California Lifts Indoor Church Limits

Yesterday, California lifted all explicit limits on capacity and location of indoor worship in the state, although the state health department continued to say that indoor gatherings are “strongly discouraged" and advised limiting the numbers to the existing percerntages given under the state's color coded tiers. For most of the state, depending on the county, those limits are currently either 25% or 50% capacity.

There is no change to the requirements for social distancing and masks, and choral and congregational singing are also still prohibited. (However, our priests increasingly pat people on the shoulders, and congregational responses are slowly returning. So far, no Karens have intervened.)

Most news reports say that this was in response to the US Supreme Court's injunction this past Friday against Santa Clara County enforcing a ban on any indoor home worship. This was argued by the Center for American Liberty in the case of Tandon v Newsom.

At the crux of the lawsuit was Newsom’s disparate treatment of at-home religious gatherings, which Newsom arbitrarily limited to three households while permitting secular gatherings in other settings to take place in significantly higher numbers.

. . . The Court ruled that California’s regulation of at-home religious gatherings was “not neutral and generally applicable, and therefore trigger[ed] strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause.” The Court explained, “California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise, permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts, and indoor restaurants to bring together more than three households at a time.”

“Here, in the case of a rule banning different families from gathering in a private home to pray together, the Court recognized that any time the government burdens religious activity with special rules, it must bear the burden of strict scrutiny, and in this case, it could not meet that test. We are grateful that the First Amendment rights of our clients were recognized by the Court in overturning the 9th Circuit,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty.

However, another pro-religious freedom public-interest law firm, Liberty Counsel, noted that the state's lifting of more general restrictions on indoor worship came as a response to the court's potential action in a different case:

In response to Liberty Counsel’s request for an emergency injunction pending appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry, Governor Gavin Newsom wrote yesterday that “mandatory limits on attendance are no longer imposed on houses of worship.”

Since this case is still pending and has been active since mid-2020, Liberty Counsel sees the governor's action as a strategic withdrawal in the face of potential appeal in this case as well, given the Supreme Court's consistent recent record of supporting the natural right of freedom to worship in five recent cases. The state's strategy has generally been to try to convince the court not to get involved, since the governor, relaxing the restrictions at issue, makes the case moot -- but then, this enables him simply to reinstate the same restrictions whenever convenient.

Liberty Counsel represents Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor twice. This case is still pending at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals requesting that the district court ruling be reversed. Unless and until there is a judicial declaration that Governor Newsom has acted unconstitutionally, there is nothing keeping him from changing his mind again, whether in this crisis or any future crisis.

As a result, the governor's action represents a temporary victory, but efforts clearly continue to extend and preserve the right to freedom of worship. Two other Southern California cases now seem to be in limbo, the Grace Community Church case in Sun Valley and the Godspeak Calvary Chapel case in Thousand Oaks. These came up last summer when both churches resumed indoor services with neither mandatory masks nor social distancing, which were at the time (and effectively continue to be) forbidden under state COVID rules, notwithstanding there has been some relaxation of specifics in recent weeks.

The effect of this week's most recent relaxation on these two cases, as well as Harvest Rock in Pasadena, is unclear. It appears that the individual judges have been kicking the can down the road, recognizing that the legal and epidemiological situations are constantly changing and apparently unwilling to create a permanent resolution while the situation is so fluid.

The state's announcement clearly puts some individual churches' and parishes' COVID measures at local option. Our diocesan Catholic parish has been playing things by ear in the wake of recent relaxations. In response to last November's Supreme Court orders, Los Angeles County itself in effect allowed indoor worship but left specific capacity up to parish or church judgment. Our parish continues to hold some masses indoors, some outdoors, and some as drive-ins in the parking lot, with the latter the most popular. The weather has been favorable.

While pews are roped off, the ushers have never specifically counted attendance and kept anyone from entering. A return to full indoor masses will clearly depend as much on the comfort level of individual members as on state restrictions. Our impression is that, especially since Easter, people have been returning to all masses in greater numbers.

Dr Walensky Reveals A Tell

I've been wondering about Michigan now for more than a week, and the COVID surge there is finally getting full media attention. Clearly the state has now emerged as the worst case in the US, with ideas from various quarters on what to do about it:

COVID-19 cases have started spiking in Michigan, which currently has the highest number of positive tests per 100,000 in the nation. The state’s seven-day average is 515 per 100,000. The next closest state is New Jersey, with 300.

. . . In October of 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court stripped Whitmer of the emergency powers she had assumed during the pandemic, declaring the orders an “unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive branch in violation of the Michigan Constitution.” Now, faced with increasing COVID-19 spread, the governor is powerless to issue the same kind of restrictions she did in the past without the Republican-controlled legislature’s consent. With the friction between the branches caused by her overarching actions earlier in the pandemic, getting back her authority to act is not likely.

In reponse, although Gov Whitmer has asked for voluntary compliance with new restrictions, the reply from schools and businesses has been that they don't intend to make changes. In response, Gov Whitmer has asked the federal government to increase its supply of COVID vaccines to the state. The Biden administration has so far refused, but the strangest take by far is from Dr Walensky:

“When you have an acute situation, an extraordinary number of cases like we have in Michigan, the answer is not necessarily to give vaccines — in fact, we know the vaccine will have a delayed response,” Walensky said in a briefing with reporters. “The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer… to flatten the curve, decrease contact with one another, to test to the extent we have available, to contact trace.”

It goes without saying that the question being asked all over independent media is where has this woman been for the past 13 months? She's advocating a new "two weeks to flatten the curve"? But, stripped of her legal authority to impose a new lockdown, this is no longer an option for Gov Whitmer. Her alternative is to ask for more vaccine.

One puzzle for me is what Dr Walensky does all day in her office, and indeed, what her staff does as well, besides run for lattes. Nowhere in any media, beyond that, is anyone asking the big question, what about California? Every US state began receiving allocations of vaccine from mid-December 2020. No state got all the vaccine it wanted. California immediately distributed its limited supply to elder care homes and those over 75, who would benefit most.

Although I questioned this at first, it also began incentivizing vaccine distribution to the poorest zip codes, again on the basis that if cases were highest there, each dose would prevent more new cases. The result was that California turned the late 2020 surge around by mid-January, and the COVID data has continued to fall to the point that the state is now at levels comparable to those a year ago.

Surely a CDC director, charged with following effective epidemiological strategies, is aware of this. I won't even say she ought to be aware of this. She's smart. She's made it to the top of a system with lots of smart people. She knows about this. Why isn't she asking the obvious question, what is California doing that Michigan isn't? But I bet that, since she's smart, she knows the answer.

Instead, she gives the dinosaur brain answer from more than a year ago: Gov Whitmer, just say two weeks to flatten the curve. That'll fix it! From the link above,

White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt told Michigan officials to “follow the science.” Science says those 65 and older with comorbidities are at the highest risk for COVID-19-related mortality. One might assume following science would mean getting shots into those individuals as quickly as possible in an identified hotspot.

The implication from the White House is that Michigan hasn't been doing what California has been doing for four months, but it appears that nobody in authority is quite willing to come out and say that. But it's hard to avoid thinking Gov Whitmer and her staff have either been slow-walking effective vaccine distribution or simply incompetent at it, which is resulting in a Canadian situation. And Dr Walensky's public advice is effectively to do the worst possible thing, the one thing that will continue the crisis.

The vaccine isn't the answer -- oh, no, "we know the vaccine will have a delayed response". But "flatten the curve" will have no effect at all!

I think there are two reasons for this. One is that the most powerful wing of the public health establishment, at the Fauci-Walensky level, has never wanted vaccines, which it sees as a Trump program, no matter its clear success in places like California, whose own public health authorities are anything but Trumpist. We see the same downplaying of vaccine in public remarks by Dr Fauci:

White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday advised people who have been vaccinated for COVID-19 to hold off on congregating indoors to eat or drink.

. . . “No, it’s still not OK for the simple reason that the level of infection, the dynamics of infection in the community are still really disturbingly high,” Fauci advised. “Like just yesterday, there were close to 80,000 new infections, and we’ve been hanging around 60,000, 70,000, 75,000.”

These people want a permanent crisis.

The Contrast Continues

The video above shows patrons at a Vancouver, BC restaurant urging health inspectors to leave when they attempted to close it due to what appears to have been a sudden, poorly communicated "red light-green light" closure of provincial indoor dining. Canada continues to experience lockdowns, curfews, and other extraordinary measures in response to a COVID surge that's returning case statisics to late 2020 levels.

In contrast, the US Supreme Court on Friday continued its recent orders confirming the natural right to freedom of worship, ruling that California may not prevent people from gathering in homes for Bible study and prayer meetings. Interestingly, the state argued that the court should not get involved, since improving COVID statistics would remove such restrictions within a week.

The court, clearly aware that last summer, Gov Newsom reversed an equivalent relaxation in another such red light-green light move, nevertheless went ahead and established the principle, issuing the restraining order the plaintiffs requested.

Canadian protests also continue in Montreal and Quebec City. especially in response to a reimposition of curfews in much of Quebec. Other protests occurred in Alberta, where authorities closed a church that violated orders to shut down. It's very puzzling that Canada is continuing to experience such a surge in cases with reimpositions of extremely strict controls that counterintuitively have had no perceptible effect on the disease. Meanwhile, the US is steadily relaxing controls, while vaccinations are showing positive results in nearly all regions. As discusssed in The Atlantic,

Canadians have been overwhelmingly compliant with public-health directives, wearing masks, limiting social interactions, washing and sanitizing our hands ’til our fingertips prune. And what do we get? Per capita vaccination numbers lagging behind those of 50 other countries, including Brazil, Chile, Turkey, and much of Europe, according to Johns Hopkins University’s immunization tracker. The country currently has a level-four travel advisory: “Travelers should avoid all travel to Canada,” warns the CDC. In March, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the U.S.-Canada border—closed for nearly a year, since American COVID-19 infection rates began escalating out of control—would remain closed for at least another month.

The Atlantic piece suggests there's no single cause for the extremely slow rollout of vaccine in Canada:

Without much domestic manufacturing capacity to speak of, Canada had to sign advance-purchase deals with international vaccine companies. The country hedged its bet by mostly going with companies funded by Operation Warp Speed, and so far its strategy has been to overbuy doses in the hopes of securing enough to vaccinate all of its citizens. A mounting critique, however, is that perhaps Canada should have been more specific than “first quarter of 2021” in terms of arranging vaccine-delivery timing.

Bu whatever the reason, it's becoming plain that as of 2021, the single most visible and effective response to COVID is vaccine, and in the hands of capable public health authorities and policymakers, the turnaround in hard-hit US states like California has been spectacular. (This doesn't exclude other potential explanations for positive results in places like Texas and Sweden.) But in some important way, Canada and a few US states like Michigan have missed the boat, and the evidence is impossible to ignore that draconian lockdown-style controls and a red light-green light approach are utterly feckless measures that are actually counterproductive.

While the Atlantic piece says "Canadians have been overwhelmingly compliant", it's startmg to sound as though there are limits even to Canadian willingness to comply. Certainly a factor in what's beginning to look like US success in beating the combination of epidemic and moral panic has been the clear willingness of citizens to hold authorities electorally accountable, as well as the cooperation of the court system in clearly enforcing natural rights in the face of open-ended government efforts to curtail them in an "emergency".

More On Why The Elites Want A Chauvin Acquittal

A piece by Joel Kotkin raises some important points on the potential outcome of the Chauvin trial.

No politician in American history owes more to African-American leadership and voters than Joe Biden. His flailing campaign was rescued from the respirator by South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic electorate. African Americans sustained his path through states such as Texas. Since taking office, Biden’s commitment to battling the ‘sting of systemic racism’ and encroaching ‘white supremacy’ has accompanied his early actions and seems to have shaped many of his appointments.

It's not hard to imagine that Biden, shallow, cynical, and impaired, will follow his worst instincts and allow his handlers to write him statements that will foster unrest if the verdict goes against the progressive narrative. The question is whether we'll have a repeat of Rodney King in 1992 or the 2020 riots. Kotkin thinks we will. i'm not sure. Kotkin says late in his essay:

This worry, given the past, is understandable, but legitimate concern over police abuse does not suggest minorities embrace the prevailing narrative. The vast majority of all races, noted a 2018 survey, reject the political correctness increasingly embraced by the billionaire class as well as corporate HR departments. Indeed, the most extreme people on racial issues are not Blacks and Hispanics but radicalised whites, whose Antifa shock troops well represent the lunatic fringe.

The woke may be winning in cyberspace and the corporate suite, but economic factors may prove more decisive in the long run. By 2032, minorities will constitute the majority of the American working class. They did better in terms of income under President Trump than previous administrations from both parties. This was one reason for the shocking move of Latin voters, devastated by the lockdowns, to Trump last year.

. . . Red Guard-like seminars may make money for the practitioners of redress but it is what my friend Sergio Munoz calls ‘the multiculturalism of the streets’ that will save us. The idea of America as a kind of apartheid regime seems surreal in a country where one in 10 babies born in the US has one white and one non-white parent and 12 per cent of all African Americans are now immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Interracial marriage has gone from three per cent in 1967 to roughly one in six now.

As I've been saying, the moral panic of 2020 has been based not just on a virus. The lockdowns were one symptom; the riots were another, and both come from a single cause, a basic insecurity about social change, which observers suggest is a factor in all moral panics. A big part of this particular change is a sense that the political alignment that began in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson is alleged to have remarked "I’ll have those [bleep] voting Democratic for 200 years", isn't likely to last anywhere near that long.

The riots, and the election of Biden as a senile puppet of backstage progressives, are signs that the elites who thrived under the LBJ arrangement are losing their grip. We simply don,'t know how the Chauvin trial will come out, but I have a feeling the results won't be quite what anyone predicts. People are simply tired of 2020.

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.