The Lizard People Want A Chauvin Acquittal

As I've said, I'm interested in what Alan Dershowitz has to say about the Derek Chauvin trial ongoing in Minneapolis, but he hasn't had a great deal to say about it. So instead, I've been following the commentary of criminal defense attorneys on blogs and YouTube. What I'm beginning to realize is that Dershowitiz is a law professor and an appellate attorney, as well as a media figure, and he's coming at the case from a completely different perspective fron the criminal defense attorneys. In fact, as a media figure, Dershowitz is a bit off key and a bit out of touch.

The YouTube video above dates from this past Monday, April 5, and it's based on the trial as of last week. It's plain that his view as of then was that, although Chauvin is not guilty of outright murder, he's got to be guilty of something, maybe manslaughter. But he does see some possibility of either an acquittal or a hung jury. In the video below, although it dates from yesterday, it refers to the testimony of Dr Martin Tobin on April 8.

Here he's coming at the case as a law professor and an appellate attorney. But in a very backhanded way, he's saynig that the prosecution's srongest expert witness, Dr Tobin, who as another YouTube commentator says, not only wrote the book on lungs but actually invented them, was not effective -- if only from an appellate attorney's point of view. Dr Tobin said there was only one cause of George Floyd's death, the pressure of Chauvin's knee on Floyd's neck (or "neck area"). But Dershowitz says this contradicts what we see every day; thousands of people are restrained this way and almost none die.

This is, I think, a very roundabout way for Dershowitz to be expressing his doubts about the case. The criminal defense attorneys I've been following are more open. The problem for the prosecution is that their own expert witnesses wind up agreeing very calmly with the questions Eric Nelson, Chauvin's attorney, puts to them on cross examination. They wind up sounding like defense witnesses, not prosecution.

For instance, in yesterday's testimony, Dr. Andrew Baker, the county medical examiner who performed Floyd's autopsy, listed a number of contributing causes for the death on the autopsy report, including drugs in Floyd's system and a serious heart condition. This contradicted Tobin's testimony the day before. Baker and another prosecution expert yesterday also told Nelson that there is "no safe level" of methamphetamine in the blood.

All of this continues to raise questions of reasonable doubt as to the cause of Floyd's death, irrespective of Tobin's opinion -- and this is before the defense calls its own experts. My wife thinks Nelson is an extremely competent attorney. What I find remarkable is how effective he's been at getting most of the prosecution expert witnesses to like him, trust him, and expand volubly on medical opinions that undermine the prosecution's case.

The bottom line is becoming that the possibility of either an acquittal or a hung jury in the Chauvin trial is looking better than remote. The question is, what the people who run the planet, whom I characterize for convenience as the "lizard people", are doing to anticipate this. A story in the Washington Examiner gives a hint:

[T]his trial involves determining the cause and manner of Floyd's death. If the drugs combined with his severe heart condition killed him, the defense argues, Chauvin isn't guilty of murder.

MSNBC's in-house race hustler Al Sharpton further fanned the flames on Friday, declaring, "I mean, if we can’t get some justice here, I don’t know what it takes."

By "some justice," Sharpton means a murder conviction, because, well, duh, Chauvin is guilty! Give the reverend a piece of that justice! Give him some!

There's a clear consensus that if in fact there's any outcome to the trial than a conviction for Chauvin, there will be another round of George Floyd riots. Dershowtiz shakes his head in disbelief, referring to the Rodney King riots of almost 30 years ago as being in "a different world". But Prof Dershowitz, if there's such a sense that this could happen again, how is this a different world? Rodney King was a long time ago, but there were far worse riots over George Floyd just last year.

The people this benefits are the media and the established elites. The media get fear-porn and disaster clickbait just when Trump has faded and COVID will be cured. The elites get the "different world" of the Rodney King riots and the tired old political formulas resuscitated one more time.

I Can Only Sympathize With Dr Walensky

The poor lady has spent her life up to now building the perfect resume to reach what must be the pinnacle of her profession -- CDC director -- only to have her arrival obscured in the blinding celebrity of Dr Fauci, an incompetent time serving bureaucrat 28 years her senior, an old white guy who can go on any Sunday talk he wants, Just the other week, he got to go on CNN with his retired sidekick Dr Birx to complain about the now-departed Trump. Dr Walensky had to watch it from home.

In fact, Fauci has taken to contradicting his boss in public, while Dr Walensky doubles down on her prediction of a fourth surge:

A more easily spread coronavirus variant first identified in England last year has now become the dominant strain in the U.S., the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

The variant, known as B.1.1.7, spread quickly across the United Kingdom and Ireland beginning last fall, with the more infectious version of the coronavirus thwarting restrictions and lockdowns that had earlier helped keep the original strain in check.

B.1.1.7 is "now the most common lineage circulating in the United States," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at a White House media briefing on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, with COVID surges confined primarily to the US northeast, Georgia becomes the latest state to eliminate all restrictions:

This latest executive order from the governor lifts the ban on large gatherings, eliminates the remaining shelter-in-place requirements for vulnerable Georgia residents, and reduces social distancing requirements at bars, restaurants, and movie theaters from six feet to 42 inches (3 feet, 6 inches) between seated parties.

As Dr Fauci has pointed out, the vaccines are equally effective against the UK variant, and apparently all others. The issue is vaccinations. Masks and social distancing had no effect against surges throughout 2020. But as vaccinations have reached something like 20% of the population, infections, hospitalizations, and deaths have been dropping dramatically.

Poor Dr Walensky needs the pandemic to continue -- for what? At 52, she's reached the top of her profession. But for the foreseeable future, she'll continue in the dim shadow of her supernova subordinate, the octogenarian Dr Fauci.

Maybe she could find someone to infect Fauci with something, huh? Gotta be lots of lab samples at the CDC.

The 2020 Moral Panic Was Stoked By Both COVID And George Floyd

I started following the Derek Chauvin trial without much interest or enthusiasm, but as I've heard from different bloggers and YouTube commentators, it's becoming clear that as details of Floyd's death in police custody come out in the courtroom environment, there's a great deal more to the story than the media presented ten months ago. And that brought to mind the recognition that last year's dumpster fire was driven both by COVID and l'affaire Floyd, and that in turn reminded me that the Floyd riots, stoked by media coverage, were an alliance of elite radicals and the Lumpenproletariat, a peculair mix.

I would normally look to someone like Alan Dershowitz for commentary, but although I assume he's following the trial daily, he hasn't been commenting on it regularly. His take as of last week is below:

As of then, he's mildly in favor of the defense strategy as it related to Floyd's girlfriend, who testified on Floyd's addiction, but he acknowledged that he didn't have a lot of information at that point. In the trial days this week,though, the defense strategy is becoming more plain: in cross-exmination, the defense is establishing, via prosecution witnesses, that Chauvin's actions that may or may not have resulted in Floyd's death were nevertheless within the scope of Minneapolis PD's use of force policy -- something which those witnesses were repeatedly forced to acknowledge in front of the jury.

Here's a summation from a blogger covering the trial who's a criminal defense attorney:

Today begins the 9th day of the prosecution in the Chauvin trial presenting their case-in-chief to the jury, and from the perspective of this small-town lawyer things don’t appear to have been going well for the state so far.

Indeed, things appear to be degenerating for the state, and badly.

. . . Unfortunately for the state, many of its own witnesses, especially its use-of-force and medical witnesses, whether existing MPD trainers or well-paid expert witnesses from out of town, have testified in ways that substantively undercut that narrative of the state.

So far in the state’s case we’ve heard the state’s own witnesses and experts testify that Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s back and shoulder blades, not his neck. We’ve heard them testify that not only was Chauvin’s force not excessive, he would have been privileged to use more force and declined to do so—a choice they characterized as de-escalation. We’ve seen photographs from MPD training materials showing officers being trained to place their knees on suspects in exactly the manner Chauvin had placed his knee on Floyd.None of that can be said to buttress the state’s still vague and ambiguous narrative of guilt.

. . . And the apparent trend to my eye is that the more the state talks about facts, the more their narrative of guilt begins to closely resemble the defense narrative of innocence.

It's starting to look as though, just like with the COVID narrative, the received version of George Floyd, a scandal driven by systemic racism in police departments everywhere, reflected in an in-custody death of a petty criminal, is breaking down.

This may be why Dershowitz has had little to say about this week's trial developments. From my point of view, things have gotten much more interesting.

Michigan Takes New Lead In Cases; Narrative Continues To Collapse

One thing I'm seeing in this phase of the pandemic is that, although California continues to have unnecessary COVID restrictions, its vaccination policy has been extremely effective. It turned the troubling late 2020 case surge completely around, to the point that LA County statistics are now equivalent to those of a year ago March, at the start of the pandemic.

The changes come amid a 97% drop in the number of new coronavirus cases reported each day. The seven-day average of new cases is now slightly under 400 per day, compared to 14,200 daily new cases on Jan. 5, county public health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a news briefing.

“This is similar to daily case numbers reported one year ago at the end of March, at the very beginning of the pandemic,” she said.

This reflects a statewide policy of aggressively vaccinating the populations most likely to be infected, including those in long term care facilities, their staff, and zip codes with the lowest incomes. Although this has the politically correct name of "health equity", it simply translates into "solving the problem". California, like all other states, doesn't get all the vaccine it wants. But it uses what it gets very effectively.

Michigan, as I noted Monday, continues to be caught in a surge that's increasingly unique among US states, and with New York again declining, it's taken the national lead in new cases.

The CDC said that Michigan is leading the country in new cases of COVID-19 per population.

On Tuesday, officials reported 5,177 new COVID cases and 48 additional deaths, including 20 from a Vital Records review. On Monday, the state reported 660,771 total cases and 16,034 deaths.

Gov Whitmer has variouisly blamed it on people going to Florida for spring break, new strains of the virus, and the usual suspects, people not wearing masks or social distancing. But the evidence from a full year of pandemic has been that masks and social distancing, with over 90% compliance everywhere, did nothing to avert surges. And even Drs Fauci and Osterholm acknowlege that the vaccines are effective against new strains of the virus.

In fact, Dr Fauci of all people seems to be acknowledging that the received narrative isn't explaining the current picture:

More than a month has passed since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shocked the Faucis of the world by scrapping COVID-inspired restrictions on businesses and individuals, including removing the mask mandate. The decisions prompted Dr. Anthony Fauci and legions of public health "experts" to warn about the devastating consequences - thousands of unnecessary deaths would result, they said - however, as the data show, practically every metric has shown that the Lone Star State's outbreak has continued to recede, even as blue states like Michigan are seeing a new surge in infections (believed to be driven by "mutant" strains).

. . . As experts have struggled to come up with a satisfying answer, Dr. Fauci was asked about the phenomenon during an interview on MSNBC Tuesday morning as the senior advisor to President Biden made the rounds. As MSNBC noted, "if you go to Texas...it looks like 2019... the restaurants are full...the ballparks are full..." and yet, cases have continued to tick downward.

Dr. Fauci seemed dumbfounded. He first suggested that the surge in cases simply hadn't manifested yet because of a "lag". That might have made sense if the trend had only been in place for a week or two. But a month has passed, and Texas' positivity rate - the share of new tests that yield positive results, seen as a more accurate representation of community spread - has continued to fall.

It's notable that these questions are now comng on legacy media outlets, not the fringe right. But it appears that Dr Fauci is already getting off the reservation:

Dr. Fauci has already rejected the CDC Director Walensky's "impending doom" rhetoric, and on Tuesday, he told CNBC that "as long as we keep vaccinating people efficiently and effectively, I don't think [a fourth wave] is gonna happen."

Well, if he could get away with shooting zingers at the US president, he can certainly get away with saying his boss at the CDC is all wrong. Dr Walensky already knew this when she did her little "I'm scared" drama routine last week -- that was her problem. But Fauci himself seems to be recognizing there are now limits. Things are changing daily, and the political establishment isn't keeping up.

The COVID Grifters Won't Quit

A week ago yesterday, Dr Rochelle Walensky, the CDC chief, made her teary prophecy of "impending doom" from a new wave of COVID. Almost on cue, as shown above, the New York statistics, which had been leading so-called national totals, peaked and appear to have resumed a decline.

There's nothing new about this. The Imperial College model in March of last year predicted that,

by October [2020], more than 500,000 people in Great Britain and 2 million people in the U.S. would die as a result of COVID-19.

The model also predicted the United States could incur up to 1 million deaths even with “enhanced social distancing” guidelines, including “shielding the elderly.” Imperial’s modeling results influenced British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose a nationwide lockdown and influenced the White House as well.

I don't mean to minimize the effects of the pandemic. On the other hand, at this point, we can be confident that COVID is neither the Black Death nor ebola, and the continued projections of disaster we hear from the same moral entrepreneurs at the top of the public health establishment are damaging its hard-won prestige and undermining its ability to control future disease.

Just yesterday, in researching that post, I ran across a new public health grifter who seems to have gained credibility by hitchhiking on Dr Walensky's efforts to spread panic, Dr Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. He went on this past Sunday's talks to spread the bad news:

A leading epidemiologist from the University of Minnesota says he believes the United States is in a fourth wave of a COVID-19 surge.

Dr. Michael Osterholm appeared on FOX News Sunday, where he said the spike in cases right now is due to the coronavirus variant first found in the U.K. — B.1.1.7. — which is now spreading here. It’s much more contagious and can be more serious.%;">

. . . “We are the only country in the world right now experiencing this increasing number of cases due to this variant, and at the same time opening up, not closing down. And the two basically are going to collide,” Osterholm said.

He says the good news is the vaccines in the U.S. protect against the variant B117.

As I noted yesterday with the remarks he made on an upper-midwest COVID spike that simply isn't taking place, the guy isn't in touch with the facts. The UK, home of the terrible UK variant, is actually reopening, despite his claim that the US is the only place that is. But Osterholm's record goes beyond this -- the UK variant has been his hobby horse for a while. On February 4, more than two months ago, he said on CNN

Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm compared a UK coronavirus variant to a “Category 5 hurricane” churning off the coast, saying some strains could cause a “major surge” in new cases in the US.

A mutation that could allow Covid-19 to escape antibody protection has now been found in samples of a rapidly spreading strain in the UK, according to a report. Experts say it's too early to predict whether this development will impact the trajectory of Covid-19 around the world.

“I think amongst my colleagues, they would agree that this variant from the United Kingdom, which is now beginning to circulate much more widely in the United States, poses a huge challenge to us. And that in just a few weeks, we could be seeing case numbers increase very dramatically,” Osterholm said on CNN’s “New Day.”

But "a few weeks" after his February prediction of an impending category-5 hurricane, nothing of the sort took place. In fact, with several states loosening or eliminating restrictions since then, from California to Florida, cases in those and neighboring states have oontinued to decline.

I'm not sure what the payoff is for any of these figures, Walensky, Fauci, Osterholm, or Birx. Birx in fact ended her career, forced to retire after it surfaced that she'd traveled to a vacation home to celebrate Thanksgiving with extended family after telling the plebs not to do this. Fauci, Walensky, and Osterholm have probably peaked in income, all likely making well into six figures with perks, benefits, and honoraria without the appearances on the talks, and given their age and demonstrated incompetence, they probably won't advance in the future, even if people will say nice things about them at their retirement dinners.

So why keep spreading panic instead of telling people it's time to get the shot and go back to life? My guess is it's narcissism, fed by the media, which explots them for clickbait.

Why Is Michigan Such An Outlier?

I'm continuing to look at the COVID trends for individual US states, because it's plain that the claims of people like Drs Fauci and Walensky that there is a "national" surge in cases are highly misleading. Any national increase is actually driven by a minority of states whose patterns don't reflect those of most others. Michigan's case, shown above, is a good example. CNN reports

Michigan reported 8,413 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday, bringing the state's total pandemic case count to 692,206, according to the state's health department.

Saturday's daily case count is the highest the state has reported since December 7, when the reported case count was 9,350, state statistics show.

Just eight weeks ago, state data showed the daily reported case count was as low as 563 cases.

Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said the Upper Midwest is beginning to see its fourth surge.

But Dr Osterholm doesn't seem to be looking very carefully at the statistics. Here's the performance of Michigan's neighbor to the south, Ohio;

And here's its neighbor to the west, Wisconsin:

Both states reflect what I'm finding is actually the most common pattern among US states, a surge in late 2020, followed by a turnaround in mid-January of this year and a fairly rapid descent to moderate or minimal levels, with no significaant upticks since. California is the best example, but the performance of many other states, Nevada, Arizona, Montana, the Dakotas, and Iowa is very similar. Michigan is in fact the big exception in the upper midwest.

The LA County health department's account of its experience, which I discussed last week, suggests that even with the small initial quantities of the vaccine that were available last December, targeting their distribution to the most critical areas -- elder and long-term care facilities and their staff -- produced dramatic results within weeks. California also incentivized distribution to zip codes where the outbreak was worst, which again has produced remarkable results in places like LA County, where daily statistics are actually in the state's "minimal" range.

The LA County health department' experience has also been that the vaccines are highly effective, so that even when quantities are limited, distribution to places that produce the most statistical bang for the buck brings a very favorable outcome.

So it puzzles me that COVID hucksters like Dr Osterholm in Minnesota seem to claim there's a new surge, when in fact efficient use of the existing vaccine supplies produces very positive results.

I would even question whether political or health authorities in places like Michigan are possibly slow-walking measures that have proven extremely effective in many other areas. It's also puzzling that I've seen no mention of the acutal US state p[atterns in any media.

UPDATE: It looks like Dr Osterholm has becme the next Dr Walensky.

Fooled Ya!

I must confess that, with a surname like Bruce, I have some Scots DNA, though it comes from a single great-grandfather who seems to have been an unpleasant guy who died young. Generally I don't take to that side of the family. But I once knew a Scots-Canadian professor who was extremely fond of a story about a Scotsman who would persuade himself to eat his oatmeal by promising himself that if he did, he could have shot of whiskey when he finished it. But once he finished the oatmeal, he'd tell himself, "Ha! I fooled ya!"

He told this story so frequently, and with such loving attention to detail and accent, that I was convinced it reflected some deep part of his character, maybe Scots, maybe Canadian, maybe both.

Anyhow, a Canadian visitor sent me a link to the Archdiocese of Vancouver, BC website that seems to reflect this side of what may be the Canadian character:

As of March 29, all indoor worship has been suspended again.

B.C. health officials had introduced a one-time variance on health restrictions to allow limited indoor gatherings for religious holidays between March 28 and May 13, but they have since withdrawn that variance.

With the short notice and a flurry of communication, it can be confusing to discern exactly what is happening.

However, the provimcoal authorites have graciously permitted the following, notwithstanding:

A variance introduced March 23 allows for outdoor religious services to be held with 50 cars and their passengers and another 50 people. Those in cars must remain in them during the whole Mass.

This is a continuing problem with the whole red light-green light system of pandemic management. The short notice and confusing communication that the archdiocese noted contribute to it and enable it.

The US has been much more successful in pushing back at this sort of thing.