Edward Feser, Just War, And Hiroshima

Yesterday, August 6, was the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, which began the chain of events resulting in the Japanese surrender in World War II. When I was an Episcopalian, more often than not, this anniversary would be the occasion of a politically correct, self-abnegating homily from the rector on the presumptuousness of the US in claiming to be the world's policeman, blah blah blah. I think at least some in the pews -- I would have been one of them -- simply gritted their teeth and tried not to listen very closely.

More recently, after I'd become Catholic, I ran into an essay in the Catholic Herald by the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser, whom I normally respect a great deal, Weigel’s Terrible Arguments, which is directed at George Weigel's position that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified because invading Japan itself would have been bloodier than the bombings. Instead, Feser argues that destruction of entire cities under Catholic teaching is intrinsically evil, and there can be no balancing of consequences.

The Russo-Ukraine war has captured my interest, especially as it has caused some degree of renewed debate over Catholic just war doctrine. Some people have argued, for instance, that the threat of nuclear weapons alone in the course of the conflict offers the prospect of widespread destruction of cities, which in itself violates just war doctrine. At least so far, this hasn't taken place, while as of the current writing, Ukraine has serious prospects of success in fully defending itself. In fact, let's look at the conditions for legitimate defense by military force in CCC 2309:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

Further,

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

When I first looked carefully at CCC 2309 as the Ukraine war started, it was in the context of Clausewitz's On War, and what struck me was how compatible the doctrine was with Clausewitz's view that war is an uncertain and upredictable exercise. After all, who can say with certainty that some other means of averting Putin's invasion might not have worked? Trump claims it wouldn't have happened if he'd been president -- did Putin perhaps see Biden as a weaker opponent than Trump, for instance? Ukraine's prospects of success have risen and fallen over the course of the war; they looked bleak indeed at the start; as of now, the Institute for the Study of War thinks they're pretty good.

Indeed, the idea that "the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated" invites a balancing of consequences that in fact "belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good"; i.e., in the case of Ukraine, President Zelensky and the authorites in NATO and the EU -- and realistically, their judgments are based on Clausewitzian uncertainties of war. To insist that for Ukraine to defend itself is evil, since this has the potential for starting World War III strikes me as a misreading of just war doctrine. Whether Putin will go nuclear ever is an uncertainty that's left to the judgment of the political and military leadership; so far, they seem to be making the correct calls.

Let's turn now to Truman and the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Discussions of Imperial Japan as it relates to just war doctrine tend to minimize the lasting, grave, and certain damage it inflicted on Asian and Pacific nations. An essay by Richard B Frank at the National Churchill Foundation gives pertinent details that fill in the picture:

. . . fewer and fewer Americans know of the horrendous toll exacted by Japan's war of aggression. Although no one can provide a definitive number, historians believe that somewhere between fifteen to seventeen million people died between 1937 and 1945 as a result of Japan's march of conquest in Asia. This total includes at least 10 million in China. There, as elsewhere, the deaths occurred overwhelmingly among noncombatants. More importantly, there was a cost for each day the war continued. In China alone, over 100,000 men, women and children died on average each month, with many thousands of other Asians dying elsewhere, not to mention Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees. Accordingly, one of the profound fallacies of the argument of critics is that while they emphatically stress the terrible costs of atomic bombings, they routinely argue as though the alternatives had no cost. And they particularly refuse to acknowledge that the reality of the daily cost of letting the war continue until the expected November invasion.

To the question of whether all other means of putting an end to the war must have been shown impractical, there's more uncertainty than we might think that an invasion or blockade would have worked. There was in fact serious question among those who had responsibility for the common good. By May 1945,

The staff of the Joint Chiefs began active contemplation of alternatives to Operation OLYMPIC [the invasion strategy]. On August 7, the day after Hiroshima, General Marshall asked General Douglas MacArthur, the designated Army commander for the invasion of Japan, whether he still regarded Olympic as feasible. MacArthur replied that he did not believe the intelligence and therefore he was prepared to forge ahead. After this exchange, however, Admiral King sent copies of both messages to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the designated navy commander for the invasion of Japan, and demanded his views. King knew the answer to the question before he asked it. On May 25, after two months of grueling fighting on Okinawa that generated an American casualty list exceeding any prior campaign of the Pacific War, Admiral Nimitz privately informed King that he could no longer support an invasion of Japan. King's message of August 9 was clearly intended to bring on a full-scale confrontation over the viability of not only Olympic, but also the whole invasion strategy. What now emerges from this evidence is the harsh reality that the key Japanese leaders in the summer of 1945 did not regard their situation as hopeless.

What we see from the historical record is that the US civil and military authorities were actively exercising their prudential judgment in continuing to evaluate conditions based on the changing circumstances and the uncertainty of war. The consensus I've seen is that it took a second nuclear strike on Nagasaki to convince the emperor in particular that the US had more than one such weapon and could continue to use them.

Feser also cites Gaudium et Spes 80,

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself.

However, even if nuclear weapons might have been behind the Council's thinking here, they are not specifically mentioned, and by 1945, all sides in the war had destroyed whole cities by non-nuclear means, from Nanjing to Rotterdam to Coventry to Stalingrad to Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. It was a war, after all. The catechism still leaves it to the appropriate authorities to evaluate conditions and in fact to effect some type of balance.

In fact, one issue I raised in an exchange in the comments on Prof Feser's blog is that although in the book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed Feser cites scriptural authority for capital punishment, he opposes the destruction of entire cities even though Sodom and Gomorrah and the siege of Jericho provide scriptural authority for just that.

The situation is by no means clear, as of course Clausewiz understood to be the whole nature of war. On the other hand, if Weigel argues that Truman was right to order the bombings merely because it saved some number of US lives in an invasion, it's a weak argument in itself and leaves out the much fuller range of issues that are in fact addressed in just war doctrine.

The Unbearable Lightness Of The Great Reset

I was drawn to some remarks by Democrat Sen John Hickenlooper on CNN discussing the $369 billion BBB-lite bill:

It’s the beginning. It’s the beginning of a long, forced march that we’re going to have to all work together on. But it allows us to imagine a successful outcome. I mean, the modelers are telling us that they think it will reduce greenhouse gases — greenhouse emissions by 40% by 2030. That’s 80% of what President Biden committed to during his campaign, and everyone thought that, oh, you’ll never get there. Well, now, all of a sudden –.”

In many ways, these remarks are a strange mixed metaphor. They allude to Mao Zhedong's Long March, the first step in his rise to power, which consisted of an extended retreat by Communist forces in 1934-35.

The bitter struggles of the Long March, which was completed by only about one-tenth of the force that left Jiangxi (about eight thousand of some hundred thousand), would come to represent a significant episode in the history of the CPC, and would seal the personal prestige of Mao and his supporters as the new leaders of the party in the following decades.

This is not a happy image at all, since it represents extraordinary sacrifice as well as mass death in service of a highly questionable outcome. It also alludes to "forced march",

any march that is longer than troops are accustomed to and maintained at a faster pace than usual, generally undertaken for a particular objective under emergency conditions.

So what on earth is the "successful outcome" Sen Hickenlooper imagines? And the immediate goal he thinks is now within reach, reducing greenhouse emissions by 40% by 2030, is just the beginning. Well, maybe he's been hitting the legalized weed they have there in Colorado, but I don't think this is ever going to get very far in a representative system of government. Just for starters, sacrifice at that level requires leadership (in a representative system) at the level of Lincoln, Churchill, or Roosevelt -- or even in a totalitarian system, at the level of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao -- and remember, Mussolini couldn't even get that far. Right now, we have Joe Biden.

All the Davos types who seem to fancy themselves whispering in the ears of the policymakers are dilettantes, unserious people. I have enormous respect for Hillsdale College's online courses, which collectively can give interested people an idea of what a real undergraduate education looks like, far better than what I got in the Ivy League. On the other hand, it's been advertising a course that represents itself as teaching the Marxist roots of critical race theory, which I don't buy.

The Marxism we see in Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station and Whittaker Chambers's Witness simply isn't the stuff of Hickenlooper-style dilettantism -- the whole subtext of Wilson's argument is that only a thoroughly ruthless figure like Lenin could succeed in advancing Marxism to something beyond the level of parlor fecklessness. Chambers's own path of disillusionment led him to recognze that idealists willing to make extreme, even ultimate sacrifices, were fodder for those same ruthless sociopaths. Having been to hell and back, he preferred the life of a gentleman farmer.

Hickenlooper is unserious. He's advocating a Great Reset agenda that's simply inchoate and unworkable, to the point that I don't believe a Lenin or a Hitler would see a capability in it. Its agenda is anything but Marxist. While there's no single Great Reset manifesto I'm aware of, the key points of the movement, stated clearly or left unsaid, strike me as something like the following:

• An alliance between elte gentry and the petty criminal class, exemplified by the George Floyd riots and the movement to defund the police. This is specifically anti-Marxist; Marx himself saw it was unworkable, and it errs grossly in conflating the interests of the criminal class with the interests of the working class.
• Deliberate reduction of agriculture under the theory that herds of livestock upset the natural balance by, for example, emitting greenhouse gases or putting too many nutrients into the soil and water. Even raising fruits and legumes requires fertilizer that upsets the natural balance. (And what's this business of legalized weed? Isn't that as bad for the climate as any other horticulture?)
• A subordinate goal is nevertheless to impose vegetarianism on the human population, notwithstanding even vegan diets impose too much of a climate load given current population levels.
• An implied corollary is that the current human population is unsustainable and must be reduced.
• This goal is at the root of the Great Reset movement to privilege sexual paraphilias and promote the general availability of abortion. The current fad of inducing pre-teens to take puberty blockers and sterilize themselves is a highly visible aspect of this movement.
• It appears that there is also a theoretical school in the professions that promote transsexualism that undergoing gender reassignment is a "cure" for homosexuality. However, this view is generally not accepted within the gay community, which tends to find same-sex attraction a satisfactory condition as it stands. This is an example of the self-contradictory nature of most Great Reset agenda items.
• All that being said, the level of human population thought to be "sustainable" is far lower than can be achieved via measures like contraception, abortion, transsexualism, voluntary sterilization, or conventional same-sex attraction. Indeed, even depopulation at the 30% level of the Black Death will be insufficient to reach the actual (but never clearly stated) goals of radical environmentalists.
• Notwithstanding the need for severe depopulation, the current living standards of the world middle class are unsustainable and must be reduced. Beyond eliminating animal-based diets, living standards must retrench and eliminate widespread availabilty of mechanized transportation, electric appliances, and communication. Indeed, for much of the population, reduced availability of medical services is highly desirable.
• Opening borders to unrestricted migration from less-developed countries is a primary means of reducing overall living standards. However, this goal is self-contradictory, since the migrants are seeking improved living standards themselves, and if given the vote will inevitably seek policies that reduce crime and increase prosperity.

There are manifest problems with this set of goals that make them unsaleable to any significant part of the population and in fact even unattractive to an elite large enough to seize power. The first is that there is no readily identifiable group that can be demonized -- in theory, everyone must stop reproducing, eating, and pursuing happiness. Thus no Hitler under this paradigm can simply blame everything on the Jews. Everyone must feel guilty for driving a car, while Great Reset policy must allow migration from countries where people want to drive cars. There's no clear target and no clear solution. In fact, as I've noted above, many of the policy prescriptions are self-contradictory.

There's no room for racism or anti-racism; the human population must be reduced drastically across the board, and eliminating any particular race or group won't kill enough to serve the purpose. By the same token, there is no identifiable Übermensch who can justify mass theft or mass slaughter -- in fact, everyone must feel guilty about past racisms, genocides, and slaveries. This illustrates the lack of focus, the self-contradiction, and unseriousness of the whole agenda.

Insecurity and self-hate aren't winners. Poseurs like Hickenlooper and AOC can't close any real sale.

Biden And The Current State Of The COVID Narrative

It seems to me that the Power Point slide above, or whatever it is, is no more than wishful thinking. The COVID narrative has been changing so fast -- lockdowns work, masks work, businesses need to close, you can't go to church, you can't go to the beach, you need to get the vax, the vax prevents transmission, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated, you need a booster, you need another booster, you won't get as sick if you're vaxxed -- all of these have seamlessly morphed into the next vademecum and the next set of excuses within months or even weeks.

Given the failure of each successive policy, the course of COVID with none other than the President of the United States, the paradigmatic citizen suffering from the paradigmatic disease, is the perfect illustration of the current public health conundrum.

Biden is quadruple-vaxxed and double-masked. He also took a round of Pfizer’s proclaimed “wonder drug,” Paxlovid, after becoming infected. Yet, he’s still COVID-19 positive after initially testing positive over two weeks ago. If that’s not a rebuke of the White House’s messaging on the coronavirus, nothing is.

The idea that even though the vaccines failed, Paxlovid would fill the breach, as I noted Dr Birx saying less than two weeks ago, looks to be one of the quickest narrative fails ever. A key remaining fallback has been home testing, on the basis that even if lockdowns, masks, business closures, vaccines, and even Paxolin didn't work, at least if you take frequent at-home tests, if you test positive, you'll know to isolate and, if needed, seek treatment. The current CDC guidelines for at-home testing specify that if you test positive at home:

• The test detected the virus and you have an infection.
• Stay home for at least 5 days and isolate from others in your home.
• Tell your close contacts.
• Wear a well-fitted mask when around others. If available, a N95 or KN95 respirator is recommended.
• Watch for symptoms. If you have any emergency warning signs, seek emergency care immediately.
• Blah blah blah.

So as far as we can tell, the president is being tested frequently, and he's been coming up positive for some days in a "rebound infection" said to be caused by the miracle drug Paxolin. But actually, from the first link above,

Joe Biden is on his sixth day of a so-called “rebound” infection of COVID-19, and he continues to test positive for the virus. The White House released the news on Thursday, though details of his actual condition are scarce. Biden’s doctor has been put on lockdown and has not been allowed to address the press.

We don't know if Biden actually has symptoms, but let's consider the best case, he's testing positive, but he's asymptomatic and otherwise healthy. Nevertheless, this puts us in a situation where the Leader of the Free World is in mandated isolation, which must limit his ability to lead the free world to at least some degree, and for each day he continues to test positive, that means another five-day isolation period. In fact, I've got to think the White House protocol is (or ought to be) something like these California guidelines. If you test positive, whether with or without symptoms:

• Isolate for at least 5 days
• Sleep and stay in a separate room from those not infected
• Use a separate bathroom if you can
• Wear a mask around others, even at home

• Get tested (antigen preferred) on Day 5

• End isolation on Day 6 if:
  • You test negative, AND
  • Have no fever for 24 hours without taking fever-reducing medication, AND
  • Your other symptoms are gone or going
• End isolation on Day 10 if:
  • You test positive on Day 5 or don’t test, AND
  • You have no fever for 24 hours without taking fever-reducing medication

But think about the implications of this regimen. The infected person must stay in a separate room, isolated from family members (and in the case of the White House, also isolated from staff). Must they push papers for him to sign under the door, or what? How do they make sure the papers aren't carrying COVID, either in or out? If Biden is alone in his isolation room, must he spray disinfectant on the papers or maybe run them under an infrared bulb? What about his food? Is there a little trap door for his meals? Must he run them through another microwave cycle before he touches the plate?

Remember, this is the President of the United States. I've got to wonder how the protocols may differ from Howard Hughes's notorious germ phobia:

As he grew older, he became increasingly worried about being exposed to germs from other people. He would insist that anyone serving him food cover their hands with paper towels, and he even wrote a manual for his employees on the proper procedure for serving canned peaches: first remove the label, then scrub the can thoroughly and wash it again, and finally pour the peaches - without letting the can touch the bowl.

This is the logical implication of even the most current polcies on home testing and self-isolation (the California policy is dated four days ago, August 1). This is clearly unworkable and likely no more effective than any previous public health decree, but it looks like it's arbitrarily restricting the president's ability to function whether he's healthy or not. I can't imagine that normal people in the real world bother with this -- a logical starting point would be not to open Pandora's box by using a home test kit. Or do I have this wrong?

We're starting to see academic studies, such as this one from Japan that indicates lockdowns and business closures had no effect on the spread of the virus, that will provide post-mortem explanations of the COVID policies that didn't work. The authorities who should have been driven by such studies from the start, as well as their own adult judgment and common sense, will likely continue to ignore them as they are released.

The disintegration of the COVID narrative is coming instead from the daily absurdity to which the public is exposed, notwithstanding the efforts of the usual "authorities" to discount it or cover it up.

The "New Normal" Continues To Collapse

If Los Angeles is a bellwether, the "new normal" has gotten old. Last year, we were hearing that masks and social distance were going to be around forever. For instance, from the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners:

The coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives in many ways. Among them is the "new normal" of wearing face masks around others for protection and to prevent the spread of the disease. This June, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez signed an Executive Order requiring the use of facial coverings in public. Following guidelines from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the order calls for the use of any facial covering that snugly covers the face and mouth, whether store-bought or homemade, and secured with ties or ear loops. Mayor Gimenez and County Commissioners have asked residents not use N95-rated masks, since these were critical supplies for health care workers, police, fire, emergency management, or other people engaged in life safety activities. They also noted that face masks are not a substitute for maintaining a safe distance.

In LA, the safe-distance stickers on the sidewalks and calibrations on supermarket floors have largely succumbed to the power washers. And following on LA County's "pause" in its threat to reimpose indoor masking,

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has conceded to public and parental opposition and announced Tuesday that it will not demand that students be vaccinated this fall, nor that they wear masks or that they provide coronavirus tests.

This seems to have been the result of intense back-channel pressure that hasn't received much publicity, but it's clearly been effective. A requirement for frequent home testing seems to have been a fallback strategy mooted by public health authorities in the wake of mounting evidence that vaccines neither prevent transmission nor assure immunity, but their steady loss of credibility as each new solution proves ineffective and the disease itself grows harmless pushes their exhortations into mere background noise -- and they're beginning to recognize this themselves.

I keep thinking back to the Hillsdale College paper from last November that I first linked the other day, What Is the Great Reset? by Michael Rechtenwald, in which he argues that to the Davos elites in 2020,

COVID represents an “opportunity [that] can be seized”; that “we should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world”; that “the moment must be seized to take advantage of this unique window of opportunity". . .

In other words, COVID was going to be the portal, or at least the excuse, for imposing a new set of human principles, although the overwhelming impression I get from Rechtenwald's review is that they were inchoate and unserious (Marx and Lenin, in contrast, were serious guys. Those Davos types are nowhere near in their league):

The draconian lockdown measures employed by Western governments managed to accomplish goals of which corporate socialists in the WEF could only dream—above all, the destruction of small businesses, eliminating competitors for corporate monopolists favored by the state.

. . . Other developments that advance the Great Reset agenda have included unfettered immigration, travel restrictions for otherwise legal border crossing, the Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money and the subsequent inflation, increased taxation, increased dependence on the state, broken supply chains, the restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect of personal carbon allowances.

Such policies reflect the “fairness” aspect of the Great Reset—fairness requires lowering the economic status of people in wealthier nations like the U.S. relative to that of people in poorer regions of the world. One of the functions of woke ideology is to make the majority in developed countries feel guilty about their wealth, which the elites aim to reset downwards—except, one notices, for the elites themselves, who need to be rich in order to fly in their private jets to Davos each year.

. . . As if the economic and governmental resets were not dramatic enough, the technological reset reads like a dystopian science fiction novel. It is based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution—or 4-IR for short. The first, second, and third industrial revolutions were the mechanical, electrical, and digital revolutions. The 4-IR marks the convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

. . . There is nothing original about this. Transhumanists and Singularitarians (prophets of technological singularity) such as Ray Kurzweil forecasted these and other revolutionary developments long ago. What’s different about the globalists’ vision of 4-IR is the attempt to harness it to the ends of the Great Reset.

Wait a moment. Ray Kurzweil is a nut. Even transhumanists like Glenn Reynolds have begun to recognize this in recent years and have stopped hyping Kurzweil and other crazies like Aubrey de Grey on their blogs. I can accept that members of the Davos clique cozened and flattered nerdy public health mavens into thinkng they'd be the vanguard who'd bring on the Age of Aquarius, but this didn't mean any of these people had a clue. If this was their plan, it worked like the schemes cooked up by Wile E Coyote.

They had a pandemic. They got the media to feature public health talking heads to show us the scary expanding circles and the predictions of imminent mass graves in public parks, the field hospitals, the hospital ships in New York and Los Angeles harbors -- remember those? They all packed up and went home for lack of business within weeks, but even if the lockdowns continued, fewer and fewer people were buying in.

But that was fine, more or less. They came up with a hero, Dr Fauci, a caudillo who'd lead us from darkness into light (and by the way up from Trumpism). As the Davos types wished, he'd suspend the economy, close the bars, barber shops, hair and nail salons, gyms, and churches. The plebs might not like it, but they'd have no choice, and masks would be the mark of their assent. And although even Dr Fauci knew an N95 was they only kind of mask that worked, as the proclamation from the Miami-Dade authorities above specified, N95s were specifically not to be used, just anything else, "store-bought or homemade".

Fauci himself showed the weakness of the plan. Short, unprepossessing, and gauche, he wasn't the kind of leader who could inspire sacrifice, and worse, neither he nor his sidekick Dr Birx was able to avoid hypocritical slips that made it clear they themselves had no intention of making the sacrifices they urged on the public at large.

And while they were able to use the COVID panic to winkle their main enemy Trump out of the US presidency, the team that replaced him was much more of a piece with Fauci and Birx, all of them people who in the course of that year's events managed to rise to their levels of incompetence -- Biden, Harris, and Pelosi. In hindsight, these people were never going to bring a Great Reset. You don't get figs from thistles or grapes from thornbushes.

The US population has proven remarkably resilient in the face of this crisis, which is what I expected when I started this blog. I've thought all along that the solution to this amateurish attempt at a Great Reset wouldn't be quick, but executed via the courts, the political process, and free expression, it would gradually be effective. So far, I've been right.

LA County Changes The Subject

Following California's declaration of a public health emergency for monkeypox yesterday, Los Angeles County, not to be outdone, declared a monkeypox emergency of its own.

L.A. County Board of Supervisors Chair Holly J. Mitchell introduced a proclamation declaring a local emergency over the rising cases of monkeypox. The action, which the board unanimously ratified, is an effort to bolster the county’s response to the outbreak. The day before, California declared a state of emergency because of the virus.

. . . Monkeypox cases in L.A. County rose to 423 on Tuesday, up more than 80% from a week prior, according to the county health department’s count of confirmed and probable cases. The majority of cases have been confirmed in men who identify as part of the LGBTQ community, county data show.

This comes only days after the county backed down on its threat to reimpose indoor COVID masking, which considering the county's standing as one of the most lockdown-friendly jurisdictions in the US must count as a tacit acknowledgement that supraconstitutional controls justified by a public health emergency are no longer politically viable anywhere. At the same time, turning the public attention to monkeypox must be seen as nothing but a face-saving gesture.

The county's public health website has this to say:

The federal supply of monkeypox vaccine remains limited. The Public Health priority is to administer a first dose of vaccine to as many people who are at higher risk for monkeypox exposure as possible. When the vaccine supply improves, Public Health will make second doses available.

Monkeypox vaccine is available to gay or bisexual men and transgender persons 18 years of age and older who. . .

Had multiple or anonymous sex partners in the last 14 days including engaging in survival and/or transactional sex (e.g., sex in exchange for shelter, food and other goods and needs)

Note: If you are immunocompromised (including if you have advanced or uncontrolled HIV), you may be at high risk for severe disease and will be prioritized for vaccination.

If you met the prior eligibility criteria you are still eligible for vaccination (i.e., you are a gay or bisexual man or a transgender person and you had gonorrhea or early syphilis in the past 12 months; or you are on HIV PrEP; or you had anonymous sex or sex with multiple partners within the past 21 days in a commercial sex venue or other venue).

If you meet any of the above criteria, you can sign-up on-line for vaccination.

. . . If you have monkeypox symptoms or are currently under isolation for monkeypox, please do not attend the vaccination clinics or walk-up sites. If you think you have monkeypox please speak with a provider and get tested. If you do not have a provider, call 2-1-1 for assistance.

. . . The risk of monkeypox in the general population remains very low based on the information available.

Note the implication that having sex "in a commercial sex venue or other venue" puts you at high risk for contracting monkeypox -- but there's not a whisper of suggestion that closing such venues, or even limiting attendance, might be a justifiable move, even though public health jurisdictions throughout the state never hesitated either to close restaurants, barber shops, and churches or severely limit attendance for many months during COVID.

News sources announcing the emergency declaration say "more than 260 monkeypox cases have been identified so far — nearly the double the amount from a week ago." In other words, cases now are expanding at an exponential rate. So what will be the impact of the current strategy in addressing the case rate? Will we see, for instance, a flattening of the curve after 15 days?

And if a spike continues, what remedies will the authorities propose? As I noted yesterday, key figures in the failed COVID response have begun to acknowledge the failure and propose monkeypox as the opportunity for a do-over. When should we begin to see the results?

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.