’t ideal, but targeting vulnerable ZIP codes is one way San Francisco and other U.S. cities and counties are trying to ensure they vaccinate people in largely Black, Latino and working-class communities that have borne the brunt of the pandemic. In Dallas, authorities tried to prioritize such ZIP codes, which tended to be communities of color, but backtracked after the state threatened to reduce the city’s vaccine supply.

The implicatoin is that an Asian woman is lower priority than black or Latin, unless she can show she lives in a neighborhood with enough blacks and Latins.

An LA County press release suggests a similar implicit policy is in force here:

About 25% of all vaccine doses were administered to White residents, 25% to Latino/Latinx residents, 18% to Asian residents, and 17% to residents who identify as multi-racial. African American /Black residents have received only 3.5% of all administered doses highlighting a glaring inadequacy in the vaccine roll-out to-date. Examining data on vaccinations of residents 65 and older indicates that 20% of this age group have received at least one dose of vaccine. However, we are alarmed by the disproportionality we are seeing in who is receiving the vaccine; American Indian/Native Alaskan (9.3%), Black/ African American (7.2%), and Latino/Latinx residents (14.3%) have lower vaccination rates than White (29.4%), Asian (18.2%) and Pacific Islander residents(29.4%). This early data shows us that we need to make it much easier for American Indian/Alaska Native, Black/ African American and Latino/Latinx residents and workers to be vaccinated in their communities by providers they trust.

So far, it's hard to avoid thinking that even if we showed up at a vaccination site, we'd be subject to a racial test. But if there are so many millions of doses coming in, why is there such a shortage? And why is there apparently a black market, and not just for the super-wealthy?

The Cardboard Cutout Super Bowl

The 2021 Super Bowl ratings, like the 2020 election results, were delayed. When they finally came out, they reflected the continuing decline of the Super Bowl as a media event. According to the New York Post,

CBS announced on Tuesday morning that 96.4 million viewers watched the game across all their platforms, “including the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports and NFL digital properties, Buccaneers and Chiefs mobile properties, Verizon Media mobile properties and ESPN Deportes television and digital properties.”

. . . Last season’s Super Bowl, a Chiefs victory over the 49ers on Fox, averaged 102.1 million viewers across all platforms.

Some in the elite, who apparently weren't paying close attention, complained that the fans in the stadium were clearly not social distancing. Even though the ones in the stadium could be excused, since they were cardboard cutouts, it does strike me as a valid point -- if corporate policies require employees attending Zoom meetings from home to wear masks on the call just to set an example, why can't the cardboard cutouts do the same?

Nevertheless, it was clearly a national scandal that the flesh-and-blood fans watching in the Tampa bars were in fact neither socially distanced nor wearing single masks, let alone two.

So much for the mayor’s order requiring masks at Super Bowl parties. Videos went viral on social media, showing throngs of mostly maskless fans and packed sports bars as the clock inside Raymond James Stadium ticked down on a hometown Super Bowl win for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

But it's also worth noting that past Super Bowls featured notable ads like the Apple 1984 and a halftime show with a wardrobe malfunction. The most notable event this year was the Jeep ad featruring a 71-year-old Bruce Springsteen calling for unity, which became a near universal laughingdtock.

Now, if you have never been receptive to Springsteen’s patented brand of rock’n’roll transcendence, or if you are skeptical of the working-class fixations that helped turn him into one of the most famous musicians on Earth, then this commercial will not convince you otherwise. In fact, this might be how you have always seen him: Here he is preaching a vague message of unity while standing far removed from any actual human beings. He is speaking to a promised land that maybe never actually existed. He looks impossibly well-maintained even though he wants you to think he’s weathered and worn from years of manual labor. He is selling you a car.

The style of sports-media hype that was once the Super Bowl is gradually but perceptibly losing its apppeal. At least the Jeep commercial didn't have Bob Dylan.

The Zuhlsdorf Problem

I'm a convert to Roman Catholicism in late adulthood. This means I have no practical memory of the pre-Conciliar Church. I came in after 20 years or so in various Anglo-Catholic environments, and I was led to believe, especially under the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, that the transition would be minimal -- at worst, a few months of catechetical touchup on Sunday afternoons before we'd be received justlikethat. The people who proposed this, including Jeffrey Steenson, were unfortunately deluded, and the sad disappointment of the North American ordinariate reflects this.

I had no choice but to become a convert to the post-Conciliar, diocesan Roman Catholic Church once the process envisioned by Steenson and others failed in the case of our Anglcan parish. On that basis, one must assume I saw merit in becoming Catholic outside any special provision for Anglicans. And if I saw enough merit in post-Conciliar Roman Catholiicism, and had no practical memory of any sort of life as a pre-Conciliar Catholic, for me to take a position that the Catholic Church of the past several generations has it all wrong would be absurd.

So the recent controversy over what appears to be Fr John Zuhlsdorf's loss of priestly faculties in the Diocese of Madison, WI doesn't really affect me. Zuhlsdorf is a media priest in what is something of a Catholic tradition, including Fr Coughlin. However, unlike Coughlin and other figures like Ven Fulton Sheen or Fr Dwight Longenecker, he has no direct pastoral responsibilities within the Church organizaion and supports himself via indepedent fundraising and speaking tours.

He had a patron and protector in Bishop of Madison, WI Robert Morlino, until Morlino's sudden passing at age 71 in 2018. By that time, I'd become increasingly skeptical of Zuhlsdorf, and I simply wondered how he might eventually fare under a new bishop not predisposed in his favor. According to Wikipedia,

In January 2021, Zuhlsdorf became involved in a public dispute over his execution of a live-streamed exorcism against participants in the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count. He said he had received the permission of his local ordinary, Bishop Donald J. Hying, the bishop of the Diocese of Madison, to celebrate the exorcism as it related to the election. However, Hying disputed that statement, saying he had granted permission to Zuhlsdorf to pray the exorcism against the COVID-19 pandemic, and not for political activity.

As a lay convert to Catholicism, my impression nevertheless is that bishops grant priestly faculties within their dioceses to priests from outside the diocese, as is the case with Fr Zuhlsdorf, but they can withdraw those faculties at any time, which makes such priests no longer able to give the sacraments within that diocese. As far as I can tell, this is a path of least reistance for any bishop confronted with controversy over a priest who has faculties within the diocese but is not incardinated there.

For instance, Cdl Cupich of Chicago, faced with two "extern" priests from Latin America who'd been ministering in his diocese but were arrested for lewd conduct in Miami in 2018, simply withdrew their faculties and rid himself of the problem, just by sending them home. Although Bp Hying, Morlino's successor in Madison, had nice things to say about Zuhlsdorf, this is simply what he was doing as well, as far as I can tell.

For a priest to become involved in a contoversy over an unpopular political matter and expect the support of a fairly new bishop is at best imprudent. I suspect Zuhlsdorf already had reservations over what his status would be in Madison under Hying and was perhaps unconsciously forcing a resolution by livestreaming an exorcism. He certainly had to be aware that this sort of thing would inevitably place Hying under pressure -- indeed, it would probably do the same with Morlino had he lived to that point.

What I've learned about the Church since becoming Catholic is that the Church is an organic whole, and a great deal of its function is based on various kinds of authority. Zuhlsdorf, as far as I can see, is promoting a view that doesn't encourage Church unity, and his most recent actions seem almost deliberately intended to provoke authority. The link to the National Catholic Reporter above quotes him:

"The near future right now looks pretty grim, in the secular realm and in the Church. The battle is coming. Trotsky said that you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you," he wrote on Jan. 15.

But I'm not sure what he and his story bring to the current crisis, which has little to do with Latin masses and much more to do with the nature and limits of secular, not religious, authority.

The 1984 Apple Super Bowl Commercial: How Things Have Changed

In 1984, Apple was Apple, and the Super Bowl was the Super Bowl. Steve Jobs ran the commercial to introduce the Mac, and the Super Bowl was the place to introduce it. The theme of the ad was that the Mac would show how 1984 wouldn't be like 1984. How things have changed. Just for starters, the female hammer thrower in the ad would mow have to be a transsexual guy, just to show how woke Apple is.

But I have no reason to think ratings for this year's Super Bowl won't continue to reflect declining interest in the game, what with narcissistic, ultra-privileged, multimillionaire players taking a knee during the anthem mostly just to insult the fans for being racists.

Beyond that, Apple's changed. Jobs launched the Think Different campaign in 1997, a generation ago. "[H]e claimed specifically that 'you always had to be a little different to buy an Apple computer.'" Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if Apple still even sells computers. It sells phones with computers in them, but the product now is simply mass market music and entertainment. Nobody buys Apple to think different.

In fact, Apple's now Big Tech. It participates in cancel culture, dropping products like Parler from its app store if in fact they do anything actually to encourage such a trend as thinking different. Jobs's widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is described by Wikipedia as

an American billionaire heiress, businesswoman, executive and the founder of Emerson Collective, an organization that, among other investing and philanthropic activities, advocates for policies concerning education reform, social redistribution and environmental conservation.

This lady does anything but think different, and in fact she wants everyone else to think just like her.

And the Super Bowl has been changing for some time. Back in 2001 -- with Think Different, this was a generation ago -- Snopes.com had to debunk a claim from 1993 that Super Bowl Sunday was the biggest day of the year for spousal abuse.

The claim that Super Bowl Sunday is “the biggest day of the year for violence against women” is a case study of how easily an idea congruous with what people want to believe can be implanted in the public consciousness and anointed as “fact” even when there is little or no supporting evidence behind it.

But that this would be such a credible fantasy suggests that the Super Bowl played a much greater role in the national consciousness than it does now. I think it's related in a peculair way to the current hysterical notion that Super Bowl parties could become COVID superspreader events, with the CDC issuing detailed guidelines for parties to prevent such n occurrence,

Except that I don't believe anyone has, ever, identified any single COVID superspreader event, despite clains that anything from choir practice to Trump rallies to Thanksgiving dinners could be such. But LA County is convinced that if restaurants allow TVs to broadcast the game, everyone'll start cheering and spewing droplets.

This is, in many ways, an indication of how much has changed, and how far out of touch our elites have become. c