Canada Updates

Yesterday I noted that I'd been searching -- at least as of late last year -- for any news about a promised independent investigation of the violent takedown last May of a teenager dressed as a Star Wars trooper by Lethbridge, AB police. A Canadian visitor sent me a link to this story in the Calgary Herald dated December 21, 2020, seven months after the episode:

No criminal charges will be laid following an external investigation into the Lethbridge Police Service takedown of a teenager dressed as a Star Wars character in May.

Well, criminal charges are beside the point and would hve been unlikely. In the US, there's a charge for assault under color of authority, which is usually applied to race-related incidents. The Lethbridge cops, and their supervisors, were just really dumb, not criminal, and the question is whether they should be dealing with any issues requiring good judgment, which is what police jobs often require. So the external investigation skipped over the real question. But the story goes on,

[Cafe] owner Bradley Whalen[, who had hired the teenager to wear the outfit for a promotion,] told Postmedia on Wednesday that he wasn’t surprised by the results of the investigation.

He said he had problems with the process of a nearby jurisdiction’s police force taking up the investigation, with ASIRT’s involvement limited to ensuring the investigation was conducted independently and objectively.

“It was pretty much a joke,” Whalen said. “We know that they know that they did wrong.”

Whalen said he talked with Medicine Hat investigators once, and said neither he nor the employee had received any contact or apology from Lethbridge police.

He questioned why the investigation took more than half a year, with the outcome released days before Christmas.

“I didn’t expect anything else. I don’t know why it took so long. It’s just to make people wait and forget, I guess,” Whalen said. “They didn’t want anybody asking questions and they didn’t want anyone to be available for comment this afternoon.”

So the question of whether the whole episode was grossly mishandled, which it clearly was, and whether anybody will be held accountable, which they almost certainly won't, goes back to the good ol' boys in Lethbridge.

Regarding exactly what happened in the Burnaby, BC Canadian Tire store last Monday, the official version, thanks to the same Canadian visitor, is that the man who refused to wear a mask and was violently taken down by a group of store security guards was arrested for assault.

Be that as it may -- the police make arrests in such cases based on the credibility of witnesses on the scene, but the disposition of the case is then with the courts -- the actual video images we have show the man in a carotid hold from store security.

In the US, this hold, when used by police agencies, is extremely controversial. It is often categorized as "deadly force". The question in my mind is how a store security department, using low-end semiskilled personnel who often are not authorized to carry firearms, could contemplate the use of such a tactic at all. As of last Wednesday, news reports said the Mounties were asking the public for additional video of the incident.

But the Mounties certainly would know the place to go for video would be the Canadian Tire security department, which would have video coverage of the whole store, from multiple angles. Even to ask the public for their cell phone shots, when all the detectives have to do is go to the back office and see the store video, is kinda silly.

My view is whatever the obnoxious customer did, the store security staff grossly mishandled the situation and created bad publicity for the store. The goon trying to break the guy's neck in the photo, and his supervisor, should be fired.

The impression I have is that US police agencies are much more acutely aware of potential public scrutiny of their actions in these sorts of situations, and local news in particular is much more conscientious about followup. I'm not impressed by how Canadian public relations officers or local media handled either situation.

Hey, you guys up there, this is the 21st century.

It's Worse In Canada

David Freiheit of the Viva Frei YouTube channel is generally uneven, and even when he makes good points, you have to suffer through his vamping and mugging to get them. In the video above, the constant personal references or the whiny kids in the back seat are at least at a low enough level that you can sit through them to get the meat.

One thing that's puzzled me in general about the current phase of the COVID panic is that the late 2020 surge has largely abated worldwide, while the vaccine is being widely distributed everywhere. The chart for Canada at right reflects this. Even in California, Gov Newsom has relaxed the extra measures he imposed in December, and the Los Angeles County health department has gone even farther, allowing schools to begin reopening and allowing outdoor sports.

The attitude in the US, justified or not, is optimistic, especially given the vaccine, and in fact I think it will be very difficult for the authorities not to continue relaxing COVID measures here.

Why is it so different in Canada? The incident at a Canadian Tire outlet in Burnaby, BC, which Freiheit covers in his YouTube, is reported more fuily here with additional video. What we know from several video clips is that an obnoxious customer refused to wear a mask and refused to leave the store. Although the headline contains the allegation that the customer punched store security staff before being forcibly taken down and handcuffed, available video shows no punching before this occurred.

There are occasional incidents like this in the US, and while the antics of mask-Karens at supermarkets now and then provide amusement, nobody's been subjected to carotid holds, violent takedowns, and handcuffs. (Carotid holds in the US are extremely controversial even when used by professional, trained police officers. Store security likely hasn't received adequate training in such tactics -- the officers and their managers should probably be fired, notwithstanding any other outcome of the case.)

The store had in fact already called the Mounties, who were responding as the incident took place. As far as I can see, the security staff's response should have been simply to surround the customer without touching him for the few minutes it would take the Mounties to arrive and resolve the situation. I have a feeling this episcode will go down the memory hole just like the takedown of the Lethbridge, AB Star Wars trooper last May. (I've searched the web since then for the outcome of the promised independent investigation with no success. I e-mailed the Lethbridge paper as well, asking for any updates, but never received a reply.)

The odd thing is the contrast between how poorly the Canadian plebs is treated, vis-a-vis what appears to be the major carveout given to US TV shows produced in Canada. Two of the most popular reality shows on cable, Gold Rush and The Curse of Oak Island, are made in Canada. Nobody, but nobody, on these shows wears a mask, indoors or outdoors, with family or with outsiders or even casual visitors. The Laginas and other US figures in the Oak Island show were subject to 14-day qusrantine when they first arrived in Nova Scotia last summer, but Marty in particular clearly travels back and forth to deal with his other businesses in Michigan. He hasn't been quarantined since.

Indeed, footage shot llast summer for the show shows Nova Scotia locals being interviewed, as well as interior shots of a library, a pub, and a blacksmith shop, with no masks, no social distancing, no library or restaurant seats blocked off. (Libraries are still closed completely in California, by the way.) A tourist boat sailed around the island last summer full of passengers, no masks, no social distancing.

The same applies to Gold Rush in the Yukon. Parker Schnabel traveled to Alaska in one episode but clearly didn't have to quarantine on returning. Nobody, nobody, nobody wears a mask. For some reason, nobody connected with either show has been hospitalized or, as far as we can tell, even tested positive. Normally, just about every episode of these shows would be considered a superspreader event, but nobody's gotten sick at all.

Oh, Canada.

The Agenda And The Response

The piece at the UK Open Democracy website that I linked yesterday suggests that somewhere, there's a cohesive expression of an ultra-leftist agenda that includes abolition of the traditional family, abolition of private property, transsexualism, radical environmentalism, and probably much more, into which the current blue program of extended lockdowns dovetails.

I've got to figure that somewhare there's a book, at least, that lays this out. Some of it clearly comes from late 19th century free-love leftism that was popular in the UK for a few decades, while other parts are just recycled, romanticized Marxism-Stalinism. But radical environmentalism and outright transsexualim (as opposed to ordinary tolerance of homosexuality) are new. If anyone knows whether there's an influential published playbook that outlines the whole current program, I'd like to know about it. What's plain, though, is that the current US Congress, with very slim majorities, is intent on pushing a program that even Obama, with bigger majorites, wouldn't touch in 2008.

Meanwhile, in the face of increasing likelihood of a recall election this fall, Califonria Gov Newsom right now seems frozen at the controls, like Bogart playing Captain Queeg. The nature of the recall campaign -- at least, if the campaigners stay smart -- is beginning to take shape.

I think the start of it will be that you can't trust Newsom to promise anything over lockdowns, because his history over the past year has been red light-green light. Whatever he loosens, he'll tighten again six weeks later, with no perceptible effect on the virus. Even if things look good after the vaccine, there's no assurance he won't find some other reason to lock, things down again.

Another part of the COVID problem is he and his allies are draggging their feet about reopening schools. This is a national problem as well. It's just part of a reluctance on the part of the left to allow basic components of prosperity for the middle class -- they're gradually canceling the benefits of universal public education, first by destroying its quality, then by closing the schools and not reopening them

Second, Newsom and his allies are moving to eliminate fossil fuel for transportation and utilities while not preparing the electric grid for new demands. This will make cars more expensive, while making electricity unreliable, which will drastically lower living standards.

Third, in restructuring the economy away from fossil fuel, Newsom and his allies are destroying jobs far beyond what they've done in the lockdowns.

(Oh, by the way, Warren Buffett has quietly become a railroad magnate, with his BNSF benefiting hugely from the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. But it also means he expects to keep making money from carrying lots of oil. Does he know something we don't?)

I'm not going to harp on the transsexual agenda, except to note that to put Dr Levine in charge of public health is a bizarre decison. The Democrats have alligned themselves with a policy of allowing men into women's rest rooms. This won't go well, even assuming there won't be some highly publicized episode that illustrates the problem in some lurid way.

It looks to me as though the Newsom recall will be a test bed for 2022, and so far, Newsom is frozen at the controls. I don't see good ideas for him coming from Washington, though.

What's The Real Agenda?

I went googling for Dr Fauci's latest remarks and came up with intriguing questions. The screen shot above is from a CNN story, where Fauci is giving the current line on the New Normal, clearly endorsed by an upper-class white woman with The Look, in this case Dana Bash. It used to be that The Look went with a facial expression that at least affected a wide-eyed ingenue quality, but no longer: Ms Bash is trying on Big Sister, which we're going to be getting more of, I do believe.

Fauci, meanwhile, is blathering away with a self-satisfied smirk.

Asked by CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union" whether he thinks Americans will still need to wear masks next year, Fauci replied: "You know, I think it is possible that that's the case and, again, it really depends on what you mean by normality."

It's plain from the CDC news conference I referenced yesterday that Fauci isn't just speaking on his own account, the suits at the CDC are behind him. He speaks for the lizard people who are running the planet, it's pretty plain. But they've clearly been moving the goalposts all along. As part of my web search, I came up with this story from last October:

People will likely need to wear masks and follow social distancing guidelines through the end of 2021 and into 2022, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts said during a recent meeting, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

. . . “I feel very strongly that we’re going to need to have some degree of public health measures to continue,” he said.

“It’s not going to be the way it was with polio and measles, where you get a vaccine, case closed, it’s done,” Fauci said. “It’s going to be public health measures that linger for months and months.”

So a year ago it was 15 days to flatten the curve, but by last October it was through the end of 2021 and into 2022, but now it's morphing into all of 2022. The public service announcements, oddly, haven't dropped the original message: wear a mask. Socially distance. Stay home. There's no get the shot and we'll have done it. Why not?

The agenda, I've become more convinced, is wide-ranging social engineering, certainly including breaking existing social patterns. Here's an example of what's being mooted, from a UK site, but I think the idea is more widespread:

Nuclear households, it seems, are where we are all intuitively expected to retreat in order to prevent widespread ill-health. ‘Staying home’ is what is somehow self-evidently supposed to keep us well. But there are several problems with this, as anyone inclined to think about it critically (even for a moment) might figure out – problems one might summarize as the mystification of the couple-form; the romanticisation of kinship; and the sanitization of the fundamentally unsafe space that is private property.

How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health? Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly violence goes down: the W.H.O. calls domestic violence “the most widespread, but among the least reported human rights abuses.”

In this view, "stay home" amounts to a temporary measure -- and we're talking about "home" as couples or nuclear family units exclusively, not extended or multigenerational families, which are clearly part of the "public health" problem. At some point in the foreseeable future, the object will be to remake human relations completely.

The longer the measures in place can continue, the more they become a New Normal, the more easily traditional ties of friendship, family, community, and religion can be broken down. At least, that's the idea.

Fauci: The Pushback Increases

I was drawn to this exchange at the White House CDC COVID briefing Monday:

MODERATOR: Next we’ll go to Chris Megerian at Los Angeles Times.

Q Hi, everyone. I was interested in your thoughts on the messaging around the vaccines. There’s a lot of conversation about how you need to keep doing the same things even after you get vaccinated — you know, like wearing a mask, not seeing your family, things like that. Do you think that’s preventing people from being more enthusiastic about getting vaccines? And may we see that change in the future?

ACTING ADMINISTRATOR SLAVITT: Well, I’m going to invite both Dr. Walensky and Dr. Fauci to comment on that, and then — you know, and then I will as — I will as well, if there’s anything to add.

DR. FAUCI: Yeah, I — actually, let — I’ll start — well, whatever. (Laughs.) I’ll start off and be very brief and hand it to Dr. Walensky.

I don't know if video of this conference is available -- I haven't seen it -- but from the transcript, it appears that Fauci is basically playing cute here, vamping and mugging (Laughs), sending a message that this isn't a serious question, but he's briefly gonna toss it off pro forma. So he basically repeats the latest Fauci line, the vaccine sorta-kinda isn't like, say, the smallpox vaccine or the polio vaccine, no, you gotta keep acting as if you'll still get sick and kill grandma no matter what.

But the problem for the others is that this isn't a question from Fox, it's a question from the LA Times. The other white folks take the threat more seriously, and they circle the wagons.

ACTING ADMINISTRATOR SLAVITT: And let me just follow up, to make a broader point. The broader point that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky both alluded to is this: . . . I will tell you that people are interested in taking the vaccine in large numbers for the same reason people are interested in taking the vaccine for MMR and for the flu: because they want to live. They don’t want to be sick and they don’t want to die. And that is a very important benefit that people don’t often talk about quite as much but that the public, we believe, clearly understands.

So beyond that, what we’re able to do as a society — the scientific team is going to continue to study based upon prevalence, based upon vaccination levels, and based upon the data, and we’ll come out with more.

Fauci does his cute routine at the start, but you can tell that all of these white people are angry at that question. The ultimate answer is the American people are smarter than you, bub, and they want to live. Whew! Maybe they should try to be less defensive and less reliant on their privilege, huh?

The problem continues to be, of course, that Fauci's remarks are inconsistent from week to week and have nothing to do with "science". Public figures from Meghan McCain to Sen Rubio are beginning to push back against Fauci publicly. McCain and Rubio are not heavyweights, but the lizard people ridiculed them on Twitter and fact-checked them posthaste.

An attack on Fauci is an attack on the foundations of how things are right now. Interesting indeed.

In fact, the two media golden boys of COVID, Gov Cuomo and Dr Fauci, who've bantered with each other about just that on CNN, are starting to lose their luster. The plebs has been sruggling to get appointments for the shot for weeks -- and based on our experience and those of friends and relatives, it takes weeks of effort -- only to find the goalposts moved yet once more. Get two shots, no big deal, you're still not gonna have your relatives for Easter.

There's a limit. The irritation of the white folks at the CDC Monday is an indication they're feeling it.

By the way, I wonder why Sally Quinn thought Dr Fauci was actually a Dr Lancer. There's gotta be MeToo lurking in the background here.

Try To Be Less White

I had a real adventure trying to find a picture to illustrate this post. After a week of Mars rover specials on TV, plus the usual History Channel fare, I was beginning to realize the world is still run by upper-class white ladies who all look the same, because no matter how many transsexuals, blacks, Latins, Asians, or whatever else they have on the show to explain things, there's always -- always -- an upper-class white lady to endorse whatever is said, although the lizard people have given everyone else an approved script as well.

So, knowing what I was looking for, I started doing google image searches for "upper class wasp woman look", and sure enough, I got mostly picures of insects, with a few 19th century sketches of period fashion as well. I tried variations. "Understated elite look" brought, remarkably, ladies in bikinis. "Upper class look" brought ladies in big hair.

Finally, as a last ditch effort, I hit on it: "Sally Quinn". That was exactly what I wanted. I kept thinking of the woman I'd seen on the History Channel last night explaining McDonald's and fast food to everyone, though I'm not sure if a lady like that ever visits a fast food joint. But it was apparently important that an upper class lady with just that look explain fast food to the rest of us.

"Those white ladies are never going to go away," I told my wife.

"You're right," she said.

It was just the icing on the cake that in my search for pictures of Sally Quinn, back in the 1990s apparently she thought Dr Fauci was hot:

In 1991, Sally Quinn—doyenne of the Washington intelligentsia, who was then on a streak of popular novels—published “Happy Endings,” which climbed the bestseller list. Across 500-plus pages, Quinn unspools the juicy romance of a widowed First Lady who falls head over heels for a dashing and cutting NIH scientist. . . who goes by the name of Michael Lanzer.

Or better known by his real name: Anthony Fauci.

In the best Washington tradition, this sort of Washington insider novel is ghostwritten, with the Washington celebrity lending her name to the product for a big fee. This is the manufactured world these people inhabit.

Whiteness is in the news due to a recent flap over a Coca-Cola employee sensitivity program that instructed the hired help to abjure whiteness:

The tips to “be less white” included: “be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble, listen, believe, break with apathy,” and “break with white solidarity.”

Another slide tells viewers that in order to confront racism, they must understand “what it means to be white, challenging what it means to be racist.”

But neither Dr Fauci nor Sally Quinn will change their ways. In fact, they'll lecture the rest of us on our whiteness, implicitly using themselves as examples of good white people.

A Romanian YouTuber on the channel Romanian TeeVee got it right, I think: the Try To Be Less White campaign is directed at the plebs, who've been subjected to racial hiring quotas since the 1970s. It's all meant to get the plebs, black, white, yellow, brown, whatever, to squabble with each ofher while the white people in charge deliberately lower their living standards.

The business of masks, wind power, and artificial beef are all on the white people's agenda.

Mars And The Living Desert Problem

I keep thinking back on the Mars mission special I watched a week ago. A space probe professor type made a remark that, to the great disappointment of all the space probe professors, Mars looked like the Sonoran desert or something. Well, not actually. the 1953 Disney film The Living Desert simply contradicts that characterization. The Sonoran desert doesn't look much like Mars at all.

What appears to be the conventional wisdom promoted in the current media discussion of life on Mars is that, given liquid water and t amount of time, life will appear in some microbial form and evolve from there. The quantity given for t is at most a billion years, because that's the time span Mars is supposed to have had liquid water. Where they got that isn't explained, but let's grant it.

I went to Wikipedia's timeline of life on Earth. I recognize that all these estimates, a billion years for water on Mars, 4.4 billion years ago for the first liquid water on Earth and so forth, are subject to all sorts of challenge, but we're dealing with conventional consensus here, so these numbers will work for our purpose.

Wikipedia indeed says the first liquid water appeared on earth about 4.4 billion years ago. Then it gives a range of 3.9 to 2.5 billion years ago as the dates when the first living cells emerged. So taking the most optimistic estimates in these ranges, from 4.4 to 3.9 billion years ago was what it took for any sort of cell to result from radiation bombardments and such -- half a billion years. Of course, it could have been as long as 1.9 billion, so that would have been too long if Mars had liquid water for only a billion years, as they said on TV. But whatever.

But then the timeline gives 2.8 billion years ago as "Oldest evidence for microbial life on land in the form of organic matter-rich paleosols, ephemeral ponds and alluvial sequences, some of them bearing microfossils." In other words, this is the primordial soup of popular imagination. But in that case, t, the time value for how long it took for microbes that could leave fossil evidence to emerge from plain liquid water, is 1.6 billion years, which is longer than Mars is supposed to have had liquid water.

But these numbers apply to Earth, not Mars. Mars is colder and has less atmosphere. How this affects the equations in which t is a factor we have no idea, but the fact is that over almost 200 years of evolutionary science, nobody has come close to developing an equation that quantifies or predicts what the value tor t is in water * t = life. Nor even DNA * t = beneficial mutation.

I think it goes without saying that nobody at McDonald's would suggest a multibillion-dollar investment in a project where a bunch of professors went looking for a random formula that would generate a new secret sauce in, oh, a billion years. But this is the sort of wild speculation that's caused generations of consensus among policymakers that we send successive probes and rovers at enomous national treasure looking for something for which there is likely no fossil evidence even if it happened.

I don't know what would happen to me as a freshman in college geology class if I raised quesitons like this. If I were lucky, the prof would think I showed promise but needed discipline, and he wasn't going to destroy my career just for youthful aberration. But I might not be lucky. Bluto, after all, didn't go to class. That might be why he turned out OK.

If you want more of something, you fund it. We keep geting more of this stuff.