The Götterdämmerung Strategy: What Were They Thinking?

If I try to get an idea of how the lizard people meant to game out a post-2020 strategy, I can come up with only an inchoate notion that there would be some type of master reset sustained by media consensus and having both legislative houses and the executive in the hands of the Democrats. Then there would be a series of woke reforms, including defunding police, forgiving student debt, bullet trains, largesse for the Lumpenproletariat, and whatever else.

A glimmer of difficulty arose fairly early in this phase when it began to be recognized that the 2022 election would still be held, and the Great Realignment would be enacted only through the slimmest congressional majorities, which would be threatened in the off-year election. Among other things, the initial post-2020 fantasy envisioned eliminating the Senate filibuster, which proved not to be attainable, and that forced a dial-back of other priorities.

Thus at this point, much more aware that the 2022 election would likely close their window of opportunity, the lizard people have focused on getting everything done before then. This probably matched Speaker Pelosi's rumored intent to step down as speaker after that election. In fact, rumors surfaced from time to time over the past several years that, in exchange for being restored as Speaker in 2019 after her normally expected retirement when the Democrats lost the House in 2016, she had promised to retire in 2022.

Thus she expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conventional wisdom expects Republican control of congress to return. The problem with this strategy is that it simply doesn't think past 2021 -- who cares if everything falls apart after this year? Speasker Pelosi will retire! The Götterdämmerung won't be her problem! The COVID strategy fails? The border collapses? The Taliban humiliates us? Inflation? None of those bills will come due until next year, when the Speaker will retire!

(In fact, this reminds me of the last time everyone thought the world was going to end -- was it December 2012 according to the Mayan calendar? A few people said that if they really believed that, the thing to do would be to run up a huge credit card debt just before the big thing happened. Another Götterdämmerung strategy.)

The immediate problem for Speaker Pelosi is that vulnerable House Democrats are worried that the world in fact won't end when the Speaker retires, and they'd like to have careers after 2022. Pelosi's bundled infrastructure bill strategy involves the bipartisan Senate compromise version, which, however, she won't bring to a vote in the House unless the Senate bypasses the filibuster and passes her second, much larger, Great Reset bill via reconciliation. Then the House will vote on both together.

The moderate Democrats' concern is that if this strategy wins now, they lose in 2022. Thus they've started to push back.

A group of moderate House Democrats is threatening to torpedo their party's $3.5 trillion spending plan unless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brings the bipartisan infrastructure bill for a vote first – an act of direct defiance to the speaker and a bold exertion of power with Democrats holding just a slim majority in the chamber.

"Some have suggested that we hold off on considering the Senate infrastructure bill for months – until the reconciliation process is completed. We disagree," the group of nine Democrats said in the letter. "With the livelihoods of hardworking American families at stake, we simply can’t afford months of unnecessary delays and risk squandering this once-in-a-century, bipartisan infrastructure package."

The group added: "We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law."

. . . Even if the moderate Democrats eventually cave to Pelosi and vote for the budget resolution, it's no guarantee that the reconciliation bill will make it out of the Senate. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have said that they aren't willing to vote for $3.5 trillion in spending. And if Democrats pare down the package to please those two, there is a chance they could lose some more progressive votes.

Given the events just of the past week, the idea that we can run up a big credit card debt because the world is going to end isn't working well. Even if the world will end in 2022, there are problems we need to solve now, and the man in the photo at the top of this post seems less and less capable of addressing them. He looks hunched, defeated, struggling to concentrate, in an empty room. What we have in 2021 and upcoming months looks to be a serious dilemma. Let's not even think about 2022.

Nobody's Talking About This

The only context I have for this is remarks by Dan Bongino last year:

Former Secret Service Agent and conservative pundit Dan Bongino has declared that Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is suffering rapid “cognitive decline," according to sources who are "close to the situation." . . . . Breitbart News reported. "Not a joke and not hyperbole – I’m hearing from people close to the situation that Biden’s cognitive decline is rapidly worsening and is becoming increasingly difficult to mask," Bongino wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday morning.

The strong implication seems to be that Bongino's sources are former colleagues in the Secret Service, who would be in the position of routinely trying to shepherd Biden through awkward moments like those caught here. The body language of the agents in the clip suggests they're working hard to maintain a professional detachment and respect for the office, but I also have the impression that this is a routine they've become used to.

But since Biden's inauguration, his allies and operaives have in fact continued to mask it. Questions are very rare and discounted as partisan attacks when they arise. Meanwhile, he erratically reverses policies like allowing the COVID eviction moratorium to expire, apparently under pressure from Speaker Pelosi.

There's little question that at least for now, Biden is president on a part-time basis. The clip above, as far as I understand this, was made this past Tuesday as he returned to the White House from an extended weekend in Wilmington. According to his public schedule, he left the White House to return to Wilmington again Thursday, and yesterday he left Wilmington to stay at Camp David until this coming Wednesday.

One possible takeaway from the clip is that he isn't comfortable in the White House, to the extent that he seems to be unfamiliar with the basic layout of how to go in and out and presumably prefers the familiar environment of his home.

As more and more crises spin out of control, now including the impending disaster in Kabul, it's not a good look. The question is how long his inner circle and the media can continue to cover for him. They've done a remarkable job so far.

Seems Like Nobody's Happy With Dr Walensky

As of yesterday, our intrepid public health authority Dr Walensky was complaining about how nobody took her seriously or something.

“I am really struggling with how to communicate to people who are worried about politics, and I just want them to continue to be at their family’s dinner table,” Dr. Walensky told the Wall Street Journal. [Family dinner table? Wha?] “My job is to put my head down, ignore the criticism and do the right thing for the public and to do the right thing for health.”

The Journal noted that patients Walensky has treated in the past are “generally” trusting of her advice but as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “she has learned the same isn’t always true of many people in the U.S.”

. . . Walensky’s mistrust comes as White House officials are reportedly frustrated by the CDC’s lack of coronavirus data transparency. “Top Biden officials are growing frustrated with the lack of internal visibility into data being collected by the CDC, particularly as they try to deal with Delta’s spread,” Breitbart News reported Monday.

“That’s where the tension is, like ‘Where the hell are the data?’” another source revealed.

But it seems there's no pleasing anybody, either in the White House or Dogpatch:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director (CDC) Rochelle Walensky came under fire Thursday for using the phrase "pregnant people" while recommending women getting the highly effective COVID-19 vaccine.

"The rise in cases, vaccine hesitancy, and the increased risk of severe illness for pregnant people make vaccination against #COVID19 more urgent than ever. Read why @CDCgov recommends that pregnant people should be vaccinated against COVID-19," Walensky tweeted, with a link to the CDC website.

Jim Treacher replied,

"Pregnant people." They can't say "women" because science-deniers will yell at them, yet they want us to trust them.

Brandon Westbrook replied,

If you’re fuzzy on whether a man or woman can get pregnant, probably not going to be taking your other science advice.

The story continued,

The CDC has been ripped as of late for issuing confusing guidance throughout the pandemic. Last month, people of all political stripes were outraged after the agency revised its mask guidance to announce that fully vaccinated individuals should return to wearing one indoors and there should be universal masking in schools in light of the spread of the delta variant.

The CDC previously advised masks be worn indoors by all individuals ages 2 and older who are not fully vaccinated and stated that those who are fully vaccinated didn’t need to wear a mask or physically distance in any setting. Walensky said at the time the agency didn't take the reversal lightly.

Adding to the problem was the highly publicized Barack Obama birthday party on Martha's Vineyard this past weekend, in which the A-listers flew in on carbon-spewing private jets and ignored mask mandates. Dr Fauci criticized the Sturgis motorcycle rally attended by Dogpatch types but said nothing about the Martha's Vineyard dig, at which neither Li'l Abner nor Daisy Mae appeared. Such developments make COVID blatantly political. For public health authorites to put COVID in the context of woke vocabulary simply exacerbates the problem. As South Dakota Gov Noem pointed out,

"Dr. Fauci has become political, and I think it's unfortunate because there's going to be a point in time again when we're really going to need our public health officials and know we can trust them," Noem said on Fox News on Thursday. "And he has discredited his entire profession by the positions he has taken during this pandemic."

The whole NIH-CDC is going to have to be redone. This will be a biger and bigger issue for 2022 and 2024. There has been massive stress and disruption, with more of it threatened from the elites, and no effective solution. Trump, DeSantis, and others are going to run with this.

Where Is The Newsom Campaign?

A couple of data points puzzle me about the California recall election's progress. The first is that by July 29, there were two polls in quick succession that showed growing sentiment among likely voters to recall Gov Newsom. Since then -- fully two weeks later -- there's been nothing. This is a rapidly developing story, with the September 14 election little more than a month away, and nobody's releasing polls.

In fact, we received our own mail-in ballots in yesterday's mail, something the state is doing for every voter in this election. This means that voting is already under way. The top Republican candidates are actively campaigning via ads on Facebook and elsewhere. But Newsom, who has raised more than $58 million to defeat the recall, three times as much as all his opponents combined, is far less visible than Elder, Cox, and the other Republicans.

Elder in particular is able to leverage appearances on Fox News and elsewhere to get free coverage, but Newsom doesn't seem to be spending much on ads, certainly nothing like his funding would suggest. He actually ran ads last March, April, and June against the signature campaign, but when the effort qualified for the ballot, he seems to have lowered his profile.

Not long ago, he gave a photo op cleaning homeless trash from under a Berkeley freeway bridge, but this is "free" media when he could easily buy ads, and not only that, though free, it points to one of his main vulnerabilities as he belatedly tries to say I'm concerned about the homeless problem, too.

Beyond that, angry unscripted remarks caught on video by the Sacramento Bee went viral on social media.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom snapped last week while talking to reporters, ranting that everyone outside the Golden State is "b----ing" about it.

Newsom, who is facing a closer-than-anticipated recall election, spoke to the Sacramento Bee in an interview last week in which he grew angry at critics of California.

Clips from interview have since gained steam online, where they have been making the rounds on social media.

. . . "I'm a future ex-governor," the governor also said in the interview. "It could happen in a few weeks, it could happen in a few years. I love this damn state."

With viral coverage like that, not only is he not spending his own money, but he's giving aid and comfort to Larry Elder. In fact, his own defeatist messaging and his apparent inability to control his maudlin remarks make me wonder if rumors that circulated a couple months ago that he had a serious drinking problem might be true.

The second data point is that it's hard to avoid an implication in his remarks that the national Democrats -- including Californians Pelosi, Feinstein, and Harris -- are cutting him loose. On August 2, I quoted him saying,

During the interview with the editorial boards of the McClatchy Newspapers, Newsom also noted that he does not think the Democrats are considering the consequences of him possibly losing.

“I don’t think the national Democratic Party’s asking themselves that question,” Newsom told them. “If this was a successful recall, I think it would have profound consequences nationwide and go to not just politics, but to policy and policymaking.”

But just yesterday, I quoted a Democrat consultant who said the national effort would ramp up -- "soon".

"You will see a full-scale war going on in the next few weeks," said democratic strategist Steve Maviglio.

. . . With heavy pressure coming down on the governor, Democrats too are pulling out all the stops.

"I'm receiving texts from the Democratic National Committee, from progressive groups. We have members of our congressional delegation holding press conferences. You'll have national figures flying in," Maviglio said.

Er, what natiional figures? Pelosi appears to be completely wrapped up pushing the next infrastucture bill, bringing the House back two weeks early from its recess and dumping her own vulnerable members in the process. Harris can't be bothered. Feinstein is 88. I can't imagine that second-stringers with a lot of baggage like Swalwell or Maxine Waters can be much help.

And people are voting now, as we speak. Polls aren't being released, but we can be sure they're being made. The lizard people dropped Cuomo. Win or lose, they're dropping Newsom.

Ruminating On Cuomo's Resignation

Well, right up to his resignation, a lot of the smart money said Cuomo would pull a Clinton, keep denying he-said-she-said allegations and hold on until the thing blew over. But Clinton was Br'er Rabbit; Cuomo pulled a Nixon, turning a stubborn countenance to the world and finally collapsing in disgrace. But there was a subtext to Nixon, too. Nixon's ultimate sin was not letting his aides bungle the Watergate fiasco. His sin was Alger Hiss. The lizard people have a long memory.

When I posted on Cuomo's problems last week, I raised questions that have also turned up in independent media: ultimately, Cuomo was accused of run-of-trhe mill offenses: "non-consensual touching" and "sexist remarks" leading to a "hostile work environment". Forget Clinton, Biden is on film doing the same frat-boy stuff, in full view and far more often. Nobody brings this up any more, because it won't go anywhere.

The other objection is that Cuomo was forced out due to the gropery, not the thousands of nursing home deaths. One answer, of course, is Stalin's insight that one death is a tragedy; millions are a statistic. But nevertheless, COVID is a factor, it's just a subtext that nobody wants to acknowledge directly. But acknowledged or not, the Democrat handling of COVID -- lockdowns, social distance, masking, closed schools, public events foregone, with no demonstrable success after 19 months of red light-green light controls -- is proving a major liability.

A few independent commentators like Don Surber have understood the issue. Surber thought Cuomo should stay:

Suddenly this summer everyone just discovered Cuomo is a cretin?

Spare me the self-righteousness.

I want this son of a gov to stay in Albany, win a fourth term, and stand as a symbol of the corruption of the American political system, which includes the media. \

This YouTuber has a take that follows up on why a Don Surber wanted him to stay:

The Democrats had to drop Cuomo, because, acknowledged or not, the COVID nursing home scandal, with the larger context that draconian controls work no better than no controls at all, was an attack from the right, which is proving successful.

And, in the wake of disturbing polls on the California recall last week, we've heard nothing new. No new polls, the legacy media just sort of carefully lowering expectations without them:

It's the battle most people didn't see coming.

As ballots are being sent out to every registered voter across California, polls show Governor Gavin Newsom locked in a tight race for next month's recall election.

"You will see a full-scale war going on in the next few weeks," said democratic strategist Steve Maviglio.

. . . With heavy pressure coming down on the governor, Democrats too are pulling out all the stops.

"I'm receiving texts from the Democratic National Committee, from progressive groups. We have members of our congressional delegation holding press conferences. You'll have national figures flying in," Maviglio said.

Right. Flying in. In just a few weeks, wait and see. Who're they gonna fly in? Kamala Harris? Nancy Pelosi? Maxine Waters? Why aren't they here now? The Republicans are campaigning right now. Cuomo's resignation is a national event. So's the California recall.

Nothing's Clear, And They Like It That Way

I posted yesteday about the imprecise language Drs Fauci and Walensky use in discussing COVID. In one sentence on last Sunday's talks, Dr Fauci used "infected" with two different meanings. Infected-a meant only that antibodies were detected in tests irrespective of symptoms. Infected-b meant someone "had" COVID, i.e., symptoms, like someone "has" cancer or the flu. This has been a basic problem with how COVID has been discussed from the start, and it's led to the widespread fear that a positive test is a death sentence.

So this leads to another question that nobody really answers: what's the likelihood that someone who tests positive will develop symptoms at all? As of July 2020, this site published an official CDC estimate:

Asymptomatic coronavirus carriers, or those who do not experience any symptoms, unknowingly contribute to the spread of COVID-19, infectious disease experts say. Now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued new guidance that raises the estimate of asymptomatic carriers to 40 percent of people who have COVID-19.

Previously, the CDC estimated asymptomatic carriers at 35 percent, a figure reported in late May. The agency concedes that “asymptomatic cases are difficult to identify and transmission is difficult to observe and quantify.”

The CDC had estimated that the chance of transmission of COVID-19 from asymptomatic people was 100 percent. But that figure has been revised downward this month to 75 percent. That means that the CDC now says asymptomatic individuals are less likely to transmit infection, compared to symptomatic individuals who have a 100 percent chance of transmission.

But in January 2021, the CDC published different results using (oh, boy) a model.

Overall, the model predicted that 59% of coronavirus transmission would come from people without symptoms, including 35% from people who were pre-symptomatic and 24% from those who never showed symptoms at all.

Jay Butler, CDC deputy director for infectious diseases and co-author of the study, admitted the researchers used "a fairly simple mathematical model" for such a complicated and continually evolving pandemic, but they were nonetheless "surprised how well it held up under a broad range of base assumptions."

Butler added, "I have no doubt that we'll still have people say, 'Well, what if you did X, Y, or Z?' But hopefully being able to adjust the variables will help address some of those concerns, such as what we did."

According to Butler, CDC wanted to do a study on asymptomatic spread because "[u]nfortuantely, there continues to be some skepticism about the value of community-wide mitigation efforts for preventing transmission such as masking, distancing, and hand hygiene."

Except that the real-world data from millions of people throughout 2020 showed that lockdowns, social distancing, and hand hygiene had absolutely no effect on transmission despite near 100% compliance. And even among semi-official sites, the numbers are all over the place. Gunderson Health, without citing any source, says,

One of the questions I get most frequently is how many people develop symptoms and how many people remain asymptomatic. We believe that the number of asymptomatic infections ranges from 15 to 40 percent of total infections. COVID-19 causes a wide range of symptoms. Some have mild symptoms like a sore throat or a runny nose that can be confused for allergies or a cold. Others grow more ill and develop shortness of breath, pneumonia or require hospitalization. We don't know why some people never get sick, have only mild symptoms or require hospitalization.

It can be challenging to keep up with constantly changing information. We encourage you to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The recommendations are based on current science and updated regularly.

OK, but when I do web searches for CDC numbers, I get nothing but the vague, heavily qualified answers you see here after 18 months of the pandemic.

One of the formative experiences of my life cane early in my freshman year at an Ivy League school. I was told that due to my test scores, I could opt out of freshman comp. Something deep inside told me I shouldn't do this, I should sign up for the course. (This was the sort of thing that gave my parents fits.) My papers came back with red scribbles all over, "vague", "wrong word", "logic", "faulty parallel", and so forth. I'd been told I was a good writer, I should look into it as a career, and here, without having to do it, I'd taken this course and gotten a C-minus, which trashed my GPA. My parents were livid.

Meanwhile, pretty down over how the comp course had gone, I would read the campus paper each morning. The staff there were the real people who were going to go on to real journalism careers, the Jake Tappers, the Laura Ingrahams. They were already junior members of the elite. I would read their pieces and suddenly see the same stuff that came back to me with "vague", "wrong word", "logic", "faulty parallel". This threw me into something not quite depression, just something more like a crisis over how the world worked. The dean of freshmen, who liked me, was never able to help. He dropped dead of a heart attack anyhow.

It took me quite some time to realize this isn't a bug, it's a feature. I'd inadvertently learned there are two kinds of writers, those who actually write, and those who don't. It was an early lesson in the Ivy League and the elites and my place in them.

Fauci and Walensky are supposed to talk this way. They've been taught this from early youth.

Parsing Dr Fauci

I once had a friend who started out in blue-collar work at the phone company. His superiors saw that he had a lot of promise, and they sent him to courses to prepare him for supervisory and management jobs. Among them were courses in speaking and writing. I never thought he had problems with communication skills, but at minumum, it showed how important at least some corporations thought they were -- indeed, they'll likely now pay lip service to diversity and inclusion, but they'll still want people who can communicate effectively. The need for those leadership skills doesn't go away.

So it's all the more intriguing that our public health authorities in the midst of a pandemic express themselves so poorly. Let's take Dr Fauci's appearance yesterday on Meet the Press. He answers a question from Chuck Todd with a remarkable tautology:

CHUCK TODD:

. . . How dangerous is this Delta variant for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI:

Well, it's extremely dangerous for the unvaccinated because, if they get infected and if they stay unvaccinated and don't wear masks, ultimately they're going to wind up getting infected.

It's extremely dangerous, because if they get infected, they're going to wind up getting infected. He may have meant something else -- he may have meant to say that if they get infected, they might wind up getting sick -- but that's not what he said. But then he goes on:

If you are vaccinated, you are very well protected against getting infected.

This is, as far as I can tell, simply incorrect. Dr Walensky came somewhat closer to correct in what I quoted from her yesterday when she said what vaccines "can't do anymore" is prevent transmission, although this is actually another example of remarkably poor expression at the top. Vaccines don't prevent infection. They induce the body to produce antibodies against the virus when it infects. This has never changed. What Dr Walensky seems to think she's saying is that as of last week, the CDC has changed its messaging to reflect this. But Dr Fauci is still groping for what this may mean:

Since no vaccine is 100% protective, there will be what we call breakthrough infections. That's the bad news. The good news is that almost invariably that will be an infection that is either without symptoms or minimally symptomatic, which means the vaccine still protects extremely well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and deaths. But the interesting and unfortunate thing that we found out that gets to the mask issue is that this virus is so easily transmissible that, if a vaccinated person gets a breakthrough infection, which will happen, Chuck. You can expect that because no vaccine is 100% effective.

I was astonished that as of yesterday, Dr Fauci used the term "breakthrough infections". Everyone, vaccinated or not, can get infected with the virus. What the vaccine does is allow the body to produce antibodies that attack the virus and in most cases keep the body from developing symptoms. The infection isn't the breakthrough, it's the symptoms. "Breakthrough illness" might be a better term, but "infections" is more panic inducing, I guess. He goes on,

Now, we're finding that the level of virus is really quite high, which means one of the bad things about all of this is that even though you're protected from getting severe disease, if you're infected, you can transmit it to someone else even if you're vaccinated. And that's the fundamental basis of now saying people should be wearing masks in indoor public places when you're in a region that has a high level of infection.

I'll leave aside the question Chuck Todd didn't ask, which would be, "But cloth and paper masks are ineffective against the way COVID is apparently transmitted. We saw that throughout 2020. What good will they do now if they didn't work then?" If Todd were to ask it, Fauci would simply reply with the sort of word salad he's been giving throughout the interview.

But in fact, the medium here is the message. On top of the vagueness, the tautology, the ponderous and repetitious verbosity, is the thick New Yawk accent. This, at least in the mind of the elites, gives Fauci authenticity. He's so bright, he's reached the top in spite of his poor communication skills. Listen to what he says! Or at least, try to listen.

This isn't a bug, it's a feature. They change what they say week to week, because last week what they said didn't work. But if they make what they say impossible ever quite to understand, it doesn't matter.