Merry Christmas

“I Want To Start By Acknowledging How Tired And Worried You Are"

I tried to watch Biden's latest COVID speech on the web, but it became plain after just a few minutes that it was flat, listless, and desultory. I think it's fair that he himself may have been tired and worried, but the country at large was busy with Christmas and fairly confident that Biden would be too terrified to try to lock anything serious down, so nobody actually paid much attention. I looked at Politico's account of the speech:

But even he must know he faces a near-impossible task, as he tries to glue back together some sense of unity in a Humpty Dumpty of a nation consumed by disease, division and distrust. The combination of a worn-out public, mixed messaging from health officials and stiff skepticism from large swathes of the country mean the president will struggle to break through.

. . . But restoring trust, and his own political sheen, is difficult when Biden is also the de facto voice of pandemic response at a time of plummeting trust in science and expertise, particularly (though not exclusively) among Republicans.

It's notable that in this address, unlike prior ones from both Trump and himself, he wasn't flanked by the likes of Drs Fauci and Birx. No prestige to be drawn from them now. His problem is that the moral panic narratives that drove the 2020 election and the leftist optimism of 2021 have run their course.

It didn't help, for instance, that in the public health establishment's effort to revitalize vaccination hysteria, two fully vaxxed and boosted US senators tested positive over the past weekend, but this simply confirmed the growing public awareness, and indeed the forced acknowledgement by the public health establishment itself, that the fully vaxxed and boosted can contract and spread COVID. As one commentator noted, it's as though the highway safety people have had to acknowledge that seat belts don't necessarily work.

This in turn destroyed the most recent attempt to identify folk devils for the panic, the anti-vaxxers and the unvaxxed. Last week, Biden tried to threaten them with, if not the power of the law, at least the wrath of the Almighty:

"For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death... for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm," Biden continued.

This week it was,

“If you’re not fully vaccinated, you have good reason to be concerned. You’re at higher risk of getting sick and at higher risk of passing it to your friends and family.”

. . . “Because Omicron spreads so easily, we will see some vaccinated people test positive – perhaps in large numbers. Vaccinated people may get sick, but they are still protected from severe illness and death.”

This is not the FDR of Pearl Harbor:

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

. . . I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

. . . With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.

If from nothing other than a rhetorical standpoint, Biden's speech in contrast was a tired acknowledgement that there's really not much we can do. Get vaxxed. It's actually slightly better than not getting vaxxed. Please get vaxxed. But the daily reports are that the most vaxxed US regions, and the most vaxxed countries, are the ones with record COVID surges.

The justification for the BLM riots, systemic racism in society merely reflected in universal police misconduct, has been steadily collapsing in the second half of this year. The COVID narrative, that Science led by Dr Fauci would prevail over an anti-Science Donald Trump and defeat COVID, is collapsing with Omicron and a determination to restore a normal Christmas season.

Ex presidents don't hold press conferences. Period. Donald Trump will hold one on January 6 to contest the House "insurrection" investigation. I'm not sure if he'll make a comeback, nor if he does that it'll be an unalloyed good thing, but it's a sign that things are changing. Big time.

"Is There Pirate Treasure On Oak Island?"

With a great deal happening but no news, I figured I'd turn to a subject I've intended to cover for some time anyhow, the Oak Island treasure and the current status of the search. We went to cable in 2012, not long after the Curse of Oak Island series started on the History Channel, and for several years I didn't bother with it, taking what I now recognize is the elitist approach that the whole thing is a fraud. It wasn't until about season 5 that I started paying attention, and after several years, it's become our must-watch show above all others.

The YouTube link above consists of a university-educated toff from the UK sneering at the whole enterprise, which for me is an indication that he simply doesn't watch the show. He does mention the current main players, the brothers Rick and Marty Lagina -- he mispronounces their names, which are spoken with a hard "g", another clear indication that he's probably never watched the show, and he basically dismisses them as a couple of rich eccentric Americans.

The problem is that the Laginas, especially Marty, are rich, but they aren't trust fund dilettantes. The family money seems to come from Marty, who first made a fortune from fracking, but when that became politically incorrect, he sold that business, turned around, and made another fortune from wind power, currently much more politically acceptable. This is a canny guy. He runs a vineyard as a sideline, but it looks like much of his surplus wealth goes to indulge his older brother Rick, a retired postal worker, who'd grown fascinated with the Oak Island mystery after seeing a Readers Digest article in January 1965.

To me, the actual story arc of the show revolves around Marty, even though Rick is the true believer. Marty pretty clearly began the project from love of Rick, but for much of the story was a treasure skeptic until very recent finds. On the other hand, the fact remains that Marty is an extremely canny guy. Whether or not Rick was chasing a will-o-the-wisp, when he sank money into the island, he was careful to negotiate a very favorable agreement with the province of Nova Scotia that ensured, should there actually be treasure on the island, that it would get 10%, the Laginas and their partners the remainder.

This was maybe a decade ago, when it was plenty easy for the province to sign anything on the bet that the Laginas were just as crazy as all the unsuccessful searchers had been for 200 years. Crazy indeed. The History Channel had also been negotiating with the Laginas from the start to run a show along the line of their other fare like Ancient Aliens, but it looks like Marty also held out with them for the best deal possible, and he now pretty clearly has control of the show, leaving aside the money it brings in. I agree with the YouTuber to some extent when he says, "There definitely is money there, if you own the History Channel." But Marty gets a cut, and he ain't done.

The problem for the province is there's incresingly money there in the presence of the show, but worse, Marty's canniness is coming through year on year. He runs what can only be characterized as a business operation behind the scenes. The dialogue alone in the show suggests that this is a structured operation, with Marty as CEO with signature authority, Rick as COO, and other Lagina family members and business partners with strictly delegated areas of authority. My surmise is that there are attorneys and accountants -- good ones -- behind the scenes. The intent is to make money.

We now get to the current state of the story arc: over the past couple of years, the systematic effort Marty has sponsored, with serious investment money to bring in heavy equipment for search and excavation, has been making it more likely that something important is actually down there. The YouTuber above thinks it's just random coins, brooches, and baubles that don't prove much of anything, but just in the last two seasons, the Lagina operation has uncovered a road, acknowledged to be a major piece of European civil engineering from the 1500s or 1600s, leading from a potential dock to the money pit area.

Among other things, this has led Marty to buy up almost all the rest of the island. He's a canny guy.

This in turn has led the province to realize there's more to the project than they'd thought when Marty negotiated the first agreement, and over a few seasons, it has been trying to increase its control over the operation. They appear to have unilaterally revised the agreement to place archaeoligists who report to the province on site, with increasing requirements to approve all activity. Marty up to this year has gone along, since academically respectable archaeologists on site do nothing but increase the prestige of the Laginas.

This has also done a great deal for the neighboring area around Lunenburg, NS. Occasional interviews with local business owners indicate that the popularity of the show has extended what had been just a fair-weather vacation season to year-round business. Tourists swarm to pubs sometimes featured on the show in hopes of spotting the Laginas there. Stores, restaurants, bed and breakfasts, and so forth all benefit. The Irving Company, a New Brunswick based player in construction and heavy equipment, is also doing quite well.

This year, Nova Scotia made a heavy-handed effort to shut down much of the operation on the island on the archaeological excuse that First Nations artifacts had been discovered in the search, and nothing much could be undertaken until the First Nations had also gotten involved. Right.

Marty is a canny guy. A not much emphasized plot line over recent episodes suggests the province is backing down. After all, the Irving Company wants the business. The Lunenburg businesses want the search to continue. Marty kicked most of the archaeologists off the island as the province finds it will nevertheless actually approve new excavations. It's good not to have bad publicty on one of the most popular TV shows. I've got to assume the offstage attorneys also earned their fees.

The show is popular because it's an American story, much as UK toffs miss the point. My admiration for Marty Lagina grows by the week.

The Quiet Constitutional Crisis

The heretofore unmentioned circumstance is entering public discourse:

Vice President Harris asserted that Joe Biden is president — not Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — during a tense exchange on Charlamagne Tha God's Comedy Central show.

Charlamagne asked Harris to name the country's "real president."

"It's Joe Biden. And don't start talking like a Republican about asking whether or not he's president," Harris told the host of "Tha God's Honest Truth" on Friday in an interview on the weekly late-night program.

More remarkable is an op-ed in The Hill that suggests -- for the first time I'm aware in polite discussion -- that the Spiro Agnew option is potentially on the table.

The last vice president of the United States to resign was Spiro Agnew in October 1973. Should Vice President Harris be the next?

. . . Ironically, as more and more Republicans hope that Harris remains on the ticket — especially as the candidate for president — a growing number of Democrats are publicly vocalizing their concerns about President Biden and Harris as viable candidates three years from now.

Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president, resigned after pleading no contest to a felony count of tax evasion. His resignation came just 10 months before Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace. Their resignations set off a “musical chairs” version of appointed vice presidents, and soon after, Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller assumed the country’s two highest offices.

I first mentioned the Agnew scenario here back on July 3 as I noted the increasing chatter about Harris's poor performance. but nobody polite at that point mentioned Agnew or any potential two-shoe drop. The implication in the link above is that influential people are thinking past a likely 2022 midterm defeat and are beginning to worry that neither Biden nor Harris is a viable 2024 candidate, while Donald Trump hasn't gone away and is beating Biden in polls.

But I think making Biden and Harris a theoretical issue for 2024 is a polite disguise for actually saying the problem is much more immediate. The two people now in the presidential line of succession are Vice President Harris and Speaker Pelosi. Should Harris be coaxed into resigning, Pelosi would be second in line over a period in which a new vice president would need to be nominated and confirmed, which, with congress very narrowly divided and few obvious choices for her replacement, could be long and contentious.

It's increasigly plain that the problem isn't Donald Trump in 2024. The problem is Biden and his successors now, with potentialy urgent issues like a Russian invasion of Ukraine or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan on the radar. The US probably doesn't have the luxury of the 10 month interregnum it had in the Agnew-Nixon maneuver.

What's beginning to occur to me -- and I'm not sure why it's taken so long -- is that political leaders are normally well spoken. The most poorly spoken president in my lifetime other than Biden was Dubya, but his problem was in large part just that he spoke Texan, not Yale, and with a teleprompter, he was fine. Biden is never anything but a stream of misspeaks, malapropisms, stutters, slips, slurs, and hypercorrections, and the teleprompter has no effect. Harris never comes off as anything but shallow and unserious. Advice from Peggy Noonan that she should serious up and rise to her potential reponsibilty is delusional.

Pelosi is an octogenarian corrupt machine politician in a safe seat, and her communication skills are generally at a par with Biden and Harris. Her histrionic public style verges on drag queen. Leaving policy issues completely aside, none has actual leadership qualities. But considering the now certain failure of the BBB, which Pelosi had characterized as her "legacy", she's become as much a lame duck as Biden.

I think it's increasingly likely we'll be seeing an Agnew scenario, sooner rather than later. Whom will they nominate to replace Harris? I don't rule out Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, As I Said

According to the UK Daily Mail, US Omicron cases have doubled overnight:

The number of confirmed Omicron cases in the U.S. has nearly doubled in a period of 24 hours, and six Northeastern states saw a record number of daily COVID cases this week as the variant is now confirmed in 44 states, with New York hit the hardest.

As of Saturday morning, there were 830 cases of the Omicron COVID-19 variant confirmed by DNA sequencing across the country, a 97 percent increase from Friday morning's tally.

In reality, the true number of Omicron cases is much higher, as only 1 to 2 percent of all cases are sequenced for variant markers, but the testing data shows a disturbing national trend.

The problem is that as is increasingly reported from Europe, the Omicron variant is far milder. The Daily Mail story continues at length to conflate Delta with Omicron, but its graphs simply illustrate another point I've been making:

There's little difference between the late 2020 peak and the late 2021 peak nationally, despite the fact that by the Daily Mail's count, 72% of US residents have had at least one dose of vaccine since the 2020 peak. According to this site, 203,479,206 people or 62% of the population have been fully vaccinated. Of those, the percentages in vulnerable populations are far higher. But this has had no remotely proportional impact on cases or deaths overall in the US, currently based on the Delta variant.

The public health establishment has simply had no good explanation for this state of affairs. Its strategy throughout has been to scold the plebs for insufficient adherence to whatever the current prescription is: too many block parties; not enough masking; not enough social distance; not enough jabs; not enough boosters. In response to the new wave, it's going to be rinse, repeat.

In fact, I found a really good example of the current credentialed line in a recent New York Magazine story South Africa's Omicron wave is already peaking. Why?

First, there’s the simple limit to testing capacity. As things increase, our testing capacity doesn’t increase as fast, and so we’re missing more and more cases. That can give you a distorted picture — it could look like a plateau in Gauteng, but you could imagine it’s really a much higher crest.

I also bet we can expect a lot more underreporting of Omicron, compared to previous wave, because it’s more mild, either through existing immunity or through actual reduction of intrinsic severity. And if, on average, you’ve reduced the severity of cases, there’d be a lot of people that don’t bother to come to the hospital or to get tested. And so as a rough guess, you might go from like one in 10 cases reported in South Africa to one in 20 or even one in 30 cases — that wouldn’t seem unreasonable to me. And that makes it so that at the same caseload of Delta versus Omicron you could actually have three times as many infections with Omicron.

We could also have a change in generation interval. If we have Omicron kind of doubling at this very fast two or three day rate, you don’t actually have to have Rt be three. You could have actually just made the whole thing faster without having the number of secondary infections being much higher. And we don’t have no way [sic] of knowing that at this moment.

It's a lot of entre nous patter sprinkled with jargon leavened by "I also bet", "rough guess", "kind of", and "just made the whole thing faster", concluding with "we don't have no way of knowing that at the moment". I'm not going to check if this guy is an MD, PhD, both, or neither. He isn't a credible spokesman.

This is the looming problem with the received narrative. It's putting out Ponzi scheme numbers on how fast things are gonna get worse, such that if they don't get a whole lot worse in a matter of weeks, they'll start to lose any remaining credibility. Remember that they're claiming cases will double at a rate ranging from every 1.5 to 3 days, such that by sometime next month, everyone in the world will be sick, and there'll be nobody left to infect but the space aliens. But if things do get a whole lot worse, they look just as bad, because after more than two years, they've proven themselves utterly feckless to deal with the problem and lose any remaining credibility anyhow.

If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing, let's break out the booze, and have a ball. If that's all.

"Viral Blizzard"?

I comtinue to think we're going through an effort to reboot the scary flashing red circles of March 2020. Even the conserative aggregators are running clickbait headlines about a new "viral blizzard":

A former COVID-19 adviser for President Biden's transition on Thursday warned of a “viral blizzard” that is about to hit the U.S. as COVID-19 cases rise and concerns about the omicron variant continue to fester.

Michael Osterholm, who served on Biden’s coronavirus advisory team during the transition, said in an appearance on CNN that the health care system could be overwhelmed as omicron becomes more prevalent in the U.S.

"I think we're really just about to experience a viral blizzard," Osterholm told CNN's Erin Burnett. "I think in the next three to eight weeks, we're going to see millions of Americans are going to be infected with this virus, and that will be overlaid on top of delta, and we're not yet sure exactly how that's going to work out."

But Dr Osterholm has been a consistent COVID entrepreneur, outdoing even Dr Fauci. A little over a year ago, he said,

Shutting down businesses and paying people for lost wages for four to six weeks could help keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus advisor to President-elect Joe Biden.

Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said earlier this week that the country is headed toward “Covid hell.” Cases are rising as more people grow tired of wearing masks and social distancing, suffering from so-called “pandemic fatigue,” he said Wednesday. Colder weather is also driving people indoors, where the virus can spread more easily.

That is to say, in November 2020, fully six months after lockdowns were finally lifted, he wanted to reimpose them for "four to six weeks". Yeah, like 15 days to flatten the curve. It looks like not even Dr Fauci bought into that one. So I've got to put "viral blzzard" in the context of last year's "Covid hell". We got through hell, I assume we'll make it through a blizzard.

Next we have Omicron more likely to reinfect than Delta, no milder -study, which was the lead at one of the aggregators yesterday:

Dec 17 (Reuters) - The risk of reinfection with the Omicron coronavirus variant is more than five times higher and it has shown no sign of being milder than Delta, a study showed, as cases soar across Europe and threaten year-end festivities.

The results of the study by Imperial College London were based on UK Health Security Agency and National Health Service data on people who tested positive for COVID-19 in a PCR test in England between Nov. 29 and Dec. 11.

Aha! Imperial College London! The same institution that foisted the discredited models that led to the 2020 lockdowns on us! I'm entitled to be skeptical here, too.

But there's another issue we still need to address, something I only gradually learned to look at during my postgraduate studies in the University of Hard Knocks, a reasonability check. The numbers we're seeing in these stories suggest a dire outcome three, six, or eight weeks from now. That's what Drs Osterholm and Fauci are telling us as we speak. These predictions are supported by assertions like "more than five times higher", or the one below:

The exact number is 21,027 cases, the first time New York State has officially cracked 20,000 in a day. It’s a cinch that case counts were higher than that in the early days of the pandemic, before testing was available, but give it a week. The way Omicron spreads, they’re likely headed for a true record in daily COVID infections. In fact, if it’s true that the variant’s doubling time is two to three days, New York State could reach 100,000 cases by Christmas Day. The entire United States is averaging “only” 125,000 right now.

But "if it's true" that the variant's doubling time is two to three days, with eight days to Christmas as of yesterday and thus up to four doublings, we're actually talking about roughly 300,000 new cases per day by Christmas, aren't we? By January 1, we're up to over a million new cases per day. By January 31, we're talking something like the entire US case total to date per day, about 50 million. Two days after that, 100 million per day. Two days after that, 200 million new cases per day, after which we quickly exceed the US population in new cases per day. These are Ponzi scheme numbers. Professors of math and statistics warn us to be skeptical of such. And I have no idea where this guy, who claims to be a conservative, is getting estimates like a doubling time of two to three days.

And consider that if random people in the US had been returning from South Africa in mid-November and spreading cases at that rate, a month later we should already be looking at very noticeable numbers all over, when the current spikes in some regions are simply consistent with those we've seen over the past two years, while states like California and Florida remain flat. So far, rhe Omicron panic isn't passing a reasonability check.

But add to that the stories that, taken in context with what we already aren't seeing, suggest Omicron has in fact arrived, it's indeed spreading fast, but it's a non event:

The omicron variant has quickly surpassed the delta variant in collections taken from wastewater sampling sites in Orange County [Florida], officials said.

A sampling this week showed that omicron represented almost 100% of the strains in the samples from the wastewater facilities, Orange County Utilities spokesperson Sarah Lux said in an email.

It’s a different story when it comes to people seeking treatment for COVID-19, officials said.

“Those who are hospitalized are being primarily infected by the delta variant,” Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said Wednesday at a news conference held at the Orlando International Airport.

But remember that Florida is a state that hasn't had any sort of spike in cases even as Omicron permeates the sewers in Orlando. So I think my seat-of-the-pants estimate that if Omicron is here, we should be seeing it already is correct -- but so far, people aren't getting sick from it or even noticing it. And there's this news from South Africa:

South Africa, which announced the discovery of the variant on Nov. 25, is being watched as a harbinger of what may happen with omicron elsewhere.

. . . Currently there are about 7,600 people with Covid-19 in South African hospitals, about 40% of the peak in the second and third waves. Excess deaths, a measure of the number of deaths against a historical average, are just below 2,000 a week, an eighth of their previous peak.

“We are really seeing very small increases in the number of deaths,” said Michelle Groome, head of health surveillance for the country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

More than 90% of hospital deaths were among the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, News24 reported, citing Waasila Jassat, a researcher with the NICD.

The problem is that the entrepreneurs, Biden, Fauci, Osterholm and so forth, are laying markers that we should be seeing a dire outcome in a matter of weeks, something that can easily be confirmed or discredited in a short period -- but if the virus is behaving like they claim it is, we should be seeing something much worse even now.

The Looming Conundrum Is Still Looming

A little over a year ago, President-elect Biden said this:

[A] "very dark winter" is approaching as the U.S. coronavirus case count nears 10 million.

"There is a need for bold action to fight this pandemic," Biden said in Delaware. "We're still facing a very dark winter."

Biden, whose campaign against President Donald Trump made the coronavirus a main focus, pledged to "spare no effort to turn this pandemic around once we're sworn in on Jan. 20."

Yesterday, a little over a year later, President Biden said this:

President Biden on Thursday warned of a winter of "severe illness and death" for unvaccinated Americans as coronavirus cases spike across the country.

Biden, in a meeting with medical advisers and Vice President Harris to discuss the pandemic, said the country was in a better position to deal with the omicron variant of COVID-19 because of steps taken to limit travel and increase access to boosters.

"But it's here now and it’s spreading, and it’s gonna increase," Biden said of the omicron variant, which experts think is more contagious than previous strains.

"For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death... for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm," Biden continued.

Dr Fauci laid down the same marker. Farther down in the story:

Anthony Fauci, Biden's top medical adviser on the pandemic, said earlier Thursday that the omicron variant will likely be dominant in the U.S. in "a few weeks" and warned of the possibility of hospitals being overwhelmed this winter.

So let me see. As best I can tell from the very sketchy and incomplete data that's been published, the Omicron variant, though first announced by South Africa on November 27, has been loose in the US, the UK, and elsewhere since about November 15. It is said to be exponentially more transmissible than the 2020 model, and it incubates in only 2 to 4 days. So why need we wait further weeks to have our hospitals overwhelmed? While regional US COVID statistics vary widely and are still driven by the Delta variant, here's the all time graph for Florida, which I think is significant because without vaccine, mask, or social distance mandates, its totals have remained low since the summer:

Given the very high transmissibility and short incubation period of Omicron, plus the relaxed attitude toward vaccines there, shouldn't we already have begun to see an alarming uptick? But if you go back to last fall and winter, cases there began to rise in late summer and peaked right around the new year. So much for last year's "dark winter".

The problem is that nothing's changed in the year since he pledged to turn things around.

"My first 100 days won't end the Covid-19 virus. I can't promise that," Biden said at an event in Wilmington, Delaware. "But we did not get in this mess quickly, we're not going to get out of it quickly, it's going to take some time. But I'm absolutely convinced that in 100 days we can change the course of the disease and change life in America for the better."

Last week, in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, the President-elect said he will ask Americans to wear masks for the first 100 days after he takes office.

The conundrum is that, with the renewed doomsday rhetoric, either he's acknowledged that his COVID strategy has been ineffective, or he's sending the message that the doomsday rhetoric is an attempt to stoke continued panic over a steadily decreasing threat. Meanwhile, even the uber establishment Atlantic ran a story Where I Live, No One Cares About Covid.