The Second Time As Farce

Yesterday, I ran into an unintentionally revealing quote from Dr Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and regular COVID talking head:

“Now if monkeypox ‌gains a permanent foothold in the U‌nited States and becomes an endemic virus that joins our circulating repertoire of pathogens, it will be one of the worst public health failures in modern times not only because of the pain and peril of the disease but also because it was so avoidable,” Gottlieb wrote in a recent opinion-editorial for the New York Times. “Our lapses extend beyond political decision making to the agencies tasked with protecting us from these threats.”

Gottlieb, who now serves on Pfizer’s Board of Directors and is a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, also judged that the U.S. government’s missteps in tackling monkeypox are similar to its failures to combat the coronavirus.

“Our country’s response to monkeypox ‌‌has been plagued by the same shortcomings we had with Covid-19,” Gottlieb wrote.

“With COVID, the virus ‌‌gained ground quickly. With ‌‌monkeypox, which spreads more slowly, typically through very close contact, the shortcomings of CDC’s cultural approach haven’t been as acute yet. But the shortfalls are the same,” he added.

Dr Gotttlieb's theme is similar to other recent remarks from Drs Fauci and Birx, if slightly more consistent: all would agree that something wasn't right with COVID strategy. Dr Fauci thinks people should all have been wearing N95 masks from the start. Dr Birx thinks Biden was wrong to tell people vaccine prevented transmission; she knew that was false all along. Dr Gottlieb thinks there were "shortcomings". All three gloss over the fact that repeated strategies that imposed near-catastrophic consequences on the world public, ranging from total lockdowns to selective business closures to restricted activities to masking to social distancing to vaccines had no visible effect on controlling successive outbreaks of COVID.

His implication is that with monkeypox, we have a do-over. What should we do differently? What on earth, for instance, was "CDC's cultural approach", and what specifically was wrong with it? The piece doesn't quote Dr Gottlieb further, but it does then quote "CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen":

“I do think it’s time for the U.S. to declare a state of emergency [. . .] because that will allow for a much better-coordinated response,” Wen said. “It will allow the Biden administration to appoint a monkeypox czar to oversee these efforts. It will also allow for more resources to be put into this as well. I hope that the window hasn’t closed. . ."

Well, both California and Illinois have done just that. UPDATE: Biden has also now named a monkeypox czar. According to NPR,

Declaring a state of emergency often helps with the logistics and coordination between departments working to respond to the emergency.

That'll sure fix things, huh? Neverthelss, although San Fracisco Mayor London Breed declared her own monkeypox state of emergency on July 28, the city went ahead and hosted the Up Your Alley festival July 31. which

is “usually described as a bit kinkier/nastier, more gay male centric” than other similar leather, kink and fetish festivals in San Francisco, according to an online guide to the weekend. The event draws thousands of revelers each year, with the host organization encouraging its attendees to “wear your gear, your leather, or your birthday suit” while keeping “an open mind” on its website.

Shades of the 2020 George Floyd riots! (Has anyone suggested yet that they might have been a "shortcoming" of the CDC response to COVID?) Now, of course, we're wrong to snicker at gay activites of any sort. Gay is serious business. It has nothing to do with being gay about anything. On the othe hand, the one thing the monkeypox czar is never going to do when we get one will be to suggest guys not do gay stuff. This is another way of saying the response to monkeypox is already front-loaded with the same fecklessness as the COVID response, and the Drs Gottlieb and Wen are fully aware of that.

The CDC "cultural approach" with its partners in the community will basically amount to vague PSAs at kink festivals urging guys to get vaccinated. How will this differ from COVID, except that they'll never, ever threaten to fire gay guys from their jobs if they don't get the jab? As Marx put it, the second time repeats as farce.

But I'm actually coming to quite an optimistic conclusion here. I mentioned the other day the suspicion of some theorists in the early days of COVID that the lockdowns were a dry run to see if they could get people to accept the same thing for "climate emergencies". Here's a paper from Hillsdale College, not a conspiracy site, that suggests the same thing:

In May 2018, the [World Economic Forum] collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to conduct “CLADE X,” a simulation of a national pandemic response. Specifically, the exercise simulated the outbreak of a novel strain of a human parainfluenza virus, with genetic elements of the Nipah virus, called CLADE X. The simulation ended with a news report stating that in the face of CLADE X, without effective vaccines, “experts tell us that we could eventually see 30 to 40 million deaths in the U.S. and more than 900 million around the world—twelve percent of the global population.” Clearly, preparation for a global pandemic was in order.

In October 2019, the WEF collaborated with Johns Hopkins and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on another pandemic exercise, “Event 201,” which simulated an international response to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. This was two months before the COVID outbreak in China became news and five months before the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic, and it closely resembled the future COVID scenario, including incorporating the idea of asymptomatic spread.

The CLADE X and Event 201 simulations anticipated almost every eventuality of the actual COVID crisis, most notably the responses by governments, health agencies, the media, tech companies, and elements of the public. The responses and their effects included worldwide lockdowns, the collapse of businesses and industries, the adoption of biometric surveillance technologies, an emphasis on social media censorship to combat “misinformation,” the flooding of social and legacy media with “authoritative sources,” widespread riots, and mass unemployment.

If that was the plan -- and my instinct is still to stress the "if" -- I've got to ask how this worked out for the lizard people, and the short answer is that it didn't. Let's grant that there were people in places like the Gates Foundation, Johns Hopkins, the CDC, the WHO, and all the usual suspects who got the bright idea of having a virus and planning what was to be done in careful detail. How'd it work?

The result was a stunning loss of credibility and a vacuum of leadership for those very people and institutions. COVID had to COVID notwithstanding the successive remedies that were imposed. The very people who were urging those remedies on us, Drs Fauci, Birx, Gottlieb, and Wen, plus numerous others who are more prudently now laying low, are oh-so-carefully backing away. There were shortcomings. Mistakes were made. Knowing what we know now, but of course, hindsight is 20/20.

But we get a do-over with monkeypox. Because there's nothing farcical about gays and kink festivals. Nothing at all. Let me say again so I'm not misunderstood, there's nothing farcical about hosting kink festivals in a state of monkeypox emergency, nothing. Although Marx said history repeats, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, he couldn't be more wrong.

The Incoherence Of Elite Policy

On Saturday, I asked in part whether elite environmental policies, which call for systematic reduction of agriculture due to climate change, will be applied to Ukraine once the current war is settled. In that case, Ukraine will have a dilemma. Historically it's faced reductionist threats from both east and west; Putin's current goal is to eliminate Ukraine as a national entity and, as a practial matter, to exterminate some proportion of its population. This is no different from Stalin's and Hitler's agendas. Will the agenda of the elitist West be little different, just driven in the name of environmentalism instead of nationalism?

Another question in a different part of the world suggests elite agendas are running up against legitimate national interests elsewhere. A trend that's been taking place since the 1990s has been the corporate integration of the Canadian, US, and Mexican rail network, which has been to the most direct advantage of Mexico and its poorer areas. Part of this has been a project of Mexican President López Obrador, the so-called "Mayan Train".

Environmentalists and defenders of the country's indigenous communities and archeological heritage have opposed the Mayan train project, claiming that the works in the Mayan jungle are detrimental to the forest balance in the Yucatan peninsula.

However, López Obrador has said, "These are public works, and we cannot accept that the interests of groups and factions be placed above the general interest, which corresponded to the neoliberalism era," noting that the Executive's decision to resume the works was made in defense of the national public interest.

Wikipedia characterizes López Obrador as "center-left, progressive, populist, and economic nationalist" and says, "Supporters have praised him for promoting institutional renewal after decades of high inequality and corruption, and for refocusing the country's neoliberal consensus towards improving the station of the working class." According to a 2020 CNN story,

If you're not a close follower of US-Mexico relations, you might be forgiven for assuming President Donald Trump and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wouldn't get along.

. . . Trump said last month that López Obrador was "a really great guy," and López Obrador said he was going to Washington, DC, "to thank Trump for his support and solidarity." They still have plenty to disagree over, but there also seems to be a lot of common ground -- not the least of which could be their similar governing styles as two populists who've built political brands on a cult of personality.

The Mayan Train project is an indication of how, outside the conventional US political paradigm, a trend of populism is rising in opposition to leftist factions that have been hijacked by elitist interests. For instance,

On March 22, several Mexican artists and activists appeared in a video uploaded on social media asking the president to stop the construction of the line’s fifth stretch, which will run 121km from tourism hub Cancún to Tulum in Quintana Roo state.

Along with the video, the movement, dubbed Selvame del Tren, launched a petition via change.org that claims the project will have four major environmental impacts, namely deforestation, destruction of the region’s aquifers, the extinction of flora and fauna and over-urbanization.

López Obrador has gone so far as to accuse the opponwents of being US-funded.

In response, the president, who is known as AMLO, unleashed a campaign of his own to discredit what he calls “pseudo-environmentalists.”

Although this is not the first time the government is accused of violating environmental norms with the project, the feud has gathered national attention due to the parties involved – including well-known actors and artists.

Other controversies over Mayan ruins in neighboring Guatemala have raised the issue that as LIDAR surveys expose large numbers of previously undiscovered Mayan ruins and tourist development popularizes Mayan sites, the jungles will no longer be under the control of tight groups of US-based archaeologists, as well as global environmentalists who claim to have the interest of indigenous people in mind as well as threatened species:

The railway line threatens to cut through biosphere reserves of the Selva Maya, home of the jaguar, tapir and howler monkey. These species need large contiguous forest areas to be able to move, feed and reproduce, and the construction of a few tunnels and bridges will not be enough to allow the wildlife to migrate.

The indigenous Maya communities on Yucatan peninsula are also affected by the project and have spoken out against it.

“The Mayan Train has nothing to do with the indigenous Maya, nor does mass tourism benefit the Maya population. We don’t want to be a new Cancún or Riviera Maya, where international hotel chains, travel companies and restaurant chains are the only beneficiaries,” the communities wrote to Mexican President Lopez Obrador.

Here's the problem. How does prosperity not benefit people? At the moment, there's no shortage of Mexicans who aren't satisfied with their standard of living and see no reason not to take their chances migrating north to get prosperity if they can't find it in Mexico. At this stage, though, global elites on one hand see no reason to allow Mexico to bring prosperity to its poorest areas, while the solution they tacitly propose is to allow Mexicans to migrate north to the US without interference.

This isn't good for Mexico, which loses population in a diaspora, and it isn't good for the US, which struggles to integrate the new arrivals. Yet the elites have no coherent way of transitioning out of old-fashioned neoliberalism, a term that was briefly adopted in the US a few years ago to describe Hillary Clinton's politics, but which López Obrador is now using profitably in Mexico. My guess is that Ukraine will soon find itself up against this dilemma just as Mexico is now.

As Roosevelt Was To Polio, Biden Is To COVID

I came up with that a few days ago, but little did I realize how quickly events would reinforce the perception:

President Joe Biden announced Saturday that he would return to isolation after testing positive again for coronavirus.

“Folks, today I tested positive for COVID again,” Biden wrote on social media Saturday afternoon.

. . . The president’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, said in a letter to the public the reoccurrence of the virus was “rebound COVID,” something that takes place with some patients treated with PAXLOVID.

Think about the manifold ramifications that emanate from this succinct announcement. First, the big guy has been fully vaxxed, and his masking, if not fully consistent, has been in general supererogatory. Second, a week ago, I quoted Dr Birx, who if not the pope of COVID is at least an influential cardinal:

So that's why I'm saying even if you're vaccinated and boosted, if you're unvaccinated right now, the key is testing and Paxlovid. It's effective. It's a great antiviral.

Except that this was in the context of how the vaccines don't work, but now the sure thing, the key, is Paxlovid. It's effective. It's a great antiviral. Except if you give it to the President of the Unitred States, well, er, you might get a rebound effect, which takes place with some patients. Sure helps build the credibility of the public health authorities, huh?

Third, let's recall that two years ago, the COVID panic-hype had many people believing that a positive test was practially a death sentence. The authorities were reassuring those who were flooding the emergency rooms over positive tests that actually a positive test didn't mean a whole lot, they should only go to the ER if they were having trouble breathing and stuff. This fussing over a mere positive test is an aftershock of that panic, which was cynically generated for clickbait and to increase the screen time of the anointed talking heads.

In fact, this episode exposes the dishonesty of the public health establishment at the start of the pandemic, when contrary to past practice, they equated "positive test" with "case", when in the past, a "case" (as in the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic) was a person who had been hospitalized with symptoms. This inflated the perceived prevalence of the disease, which had the short-term effect of spreading panic, but over the longer term created an underlying sense that the Birxes and Faucis were lying to us.

Two years ago, if the president tested positive, they'd have been figuratively dusting off the bier so he could lie in state, though probably in a lead coffin. That Trump could catch the 'rona and recover only months later had a deeply reassuring effect. Now, Brandon's second positive test is a trivial event worthy of a trivial guy.

Next, that Biden should effectively return to the basement studio of COVID quarantine is just another reminder of how he won the 2020 campaign and the persistent sense that something was hinky about that whole exercise. It simply allows Trump, who is gradually returning to public discourse, to repeat a probably counterfactual but figuratively resonant claim that the election was "stolen". Biden apparently will have no strategy to counter this beyond renewed retreat to his Delaware basement.

This is why we seem to be feeling a need for more optimistic, confident leadership. President Zelensky is to the current European crisis as Victor Laszlo was to Casablanca, a thoroughly commendable fellow, but in the background and not really what we need to solve the bigger problem. Victor Laszlo was actually a problem Major Strasser should have been able to deal with but couldn't quite manage. The West needed someone more like Roosevelt to solve the bigger problem.

Let's face it, Joe Biden can't even solve COVID. The real problems now are Russia and China. Going forward, this isn't going to work.

"People Eat More Protein Than They Need To"

A couple of stories at the aggregators this morning reminded me that they don't just want us to drive electric cars. In Scientific American ,

In the U.S., people eat more protein than they need to. And though it might not be bad for human health, this excess does pose a problem for the country’s waterways. The nation’s wastewater is laden with the leftovers from protein digestion: nitrogen compounds that can feed toxic algal blooms and pollute the air and drinking water. This source of nitrogen pollution even rivals that from fertilizers washed off of fields growing food crops, new research suggests.

Well, they sure know about nitrogen pollution in the Netherlands and the EU, huh?

Dutch government proposals for tackling nitrogen emissions indicate a radical cut in livestock - they estimate 11,200 farms will have to close and another 17,600 farmers will have to significantly reduce their livestock.

Other proposals include a reduction in intensive farming and the conversion to sustainable "green farms".

As such, the relocation or buyout of farmers is almost inevitable, but forced buyouts are a scenario many hope to avoid.

Inevitably,

Dutch farmers dumped manure and set fire hay on fire along major highways Wednesday, prompting traffic jams in central and eastern parts of the Netherlands, in protest over government plans to reduce fertilizer use and livestock numbers.

Wait a moment. Ukraine has applied to join the EU, and the EU apparently views this favorably and is expediting the application. But isn't Ukraine's agriculture the key to avoiding a global food crisis?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, now in its fourth month, is preventing grain from leaving the "breadbasket of the world" and making food more expensive across the globe.

Russian forces' blockade of Ukrainian ports, destruction and alleged theft of the country's grains and agricultural machinery, and shells and mines now strewn across its fields are threatening to worsen shortages, hunger and political instability in developing countries.

So the EU thinks the Netherlands has too many farms, but not that far away, if the world doesn't get enough Ukrainian farm products, there's going to be a crisis. What will happen when the Russians are inevitably kicked out of Ukraine, and Ukraine is in the EU. Is the EU going to reduce the number of Ukrainian farms? How's that all going to work?

Meanwhile, in California,

It appears that the “Climate Change Mitigation Strategist” on the California State Water Resources Control Board has stepped down, making a splash with a resignation letter that blames Governor Gavin Newsom and his administration, as well as his own colleagues, for California’s inability to manage its climate crisis.

In his resignation letter, he says,

Sadly, this state is not on a path towards steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, massive construction to alleviate the housing crisis, quickly and permanently reducing agriculture to manage the loss of water to aridification, and reducing law enforcement and carceral budgets and reallocating resources to programs that actually increase public health and safety.

"Quickly and parmanently reducing agriculture" is part of the whole progressive-reset agenda that hasn't had much attention, but it's there. And California is the top US state in agricultural revenue, 11.63 percent of the total. Exactly what these people intend to do with the people who work directly on farms, sell to farmers, transport farm products, and provide other support, is unclear -- but the same people would also like to eliminate another key part of the California economy, oil and natural gas.

California's natural gas and oil industry supported 1,059,000 total jobs across the state’s economy in 2019. California ranked among the highest states for the percentage of total economic contributions by the natural gas and oil industry, generating $199.3 billion toward the state’s gross domestic product—including $94.4 billion added to total labor income.

If Newsom has been dragging his feet on this agenda, that's certainly good news. The problem overall is that the philosopher-king wannabes have an overall agenda that at least in its end state proposes drastic reductions in the world standard of living, only decades after market and commercial progress succeeded in raising that standard and putting billions of people into a relatively prosperous new middle class.

I've only started to try to get my head around this.

Apparently Only So Far

I remember people claiming back in the initial days of COVID lockdowns that stay-at-home orders weren't so much intended as a public health measure but were actually a dry run to see how well they'd work for climate change "emergencies". But if you think about it, climate change is simply a cat's paw for something else as well, just as COVID has been. The real question is whether, irrespective of the specific excuse, the unelected administrative state can impose supralegal measures on the population at large.

After more than two years of COVID controls, the answer appears to be only so far. As I noted on Wednesday, LA County was considering reimposing an indoor mask mandate, but it appears that strong behind-the-scenes opposition has headed this off:

Los Angeles County will not be reimposing an indoor mask mandate for now after COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations appear to be trending downward, and the region may soon move back into the “medium” community level of virus spread, officials announced Thursday.

. . . The county entered the high level on July 14, prompting County Health Director Barbara Ferrer to warn the public about a possible indoor mask mandate being issued to slow the spread.

And while L.A. County remains in the “high” community level based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s indicator, Ferrer said local officials will wait to further analyze data based on its own, more current, metrics.

“Since most of our local data trends have just begun to decline, we decided to take a closer look at the hospital admissions rate using our own data … so that we can get a more precise sense of where we might be headed,” Ferrer said Thursday.

Wait a moment. Up to now, CDC data had been the gold standard. If the CDC says it's true, it's true. This was the basis for Gov Newsom's red light-green light routine throughout 2021, for instance. Nobody claimed they needed to "further analyze data" back in 2021. Back then, if the CDC said you were widespread, you were widespread, and indoor businesses were shut. Now, well, we need to study things more. Maybe it'll get better by itself, let's not overdo things here. At the same link,

The threat of returning to the mandate stirred up controversy. Several cities, including Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Long Beach, and most recently El Segundo, had announced this week they would not enforce any mandate.

Additionally, two [of five] members of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors had indicated they opposed the reinstating of a the region-wide mask mandate.

In an open letter, Supervisor Kathryn Barger said “masking mandates lack empirical evidence to back their effectiveness, are unenforceable, polarizing, and take a huge toll on the social-emotional well-being of children and youth.”

It appears there was a massive back-channel campaign against restoring the mandate, given Supervsior Kuehl's remark about the "snowflake weepies" who were opposing it. Sounds like the snowflake weepies won the day, and I would guess the supervisors put a lot of pressure on "Dr" Ferrer to decide she needed to look more closely at the data before they themselves would be pressured to vote against reimposing the mandate, which would likely put Ferrer's own job at risk.

In other news,

Fox News host Tucker Carlson jokingly announced plans to rename monkeypox 'schlong COVID' after a woke official deemed the existing moniker racist.

Carlson announced the results of a Twitter poll on his Fox News show Thursday night, saying: 'So, monkeypox is about the coolest name ever for a disease.

'But they are changing the name because racism or something.'

'So, we had a vote,' Carlson then said: 'There was no ballot harvesting. You can trust our counting. And the new name for monkeypox is now officially – and we’re declaring it – schlong COVID. That won our audience election result with about 40% of the vote. So, let Rochelle Walensky at the CDC know.'

Public health authorities need to be thinking about the implications if their deliberations begin to be the topic of late-night humor. I think even Drs Birx and Fauci had begun to recognize people were fed up, and the political authorities in deep-blue LA very reluctantly realized it was time to shorten "Dr" Ferrer's leash. At some point, the same authorities need to recognize that they went just a bit too far with COVID, and the current self-parody with monkeypox is threatening long term damage to their credibility.

Australian Ordinariate To Receive A "Visit"

On Sunday and Monday, I posted on Pope Francis moving Opus Dei from the supervision of the Vatican Dicastery for Bishops to the Dicastery for the Clergy, with commentary from a knowledgeable reader on how this reflects on the Vatican's overall interest in accountability. One issue arising from this move is the suspicion among Catholic traditionalists that Pope Francis opposes conservative movements in the Church, although my own view as a convert to Catholicism is that if for no other reason, it would be silly to become a Catholic on one hand while on the other insisting that the pope has things all wrong. Catholics current or potential have lots of options available that don't carry that contradiction, including any number that might potentially ease their consciences by claiming to be Catholic in some way or another.

In any case, another Vatican move in recent days will stir this pot again. One of my last posts on the old blog covered a notice from the Australian ordinary that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican dicastery that supervises the Anglican ordinariates, had becomed concerned about the viability of the Australian ordinariate, the smallest and shakiest of the three erected under Anglicanorum coetibus. This concern was reflected in a January 21, 2021 letter from Msgr Reid that I attached to that post, which set particular conditions that would need to be met by January of this year; if they weren't fulfilled, the dicastery would send a letter to the Australian Catholic Bishops Council "asking counsel regarding the future" of the Australian ordinariate.

A visitor has sent me an update on this situation:

It was later explained that this deadline had been extended owing to COVID but now it appears that there will be follow-up (see letter below). Commenters on Facebook are treating this as part of Pope Francis’s alleged crackdown on traditionalists but in that case, of course, the OOLSC [Australian ordinariate] would not be the only Ordinariate subjected to a visit and a Visitor so obviously sympathetic to the project as Bp Lopes would not have been chosen. There has been no official update on communities’ compliance or otherwise with Msgr Reid’s original directive, but scattered comments from OOLSC members on Facebook seem to indicate that nothing has changed, financially or demographically.

Here is the letter (click on the image for a larger copy):

The original deadlines set in the January 2021 notice were meant to be met by January of this year, but presumably in light of COVID and the particularly stringent controls imposed in Australia, the threatened letter asking counsel regarding the future of the ordinariate from the ACBC has apparently been deferred. Nevertheless, there will now be a Visitor Apostolic to review the situation. The Visitor appointed is Bp Steven Lopes, the ordinary of the North American ordinariate, which is the largest and most successful of the three, but that is only in relative terms. He will be joined by two others whose identities are yet to be announced, and the visitation schedule is also yet to be announced.

For that matter, what it will decide, and how the decision will be made, remain completely obscure.

The visitor also forwarded a screen shot of typical social media commentary on this development (click on the image for a larger copy):

I spent nearly ten years running a blog that covered the history and progress of Anglicanorum coetibus, and I stopped it in some measure because I concluded the whole question had never reached the level of importance where it was worth my time. This suggests to me that even the Vatican is beginning to ask this question. I think the Australian ordinariate is only the weakest link, and eventually this question is going to be raised over the whole effort.

It's a big mistake to attribute this to animosity from Francis.

In LA, The Masks Come Off Over Masking

California, or at least part of it, has been seeing a resurgence of bien pensant opinion that we should be wearing masks, even though Drs Birx and Fauci have been publicly backing off their own previous endorsement of COVID measures. Contra Costa County, which includes both Oakland and Berkeley as well as very tony suburbs, tried to reimpose a mandatory indoor mask rule in June but dropped it after a few weeks. Los Angeles County has been threatening the same for two months now, but pressure against it has been building.

Lame duck LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, who represents the uber-wealthy West Side and Hollywood Hills, had this to say about the growing opposition to a renewed mask mandate:

"I'm particularly struck by the blowback from a number, though not a really significant number of sort of, 'snowflake weepies' about how oppressive it is to wear a mask."

Kuehl has previously been a supporter of COVID restrictions that have been among the strictest in the US. In December 2020, demonstrators surrounded her home in Santa Monica when she voted to ban outdoor dining at restaurants but promptly went out the same evening to dine at an outdoor restaurant:

LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, who represents Santa Monica, ate at a local restaurant just hours after voting to ban outdoor dining and saying doing so is “probably more dangerous in terms of contagion than any other kind of business.”

On Tuesday, November, 24 Kuehl along with two other Supervisors voted to suspend outdoor dining for three weeks in Los Angeles County due to rising COVID-19 cases. The ban passed with a 3-2 vote.

“Outdoor dining is probably more dangerous in terms of contagion than any other kind of business,” Kuehl, a Santa Monica resident, said at the Tuesday meeting. “The servers are not protected from us, and they’re not protected from their other tables that they’re serving at that particular time, plus all the hours in which they’re working.”

That evening, however, Kuehl ate outside at Santa Monica restaurant Il Forno, as confirmed by Barbara Osborn, Director of Communications for the Supervisor.

If it's as dangerous as she claimed, why on earth did she risk her health and her life to do it one last time? In any case, she was first elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2014 and had been subject to a three-term limit, which would hsve ended in 2026. It is not entirely clear why she announced last month that she would not run for reelection in 2022, although she is currently 81, but her positions on COVID, as well as her public conflicts with County Sheriff Villanueva on homeless encampments, may also have convinced her that reelection might not be a sure thing. Oddly, there has been no serious coverage of her decision.

Previous restrictions have not played well in the county, and although there's an existing mask mandate on transit, neither Amtrak nor the Metrolink commuter rail agency has enforced it since the spring. In addition,

The local governments in several cities in Los Angeles County, including Beverly Hills, Manhattan Beach and Long Beach, have already said that they would defy a county mandate on masks, reports NBC Los Angeles.

Additionally, neighboring Orange County's Healthcare Agency said in a statement that the would not be implementing a mask mandate.

My guess is that a substantial part of the population anywhere in the US is simply done with COVID and recognizes that masks are, and have been throughout, useless in controlling the pandemic. Nevertheless, even without a mandate, my estimate is that roughly half of those who attend Sunday mass wear them, and a remarkable number still wear them on the street. If LA County or any other jurisdiction is serious about limiting transmission, they should take Dr Fauci's advice and require everyone to wear N95 masks, properly fitted.

And of course, if they're in a restaurant, they should remove the N95 only briefly when they take a bite and quickly replace it while they chew. But as Supervisor Kuehl has already pointed out, even this is highly dangerous.

The fact is that nobody, starting with Supervisor Kuehl, actually takes any of this seriously. On one hand, it's kabuki. On the other, it's a sign of assent. As with Darth Vader, it shows you take orders. The wealthiest seem to want things back like they were in 2020.