That's So 2021!

Among the first headlines of the new year is this one in the Washington Post: House Democrats begin preparing for the post-Pelosi era. The story says,

After almost 19 years as House Democratic leader, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) is expected to step down at the close of this Congress, ending a historic career. . .

The key phrase is "expected to step down", which is new. As of just last December 15, the headline on CNN was Pelosi will stay around to lead House Democrats through the next election -- and perhaps beyond.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will stay until at least after the midterm elections, extending her nearly 20-year run as the House's top Democrat after she turns 82 and, perhaps, beyond.

She is planning to file and run for reelection in her San Francisco district next year -- at least for now -- in keeping with her pattern of deciding about staying in Congress after the elections, when she likely will have won an 18th full term.

And sources familiar with Pelosi's thinking say she isn't ruling out the possibility of trying to stay in leadership after 2022, despite her original vow to leave as the top House Democrat.

Sounds like things have changed in just a little over two weeks. Indeed, as of last Thanksgiving, the legacy media was gleefully fact-checking rumors that Speaker Pelosi had bought a $25 million retirement home in Florida.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi did not buy a $25 million mansion in Florida this week, contrary to claims circulating online.

. . . A spokesperson for Pelosi also told Reuters that the claims made online are fabricated.

“This is completely false,” Deputy Chief of Staff for Nancy Pelosi, Drew Hamill, told Reuters. “There’s no such pending sale nor is the family looking or interested.”

VERDICT

False. Nancy Pelosi did not buy a $25 million mansion in Florida this week. A realtor involved in the sale of the property told Reuters that the buyer is a local resident. The listing broker for the property also told Reuters Pelosi did not purchase the property.

This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.

It certainly looks like legacy media, with the Pelosi machine firmly behind them, was actively stamping out rumors of retirement up to just before the holidays, but now the official narrative seems to be changing.

Well, we're officially in 2022, the dreaded year of the midterms, and we're in a continued quiet constitutional crisis, with the speaker third in line if the president and vice president find themsleves no longer available.

For now, the speaker is the low hanging fruit.

Panic Pushback!

Over the holiday weekend, the elites belatedly began to realize they're losing control. Almost as soon as Brandon Brown announced his sponsorship deal for the 2022 season in a December 30 Tweet, NASCAR walked it back:

NASCAR is walking back its approval of driver Brandon Brown's sponsorship with LGBcoin after initially approving the deal, according to Brown's spokesperson.

. . . Brown's spokesperson Maxwell Marcucci told FOX Business that NASCAR pulled back its approval of the sponsorship deal on Dec. 30, after the partnership with LGBcoin was announced.

"After the announcement went live on Thursday morning, NASCAR acknowledged to us late that afternoon that we had received approval but that they now needed to discuss this at a higher level," Marcucci said.

A NASCAR spokesperson told Motorsport.com that Brown's team "jumped the gun" by announcing the partnership on Dec. 30.

Marcucci says that NASCAR's statement runs "counter to facts of the situation."

In a statement provided by Marcucci, Brandonbilt Motorsports received approval on the sponsors from a NASCAR Racing Operations official on Dec. 26.

According to the statement, the approval of the partnership was "unambiguous" as an opening portion of the email from the official said "The sponsors are approved..."

The statement acknowledged that the NASCAR official offered feedback on a minor graphic design change "to ensure legibility on the track at 170mph."

This will be fun to watch, especially if NASCAR risks dumping its fan base by withdrawing approval. Major league sports is only slowly learning its own lessons from going woke. I suspect that unless NASCAR immediately returns to the anoounced program, this could get very expensive for them at minimum, but it could easily destroy the franchise.

But there's more! Dr Fauci is walking back last week's revised CDC quarantine guidance:

Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky spoke about the CDC change to the guidance — that they would be halving the isolation guidelines if you got COVID, from ten days to five days if you were asymptomatic. Fauci indicated that the reason for the guidance was due to economic factors and not having society grind to a halt with the increase in the number of people getting the Omicron variant. Dr. Walensky also said that testing would not be required to end isolation because the PCR testing could still show positive even for up to 12 weeks even if you were no longer contagious.

That caused a lot of pushback from people with some wondering why they were suddenly changing the guidance now and still others wondering about the testing requirement.

Prepare for yet another Fauci flip flop.

Fauci told ABC in interviews on Sunday that the CDC is reconsidering what they just said last week.

. . . Fauci told CNN the CDC would likely be issuing a new testing recommendation to end isolation.

Fauci’s flip flop on testing then raised even more questions as to whether this was about politics and pushback, not public health.

“The Biden Admin CDC has done this nearly every step of the way with Covid,” Dr. Nicole Saphier tweeted. “They put forth a recommendation and within a week change it because of external pressure. If they are following the science, this wouldn’t happen. In 2022 we need less politics and more science.” “As a result of external political pressure, the CDC and FDA have become compromised and have very little credibility at this point,” she also tweeted.

The problem continues to be credibility. Oddly, we're hearing reports that Sen Manchin is back to negotiating over BBB, two weeks after saying he was a firm "no". But the whole Manchin story has turned into something iffy, whether you believe Manchin's own side or the White House. The bottom line is loss of credibility, which seems to have become the theme for the past several days.

The year is off to an interesting start.

A Business Call Gets Stood On Its Head

Just days ago, my wife and I were feeling sorry for Brandon Brown, the NASCAR driver who, during an interview after a victory, inadvertently became the viral anti-Biden meme when the interviewer deliberately misinterpreted the crowd's "[redacted] Joe Biden" chant as "Let's go, Brandon!" It seemed as though his good fortune suddenly went bad on him, since without any action or expression on his part, his name suddenly became an in-your-face political statement, the sort of thing that conventional sponsors avoid like the plague unless it's Black Lives Matter.

A week or so ago, articles were running on the difficulty the guy was having lining up sponsors, especially, as one writer puts it,

“Let’s Go, Brandon” is a manifestation of the class warfare that increasingly characterizes American society. It’s the cry of the working class, bold and joyous, utterly uncontrollable. It has energy and cheer, while the pathetic moaning of the ruling caste’s spokescreatures is rote, boring, and bereft of any power. The regime-approved memes our elite’s minions repeat on cable and in social media are the chant of serfs.

There used to be mainstream ads that even echoed this -- "Have a Coke and a smile," for instance, or for that matter, Apple's "1984" ad, or its "Think Different" campaign. As of this morning, Brown's problems have gone away. A sponsor realized there was money to be made in the bold and joyous, in energy and cheer.

NASCAR driver Brandon Brown is now being sponsored by a cryptocurrency named after the politically charged 'Let's Go Brandon' chant he unwittingly inspired, days after complaining that the phrase had cost him sponsorships.

'I'm excited to welcome @LGBcoin_io aboard my No. 68 Chevrolet Camaro as our 2022 NASCAR Xfinity Series full season primary partner!' Brown announced on Twitter Thursday. Brandon shared a glossy video of himself walking up to his red, white and blue shevy [sic] emblazoned with the LGBCoin logo.

Brown, 28, unintentionally sparked the phrase the national anti-Biden chant after NBC sports reporter Kelli Stavast confused the crowd jeering 'F*** Joe Biden' for 'Let's Go Brandon!' at a NASCAR event in Alabama on October 2.

. . . 'We are proud to support Brandon this season, to help him continue his American dream,' James Koutoulas, LGBcoin HODLer and founder of Typhoon Capital Management, said in a press release.

'If we do our job right, when you think of us, and you hear, 'Let's Go Brandon,' you'll think and feel, 'Let's Go America.'

In wake of the new sponsorship, Brown - who is being referring to as 'America's Driver' by the cryptocurrency - will sport a red, white and blue Camaro with the logo and wordmark of LGBcoin during the upcoming season.

After securing funding from a portfolio of crypto entities this past year, he is now the first NASCAR driver to land multiple crypto deals.

He also distinguishes himself as an early attractor for meme and crypto partnerships.

'Having the financial support of LGBcoin is incredible, especially at such a pivotal time in our team's growth as we work to build to the next level of competition,' the pro-racing driver said.

This sort of thing, properly applied, has worked effectively in the past.

Two Vignettes Of The Morning After

According to The Daily Wire,

On Tuesday night, President Biden and his wife Jill, both of whom are triple-vaccinated, took a walk on a deserted Rehoboth Beach with their German Shepherd puppy during their Delaware vacation, but despite the fact there was reportedly no one within 10 yards, still refused to take their masks off. Last July, Biden insisted, “Don’t have to mask if you come home to Delaware with me.”

“The President, 79, even continued to wear his mask after the First Lady, 70, took hers off. It’s not clear who Biden believed he was protecting or who he felt he needed protection from as the only other people on the beach, the secret service, didn’t come within 10 yards,” The Daily Mail noted.

A few days earlier,

A pre-Christmas flight got dicey when a woman now dubbed ‘Airline Karen’ got into an altercation with another passenger.

The ATL Uncensored Twitter account posted a nearly two-minute video of a woman standing with her mask down below her chin while on Flight 2790 from Tampa, Florida on Dec. 23. The woman repeatedly tells an older male passenger who is seated to put his mask on.

. . . "Sit down, Karen. You’re a god—- Karen, sit down,” the man fires, to the vocal amusement of other passengers. The back-and-forth continues as flight attendants attempt to defuse the situation.

When the man calls her a “b—-“, Cornwall strikes him in the face and continues attempting to attack him as an attendant holds her back and the man yells, “That’s assault, now you’re going to jail!”

According to the UK Daily Mail,

The former Baywatch actress dubbed 'Delta Karen' for punching an 80-year-old man in the face on a Tampa-to-Atlanta flight, threatened to kill her mother and stepfather and kidnap their children, court documents claim.

Patty Cornwall's stepfather filed a restraining order against her in July 2020 claiming she made the threats while living at their house.

. . . Spoeri claimed his stepdaughter, who has now been released on bail following Thursday's air rage incident, had already been detained two or three times before by the authorities for mental health reasons.

So far, nobody has juxtaposed these two episodes, and I'm not sure why. In the case of the Delta Karen, an 80-year-old man stands up to a domineering, entitled, unstable woman "to the vocal amusement of other passengers". On the Rehoboth beach, a 79-year-old man, apparently fearing a similar reaction from entitled and unstable Karens in tne elites, performs an act of supererogation in continuing to wear his mask beyond even the most prudential exhortations of the public health authorities.

President Brandon is not, ever, going to say, "Sit down, Karen!" to the vocal amusement of anyone. Indeed, as I anticipated, he backtracked on Monday's assertion that there was no "federal solution" to COVID. But this leads me to a pearl-clutching analysis of the "Let's go, Brandon" phonomenon I ran into this morning:

When a caller used that expression to President Joe Biden's face during a livestream on Christmas Eve, it prompted widespread cheers on the right.

This is bad, and for multiple reasons. It's bad to spew vulgarity in public spaces, whether or not it's concealed by a modestly clever slogan. But it's worse to teach other Americans, especially children, that it's acceptable to practice politics by hurling insults at those on the other side of partisan disagreements.

. . . "Let's go, Brandon!" [doesn't] assert a fact or claim that could be argued about or disputed. However much you may disagree with the assertion, it's possible on principle to marshal evidence for and against the claim that Biden is a socialist, or a crook, or that he stole the 2020 election. But that's not what these slogans are about. They are insults intended to dishonor and offend the president and the 81 million or so Americans who voted for him. That makes them inimical to reason and deliberation. They express anger, and their aim is to provoke it in return. They are roughly equivalent to telling your neighbor to go to hell.

They are also roughly equivalent to telling your neighbor, "Sit down, Karen!" Or for that matter, the vulgarism behind "Let's go, Brandon!" is almost exactly the same as Churchill's V gesture, which does not actually mean "Victory".

This isn't the high school debate team. At this point, the national mood is calling for more people to tell the Karens to sit down.

Constitutional Crisis!

I've been saying for a couple of weeks that we're in the Morning After phase of a moral panic, and part of the hangover this time is a quiet constitutional crisis. Part of the issue now, though possibly not the underlying one, is that nobody in the line of succession, the president, the vice president, or the speaker, is up to the job, and I'm not sure if we have the luxury of three years, or even 11 months, for this to work itself out.

People are starting to notice.

[Historian] Jon Meacham scares his audience, Democrats, into thinking that if Trump runs and loses again, he will do as he did in 2020 and refuse to accept the loss. He will again claim the election was stolen from him. Meacham appeared on Fareed Zakaria’s Sunday show on CNN and when asked if such a scenario would present a constitutional crisis, Meacham responded by saying, “It’s an unfolding one.”

According to the UK Daily Mail,

Presidential historian and former Biden speechwriter Jon Meacham said that he believes if ex-President Donald Trump runs for a third time in 2024, America may be thrown into a civil war as Democrats continue to press for voting rights legislation.

Meacham, a regular CNN contributor, appeared on Fareed Zakaria's Sunday show on the network, where the host said Trump will claim he won regardless of the results in 2024.

'Doesn't that present us with a constitutional crisis?' Zakarias asked.

'I think it's an unfolding one,' Meacham replied, calling it 'an interesting use of the word crisis.'

Meacham said the riot at the Capitol on January 6 was the closest America came to forfeiting its Democracy since the Civil War.

I don't think we can dispute that people across the political spectrum -- Meacham is on the left and a Biden speechwriter -- have had an instinctive feeling that something was hinky about either the November 3, 2020 US presidential election or the January 6, 2021 demonstration at the US Capitol that protested that election. I'm an agnostic about whether the election was stolen, although clearly as a practical matter, US citizens generally have come to behave as though it was legitimate and are working through the political process to redress grievances in future elections.

And so far, it appears that they may well succeed. 2024 is a long way off for prognostication, but Trump at this point continues to dominate the political scene, consistently winning hypothetical rematches against Biden, while his endorsements of other Republican candidates are important. But even if he were to fade -- something we can't rule out -- there are other strong potential Republican candidates, including now Ted Cruz, who performed well in 2016.

What Meacham and others of the elite who were quick to agree with him on the CNN show reocognize is that the see-saw political settlement that emerged in the 1970s, resulting first from Nixon's landslide defeat of McGovern in 1972 followed by his forced resignation in 1974 and Carter's election in 1976, is coming apart. Biden and Pelosi both began their political careers during this period and advanced as conventional machine politicians.

Their problem is that the Republican party has adapted over the succeeding decades, while the Democrats have continued to rely on formulas developed during Watergate. Both Bush administrations owe a lot to Gerald Ford, but the Bushies are gone, with a tiny rear guard led by Lynne Cheney. On the other hand, the Democrat strategy against Trump following his upset election was pure Nixon era, to concoct media-driven scandals and try to drive him from office via congressional investigations, and when that didn't work, they simply repeated the effort expecting a different result. We now hear the January 6 committee will redouble its efforts in the new year. Good luck with that.

The problem with the current national mood is that whatever the Democrats were trying to accomplish in 2020, it simply didn't work, and we're seeing the results on a daily basis. That seems to be bothering everyone, but for now, we don't have any kind of resolution.

"Is It Covid-19 Or A Cold?"

"A doctor explains how to tell the difference." This story is on today's CNN live COVID news feed.

While Covid-19 cases are sharply rising across the US, the winter season is also a time for the common cold. Symptoms for the two can certainly look the same — sore throat, runny nose, cough and headache, among others.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed gives guidance to people trying to figure out if they have been infected and need to get tested or if they just have a cold.

. . . "Even though with Omicron, it's less likely that you're going to lose your sense of smell or sense of taste, those are really specific for Covid-19," he said.

Another common symptom with Omicron is a headache, El-Sayed added.

I'm subscribed to Alex Berenson's substack, and his reaction this morning was

Guys, I don’t know how to say this any more clearly: it is OVER.

The Omicold (pronounced Immacold) variant is about to bring this clown show to its inevitable conclusion.

. . . When your media water-carriers have to write articles explaining the difference between Covid and a cold… it’s over.

So why won’t Uncle Joe just say so? Because the current strategy isn’t working - not politically, and not for the country. It’s time to surrender to the ro like you did to the Taliban and to inflation.

Well, President Brandon is at least moving in that direction. Yesterday he told the governors on a call that “There is no federal solution” to COVID. For now, it appears that this statement is meaningless, since it doesn't look like the administration will drop its efforts to defend its various vaccine mandates as their cases come before the US Supreme Court.

It's just an effort to dodge the conundrum I've noted here, that nothing he's done over the past year has had any effect on the pandemic, yet when it does play itself out -- as it currently appears to be doing -- he'll get no political credit for that, either. Best just to step away from the whole thing, but on the other hand, withdrawing the vaccine mandates would make him look weak.

Meanwehile, with Omicron, The Science is collapsing as well:

There are legitimate concerns about the trajectory of the newest variant, Omicron, and public health experts are paying close attention to the exponentially mounting cases, particularly in the United Kingdom, which in the past has functioned as a canary in the Covid-19 coal mine for the U.S.

. . . [T]he rapidly mounting case numbers and overall transmissibility have been alarming, particularly in the U.K. According to a Dec. 10 government technical briefing (see page 17), Omicron cases were expanding by 35% per day.

But there’s something else different this time around, at least in the U.K.: the statistical relationship between Covid-19 cases and deaths appears to have broken down with Omicron.

. . . In earlier waves, rising death rates would follow an increase in cases; the impact of rising cases on death rates could be seen visually and validated statistically. Deaths would follow cases upward, and peak roughly two to three weeks after new cases began trending downward. With Omicron, however, we not only don’t see the rise in death rates that were associated with the first waves, but we actually see a continuing decline in death rates, despite a radical increase in cases.

As of today, panic porn headlines have taken a hiatus, and over the past week or so, advice from the public health authorities to ban unvaxxed relatives from Christmas dinner has been muted. As of this morning, other than in New York, where Mayor DeBlasio is a lame duck, there don't seem to have been mass cancellations of New Year's celebrations.

I think we're definitely entering the Morning After phase of the 2020 moral panic. In the aftermath, though, we're left with a quiet constitutional crisis.

NASA Hires Theologians To Prepare Earthlings For Alien Life

How are government theologians, on contract or on the payroll, not a violation of the Establishment Clause of the US First Amendment?

NASA is looking to the heavens for help with assessing how humans will react if alien life is found on other planets and how the discovery could impact our ideas of gods [sic] and creation.

The agency hired 24 theologians to take part in its program at the Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI) at Princeton University in New Jersey, which NASA gave a $1.1 million grant to in 2014.

CTI is described as building 'bridges of under understanding by convening theologians, scientists, scholars, and policymakers to think together - and inform public thinking - on global concerns.'

So let's back up. Theology is literally the "study of God". As even our Hollywood Episcopalian rector explained back in the day, it isn't the study of whether there's a God, it's the study of the God Who exists, and as a practical matter in the West, it's the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Central to that tradition is a creation in which a unique creature, Man, is fashioned in God's image, equipped with reason, skill, language, and free will to operate in creation toward a mutual destiny with God.

Now, things may very well be otherwise. Buddhists, Mormons, and Scientologists are not much in tune with the Christian creeds, but at least the US First Amendment prevents the government from choosing sides. In modern times, though, governments have sought the convenience of eliminating Judeo-Christian moral traditions that stand in the way of eugenic or redistributionist policies. The governments that wish these things most fervently seem to think that materialist, anti-religious, or at least anti-Judeo-Christian, views are most tolerant of such policies.

One of the chief obstacles to more widespread anti-Judeo-Christian materialism as relates to the observable universe has been Fermi's Paradox, which according to Wikipedia says

The Fermi paradox is the conflict between the lack of clear, obvious evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for their existence.

As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."

Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi's name is associated with the paradox because of a casual conversation in the summer of 1950 with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski. While walking to lunch, the men discussed recent UFO reports and the possibility of faster-than-light travel. The conversation moved on to other topics, until during lunch Fermi blurted out, "But where is everybody?" (although the exact quote is uncertain).

In fact, the whole history of Mars probes so far may be characterized as a great vindication of Fermi, with successive expeditions, ranging from photo overflights to rovers digging beneath the soil, proving fruitless in detecting even the tiniest fossil evidence of ancient life, despite the confident predictions of the neo-Darwinian model that, given the presence of water, organic elements, and enough time for the process to occur, life must certainly have emerged from the primordial ooze there as it did on earth.

The names of the NASA Mars rovers to date suggest progressive stages of frustration with this project: Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. Might the next ones move on to Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance? I've come increasingly to believe that the whole space exploration effort, especially following the passing of Wernher von Braun, who did come to see a transcendent purpose in it, has been an epic boondoggle of an attempt to refute the Judeo-Christian picture of creation, with Man created uniquely in God's image. Get rid of that, and everything is permitted.

It's been an immense expenditure of national and world treasure to find even a single microscopic piece of material evidence to contradict it, and so far, it's failed. But no matter, we'll find it yet, if not under Martian sands, then most certainly in the ammonia oceans under the ice of Jupiter's moons. Whenever it happens, with keen foresight, the government will have a team of theologians on the payroll to prepare us earthlings for the event. The only one mentioned so far by name is The Revd Dr Andrew Davison MA DPhil (Oxford) MA PhD, an Anglican. I'm sure he'll do just fine, with those degrees and all, and Anglicans are certainly at the forefront of permitting everything.

The ray of hope is that Musk and Bezos are replacing the feckless government objectives with an efficiency borne of crass commercialism, which I find reassuring.