Take Us To Your Leader

Via the UK Daily Mail, I learn of another round in the debate about space aliens:

A group of astronomers are pushing back on humanity's preoccupation with communicating with aliens beyond our galaxy, warning that alien contact could result in 'the end of all life on earth,' physicist and science writer Mark Buchanan wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

I think the last time I brought up space aliens here, it was to cite Fr Sam, the smartest man I've ever met, who spoke in a homily about a question he raised in a session with seminarians: if we encounter space aliens, should we offer them baptism?

This is all a reminder to me that there's no real science or philosophy in the current talk about life on other planets. Fr Sam has this right. Nobody else does.

I was watching a TV show about the European Space Agency's Mars rover mission, which made the point that the agency is spending a billion euros to send a new-model rover to Mars for the specific goal of finding life there. This in fact has been a major purpose, if not the driving one, behind all Mars missions, and the most recent was named Perseverance, which can only be an indication of how frustrated the space elites have been at finding nothing of interest there to date.

An Italian scientist explained in the show I was watching that the problem has been that solar radiation has "sterilized" the top meter and a half of the Martian surface. However, the ESA rover will be equipped to drill a full two meters into the surface, which will be beyond the sterilized layer, and this will most certainly either bring up live microbes or fossils of old ones.

The narrator indicated this would be a major, major discovery. Except, first, it hasn't happend yet. Second, so what? On Earth, we keep finding microbes that live in boiling water or under Antarctic ice. The space elites have already told us this should make life possible in oceans under nitrogen ice on the moons of Uranus. Why should we even need to go looking for it? But if we don't find microbes two meters down on Mars, we can still have missions to the moons of Uranus anyhow. Nice work if you can get it.

The reason the space elites keep wanting to find microbes on Mars is that they think this will finally scorch away the unscientific, terracentric, homocentric Biblical world view once and for all. But there's a problem with their basic assumption. Let's go ahead and grant that the 83rd mission to the moons of Uranus drills through the nitrogen ice to find microbes in the ocean there. The technology in 2096 lets us not only find them, but bring them back.

Except there's a lab leak. Even by 2096, they haven't cured the problem of screwups. The Uranus moon microbes break out of the lab, but the life form is so different from ours that we haven't got the first clue on how to make a vaccine, and within two weeks, the Uranus moon virus wipes out all life on Earth.

Naturally, the space elites haven't figured this one out even now, which is why the scientists are writing worried op-eds. But the elites are acting under the unconscious assumption that the universe is benevolent -- as Bp Barron puts it, the universe acts in a way that can be understood, which is an argument for the existence of God. But this is also behind the science fiction fantasy that if there are space aliens, they'll also form intergalactic federations and either play the usual Earthbound political games or fight the usual Earthbound wars. Nobody's seriously thinking they're just gonna harvest the planet, eat everything, and move on.

The science fiction writers basically feed the thinking of the science elites; there's an assumption in particular that if a species is advanced enough to understand and manipulate the matter in the universe, light or dark, it's working under conditions in a consistent universe created by God, that this will be done by intelligent beings capable of reason, created in God's image. Otherwise, eveything is absurd. Among the absurdity is that the grants and tenured professorships and perks that go to the space elites are completely random, and any efforts they put forth to get or retain them are meaningless.

No matter how I circle around this, I can't escape from the conclusion that Fr Sam has this right -- if we run into space aliens, it's our duty to offer them baptism.

The Recovery Continues

Although our priests have been predicting this development for a while, the actual announcement comes as something of a shock (click on the image for a larger copy). Although there've been gradual loosenings -- indoor celebrations allowed, then no need for reservations, the choir gradually expanding, nevertheless, pews have still been roped off with six-foot calibrations in the aisles, and masks were required with temperatures taken on entry. No missals, no singing. Last week, one of our pew friends was still wearing two masks, not one, as Dr Fauci had instructed. I'll be interested to see how he responds this Sunday.

California mostly reopened on Tuesday, fully three months after other states like Texas. But it's worth noting that the UK, whose COVID performance has been equivalent to the US after vaccinations, got cold feet over a June 21 reopening and has pushed it back to July 19, although this may not involve lifting mask requirements even then. Meanwhile, Canada lags far behind even the UK, with Ontario maintaining strict limits on "non-essential" retail and even outdoor gatherings.

I think Gov Newsom would have extended COVID controls in a similar way in California had he not been subject to recall. By he same token, I don't think houses of worship would be able to reopen this way without the legal action the observant churches and synagogues brought last year.

But maybe just as significant, reality ride-along police programs are starting to make a tentative return to cable. Body Cam on Investigation Discovery appears to be the first of these, as we saw a new episode this week. Live PD, which was one of the most popular shows overall until A&E was forced to cancel it in the wake of George Floyd, has made no public announcement. Cops resumed limited production last fall to meet contract commitments outside the US but has made no other announcement.

Again, I think the COVID moral panic was directed at the plebs as the folk devils, with the moral entrepreneurs in the political and credentialed elites. The folk devils were the middle and working classes who objected to lockdowns or business closures, resisted masks and social distancing and threatened to hold block parties or family reunions or take vacations, notwithstanding the elites clearly felt entitled to do just those things. The BLM riots exploited the preexisting panic, adding the attribution of racism to whites among the plebs.

The problem for the elites is that as the panic subsides and the plebs is allowed to resume their jobs and the parties, reunions, and vacations -- indeed, to resume watching the police shows -- the country at large is beginning to ask what the fuss was about, as questions begin to come up about how the COVID panic took shape and for whose benefit.

A good example is this week's episode of Deadliest Catch, a reality show that's portrayed, among other things this season, how the COVID panic affected the Alaska crab fleet. (This sort of coverage is rare anywhere.) In this week's episode, Sig Hansen's daughter Mandy, who works as relief captain on his boat, has a false positive COVID test and has to go into quarantine until she can have two successive negative tests. The result is to delay the boat's departure and throw the whole operation into uncertainty until, after two days in quarantine and two negative tests, she can return.

This wasn't scripted, it was just how things happened with the camera watching. The result, with no judgment from writers or producers, was to show the destructive effect not of COVID but of the COVID panic. The plebs has gotten this messsage. It doesn't hurt that Mike Rowe narrates the series. The timbre of his voice alone reflects his underatanding, from bottom up, of how these things work.

I see ads on Facebook for a color-coded bracelet or amulet that lets people make it known what type of interaction they prefer post-COVID -- one color for handshakes, another for hugs, and so forth. I hope this dies a quick death, but it's an indicator of how profoundly the COVID panic affected everyone. There's going to be an adjustment to make in California, but I have the impression that people in Texas and Florida accommodated themselves to the old normal without much trouble.

Pope Francis On Rigidity

I said in yesterday's post that I wasn't sure what Pope Francis meant by "rigid" when he spole of rigid priests. This morning, looking for something else, I went to Church Militant and found an informative post, "Rigid" Seminarians. (I was originally looking to find the rad-trad take on the reported non-eucharist of President Biden from Francis, but intriguingly, Church Militant carries no mention of this.)

The post actually clarifies Francis's meaning quite helpfully:

[H]e offered [seminarians in Ancona] advice on four aspects of their seminary experience: the human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral dimensions. He extended his definition of rigidity to include "ritualism," saying "prayer is not ritualism — the rigid end up in ritualism, always."

. . . Regarding the intellectual life of a seminarian, Pope Francis advised them to study hard to encounter and "proclaim [their] faith and proclaim Christ." He made no mention of proclaiming the truths that Christ passed on to His apostles. Rather, it is proclaiming one's faith, which is a nebulous idea.

But worst of all, he secularized the role of the priest, saying, "Go enthusiastically to meet the people," adding, "One is a priest to serve the People of God, to take care of the wounds of all, especially the poor."

As it happens, I saw a Bp Barron video not long ago where he said to those who oppose Vatican II that in the Catholic Church, you don't get any higher authority than an ecumenical council. A few days later, I got an e-mail. from his Word on Fire organization promoting a collection of the Vatican II constitutions edited by Bp Barron and containing reflections from post-Conciliar popes and Barron as well. So I sent for a copy. I've been working my way through Lumen Gentium.

Lumen Gentium strikes me as an extended explanation of the Church's whole function, dwelling especially on the roles of bishops. priests, deacons, and laity. Without question it gives bishops and priests a sacramental and pastoral role, but it also specifies an evangelical role. I would note that the post at Church Militant makes the point that Francis touched on the human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral dimensions of the priesthood. We must assume he spoke of pastoral and sacramental roles elsewhere in his address.

But certainly intellectual abilities are key for evangelism. G K Chesterton, Fulton J Sheen, and Bp Barron were and are all smart men. As far as I can see, Francis's reasoning is that since the Church has an evangelical role, its priests must prepare themselves intellectually for that role.

And in in section 17 of Lumen Gentium, we see:

As the Son was sent by the Father, so He too sent the Apostles, saying: "Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world". The Church has received this solemn mandate of Christ to proclaim the saving truth from the apostles and must carry it out to the very ends of the earth. Wherefore she makes the words of the Apostle her own: "Woe to me, if I do not preach the Gospel", and continues unceasingly to send heralds of the Gospel until such time as the infant churches are fully established and can themselves continue the work of evangelizing.

In section 28, we see

Because the human race today is joining more and more into a civic, economic and social unity, it is that much the more necessary that priests, by combined effort and aid, under the leadership of the bishops and the Supreme Pontiff, wipe out every kind of separateness, so that the whole human race may be brought into the unity of the family of God.

My take from reading Lumen Gentium is that it characterizes the Church as an extension of heaven into this world, and to be this faithfully, it has to face outward. What Francis is telling the seminarians in Ancona strikes me as unexceptionable post-Conciliar Catholicism. When I listen to Bp Barron on the problem of pre-Conciliarism in the Church, I've got to think Church Militant's objection to Francis's remarks on "rigidity" fits Barron's characterizations.

According to Wikipedia, "This dogmatic constitution was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on 21 November 1964, following approval by the assembled bishops by a vote of 2,151 to 5." It appears that for whatever reason, writers at Church Militant are deeply uncomfortable with it. If so, I can't disagree with Bp Barron that there's a problem here.

Will Pope Francis Suppress The Latin Mass?

There's been lots of speculation recently, for instance here, that Pope Francis is on the verge of revoking Summorum Pontificum. I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm a Catholic convert to the post-Conciliar Church, and I've never been to a Latin mass (if you leave out the one my mother took my sister and me to in the 1950s).

Beyond that, our pastor turned my view of Pope Francis on its head a couple of years ago, when he gave a homily on the passage in John 21 where the risen Christ recommissions Peter on the shore of a lake. He said the Peter we see in that account reminds him a great deal of the Holy Father we have now: often impulsive, even clumsy, but utterly genuine. Francis is the pope we have, just like all the others. My takeaway at this point is that as a convert, I need to avoid trying to be more Catholic than the pope.

We have a highly successful novus ordo parish. We came into the Church via another parish that was less successful, though I've heard they're improving. After two years there, we went looking to see what else was available, and we found this one within a couple of miles. It's anything but the novus ordo stereotype. In some ways, without being self-conscious or self-congratulatory, it out-Episcopalians any of the Episcopal parishes we used to attend. The cantor at our mass is a professional soprano whose day job is singing opera and Broadway.

Our pastor and a succession of associates and priests in residence are extremely capable and inspiring men who would succeed at other careers -- the pastor worked at an accounting firm before following his vocation. I would summarize their message as go to mass; go to confession; get/stay married unless you have a vocation, which is something you must take seriously; study scripture; read the Catechism; go to adoration; give to the parish and the archdiocese; keep your sense of humor.

Given that, I simply don't see what the Latin mass brings to the party. Since I've never been to a contemporary Latin mass or gotten to know a TLM parish, I don't know what I could be missing, but it would have to be so muich better than our parish that it would also be woth an extra 30-minute drive. By the same token, I've never had first-hand experience of the downside to a rad-trad parish. Bp Barron is clear that this exists. He's taken aback by the vehemence, discourtesy, and anger of on line comments against him. He often engages atheists, agnostics, and non-Catholics, but the people who consistently denounce him are the rad-trads.

His position is that if you like the Latin mass because you like the Latin mass, more power to you. But I wonder how many of those there actually are, vis-a-vis people who are maybe overcompensating for something else, with anger as part of the package.

I did get some exposure to people who are at least first cousins of TLM rad-trads when I investigated Anglicanorum coetibus on the old blog. The original target audience was disgruntled Episcopalians from the "continuing" movement of the 1970s and 80s, but few took this up, and by default, the target audience has changed to disgruntled rad-trad cradle Catholics, who like a concocted super-long liturgy that includes all the extra Anglican prayers with all the extra verbiage of Eucharistic Prayer I in the Catholic English mass, with a thorough sprinkling of thee-thou archaisms.

And although I stopped updating the old blog late last year, I still get angry and abusive e-mails about it. This suggest a mindset not too far from the angries who beset Bp Barron in comment sections. Just last week I heard from a guy who insisted that Catholic ladies wear chapel veils all the time, and I was completely off base to suggest that ordinariate parishes use them as an ostentatious marker that they're with a rad-trad program.

All I can say is that Pope Francis speaks against "ritualism", and if he means making a fetish of a particular liturgy as a form of overcompensation, I've got to say he has a point. He also says he doesn't want "rigid" priests. I'm not sure what he means by that. I'm not sure if St Peter always carefully explained himself, either. However, I don't think either Abp Gómez or Francis himself would call any of the priests who've passed through our rectory "rigid". They simply encourage us to study and practice the faith and be good Catholics.

At this point, nobody can be sure if the pope actually intends to suppress the Latin mass, or what measures, if any, he may take short of that. It really won't affect me or our highly successful parish. But after all, he's the pope, just like all the others.

Why Does Peter Daszak Tell Lies?

In court, a jury instruction you often see is that if a witness is shown to have lied in one part of his testimony, the jury is entitled to doubt his veracity about any other part of his testimony. This is one reason I'm scratching my head about all the public statements key figures in the Wuhan scandal keep making, when people in their situation should be maintaining a low profile. This applies to Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, which bundles grants from US agencies and allocates them to Chinese virology labs.

In a post last week, I noted that Daszak has insisted he didn't fund gain-of-function research that made viruses worse and more contagious, when he's on video explaining that gain of function is exactly what those labs do. Now, over the past weekend, Sky News Australia found video of live bats in cages at the Wuhan virology institute, when Daszak had previously denied this was done:

A member of the W.H.O. team investigating the origin of the pandemic in Wuhan, zoologist Peter Daszak said it was a conspiracy to suggest bats were held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and no evidence existed to support the allegation.

In one tweet dated December, 2020 he said: “No BATS were sent to Wuhan lab for genetic analysis of viruses collected in the field. That’s now how this science works. We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!”

Two things strike me. The first is that the guy is simply telling an outright untruth. But the second is that the untruth is dressed up in animal-rights virtue signaling -- no bats are harmed in our research! We gather their viruses and release them! The fact that millions of humans have been harmed in the course of this same research goes unmentioned. This goes to the strange anti-humanist environmentalism that seems to surround this whole field of pandemic research. It's more important that we seem to care about animals than that we recklessly endanger humans. But the whole pose is a lie.

The poster at the top of this post reveals another puzzling aspect of pandemic research. One of Daszak's colleagues in this tight little group, Ralph Baric, gave a presentation in 2018 entitled "Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!”. Isn't it odd that both Daszak and Baric represent their field as helping us to prevent flu pandemics, when in fact they seem to have funded the lab whose leak resulted in one of the worst flu pandemics ever?

At minimum, if I attended either of the presentations by Daszak or Baric, I think I'd ask for my money back. There's something really hinky here, and it's not just Daszak.

Let's Revisit The 2020 Moral Panic In Light Of What We've Learned

Here in LA, we're just two days away from having most COVID restrictions dropped, and the outdoor mask mandate has been gone for weeks, but I still see a majority of people on the street wearing masks. Churches have been gradually returning to normal since the new year, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has just announced that things will be fuily back to normal (I assume this includes choral singing and missals in the pews, but we'll have to see) by June 20. Even so, some of our pew friends at pre-2020 mass are struggling for the courage to get back to in-person church.

In other words, the moral panic of 2020 has had lasting effects even as the COVID pandemic is in full retreat. What have we learned since the release of the Fauci e-mails and related developments? The big one is the strange suggestion that by January 2020, Fauci and others in the loop were fully aware that a lab leak had released a highly contagious new virus on the world, and that US government agencies were complicit in funding the lab that released it. Whether the virus was manufactured or not is beside the point for our purposes here, but I think it almost certainly was.

Fauci's flip-flops are completely understandable in this context. His immediate effort in February and early March 2020 was to minimize the potential seriousness of the outbreak. Thus his remarks saying most people should go ahead and go on cruises, his advice not to wear masks, and his objection to a China travel ban. Speaker Pelosi at the same time was taking the line that fear of a Chinese virus was racist, and she made a publicity trip to San Francisco's Chinatown, urging people to visit. At this stage, the people in the loop were pretty clearly hoping the thing would just blow over.

By mid-March 2020, researchers at Imperial College London released their infection model, which wildly overestimated the extent of infections. It recommended lockdowns and widespread closures. For reasons that aren't completely clear, the consensus among media and public health elites immediately switched from nothing-to-see-here to full panic. TV news shows began to broadcast the maps with scary expanding red circles.

Within a fairly short period, the Imperial College model began to be discredited, but its recommendations for lockdowns and closures persisted as the policy paradigm notwithstanding. After March, the narrative shifted from don't-wear-a-mask to masks required. We were locked down in California from March to June, but by the time I could get out, the strange public dance of social distancing was firmly established, with sidewalk signs and six-foot calibrations as a constant reminder. My wife was denounced by a Karen at the supermarket, not for not wearing a mask, but for wearing the wrong kind of mask.

I think the panic model proved useful to the lizard people. The virus was portrayed as a constant threat that could infect anyone at any time, even though hospital ships proved completely unnecessary, and data began to reflect that most victims were elderly with other serious illnesses. Thus people who didn't conform to visible norms -- wearing a mask, or even being outdoors without good reason -- were characterized as the real threat. In many areas, churches and communities of believers were regarded as centers of disease and were subject to specific controls.

Throughout the initial period, goalposts were moved, and justifications for particular measures were changed. I think this was necessary to keep the public off balance and maintain a situation where the plebs, in the form of Karens and snitches, turned on itself. This was needed to distract attention from the ineffectiveness of lockdown measures, the incompetence and hypocrisy of figures like Whitmer, the Cuomos, Newsom, Birx. and Fauci, and possible questions about the source of the pandemic, which those in the loop were fully aware was a leak from a US-funded Chinese lab.

An additional feature of the official tone throughout 2020 was the constant scolding of the plebs. The plebs was not staying home, not wearing masks, always threatening to hold parties or family reunions, never grateful to the elites. If the plebs would get with the program, we wouldn't have the surges. Instead, we had them, so the lockdowns and closures had to resume or continue, no matter the surges kept on whatever the remedies -- only a combination of vaccine and natural immunity reversed them in early 2021.

The plebs was clearly the folk devil, and not just in the COVID panic. The BLM-Antifa riots, which began in May and continued throughout the rest of the year, blamed not just police brutality but "endemic racism" and "whiteness". The plebs was encouraged, especially in corporate training, to be "less white". If anything this indicated an underlying fear of the plebs among media, political, academic, and corporate elites, a result in part of the success of Donald Trump in his incarnation as a politician and the threat a populist movement represented to the established order.

Nor can I completely neglect the potential power of the anti-humanist environmental movement. Those who ascribe to these views, which represent an incoate and completely unworkable fantasy, seek to save the planet by exterminating some large fraction of the world's human population. I can't help but wonder if the scary red circles on the Imperial College model maps were in fact aspirational.

The question remains what those who funded and managed the Chinese virus labs were actually intending to do, no matter their actual product. The leaked COVID virus represented near complete incompetence: if they meant to conduct safe experiments, they certainly couldn't do that, but if they intended to create a weapon, it was at best a damp squib and must eventually anger the wounded bear of the plebs that was its presumptive target.

I think an encouraging lesson from the last year and a half is that, whatever the ill intent among our elites, their incompetence puts a strict limit on the damage they can inflict on us.

So Again, Why Is The US Deep State Funding Chinese Development Of Superbugs?

Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 short story "Welcome to the Monkey House" depicts a dystopian future in which the world government runs ethical suicide parlors to control overpopulation. The idea of mass euthanasia as social policy began around the turn of the 20th century in the eugenics movement. It had a thorough beta test under the German National Socialist regime, with results many felt were a failure, but it has never quite fully disappeared from the overall conversation.

Nor have neo-Nazi wackos been its chief proponents. The idea of population reduction -- and we're talking reduction, not just stabilization -- has been present in the environmental movement from the start. The problem is that when environmentalists start seriously projecting what's needed to achieve things like carbon goals, they begin to realize that electric cars and synthetic beef just aren't going to be enough to do the necessary job. Even if you get rid of all the cars and all the farting cattle, human beings alone, in the numbers in which they now exist, emit too much CO2 just by breathing. For instance,

The largest single threat to the ecology and biodiversity of the planet in the decades to come will be global climate disruption due to the buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. People around the world are beginning to address the problem by reducing their carbon footprint through less consumption and better technology. But unsustainable human population growth can overwhelm those efforts, leading us to conclude that we not only need smaller footprints, but fewer feet.

Portland, Oregon, for example, decreased its combined per-capita residential energy and car driving carbon footprint by 5 percent between 2000 and 2005. During this same period, however, its population grew by 8 percent.

Or, from an environmental group called Population Matters,

The effects of global warming are already bringing harm to human communities and the natural world. Further temperature rises will have a devastating impact and more action on greenhouse gas emissions is urgently required. Population and climate change are inextricably linked. Every additional person increases carbon emissions — the rich far more than the poor — and increases the number of climate change victims – the poor far more than the rich.

. . . We are currently adding more than 80 million people a year to our global population. The UN projects that without further action to address population growth, there will be two billion more people by 2050, and three-and-a-half billion more by 2100.

The piece then quotes from something called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018:

"All options need to be exercised... We can make choices about how much of each option we use... but the idea you can leave anything out is impossible."

So, just what option are we "leaving out"? They never quite say. But so far, neither Planned Parenthood nor even the Chinese one-child policy has had the effect these folks have in mind. This body of opinion has been recognized for what it is:

There is a single ideological current running through a seemingly disparate collection of noxious modern political and scientific movements, ranging from militarism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and radical environmentalism, to socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism. This is the ideology of antihumanism: the belief that the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity.

We can't say with any certainty who among the environmental or public health establishments ascribes to these views, but on one hand, they aren't limited to redneck Nazi cells, and this sort of thing has also, since the start of the eugenics movement, been part of the elitist mindset. Do Fauci, Collins, and other deep-staters who've laundered hundreds of millions through EcoHealth Alliance to Chinese virus labs want population reduction? We don't know. We really ought to try to find out.

It seems to me that if population reduction advocates are serious -- and they certainly sound that way -- they're in fact aware that the existing respectable measures for population control have proven ineffective. They must certainly be at least spitballing other options. Unfortunately, these pretty much all involve some way of getting many millions, or even billions, of people off the planet. Zyklon B was tried in the 1940s beta, but even 6-12 million bodies proved too great a relocation and disposal problem, not to mention the public relations issues, and even that number would not address current population optimization needs.

Nor, we can be pretty certain, would ethical suicide parlors. People aren't going to line up to get the problem solved themselves.

So, what about a really good killer virus? If you do it right, the people who get the program going won't be identified, and it'll just be written off as an unfortunate natural disaster like the Black Death. And also, if you do it right, the people who get to survive will have the vaccine before the virus is unleashed. I'm not saying this is the only explanation, but it is in fact one that fits. And even Vanity Fair is implying that hinky stuff is about to come out in the Gates divorce:

Gates has embarked on a 20-year public relations effort to frame himself as a good-guy geek deeply excited by new technologies and leading the effort to fix the ills of the world. He’s given away billions to fight malaria, climate change, world hunger. He led the effort to warn of a potential global pandemic (back in 2015, Gates famously said a pandemic was imminent and could lead to the deaths of more than 30 million people), and then, when his vision became reality and COVID-19 obliterated the global economy and killed millions, there he was at the forefront of vaccine research efforts.

Right. How come nobody trusts the guy? He's willing to go public with saying we need to get used to the taste of synthetic beef (though nobody thinks he'll ever eat a bit of it) -- what is he not willing to say in public? For that matter, we learn from Fauci's e-mails that he and Mark Zuckerberg are on a first-name basis, but what they talk about has to be redacted. Why?

I'm not sure we have a whole lot to fear even if deep-staters are colluding with megabillionaires to save the world by killing most of the human race, even though I think there's a good chance that some of these guys actually believe this. The level of incompetence displayed by the credentialed elites in the COVID episode, top to bottom, start to finish, suggests that at least what these people envision can't come to pass.

But they still have the potential to do lots of damage, and we really need to find out what's been going on behind the scenes, because something certainly has.