Omicron Is Proceeding As Expected

Just before Christmas I said,

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.

The day before that, I said,

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.

As of January 4, the US was said to have its first day of a million new cases, but I've seen skepticism about how such a number could be derived so quickly amid a shortage of test kits, and I suspect with those other observers that the number was higher, which tracks precisely with my estimate from December 18. In other words, in a matter of weeks, there'll be nobody left to infect but the space aliens. In addition,

The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 now accounts for nearly every new case of the virus blanketing the U.S., according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The new strain represented 95.4% of sequenced COVID-19 cases during the week ending on New Year’s Day, while the once-dominant Delta variant made up just only 4.6% of sequenced cases, the CDC said.

But this occurs as vaccine or testing mandates have caused a run on test kits. But the chart at the top of this post indicates that as Omicron "cases" increase exponentially in the US, hospitalizations and deaths have either remained level or slightly declined, with the vast majority of cases either asymptomatic or indistinguishable from the commmon cold.

As of December 16, President Biden predicted,

"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. "But there's good news. If you're vaccinated, and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death, period."

But via Alex Berenson's Substack, these are the actual current proportions of people (apparently in Ontario) in the hospital but not the ICU with COVID/Omicron, vaxxed, partially vaxxed,and unvaxxed:

So far, neither President Biden nor the rest of the public heath establishment has been updating its narrative or its planning to accommodate the current Omicron phase of the pandemic, which appears in the US to be following the pattern seen in South Africa and the UK, a sharp, steep increase in infections that quickly replace the Delta variant but are far less severe.

The problem is that the second horn of the dilemma is still there: the public health establishment will lose credibility because it's continuing to cry wolf over a quickly diminishing crisis.

More For Fermi's Paradox

I mentioned Fermi's Paradox the other day, the conflict between the lack of clear, obvious evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for its existence. I was watching a new TV series, Expedition Deep Ocean, which covers what seems to be in some measure a vanity project by hedge fund guy Victor Vescovo to dive to the deepest points of the world's oceans. (The internet gives him a net worth of $1-5 million, which is your normal bourgeois couple these days, but the show claims he funded a $50-million dive vehicle from his own resources. Guy seems just a little hinky to me, but let that go.)

The big thing that struck me about the first two episodes of the show was images like the one above from the bottom of the deep-sea trenches from "landers" with cameras and bait that are sent to the bottom at the same time as the main sub. At depths of over 25,000 feet, in water with sub-freezing temperature and completely dark under extreme pressure, little shrimp-like creatures swarm to get the bait like bugs drawn to a patio light.

Here's my immediate problem with this. Why didn't we see this with the first Mars landers? Professors of cosmology will tell me this is a silly question. It's because in the history of Mars, the frammis equation dislocated the continental shift, which in turn degraded the nitrogenous humors and deprived the planet of Van Allen belts, such that the solar winds bewildered the mRNA capacity of the genetic folderol, or something. But before his happened, maybe three or four billion years ago, life reached a certain point, but then it went away. According to the models. We're gonna find the fossils, any expedition now.

But the pro-alien life faction turns around and argues just seconds later that on earth, microbes live in boiling water around volcanic vents on the ocean floor, and bacteria thrive a mile under Antarctic ice. So life is so robust that it must exist under conditions that we would think impossible, like, say, on Mars. Just look at the pictures Victor Vescovo brought back from the South Sandwich Trench, shrimp-like creatures swarming the base of the lander!

Except we go to places like Mars and Venus, where Science Tells Us there's no reason there can't be life under those conditions, and we don't find it. And it seems to me that if there were life, it would be swarming like the life we keep finding in the most inhospitable places on earth. Even Walt Disney saw that in The Living Desert. And beyond that, on earth there are both fossils of old swarming life and swarms of new life. Even if the big asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, somehow the cockroaches kept on keepin' on. Why didn't it persist on Mars if it had no problem doing it here?

Life swarms. Life persists. Those seem to be properties. It sure isn't swarming on Mars.

Fermi had a point. Where is everybody?

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.