The Looming Conundrum

The Omicron variant represents a major challenge to the official COVID narrative, which has grown increasingly threadbare. Nothing, up to now, has been very effective against any variant. The pattern has beeen repeated spikes and lulls, when strict measures in one state like Michigan have proven no more effective than no measures at all in another like Florida. But now we learn via the Washington Post that

As part of an enhanced winter covid strategy Biden is expected to announce Thursday, U.S. officials would require everyone entering the country to be tested one day before boarding flights, regardless of their vaccination status or country of departure. Administration officials are also considering a requirement that all travelers get retested within three to five days of arrival.

In addition, they are debating a controversial proposal to require all travelers, including U.S. citizens, to self-quarantine for seven days, even if their test results are negative. Those who flout the requirements might be subject to fines and penalties, the first time such penalties would be linked to testing and quarantine measures for travelers in the United States.

This effectively nullifies the COVID narrative we've heard over the past year: the vaccines are highly effective against all variants. The persistence of COVID is due entirely to the unvaccinated. Masks, lockdowns, and testing are a carrot and stick to induce the unvaccinated to get the shots (and now the boosters). Once we reach herd immunity, this will all go away.

Now it looks like these basic assumptions no longer apply. Travelers must test irrespective of vaccination status. Maybe get retested too. Maybe self-quarantine as well. After all, don't we already know vaccinated people still transmit the disease? The logical craziness is outlined in this piece:

Requiring people to quarantine for seven days even if they test negative is something you’d expect to see out of the Australian government. If someone tests negative, logically, they do not need to stay locked in a room for a week. Further, they would have tested negative prior to the flight as well, which means people would be quarantined after not one, but two negative tests. And for what, exactly?

Back in 2020 at the start of the panic, people had to self-quarantine after one positive test but could get out after two negative tests. Now, nearly two years later, two negative tests apparently won't be enough. In other words, the public health establishment is very belatedly coming to the conclusion that all the COVID measures they've had in place for nearly two years up to and including vaccines and now even boosters, have been ineffective. So naturally, we're going to just reboot and start back with quarantines and travel restrictions and see if that works this time when it didn't before. As Press Secretary Psaki said just the other day,

As you just heard the President say, this is not going to prevent; it is going to delay. And that delay is going to help us have necessary time to do the research by our health and medical teams, to get more people vaccinated and get more people boosted. And he’s always going to err on the side of protecting the American people.

This is starting to sound like "fifteen days to flatten the curve", which was the next step after travel bans in 2020. Fifteen days to buy us time to come up with a new vaccine that's gonna fix it all, this time. But no lockdowns. Oh, no. At least, not yet. That's what the president just told us.

I notice Dr Fauci's continued insistence on last Sunday's talks that attacking him is attacking science but he's gonna go on just saving lives fell really flat. Everyone from Piers Morgan to Adm Giroir told him it's time to shut the Brandon up. I think even Fauci is starting to see where this is headed.

Interesting Data Point

Next year is an election year for LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, and he's been increasing his public profile. He says of himself,

he is the first Spanish-speaking sheriff in the county. In 2018, retired sheriff’s lieutenant Villanueva defeated incumbent Sheriff Jim McDonell, becoming the first to unseat the incumbent in over 100 years. Sheriff Villanueva also became the first Democratic Sheriff in LA County in almost 140 years.

But he isn't that kind of Democrat. As sheriff, he's elected to countywide office independently of the county supervisors, and he's frequently been at odds with them, as well as the LA City mayor and council.

When L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva arrived in Venice earlier this month in a cowboy hat promising to clear its famous boardwalk of homeless people, he seemed to surprise just about everybody. After all, Venice is the LAPD’s jurisdiction.

Chief Michel Moore was among those caught off guard.

“I did not invite the sheriff into Venice Beach,” Moore told our newsroom. So he called his counterpart the day after his visit. “I asked him, ‘How can we work together? I want to talk to you as chief-to-sheriff.’”

Moore did not condemn Villanueva. After all, the sheriff has the authority to enforce laws anywhere in the county.

And in Venice, he is able to do what Moore cannot. As COVID-19 hit last year, the city council imposed a moratorium on the removal of tents housing homeless people during daytime hours. The idea was to limit the spread of the virus. That’s meant the LAPD has had a hands-off approach to encampments across the city.

. . . The sheriff says politicians have “handcuffed” the LAPD and that he had no choice but to deploy to Venice. “We’re taking action,” he said on his June 9 weekly Facebook live chat.

. . . Villanueva has taken a different approach from [the usual homeless services] groups by issuing an ultimatum: accept services, leave, or be arrested by July 4. He’s targeted people from out of state, whom he claims make up a “large” part of the population.

Indeed, Venice Beach was swept clean of the homeless, and there's now a recall move against the city councilman who opposed Villanueva's effort.

Now the sheriff has taken on the county's vaccine mandate for its employees:

The Los Angeles County Sheriff has put out a letter stating that his department will not be working with the company hired by Los Angeles County to enact a mandatory regime of COVID-19 testing and registration. That came after disturbing information arose on the background, policies, and connections of the firm hired to facilitate the program.

. . . Los Angeles County had previously mandated registration with Fulgent Genetics, citing it as part of a “vaccine passport” system applying to all public employees. As the second letter above indicates, threats of termination have followed that mandate. Yet, their own website warns that they “may store, process, and transmit personal information in locations around the world, including locations outside the country or jurisdiction where you are located.” Further, it encourages people to not register with Fulgent Genetics if they wish to avoid that happening.

All of this is a flagrant violation of federal law, the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which makes medical records confidential, especially as they relate to disclosure to an employer. Villanueva's point, though, is that firing sheriff's deputies is counterproductive no matter what, and local authorities across the country are taking this position over public safety and health care workers.

Villanueva seems to have sharp political instincts, and it appears that he's so far been successful in reflecting the actual concerns of an increasingly Republican Latin base, even thnough he's a nominal Democrat.

Why Is Dr Fauci Unhappy?

Dr Fauci had an extended interview yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” where he displayed irritattion at his critics in a pattern that emerged last week when he said of Tucker Carlson and others, "I'm trying to save lives and the people who weaponize lies are killing people." Yesterday, he expanded on this:

BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted.

FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?

BRENNAN: Do you think that this is about making you a scapegoat to deflect–

DR. FAUCI: Of course-

BRENNAN: –From President Trump?

FAUCI: Of course, you have to be asleep not to figure that one out.

BRENNAN: Well, there are a lot of Republican senators taking aim at this. I mean–

FAUCI: That’s OK, I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives and they’re going to be lying.

BRENNAN: It just, it seems, another layer of danger to play politics around matters of life and death.

FAUCI: Right, exactly. Exactly. And to me, that’s- that’s unbelievably bad because all I want to do is save people’s lives. Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.

This is all about. . . President Trump? The elephant in the room now is that over roughly a year since Biden has been in office, with vaccines available over that entire period, there will have been about the same number of COVID deaths by January 20 as occurred under Trump. And the visible face of the COVID crisis since it began, under both presidents, has been Tony Fauci. who's been doing his job and just trying to save lives, except that his record shows he hasn't been especially good at precisely that.

But his version is that he's a scapegoat to deflect from Trump's failures, except that Biden's have been precisely the same. But criticizing Tony Fauci in any of this is criticizing science.

The problem is that hypothetical 2024 matchup polls show Trump beating Biden handily. Fauci sees sentiment against him as a surrogate for pro-Trump sentiment. He's got that right. I've seen surmise from a few poll watchers that the Delta COVID variant fed dissatisfaction with Biden's handling of the crisis.

But this means that hyping the new Omicron variant now will simply compound the problem. And scolding the plebs for not wearing masks or being unvaxxed, or worse, imposing new lockdowns, will only increase resentment and won't fix the problem.

At some point, even Biden will have to recognize that one good way to stop his slide will be to fire Fauci. He's long overstayed his 15 minutes. Even if nothing improves, it will buy Biden some time.

Remember The Scary Red Circles?

The map with the scary flashing red circles was all the rage in early 2020, and it was on the news shows along with predictions of mass graves in public parks. It was based on the Imperial College model, which was almost immediately discredited, and even the media got tired of it around the time the hospital ships in New York and LA harbors were sent back to port.

All of a sudden, it looks like the lizard people want to bring back the old panic. And a panic, or an attempted stampede, is what the Omicron variant appears to be.

What a small world we live in. The “Nu variant” scare you keep hearing about is coming from the same people and institutions that spawned the last COVID scare, and the one before that, and the one before that one, dating back all the way to the onset of COVID Mania.

. . . Just as with previous ruling class-fomented bouts of Hysteria-19, there is no statistical cause for alarm over this new strain, which is one of over 100,000 mutations of the coronavirus.

The “new strain” has hardly produced any lab confirmed cases, but a panicked narrative has already been seeded in the public. The U.K. in particular has driven the fear to new levels. The country has already added several African nations to its travel ban list, citing the new strain.

The same applies to the US:

United States' top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on Sunday that Americans should be prepared to do "anything and everything" to fight the spread of the new COVID-19 variant Omicron.

It is "too early to say" whether we need new lockdowns or mandates, Fauci told ABC News.

"You want to be prepared to do anything and everything," he said.

But the lizard people who are whispering in President Biden's ear have overlooked a change in the political alignment -- or maybe more accurately, they're misreading it. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins sees this, if not very clearly,

Mr. Biden, with the benefit of vaccines, has presided over more deaths now than Donald Trump, whom Candidate Biden practically labeled a murderer. He will be lucky not to see midterm ads reminding him of this. Unraveling here is a White House strategy that counted on Covid going away before the next election so it could claim its handwaving delivered us.

Two things are happening. The moral panic of 2020 was fed by the social uncertainties that put Donald Trump in the White House -- or maybe more precisely, the fear among those who profited from the post-1960s social settlement that this stability could be reversed. But the realignments are still taking place irrespective of Trump; for instance, the recognition among Latins that class identity is more important than racial identity; that the Latin working and middle classes have the same interests as the Anglo working and middle classes, and they're voting Republican like the Anglos.

Worse, Trump was never dead, and he's starting a comeback. But even there, he was only a talented amateur who took advantage of trends that had begun without him, and they'll continue no matter his individual political fate. Thus the current effort to reboot 2020 is going to be feckless.

The new Omicron attempted panic comes amid important US political developments: the January 6 commission, that was supposed to drive a final stake through Trump's heart when two impeachments couldn't, has tapered off into a joke that will end Liz Cheney's career. The jury system, with events like the Rittenhouse verdict, is refusing to knuckle under to the received narrative -- and the courts, in continuing to resist unconstitutionial COVID restrictions, are continuing to do the same.

The basic conundrum right now is that the prevailing strategies haven't worked. The graphs I showed yesterday indicate pretty clearly that no lockdowns, no mask mandates, and no vaccine mandates. work just as effectively as having them. Wearing two masks, as Dr Fauci briefly advocated, worked just as well as wearing no mask. People are catching on. Three shots will work about as well as four. Two will work about as well as three. None, it's starting to seem, works about the same as any. That which cannot continue must stop.

Color Me Skeptical

Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, we all got an emergency alert on our cell phones: "City of LA: COVID cases are spiking. Get vaccinated/tested now." My immediate thought was to ask if I'd missed something -- as far as I knew, cases in the county had been slowly declining for months. I went to my computer and pulled up the graph above. Yup, same old same old. Somebody at emergency management decided maybe they could panic half a dozen people into getting the shot that way, huh?

This is a completely irresponsible way of abusing the emergency alert system, which should be used only to notify people of wildfires, flash floods, and the like. If you cry wolf once too often, people don't take you seriouly.

So over the holiday and yesterday, the big headline at all the aggregators was WORST EVER MUTATION! VACCINE RESISTANT! STOCK MAKET DRIOPS 1000 POINTS! This is panic porn pure and simple, and I guess the world was ready for it if LA City was broadcasting stale alerts about spiking COVID the night before.

I've kept checking the COVID stats. Nobody's asking some obvious questions. Below is Florida's graph:

It could hardly be more different from LA County. Its spring-summer 2020 surge was more severe than LA, but LA had an enormouss peak in late 2020, much sharper and taller than Florida. But LA had a much smaller summer 2021 Delta surge, which has now largely faded. Florida's Delta surge was the highest yet, but it'd also largely faded.

In contrast, look at Michigan:

It had no spring-summer surge in 2020, but it had a surge late that year -- but then it had a big surge in spring 2021 that neither LA nor Florida saw, while it had no Delta peak last summer, but it now has its biggest peak yet. Why is there such wide regional disparity? Shouldn't someone be looking at this? Might there be answers here? At minimum, it's hard to avoid thinking that Florida shows doing nothing is about as effective as vaccine passports, mask mandates, social distancing, and lockdowns.

I've had my two jabs and a booster. I'm not anti-vax. I just don't think any of this is working, and I think the new variant is overhyped, just like everything else.

Looking At David French

The other day, I ran into a piece by David French on Jonah Goldberg's Dispatch newsletter, "The Moral Collapse of America's Largest Christian University". Up to now, I haven't given David French much thought. All I knew about him was that, as a writer for National Review, he briefly mulled running against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016, making him a never-Trumper. Poking around the web, I saw that he's now, like David Brooks, a contribuing writer for The Atlantic, as well as Senior Editor for Goldberg's Dispatch and a columnist for Time.

Yet Wikipedia says of him,

David Austin French (born January 24, 1969) is an American political commentator, theologically conservative traditional Christian, and former attorney who has argued high profile religious liberty cases.

The "theologically conservative traditional Christian" part puzzles me. Here's what he has to say about "Christians" in the Dispatch story at the link:

A few days ago I was eating dinner with a small group of students at a Christian university, and the subject of post-liberalism came up. A person directly asked me why I seemed to object to formally seeking Christian governance in the United States. I answered his question with a question, “Why do you think it would be better than what we have?”

I was thinking both historically and presently. Historically, one could arguably locate the apex of Protestant power in the United States as somewhere around the time of Prohibition. After all, Christians were powerful enough to pass a constitutional amendment banning alcohol, all as part of an effort to improve public morals and public health.

Yet what was the state of American righteousness at that time of apex Christian power? Lynch mobs roamed the South. The entire region was an oppressive nation-within-a-nation, largely cut off from the rule of law. Anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments proliferated across the United States. Not even religious liberty was safe when Christians ruled.

And what about the present? Its largest institutions reel from scandal. A great mass of its members have succumbed to conspiracy theories. Its “religious” anti-vaxxism is claiming lives by the thousands.

So he's essentially conflating Christianity with Protestantism and then saying "Christians" are Prohibitionists, segregationists, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists. Though he doesn't mention it here, they're probably Trumpists, too. (He also doesn't mention that Prohibition was an anti-Catholic measure aimed principally at Irish and Italian immigrants.)

But wait. I'm not aware of any movement that is "formally seeking Christian governance in the United States". This would require a repeal of the First Amendment, something I just don't see on the horizon. This sounds an awful lot like a straw-man argument to me. It sounds like some people thought he "seemed to object to" something that as far as I can tell just doesn't exist. Well, I strongly object to space aliens invading the planet to steal our oxygen. Maybe he and I can join forces.

What was that about conspiracy theories?

In reality, especially in a world where Donald Trump has expanded the possible range of activism, at least some Christians, especially Catholics, have adopoted a stance of advocacy, and indeed political alliances, on a case-by-case basis. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas recently said,

The Catholic Church should feel free to criticize the government when necessary and “shouldn’t be captive to one party or another[.]”

, , , “The Church has to have an independent voice to say we agree when we can agree, and when we can’t agree we’re going to say something,” Bishop Flores told Crux, an online Catholic news outlet.

“And that’s the way it works. I mean, the church is free to speak, and we shouldn’t be captive to one party or another,” he added.

Flores is the new head of the doctrine committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which is charged with assisting the bishops “in areas of faith and morals, providing expertise and guidance concerning the theological issues that confront the Church in the United States.”

This is consistent with recent statements I've noted here from Abp José Gómez, USCCB President, whose view is that there's currently a great deal about which to speak out. Does David French think this is "Christian governance"? I think it's more like the right of petition for redress of grievances, also in the First Amendment.

French isn't much of a legal mind if this is any indication. He certainly isn't much of a writer. I guess that's why he's at Time and The Atlantic.

Let Them Buy Electric Cars!

President Biden channeled Marie Antoinette yesterday:

"For the hundreds of thousands of folks who bought one of those electric cars, they’re going to save $800 to $1000 in fuel costs this year,” Biden said, referring to the $112,595 electric Hummer pickup he test drove at a General Motors factory in Detroit earlier this month.

The least expensive new electric car is the 2022 Nissan Leaf, with a starting price of $28,375. You can get a used Leaf cheaper, but they're still more expensive than comparable gas-driven cars. But not many people currently suffering from high gas prices will come out better, since trading in a gas-driven car will bring a new, higher car payment no matter what.

Another issue is vehicle range. Available models start at about 100 miles, which for many commutes is a single round trip. Recharging can take from 30 minutes to 12 hours, so you can't just swing by the corner gas station to fill up. Longer trips other than commutes are problematic. Conversion just isn't a practical option for most people given current costs and technology..

Beyond that, there are other questions like the need to upgrade the electrical grid if significantly more people are charging those electric cars. If that isn't done, the grid becomes less reliable, so that there are tradeoffs in social costs as well as family budgets. These issues can't be dismissed with a wave of the hand.

But there's a bigger question here -- what is the formal cause of President Biden's remarks? In Aristotelian terms, what's the plan behind them? Joel Kotkin has the most insightful take I've seen so far, which matches my own view that Marx had nothing to say about climate change or gender dysphoria, and he didn't think the Lumpenproletariat was a reliable working class ally:

[U]nlike the social democracy movements that followed World War Two, the New Socialism focusses not on material aspirations but on climate change, gender, and race. While the old socialism sought to represent the ordinary labourer, many on the Left today seem to have little more than contempt for old working-class base and its often less than genteel views on issues such as Critical Race Theory.

Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population.

. . . But there can be little doubt that the biggest change is taking place on the Left. Historically, the British and Australian Labour Parties, the French Socialist Party, America’s Democrats and Canada’s Liberals evolved from a strong working-class base. But in recent years, for both economic and cultural reasons, these parties have become dominated by professionals, academics and government workers increasingly bent on introducing paternalistic, puritan policies.

I don't think he pays enough attention to the actual political dynamic. Most "professionals, academics and government workers" are still middle class -- they're computer programmers, community college instructors (increasingly untenured), administrators, and paper pushers. They have to fill the gas tanks on their older cars like everyone else. They're faring no better than UPS drivers or construction workers, unionized or not.

There's a separate class of elites, the Dr Faucis, Speaker Pelosis, or Al Gores who fly to climate conferences on private jets and go blithely unmasked at lavish parties. (Why didn't Prince Charles ride to Glasgow on the all electric royal train, by the way? Why doesn't Biden tell the secret service to get him an electric presidential limo?)

The current de facto policy objective is actually to punish the working and middle classes by reducing their liviing standards, subjecting them to ever increasing levels of crime, and implementing pansexualist policies that, via discouraging marriage, allowing men into women's toilet facilities, and allowing men to compete in women's sports, reduce the status of women.

Kotkin concludes his piece by hoping the left can rediscover its working-class roots, but the utopia envisioned by the current elites has nothing to do with traditional leftism. The policy the elites seem to be aiming at is a new aristocracy that consumes the resources of subordinated, demoralized middle and working classes.

President Biden is fully on board with this -- this isn't a cognitive issue. His refusal to answer questions even from a generally sympathetic press is an inevitable passive-aggressive strategy forced on him by his insistence on continuing unpopular and unworkable polcies.