Cat Prohibitionism And The COVID Moral Panic

As I reflected on yesterday's post about the deliberations in the UK over rounding up everyone's pet cat, it suddenly occurred to me that cat prohibitionism isn't a new phenomenon. There's been a long-term movement in the UK that insists that pet cats kill songbirds, which is thought to be something that must be curbed if not halted entirely, but more recently, a body of literature has grown in the US that insists that pet cats are an environmental hazard. At the link,

Free-ranging domestic cats Felis catus, from owned pets to feral cats, impact biodiversity through predation, fear effects, competition, disease and hybridization. Scientific knowledge regarding these impacts has recently increased, making it timely to assess the role of nature conservation legislation in this connection.

. . . Many national authorities around the world are currently required, under international law, to adopt and implement policies aimed at preventing, reducing or eliminating the biodiversity impacts of free-ranging domestic cats, in particular by (a) removing feral and other unowned cats from the landscape to the greatest extent possible and (b) restricting the outdoor access of owned cats.

Factors that can influence or impair the application of these obligations include considerations of feasibility, scientific uncertainty, the interests of cat owners and the (perceived) interests of domestic cats themselves. Even if such factors may to some extent explain why many authorities have hitherto failed to take effective action to address the threats posed by free-ranging domestic cats, from a legal perspective these factors provide little ground for justifying non-compliance with international wildlife law.

Although this particular link dates from February 2020, just as the COVID panic was starting, this link from 2015 says,

Free-ranging domestic cats are an environmental disaster. They may be the most destructive invasive species, the “single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals” according to a study (pdf) co-authored by scientists at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. These authors found that domestic cats annually kill from 1.4-3.7 billion birds and 6.9-20.7 billion mammals in the U.S.

For radical environmentalists, a world without domestic cats would be a big improvement, the only obstacle to which would be legions of cat ladies that would make an effective solution unfeasible, at least in the short term. But enlightened public policy, just as it can eliminate environmental hazards like SUVs and gas stoves, requires only deliberation and fortitude in its implementation.

Yesterday we saw the testimony of Lord Bethell, a former deputy health minister in Her Majesty's government, that it was at least briefly considered that all pet cats in the UK be rounded up, ostensibly because they might carry COVID, but it's hard to avoid thinking that, COVID or not, it would be a good idea just because. After all, feral cats are an invasive species, but the problem isn't just feral cats, because not all pet cats are indoors-only, not all pet cats are spayed or neutered, and pet cats can create feral cats just like that. So round up all the cats. Check with your local animal control office for the day you must turn yours in, or we'll come for her. Past that date, harboring a cat wird schwer bestraft.

The problem is that cats aren't the only species that thrives around humans, and not just pets. Raccoons. rats, and possums thrive on human trash, as do crows and ravens in suburban areas. Lots of bird species eat seeds and fruit from lawns, gardens, and fields. Mice live in barns. And from a radical environmentalist standpoint, humans themselves are an invasive species. and even if we can't exterminate them all, the theory is that the planet has already far exceeded its capacity. An effective solution to that problem is unfeasible in the short term.

But hey, getting rid of all the cats is a good start. If the authorities can stir up a good panic, the short-term feasibility barrier might be overcome. After all, even the cat ladies are huddled in their homes in fear of the virus, right? This Ed Morrissey piece at Hot Air is a pretty good status check on the current phase of the morning after phase of the COVID moral panic, and it concludes,

The government and the media establishment weren’t interested in science. They were interested in compliance. And they imposed on us exactly what Thompson correctly identifies as an anti-science regime in which priors are never re-evaluated, conclusions never questioned, and the higher functionaries are protected from any criticism or dissent. That isn’t science; it’s a religious cult with white lab coats. And all of these institutions that are supposed to serve the people turned into its enforcement arm instead, a mass of corruption that the media still won’t address.

In some ways, the whole COVID episode was an experiment in feasibility. It sounds as though in the UK, certain feasibilities were entertained that might piggyback on the manufactured COVID crisis, but at least for now, however close the call may have been, they were quietly dropped. I very much doubt that the people who wanted those things done will drop them for good, though.

It Could Have Been A Lot Worse

Via Instapundit,

THIS ERA WILL BE LOOKED BACK ON AS ONE OF MASS HYSTERIA AND OFFICIAL INCOMPETENCE: The U.K. Briefly Considered Killing All Pet Cats Early in the Pandemic.

To be fair, that’s only because it was an era of mass hysteria and official incompetence.

Plus: “The revelations have sparked astonishment from some on social media, with users sharing images of their own cats and vowing they would have put up a fight.” Meh. Most of them would have gone along. Many would have bragged about their compliance and shamed those who resisted.

The link is to a story in TIME:

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the virus, the U.K. government briefly considered asking the public to exterminate every cat amid fears that the pets could spread the disease.

Lord Bethell, a former deputy Health Minister from 2020 to 2021, revealed the news Wednesday during an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News.

. . . Bethell added in the Channel 4 News interview that there was a moment where evidence suggested there was merit in taking the extraordinary measure but it was investigated and ultimately dismissed.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, animals do not appear to play a significant role in spreading COVID-19 to humans, but cases of animals have been documented and most of them were “infected after contact with people with COVID-19.”

I posted not long ago about the hospital ships sent to New York and Los Angeles that, with the field hospitals that were sent as well, remained mostly empty and unused for weeks until they were quietly recalled. I noted that this was during the early days of the panic, stoked by the Imperial College London model of COVID spread that was almost immediately discredited -- but it nevertheless served as the justification for continued lockdowns, closure of houses of worship, shutdown of businesses, schools, playgrounds, beaches, and the rest, for which the talking heads are only now reluctantly and tardily acknowledging there was never medical justification.

Thus it would have been only a very small step for Dr Fauci to have convinced President Trump that indeed, all cats would need to be euthanized, and Drs Fauci, Birks, and assorted other stooges in lab coats would have stood in a line at his shoulder nodding their heads in agreement. Then for all I know, the cat owners would have complained that dogs weren't included in the extermination order, and after days of public kerfuffle, dogs would have had to be rounded up as well, with Dr Fauci insisting we follow the science.

And Trump would have been on board.

This is one reason I'm skeptical of a Trump reboot. He was the one responsible for ordering the hospital ships and endorsing the national lockdowns, and he didn't utter a peep when "15 days to slow the spread" lasted for months. Someone at some point needs to ask him what he should have done in hindsight, and there's no question that even without the benefit of hindsight, Gov DeSantis maintained a much saner public policy perspective as events unrolled. Trump let himself be bullied by Fauci and Birx, two unlikely figures, and my instinct is that this severely diminished his stature in advance of the 2020 election.

Why Are The Biden Lawyers Squirrely?

One thing nobody's covered lately is the strange tendency of Biden lawyers no longer to be Biden lawyers. I've already noted here that Patrick Moore, a former Obama White House counsel who appears to have been the key individual tasked with cleaning out President Biden's Penn Biden Center office and who had quietly notified the Justice Department of the classified documents, was no longer representing Joe Biden following the January 9 revelation of the find. Via that link, his first day at a new job with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office was January 18.

More recently, one of Hunter Biden's high-powered defense attorneys, Joshua Levy, has just as quietly withdrawn from that case.

Levy has removed himself from the case, reportedly due to infighting within Hunter’s legal team and specifically with Abbe Lowell, who was hired in December to defend Hunter and the Biden family from nine congressional probes, including money laundering and wire fraud.

. . . Levy was reportedly discontented with Lowell’s legal strategies and feared that his tactics could flop. In February, Lowell was a part of the effort to send Rudy Giuliani, Tony Bobulinski, and 12 others “litigation hold” letters to preserve “Laptop from Hell” records, a move seen by some critics as a public relations tactic to change the troubling narrative for the Biden family.

The link quotes the New York Times on the chronology of Levy's engagement and details the conflicts within the legal team:

President Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, had recommended Mr. Levy for the job. But Mr. Levy had clashed with Kevin Morris, a lawyer and close adviser to Hunter Biden who has lent him money to pay his back taxes and some other bills, according to a person familiar with the strategy. Mr. Morris and Hunter Biden brought on Mr. Lowell late last year, prompting Mr. Levy’s departure.

In previous posts here, I've listed Levy and Lowell as part of Hunter's legal team, as well as Chris Clark and Keven Morris. With Levy out, that leaves Lowell, Clark, and Morris, but some of the stories I've seen suggest that Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, who appears to be a friend of Hunter as well as a financial angel, is calling the shots. But Morris is an entertainment lawyer, not a criminal defense attorney who specializes in issues like taxes and money laundering, which were Levy's skill set. Clark has been representing Hunter in his tax case with the Delaware US Attorney, but a major problem is the commingling of Biden family funds that's likely to metastasize and affect Joe and his brother Jim, if not other members of the Biden family.

Down the road, it's hard not to be suspicious that Joe continues to rely on Hunter as a key confidant, but the problem is that Hunter is an addict who's been in and out of rehab for more than a decade, and if nothing else, his judgment, especially over his own case and the family's legal exposure, is likely to be seriously impaired. And his case will always be closely linked with Joe's and the rest of the family.

This also leaves aside the separate issue of the doubts within the FBI about what led up to the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

According to the Washington Post, the raid took place only after months of debate between the FBI and prosecutors from the Department of Justice. The FBI argued that a request for a full search of the property would have sufficed, according to two senior officials from the bureau.

. . . Most of this we knew already, but not the infighting at the DoJ. So what does this leak to the Washington Post tell us? First off, it probably signals that prosecutors didn’t end up with a usable case even after the raid. Success incentivizes unity; failure incentivizes blame games. The FBI’s two “senior officials” want everyone to know it wasn’t their idea, which wouldn’t be necessary unless the raid and the prosecution has flopped.

I've posted here on what seems to be a new "deep throat" phenomenon whereby unnamed FBI officials brief the Washington Post on chicanery at the White House, just as they did 50 years ago. All I can think is this is a continuation of what we've been seeing since the middle of January, while Biden attorneys are quietly heading for the exits. Meanwhile, the reporters are still working from home.

I'm Not Sure If We're Looking At The Same Church

I note another blog post from Fr Longenecker today, Quo Vadis Traditionalists?, in which he discusses options that might be open to traditionalists who may be frustrated by recent restrictions on the Latin mass. On one hand, I'm not sure of his definition of "traditionalist", and in that light, he's been clear to say he isn't one, which separates him from someone like Fr Zuhlsdorf. But Bp Barron also calls himself a "traditionalist" if by "tradition" one means "adherence to the Church's ecumenical councils, incluiding the Second Vatican Council".

Fr Longenecker proposes avenues for Catholics who disagree with restrictions on the Latin mass:

[W]hat will be the response of those Catholics who are devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass given Rome’s latest round of restrictions? Several things: Some will migrate to the SSPX. Others will seek out other forms of reverent, traditional Catholic worship– an Ordinariate parish, a Byzantine parish or a Novus Ordo that is celebrated in a traditional manner. Others, who are more hard line, will practice subversive obedience. “We can’t have the Latin Mass in the parish church? OK. We’ll move it to the parish fellowship hall, the gym or the Rectory chapel. In fact, what we’re doing is raising the money to build a Latin Mass chapel on the church campus. We’ll worship there instead of the parish church.”

He puts this in a somewhat peculiar context:

What complicates this problem even further–and something which the Englishman [Cardinal] Roche doesn’t seem to understand at all is the entrepreneurial spirit of American conservative Catholicism.

Having been a close observer of the first ten years of an "entrepreneurial" option among those he lists, the North American ordinariate, I've got to say that the reality on the ground isn't what Fr Longenecker suggests it might be. He suggests conservative Catholics might raise money for their own projects, and indeed, that's what we've seen over and over in the ordinariate, with results that have been at best disappointing, but also in some cases like the St Barnabas Omaha ordinariate parish, flagrantly mismanaged. There, its pastor was removed for out-of-control spending that resulted in the need to sell off parish property, but a new administrator has since been faced with continuing divisive issues within the parish. As a visitor put it to me in an e-mail,

To me, those who give their typical diocesan parish a failing grade and then try to get an Ordinariate parish going are like parents who give up on the local school system and try to get a charter school going, or a private alternative . This may benefit the small number who attend, but does nothing to improve local education generally. Perhaps the issue of personal responsibility in the area of education s a political one, but in the case of the Church I think it is moral. Establishing a little enclave of "people like us" is the exact opposite of evangelisation. The financial saga of St Barnabas, Omaha is a depressing example of how “privatisation” is fundamentally the wrong approach, IMHO.

Beyond that, I've got to say that in my case, a thwarted attempt to enter the Church via a parish that failed to join the ordinariate forced me, kicking and screaming, to discover how reverent and worthwhile a diocesan parish can be. What's continued to fascinate me is that the St John's Seminary of the Los Angeles archdiocese, which has been a conspicuous target of conservative agitators who don't live here, continues to provide a steady supply of remarkable priests. Some of them rotate through our parish, either as residents while in seminary or associates after ordination, and then go on to other parishes throughout the archdiocese. What strikes me is that these priests set an example that makes me think the Catholic priesthood has actually become a viable career option for capable, healthy men seeking a worthwhile use of their talents.

Their standard of education, communication, pastoral leadeership, and management style is uniformly high. It's also plain that the level of support and the level of expectation from the archdiocese are both just as high. Our parish programs also involve parishioners from other parishes in the area, and the sense I have is that the level of pastoral care isn't unique to our own parish. Nobody I've gotten to know is disgruntled, and certainly not to the point that anyone is proposing a campaign to build aomething like a Latin mass chapel.

Fr Longenecker deosn't mention what I think are two much more significant "entrepreneurial" phenomena, Ascension Presents and Bp Barron's Word on Fire. Ascension has sponsored two widely available series on YouTube and elsewhere, Bible in a Year and now Catechism in a Year. I'm following the Catechism in a Year, which at the moment has about 110,000 subscribers on YouTube. This is the 1992 St John Paul II Catechism, which is explicitly based on the Second Council.

Word on Fire is, among other things, a high-quality publishing outlet; last year it published an edition of the Second Council documents with commentary by Bp Barron. I bought this and read it. I can only agree with Bp Barron that if people have a problem with the Council, they at least ought to read its documents and commentary. But Word on Fire publishes a great deal else.

One big point I'm taking away from the Catechism in a Year is that salvation is corporate and takes place in the context of the Church. I'm not at all sure that it solves anything to suggest that people set up little enclaves of the like-minded, especially when the US Church is currently displaying remarkable energy. I'm back to the question I used to ask on my old blog, "What problem are we trying to solve?" What problem, for instance, is the North American ordinariate trying to solve if it's attracted so few disaffected Episcopalians after ten years? After all, even Fr Longenecker acknowledges that the point of ordinariates was to allow Anglicsns to preserve their traditions and liturgy in a Catholic context, but now he's suggesting they're actually for disgruntled Catholics.

And of course, we've got to acknowledge that fairly soon after its founding, the US ordinariate extended its target market to Methodists and AME. Isn't it worth asking why this was done and why, in light of a Methodist schism even bigger than the "continuing" movement for Episcopalians, not a single Methodist parish has shown an interest? Instead, the ordinariate is being proposed as a boutique option for Catholics to practice what Fr Longenecker recommends as “subversive obedience”. I'm scratching my head.

Anglicanorum Coetibus And Conservative Wishful Thinking

I've already posted here about the schism dividing the United Methodist Church over same-sex marriage and the fact that Methodists are already fully eligible to enter the Roman Catholic Church as intact parishes with their clergy under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus. This is, at least in theory, an option available to the thousands of UMC parishes that are investigating disaffiliation and joining a more conservative denomination. However, I concluded in that post that this isn't what William James would call a "living option":

[L]et us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.

A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

For whatever reason, we must conclude that for United Methodists, 7.6 million in 20l0 in the US, a number closely approaching zero has elected to enter the Roman Catholic Church via Anglicanorum coetibus even as individuals since the erection of the North American ordinariate in 2012. As far as anyone is aware, no United Methodist parish has ever attempted to join, or even inquired about joining, the North American ordinariate. Thus in William James's terms, we must come to the conclusion that for any UMC parish determined to disaffiliate, although it is canonically and legally possible, the option "continue as a corporate body affiliated with the UMC or affiliate with the Roman Catholic Church via the North American ordinariate" is not living -- neither is it forced, and neither is it momentous.

This, of course, does not cover the entirely separate option of individual United Methodists, or for that matter baptized Protestants of any other denomination, to enter the Roman Catholic Church via RCIA or other catechetical process -- and many thousands do this each year. For all of them, this is a living option. It's just the ordinariate option that isn't living.

I may be completely unique among commentators in having made the observation that it's even possible for a UMC parish to elect to join an ordinariate. I'm not aware, for instance, of any wave of anticipation at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society that any UMC parish will elect to do this, much less dozens or hundreds. And I'm not aware of anyone asking why this might not be the case. (I'll leave any attempt to answer that myself for another post.)

What does intrigue me is a blog post by Fr Dwight Longenecker, Will the Church of England Split? Fr Longenecker is a Roman Catholic priest, married with a family, who was raised a devout Evangelical but was attracted to Anglicanism, went to seminary in Oxford, and was ordained and served as a priest in the Church of England in the UK. He left the CofE in the wake of its decision to ordain women in 1994. At that time, the Roman Catholic Church created a provision for ordination of married former CofE priests, but its implementation was uneven, and Fr Longenecker's ordination was stalled until the US Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina was able to ordain him via an obscure provision dating from Pius XII and return him to the US as a married priest in his jurisdiction.

Thus Fr Longenercker is in a situation completely outside either the Pastoral Provision or the ordinariates, a married former Anglican Catholic priest who serves in an ordinary diocesan parish. My impression is that although he is somewhat conservative theologically, he isn't closely aligned with traditionalists, though he often expresses sympathy for them. But it seems to me that, as a former priest in the Church of England, his views on a potential split there are naive:

[T]he answer to those in the Church of England who are troubled is close at hand. The Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was established to help Anglicans who treasure their traditions and patrimony to retain their customs and culture while also being re-united into full communion with the Catholic Church. I had mentioned that it was mostly the Evangelicals in the Church of England who were upset. Would Evangelicals be welcome in the Ordinariate or is it only for disaffected Anglo-Catholics? You must ask those who are already in the Ordinariate, but in my opinion there is no reason why good, orthodox Evangelicals should not be able to find a home in the Ordinariate and bring into the Ordinariate the strengths of their own Evangelical-Anglican heritage. No doubt they would have to make some adjustments to some of their theological opinions, but that could be a strong growing point and their Evangelical zeal, their entrepreneurial spirit and their love of Scripture and emphasis on personal conversion would all help to strengthen–not weaken the Ordinariate.

. . . Membership of the Ordinariate solves the problem of Anglican fissiparousness not through further division, but by unity with Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Catholics are supposed to be talking at this time about “enlarging the tent” of the church. The Anglican Ordinariate does just that.

In part, his view is understandable, becahse he's not just a former Anglican, but he's also a former Evangelical, but his own road to Catholicism, via Oxford and Anglo-Catholicism, was idiosyncratic. People who haven't traveled that particular path, which involved the need to resolve not one but several spiritual options in sequence that were living, forced, and momentous, will see a single option, "remain a low-church Anglican despite my discomfort, or become a newbie Catholic despite my even greater discomfort", as neither living, forced, nor momentous.

The actual state of the ordinariates as they currently exist isn't an encouraging factor, either. In general, conservatives tend to see the ordinariates as a good idea for everyone else, just like conservatives often see military service as a good thing for people in general, just not for themselves. Clearly Fr Longenecker never seriously considered reincardination into the North American ordinariate for himself, for instance; there were never, and still aren't, realistic full-time career opportunites in his part of the country (and indeed nearly anywhere else).

Despite a couple of well-publcized conversions of Church of England bishops to Catholicism and joining the UK ordinariate after retirement, no ordinariate parishes there own any property, and at best, membership numbers are stagnant. Someone -- significantly, no one currently active in the UK ordinariate -- is available to undertake the task Fr Lengenecker proposes of evangelizing low-church Anglicans and overcoming their instinctive distrust of Catholicism, when the predominant strain within all the ordinariates tends toward a somewhat dilettantish boutique Anglican Papalism.

Unfortunately, to comment on Fr Longenecker'ss blog, you have to be a registered financial donor, and our charitable budget is dominated by the need to support causes much closer to home. Otherwise, I wish I could have engaged Fr Longenecker more closely in this discussion by commenting directly on his blog. If anyone is in a position to make Fr Longenecker aware of this post, I'd welcome the opportunity to hear his views.

Remember The Hospital Ships?

During March 2020, the hospital ship Comfort was ordered to New York, and the Mercy was ordered to Los Angeles as part of the federal government's initial response to the COVID pandemic. On March 16 of that year, President Trump declared a national emergency, and under the theme "15 days to slow the spread", he endorsed the quasi-national lockdowns ordered by state and local health departments, which famously lasted much longer than 15 days. The moral panic took firm hold, although within a fairly short time, the public was made aware that the model under which the lockdowns were ordered and the hospital ships dispatched was "so highly flawed it never should have been relied upon for policy decisions to begin with."

As the "morning after" phase of the panic slowly dawns, we're gradually learning details of how the authorities tried to cover up the consequences of their initial policy errors. Yesterday's New York Post carries this story:

A US Navy admiral begged the Cuomo administration to send patients to the nearly-empty hospital ship docked on the Hudson River during the height of the pandemic — but his pleas were met with politics and paranoia, The Post has learned.

. . . Another federal facility was set up in the Jacob Javits Center in midtown. Both famously sat mostly empty during their time of operation — with city, state and federal officials blaming each other for the issue at the time.

But in a trove of recently unearthed government emails obtained by activist Peter Arbeeny and provided to The Post, a frustrated Vice Admiral Mike Dumont urged the Cuomo administration to act.

The problem was that in fact, there weren't enough COVID patients to go around, because the Imperial College London model of the pandemic wildly overpredicted the number who would be hospitalized. This was the reason Trump, on the recommendations of his COVID advisers, dispatched the hospital ships in the first place.

“We could use some help from your office,” [Adm Dumont] wrote in an April 7, 2020 missive to Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa. “The Governor asked us to permit use of USNS COMFORT to treat patients without regard to their COVID status and we have done so. Right now we only have 37 patients aboard the ship. Further, we are treating only 83 patients at the Javits Events Center.

. . . The Comfort arrived to much fanfare in New York City on March 30, 2020. New infections were spreading out of control, hospitals were overflowing with patients, and supplies were so short, first responders were reduced to wearing garbage bags.

I think it would be more accurate to say media was reporting new infections out of control, hospitals overflowing with patients, and short supplies. For instance, in early May 2020, there was a frenzy of reporting that the City of New York was forced to store bodies in refrigerated trucks, but a year later, the trucks and bodies were still there, not because the morgues were overwhelmed, but because the city had lost touch with relatives to get instructions on their disposition. By mid-May, it was plain that sending both the Comfort and the Mercy to New York and Los Angeles had been unnecessary from the start:

Though Mercy arrived in Los Angeles – and sister ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) arrived in New York City – amid concerns that local hospital systems would be overwhelmed with COVID cases and need additional capacity to support the high patient load, that need to lean on the hospital ship never materialized. LA-area hospitals ultimately only sent 77 patients to the ship over six weeks. The Mercy MTF performed 36 successful general, orthopedic and plastic surgeries, as well as interventional radiology, exploratory laparotomy and skin grafting procedures.

Even if there was finger-pointing in New York over how few patients wound up in the Javits Center and the Comfort, the situation in Los Angeles with the Mercy was exactly the same. Even so, local politicians continued to try to stoke panic with each renewed COVID surge:

A Los Angeles County supervisor is appealing to California’s governor to request a Navy hospital ship return to the city’s port to help hospitals battling COVID-19.

In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, LA County’s fourth district Supervisor Janice Hahn said hospitals in Los Angeles are reaching a “breaking point” due to the amount of coronavirus cases and asked Newsom to request hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) come to the city’s port.

. . . The Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Hahn’s request.

The House Republicans intend to hold some type of investigation into the COVID panic, but I'm not sure if we'll ever get a clear picture of what actually took place. For now, it seems plain that the Navy quickly determined that sending the hospital ships was an epic fiasco, but it kept the matter quiet, and its medical staff doesn't seem to have been anxious to insert itself into any higher-level policy discussion. Admiral Dumont, who seems to have had some part in this belated revelation, waited until he'd been retired for more than a year.

Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method In 't

Has anyone else noticed that recently, every time John Kirby appears at a White House press conference, Karine Jean-Pierre stands at his shoulder? This appears to date from a kerfuffle last September, when according to the New York Post,

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was left stunned Friday when a reporter asked if his frequent briefing room appearances meant that he was the “second press secretary” and undermining Karine Jean-Pierre, the first woman of color to be chief White House spokesperson.

The head-turning inquiry came from Cameroonian journalist Simon Ateba — who was selected by Jean-Pierre to ask Kirby a question, despite previously sparring with Kirby on a similar topic.

Note that according to the Post, the moment was scripted.

“The reason I’m asking is because almost everywhere I go, I have black people telling me that the reason you’re at the White House is to undermine the first female black [press] secretary,” added Ateba, of Today News Africa.

. . . “If anyone gets any kind of idea in their head that I’m taking away from Karine or her work that’s really regrettable,” Kirby responded to Ateba.

“And I’m very sorry that that’s any impression that anybody would have. I am simply working at the National Security Council on national security communications — and with her good graces, I’m able to come up here every now and then to talk to you about simply national security issues,” Kirby continued.

Kirby's response sounds as if it was pretty tightly scripted too, and almost immediately, we began to see a lot less of Adm Kirby (checking Wikipedia, his naval career and rise to rear admiral was entirely via positions as a public affairs officer, so I don't feel all that sorry for the guy -- he basically just looked good in an admiral's suit.)

In the photo above, where they let him out again on a very short leash to address the UFO ballons, he looks tired and unhappy. In the wake of revelations that the UFO balloons were student science projects and hobby exercises by middle-aged white guys, his job was to obscure that:

[T]he Biden administration is still assessing the three unknown objects, and White House National Security Council Director of Strategic Communications John Kirby said Friday they might never know what the objects were.

"I can’t sit here and promise you that we will get to that level of fidelity and detail," Kirby said, noting "a lot of it" would depend on when and how officials recover the objects.

Kirby said "it is going to be very difficult to find them" given the conditions of the locations where the objects were shot down, and said it would also be difficult to "do the forensics to identify" them.

"I can’t promise you that we’ll know definitively, one way or the other," Kirby said.

Well, that's because the balloons are about 36 inches in diameter, their payloads are nothing but small circuit boards, and the half-million dollar missiles that shot them down basically reduced everything to a little cloud of corn flakes, if that. Any effort at recovery was pure kabuki. The Mounties seem to have been the first to get real about this, likely because Biden can't order them to do anything more:

“After conducting an extensive search in the Lake Huron area with the assistance of the Canadian Coast Guard and other domestic and international partners, a decision was reached to suspend the search due to several factors including deteriorating weather and the low probability of recovery,” the RCMP said.

I had a boss once who, in response to some corporate ukase, came up to me with it and said, "Were you ever in the military? If you were, you know about bullsh*t. Well, this is bullsh*t." Somehow I think Adm Kirby's expression in the photo above reflects this, but again, he's made his own bed here. So he's going to say nothing to contradict the author of last Sunday's bullsh*t, presumably out of professional courtesy:

The U.S. Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said on Sunday after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects that he would not rule out aliens or any other explanation yet, deferring to U.S. intelligence experts.

Asked whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin for three airborne objects shot down by U.S. warplanes in as many days, General Glen VanHerck said: "I'll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven't ruled out anything."

But they did feel the need to put Adm Kirby out for something.

Karine Jean-Pierre says the U.S. military shot an object over Canada "because it's part of NORAD. There's, uh, the NORAD is part of like a, part of a—it's a, it's a, what you call, a coalition, a consortium."

"We did it clearly in step with CANADIA." pic.twitter.com/X1CmWnR2ns

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 12, 2023

He wasn't out there to explain anything at all, he was just there to fill in time without the risk that Ms Jean-Pierre would embarrass herself yet further. I'm sure that's yet another factor in the admiral's facial expression.

Here's my current theory. Somehow in the general panicked muddle at the White House as members of Biden's own party criticized his non-response to the Chinese spy balloon, somebody brought up the hundreds of hobbyist pico balloons traversing the country at any given time. Whoever brought it up hadn't thought it through all that clearly, but may well have made the point that we don't shoot those down, do we? And Trump did nothing about those, either! He knew all about them and did nothing!

President Brandon seized on that point. Probably without understanding the underlying issue very well at all, he decided on a show of strength, not only was he going to shoot down the big Chinese ballon, he was going to take a hard line on all those little balloons that Trump did nothing about. I'll bet that everyone in the room, from the national security director on down, knew exactly what those little balloons were, and so did the F-22 and F-16 pilots who were ordered to shoot them down. (They could be court martialed for giving their real opinions.) For that matter, so did the Mounties tasked with making a token search for the debris, but at least they could quickly but politely bow out. Every last one of them knew it was bullsh*t.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines spoke briefly on the suspected Chinese spy balloon controversy during an appearance at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Haines, who oversees the U.S. intelligence community, remarked on how “crazy” the situation has become in the past couple weeks.

“It’s so crazy. It’s really like an episode of ‘Veep,’ you know, on some level,” she quipped, referring to the HBO political satire show that starred Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

It's crazy because nobody at that level has any credibility. And that's because some kids working on scout projects and middle-aged white guy hobbyists have made monkeys out of them without even meaning to.

I briefly thought someone like Secretary Austin could fix the problem by making a good-humored offer of reimbursement for the balloons, but that leaves out the question of who'll pay for the $2 million worth of rockets that shot them down. The problem is beyond simple remedy, because it was micromanaged by the guy at the top. But this, yet once more, is not the product of dementia. This is Hunter's dad and Jill's husband. However wacky, there's method in it.