What's Happening To Poor Andrew Cuomo?

In today's headliness: NY AG to launch Cuomo ‘harass’ probe, admin lawyers up on nursing home scandal

Lower Down: Covid-19: The U.S. Is Edging Toward Normal, Alarming Some Officials

Do you see a connection? I do.

Let's back up. As Limbaugh used to say, politics is Hollywood for ugly people. Translation: an ugly guy can get a lot more action in elective office than out of it. There's nothing unique about Andrew Cuomo. In fact, the lizard people who run the planet like it that way, just as the ancient emperors in Rome and Persia did: if a procurator was corrupt, they'd tolerate it until it was convenient to remove him for corruption.

Next, I don't think the current US political leadership is runnng anything directly. Speaker Pelosi and President Biden are both generally assumed to be working under seriously impaired judgment. They're surrounded and cosseted by handlers, with a few hovering in the background who are clued in to what's happening, much better than they are themselves.They say and do what they're told. In this case, they and their handlers have been told it's convenient to remove Cuomo -- they've been told, in fact, to be shocked, shocked.

Why? Cuomo said let's play strip poker? He blocked some lady going out the door and kissed her? It's been alleged that Gropin' Joe's done far worse. Let's not even think about Slick Willie. The problem isn't that Cuomo's a low-level, garden-variety horndog. There's got to be something else that's got the lizard people really, really pissed off. Consider that just weeks ago, he was riding high on a book deal where his ghostwriter told us how great a job he did handling COVID as governor. He and Fauci were on CNN together congratulating each other.

I do think the problem for the lizard people is in fact COVID, but it isn't the nursing homes. Who are the lizard people in this case? Two I would nominate are Bill Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs. If one of their handlers called the White House, you can be certain one of Biden's handlers would pick up the phone.

What would Bill Gates be pissed off about? (I assume Mrs Jobs is generally aligned with Gates as well.) Gates recently said wealthy countries shoud switch to 100% synthetic beef. He's on climate change like white on rice, though I believe he has his doubts about rice.

But let's recall that farting cows are only part of the climate change agenda. We'll have to do a lot more than get rid of cattle to fix the climate, and as a clued-in lizard person, Gates must certainly be aware of this. Received opinion among the climate crazies, as we saw in yesterday's post, is that while we have to eliminate gas powered cars by 2035, we've also got to reduce world population by 2100. That's less than 80 years from now. Free condoms and Planned Parenthood aren't gonna cut it if we're gonna make that goal.

I think people with this mindset had enormous expectations for COVID that were never remotely met. They relied on the Imperial College model, it was gonna be the Black Death, throw out your dead every morning, mass graves in public parks. The hospital ships would be feckless to deal with the sick and dying. This would be the fulfillment of their population-reduction fantasy, or at least a very good start.

I don't think it ever quite registered with the likes of Bill Gates that the COVID pandemic wasn't working out that way -- and it's taken them a year to realize things in the US, as the headline says, are edging back to normal (which has some officials alarmed). Not only that, but the courts, after a slow start, have begun to recognize again the existence of natural rights, and they're setting precedents that will make it more difficult, when the time comes, to nominate large segments of the population to be humanely put down in the name of climate change, since COVID didn't do the job.

Cuomo was the face of COVID. It didn't help, though, that he lost some of the key cases that have got things headed back to normal. He was getting prizes for the great job he was doing just a few weeks ago. But as far as Gates and those of his mindset are concerned, he's blown it. He's the current scapegoat for the failure of that part of the agenda.

Partial Victory Against New York Curfew

A New York state judge issued a preliminary injunction Saturday night preventing the state from enforcing its COVID curfew against a group of bars and restaurants who are suing Gov Cuomo, demanding that he allow them access to the scientific data supporting such a curfew. When the state dithered, the judge issued the injunction.

But the details are less important than what we're beginning to see, that what I've predicted will be a long legal and political battle to get back to ordinary life is gaining traction, and it appears that it's having more success in rhw US than in many other parts of the world. That the New York skirmish should be over a curfew is, I think, significant. Commentators have been asking snce they became popular late last year why curfews do anything to prevent the spread of COVID, and they have a point.

Actually, I don't think COVID is the reason for these curfews. I've been saying all along that curfews amount to a de facto ban on fornication, and I'm not just being cute. I said last week that the agenda behind COVID restrictions is an inchoate, not fully articulated set of policy objectives stemming from radical environmentalism, radical feminism, old-fashined Stalinism, eugenics, and a great deal else, but the practical tendency of emergency COVID decress has been to create an environment more or less satisfactory to advocates of this agenda, and they'll fight to maintain the New Normal.

I asked last week if anyone's aware of a single manifesto for this agenda, and so far, I haven''t learned of any. But the pieces are out there. One part of the agenda is radical environmentalism, and that definitely includes not just population control, but population reduction. For example,

In all the talk of tackling environmental problems such as climate change, the issue of population growth often escapes attention. Politicians don’t like talking about it. By and large, neither do environmentalists – but former Greens leader Bob Brown has bucked that trend.

Brown recently declared the world’s population must start to decline before 2100, telling The Australian newspaper:

We are already using more than what the planet can supply and we use more than the living fabric of the planet in supply. That’s why we wake up every day to fewer fisheries, less forests, more extinctions and so on. The human herd at eight billion is the greatest herd of mammals ever on this planet and it is unsustainable to have that growing.

Research suggests our species has far exceeded its fair share of the planetary bounty, and Brown is right to call for the global population to peak. It is high time others joined the chorus – not only other environmentalists, but those concerned with international development and human rights.

Er, human rights? How on earth do these people expect to reduce the world's population by 2100 except by some form of mass extermination? Remember that Zyklon B was promoted as a humane solution to just such a problem not all that long ago.

But this will take baby steps. One important development has been not just to normalize, but to privilege transsexualism. While I can't imagine Dr Rachel Levine becoming Playmate of the Month anytime soon, clearly the idea in principle is to seed sterile females into the population to control the birth rate. Given the likelihood of success with that strategy, we can't rule out bans on fornication as a potentially more effective plan. Acording to the Brookings Institution,

When the public health crisis first took hold, some people playfully speculated that there would be a spike in births in nine months, as people were “stuck home” with their romantic partners. Such speculation is based on persistent myths about birth spikes occurring nine months after blizzards or major electricity blackouts. As it turns out, those stories tend not to hold up to statistical examination (Udry, 1970). But the COVID-19 crisis is amounting to much more than a temporary stay-at-home order. It is leading to tremendous economic loss, uncertainty, and insecurity. That is why birth rates will tumble.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. Baby steps.

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.