We're In The "Morning After'" Phase Of A Moral Panic

Not every discussion of moral panics recognizes a final, "morning after" stage, but recent panics like the day care child abuse controversy of the 1980s have clearly had one, in which the media, the legal system, and politicians slowly and reluctantly admit that mistakes were made. The resignation of New York Gov Andrew Cuomo, one of the chief moral entrepreneurs of the COVID panic, followed by the firing yesterday of his enabler brother, is an indication that we've reached that phase.

No matter the ostensible reasons for their departure were allegations of groping. These are conveniently vague, and their enforcement is highly selective -- Bill Clinton got away with far worse, as (so far) has President Biden. We may assume that when it becomes convenient to dispose of Dr Fauci -- and we're approachintg that point -- allegatioins will arise as needed.

Speaking of whom, the man himself seems now to be playing for sympathy. In a documentary relased this past October, he weeps about having PTSD from his experience as an AIDS bureaucrat:

Doctors were watching helplessly as patients rapidly deteriorated. Fauci describes the trauma of those cases in a new National Geographic documentary called "Fauci," which is streaming on Disney Plus.

"It was all bad, bad, worse, bad, worse, bad, worse," he says in the film. "It was just so unbelievably frustrating when you're used to being able to fix things and you're just not really fixing anything."

. . . When the an interviewer asks why Fauci is so affected by the memory, he replies: "Post-traumatic stress syndrome — that's what it is."

It must be bad not really fixing anything. What a feeling!

A headline on Drudge this morning is AMERICANS 'NUMB' TO COVID, but if you go to the link, it's actually more restrained: 'Americans seem to have become numb to Delta': Omicron is coming, but older variant is still driving infections

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has dominated the news since its discovery in southern Africa was announced last week, but it is the Delta variant — which has been in the United States for months — that is still unilaterally driving the current increase in infection rates in parts of the country.

The disconnect presents public health officials with a new challenge: warning Americans about a new strain of the coronavirus while reminding them that an older strain is showing clear signs of resurgence.

. . . "All the news is about Omicron,” lamented Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Science Institute, on Twitter. “As if a major 2nd surge with Delta wasn’t happening.”

But isn't this a backhanded way of acknowledging that the media -- one of the main ingredients for a moral panic -- has cried wolf one too many times? If Omicron were in fact the panic-inducing new phase of the Blsck Death it was hyped to be. wouldn't the public -- another key ingredient of a moral panic -- be in a frenzy? Ohmygoodness, now it's worse than ever!! Ohmygoodness!!b Ohmygoodness!! The media would be running film of overwhelmed emergency rooms all over the world, just like they did 18 months ago. Heck, there'd be a new run on toilet paper.

The problem is that the moral entrepreneurs and the media didn't get the reaction they thought they would, and in fact they didn't get it within days. And in turn it's had the unintended side effect of encouraging people to minimize Delta. But now we're starting to get level-headed advice:

"Let's not live in fear because Dr. Fauci is promulgating things that are unscientific just to scare you," [Sen Rand Paul] said. "If you've been vaccinated or if you've had the disease, live your life and ignore this man and let's hope he can be gone as soon as possible."

If Chris Cuomo is gone, we can certainly hope.

Omicron Update

As I'd surmised, the attempts by the public health establishment to incite panic during last holiday weekend over the Omicron variant have gone the way of the boy who cried wolf. The information that's coming out is that the variant had been spreading well before its "discovery" late last month. A Minnesota man contracted and recovered from Omicron by November 24, prior to the South African announcement of its discovery.

About 60 people who attended a holiday party in Oslo November 24 were infected and recovered with mild symptoms.

All of those infected at the party - which hosted employees of South African renewable energy firm Scatec - are currently recovering at home, [public health officer] Ravlo added.

The Olso outbreak - currently the world's largest-known Omicron outbreak - happened after several employees who had recently travelled to Scatec's head office in Cape Town attended the party.

. . . [All] cases are assumed to be the new variant, with the results of more sequencing tests expected soon.

Mr Ravlo said the 'incubation period' of the new variant - the time from infection to first symptoms - appears to be two to four days.

This suggests that Omicron had escaped from South Africa before the South African announcement, and certainly well before President Biden's November 26 travel ban from some African countries. So the current renewal of COVID international travel controls is effectively closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out. And more recently, WHO has announced that despite Omicron being identified in 38 countries, nobody so far has died from it.

No one has died with the new super mutant Omicron Covid variant despite the strain being spotted in 38 countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) has revealed.

. . . The WHO warned it could take weeks to determine how infectious the variant is, whether it causes more severe illness and how effective treatments and vaccines are against it.

As I've said, Omicron poses a double threat to the current public health regime. I think it's increasingly likely that it's turning into an overhyped damp squib, which further damages the credibility of Dr Fauci and his colleagues. On the other hand, while I think this is progressively less likely, if it turns out to be a serious threat, it also damages the prestige of the public health establishment, in that all the "scientific" authority and remedial strategies at its disposal have not defeated the disease.

The other side of the whole coin, though, is that the public has taken this in stride. There have been absolutely no runs on toilet paper or face masks, and the news has continued to focus on other issues like crime, Jussie Smollett, and Ghislaine Maxwell. People are fed up with COVID and have decided to resume their daily lives.

It looks like Omicron will be a rear guard action for the moral entrepreneurs hoping to renew the 2020 moral panic.

Epstein At The Clinton White House

The Ghislaine Maxwell trial is bringing out unrelated material on Epstein's modus operandi, as well as his high-level dupes and cronies. As a longtime Ferdinand Lundberg fan, this provides confirmation and insight for me into how the ruling class actually operates. My guess is that there's a great deal that hasn't come out over Epstein and his ability to manipulate the various economic and legal systems at high level, and much of it may never come to light. I don't think, though, that Epstein is a unique figure; Hunter Biden is a near clone as we speak.

The UK Daily Mail obtained White House visitor logs from the Clinton Presidential Library under a series of FOIA requests. Its story here covers Epstein's visits in some detail.

Epstein, who died in 2019, visited Bill Clinton at the Executive Mansion over the course of three years with the first invitation coming just a month after his inauguration in January 1993.

The logs show the late financier showed up on 14 separate days, even making two visits in a single day on three different occasions.

Epstein was invited by some of Clinton's most senior advisers and aides, including one who later served as Treasury Secretary, according to records.

The documents reveal that the vast majority of Epstein's visits stated that he was going to the West Wing, meaning there was a strong likelihood he was meeting Clinton.

What's at least as important as the visits themselves is how they were arranged and who arranged them.

They show that Epstein's first visit to the Clinton White House was on February 25, 1993 and the person who issued the invitation is listed as 'Rubin'. The location of the visit is listed as 'WW', or West Wing.

The most prominent Rubin in the White House at the time was Robert Rubin, who took up his position as director of the National Economic Council when Clinton took office.

Rubin was so favored by Clinton that he was appointed Treasury Secretary in January 1995.

Robert Rubin was not a bit player. The story makes the point,

Rubin would go on to serve as chair of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an international affairs think tank, between 2007 and 2017.

Epstein was a member of the CFR from 1995 until 2009 and donated $350,000 to the organization, money which it later gave to an organization which fights human trafficking.

Wikipedia says the CFR

is a United States nonprofit think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. It is headquartered in New York City, with an additional office in Massachusetts. Its membership, which numbers 5,103, has included senior politicians, numerous secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, professors, and senior media figures.

There is general consensus across the spectrum that its membership includes the power elite or the lizard people, who are extremely influential in high level policymaking. It's mildly surprising that Epstein would have been a member for 14 years, presumably at Rubin's recommendation. Wikipedia says of membershio in the CFR,

The CFR has two types of membership: life membership; and term membership, which lasts for 5 years and is available only to those between the ages of 30 and 36. . . . A candidate for life membership must be nominated in writing by one Council member and seconded by a minimum of three others.

That Epstein served for well over five years as a member suggests he was a life member, leaving in 2009 presumably after complications arose following his 2008 guilty plea and detention. But prior to that, he appears to have ben a fully fledged lizard person. And in the years immediately following Clinton's leaving office in 2001, he flew on Epstein's Lolita Rxpress multiple times.

Among the unanswered questions arising from the Epstein affair is how Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein's partmer in the Tower Finamcial Ponzi scheme, was jailed for 20 years after its 1991 collapse, while Epstein was never arrested or charged. (A related question is how Epstein in the wake of this case could be vetted for admission to the White House.) Tower Financial was the biggest Ponzi in history before the Bernie Madoff scheme. Another issue is the 2006-2008 case that resulted in a guilty plea to charges of procuring a minor, which included immunity from federal prosecution and an extremely lenient work relase sentence.

Alexander Acosta, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said he negotiated the plea deal because he was told that Epstein "belonged to intelligence", was "above his pay grade" and to "leave it alone". There can be no question that Epstein lived a charmed existence for much of his life.

I have a strong suspicion we'll never know exactly how this happened.

Jeffrey Epstein Was A Transhumanist

I've been following commentary on the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and found a data point I hadn't seen before, that Jeffrey Epstein was a transhumanist. This source summarizes that New York Times article:

Transhumanists herald genetic engineering and artificial intelligence as promising ways to improve human performance. They advocate, essentially, for the use of technology — including nanomedicine, robotics, brain-computer integration, and more — that alters typical human physiology in order to better our body and brain.

The usual discussions of transhumanism are far too polite. Among its basic tenets is the idea that in the future, cures will eliminate diseases and conditions that are fatal now but will not be then. Thus it will be possible to freeze the bodies of people who die now, but at some point in the future, not only will medical advances cure the condition that killed the patient, but other future technology will be able to resuscitate the frozen body and bring the patient back to life.

But keeping an entire body frozen may be expensive and for that matter unnecessary, since at some future time, it may be possible to transplant just the frozen head onto a new donor body. So most transhumanists go for the economy solution of freezing just the head, surgically detached after their presumpive death. You can find more about this option at the Cryonics Institute.

According to the link,

Cryonics, the controversial process of freezing a body with the goal of bringing it back to life later, also has a place in transhumanist thinking. Currently, it only works for human embryos. But according to The Times, one unnamed transhumanist said he and Epstein once chatted about cryonics, and Epstein said he'd want his head and penis frozen.

Fringe fans treasure the hilariously ghoulish second-season episode "Momentum Deferred", which "followed the theft of cryogenically-frozen heads by shapeshifters from the parallel universe in their search for a specific head, while the Fringe team attempts to prevent this." This involved the shapeshifters hijacking a truck transporting the frozen heads and casually tossing each head away in their search unitl they find the one in question. "In January 2013, IGN ranked it as the third best episode of the series."

It's unknown if Epstein's head and penis were removed from his body and cryonically frozen following his autopsy. According to the Cryonics Institute,

Damage does occur in the cryonic suspension process, but there are sound reasons to believe that that damage can be limited, especially for patients and their families who are prepared, and can begin the process as soon as possible after clinical death.

Buit if we follow transhumanist logic, even if Epstein's body parts had gotten pretty rank before they were frozen, certainly future technology should be able to reverse this as well. And we can be sure that by then, the statute of limitations on Epstein's crimes (at least in this goaround) will have long since expired by the time they bring him back.

But I'm less concerned about Epstein's own beliefs about transhumanism and cryonics than what it reveals about the acceptability of those beliefs in the circles in which he traveled, and in fact amomg B-list elites generally. A Guardian story reports,

According to the [New York Times], Epstein’s circle included the molecular engineer George Church; Murray Gell-Mann, who proposed the quark; the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks; and the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek.

. . . The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he considered Epstein as an “intellectual impostor”.

“He would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack,” Pinker told the paper. The virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier said Epstein’s ideas did not rise to science that could be subjected to critical analysis.

The scientific community, like Trump and much of New York and Palm Beach society, would sooner forget their association with Epstein.

But they hung out with the guy, took his money, and in some cases his nymphets as well. But transhumanism is socially acceptable among B-listers who haven't even been on the Lolita Express. Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit blogger and law professor with an endowed chair, Yale and Yale Law alum, who's been a regular columnist in the New York Post and USA Today, is a self-described transhumanist. I took up this issue in the first iteration of the Mt Hollywood blog and just as I write now found a link to the controversy at the time:

The blogger John Bruce recently read Glenn Harlan Reynolds' Army of Davids, which promotes transhumanism, and has decided to launch a campaign to have newspapers drop Reynolds on the grounds that he promotes the "transhumanist cult." I exchanged some email with Mr. Bruce trying to bring him up-to-speed, but it had no effect. It seems clear that he is motivated by some personal and partisan agenda I don't full [sic] understand.

My effots were unavailing in any case. Over the years, Reynolds has soft-pedaled his views, and I'm not sure if he still holds them. I was never able to determine whether he has a contract to freeze his own head or other parts on his own death. The problem is that Reynolds is an example of how poorly educated you can be with multiple Ivy degrees and how easy it is to gain a platform with such a poorly formed outlook. Epstein is also an example of how easy it is for even an impostor to con and manipulate our elites.

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.