…that the current, possibly-excessive, garment-rending over the “Omicron” variant is the sound of an awful lot of people who’ve gone through lives with little purpose or meaning, and have found a perverted version of both in bullying, shunning and scarlet-lettering people with different conclusions and means of dealing with Covid?

That depression and anxiety might be the least of society’s mental health issues when it comes to this pandemic – that the wave of cultural narcissism it’s released dwarves everything else (except, obviously, the suicide?)

… when it comes to public health, for Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, it’s all about the science.

Nothing but the science.

I don’t believe the doomsayers. In reply, they call me a science denier. Actually, I’m practicing a different kind of science – pattern recognition – which informs my analysis.

Most political hoaxes are based on the logical fallacy “Appeal to Authority.” The hoax follows a familiar pattern. Once you recognize the pattern, the hoax is obvious.

“There are only a few years left to save the planet from global climate change. No, you can’t see my data, you aren’t capable of understanding it. I am a climate scientist. You must trust me and do as I say.”

“The Second Amendment does not protect a personal right to bear arms. We know this because hardly anybody owned guns in colonial America. No, you can’t see my probate court data, you aren’t capable of understanding it. I am a historian. You must trust me and do as I say.”

“There is no evidence the election was stolen. No, you can’t see the ballot counting software, you’re not capable of understanding it. I am an election official. You must trust me and do as I say.”

It never works, of course. The truth leaks out eventually. Michael Mann’s climate change “hockey stick” graph has been thoroughly discredited. Michael Bellesiles’ probate court research was simply made up. Statistical analysis shows significant election fraud occurred. These were not cases of “science” being challenged or denied, they were cases of “science” being manipulated and distorted to promote a specific political agenda. Once it became clear the “science” didn’t say what the proponents claimed it said, the hoax was laid bare for all to see – all who were willing to see. Not everybody is willing to see.

And now this: “The Covid virus is deadly to everyone of all ages. Only the Pfizer vaccine can save you from it. No, you can’t see my data, you aren’t capable of understanding it. I am a medical doctor. You must trust me and do as I say.”

The funding and origin of the virus is shrouded in lies. Mortality statistics are inflated even as breakthrough cases are undercounted and vaccine adverse reactions are downplayed. Policies of lockdown, masks, social distance, mandatory vaccination are based on assertions, not evidence, backed by threat of prosecution and financial ruin, but only for those who lack political privilege.

The existence of the Covid virus is not a hoax. The panic response to the Covid virus is the hoax. This is not a medical problem. This is a political problem. We must begin treating it as one.

Joe Doakes

I hope the actual science finds a way to recover from this past two years.

Schools in Edina – once known as a good school district – are

Pictures of Normandale Elementary School in Edina show students eating their lunch outside with hats, coats and mittens on.

“Since the beginning of school, I learned that essentially if you brought a lunch from home, you were eating outside,” said Carissa Palm, the mother of a third-grader at the school.

The related article, from KSTP-TV, is too full of nauseatingly idiotic school administrator pullquotes, or, worse, “no comments”, to get through without yelling at the screen.

Government is the things we do together – stupidly and with the lowest common intellectual denominator in charge.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals says — no mandate for you:

A federal appeals court has upheld its stay on President Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate for companies with at least 100 employees.

In a 22-page ruling on Friday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the mandate was “fatally flawed,” and barred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from enforcing the mandate “pending adequate judicial review” of a motion for permanent injunction.

OSHA shall “take no steps to implement or enforce the mandate until further court order,” the ruling stated.

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The mandate, which was supposed to take effect Jan. 4, requires business with at least 100 employees to mandate their workers get vaccinated or undergo frequent testing.

Two predictions:

• Biden and co. will ignore the court ruling; and
• The chorus of MSM scolds will try to justify whatever Biden does. Constitutional crises are so 2020, doncha know.

…is that as the things considered “Virtues” change, so do the signals.

Incenting people to snitch on each other over personal and business decisions is one of them.

“But wait, Mitch – the fact that you didn’t say anything against the Texas abortion law’s incentives for filing actions against abortion providers or customers speaks volumes“.

It sure does. I’m not necessarily wild about that part of the Texas law – although the decision to abort affects more than just the mother; in many cases, more than just the mother and child, as well.

But in this case? If you loved East Germany under the Stasi, you’ll love a second Biden term.

There are so many reasons to flush the Biden administration like a bad tequila and gas station burrito bender the next morning.

This story is merely one of them. But it’s a big one:

Veterans that chose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine and are dismissed from their posts will not receive any special protections or preferential evaluations for veterans’ benefits eligibility, with the decision being ultimately determined by their discharge status.

The decision of whether to give these veterans other-than-honorable discharges will be left to their local commanders.

I don’t care what Betty McCollum and Ilhan Omar have to say about this – it’s perfectly predictable.

Now Dean Phillips and Angie Craig? That’s an opinion I’d like to get.

When your dumbass Karen of a sister-in-law asks for just one bit of “scentific” proof that acquired immunity isn’t in fact “nonexistent”, but is for sake of argument at least as important as vaccination in dealing with Covid?

Give them 64 bits, and counting.

And then 96 more, although some may overlap.

I authorize the use of extreme force to force them to listen to every one.

You’re welcome.

One of the great, largely untold, stories of World War 2 was that in the post-war era, the American occupation made such an impression on German society that they ended up taking Federalism to heart to a degree that Americans would feel jealous of, if most of them knew better.

And while it’s not a specific point in the article I’m linking, I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and say that their relatively strict observance of federalism has helped them keep a pragmatic approach to Covid that has largely eluded our centralized public health bureaucracies.

Untrammeled central government hurt Germany terribly, 80 years ago – far worse than Covid has harmed the US. So far.

The power of federalism, not only to help people who don’t like each other much to co-exist politically, but to sand down the rougher edges of government stupidity, is a lesson this country would be blessed to learn, while we can.

 A recent experience (last night, actually) in the northern suburbs, but repeated elsewhere with alarming frequency.

My family traveled to our friendly local neighborhood Culver’s for dinner. We arrived at 6 p.m. We could see people sitting in the dining room and customers at the counter, so we assumed the restaurant was open for dine-in.

We got to the door and saw a sign mentioning that the restaurant would be closing at 8. This is a typical scenario — we are all getting used to labor shortages causing a variety of businesses to curtail their hours or even close on certain days. But as we attempted to enter the restaurant, the door was locked.

At the time of our arrival, four other groups were converging on the location. I knocked on the door, hoping one of the workers would hear it. They didn’t, but a customer did and came to the door to talk with us. “I think they’re closing the dining room,” the customer said.

A woman on the outside said, “but the sign on the door says they are closing at 8. It’s 6. Why are they closing?”

Another potential customer said, “this is ridiculous. It’s not 8. They should change the sign.”

“Perhaps they think they’re in Nova Scotia. It’s 8 there,” I offered. That got a chuckle out of yet another customer.

After a moment, a manager who appeared to be a year out of high school appeared at the door. “We’re very short staffed so we’re closing the dining room because we can’t provide the expected level of customer service.”

The woman who had noted the sign on the door said, “well, if you aren’t open, you should have a sign on the door.”

“I’ll go get a sign for the door,” the manager said. Then, reading the faces of the customers he was turning away, said “do you want me to get the general manager? I’ll go get the general manager.” He walked back in to the restaurant, but by then all of us decided to take our business elsewhere.

A few observations:

• As a rule, it’s never optimal to maintain a level of service by providing no service at all. I would guess the people who departed without a meal last night would have spent between $150-200 at the restaurant. Turning away customers is always a bad idea.
• At the same time, what could the manager do? He was trying to protect his workers, who were clearly getting swamped. If the workers who are willing to show up get abused, they will quit. The poor kid was caught between Scylla and Charybdis. 
• I have never worked in a restaurant — a desultory semester of work-study in the college cafeteria is my closest experience to that. I have family members who have spent many years in the hospitality industry and they have many, many stories to tell.
• Many restaurant jobs are entry-level work and the pay is generally not great. I see plenty of signs around town with fast fooders offering $15/hour or more, but most locations find themselves short-staffed anyway. People respond to incentives, and most of the incentives are pointing away from the hospitality industry. That could be changed, but the folks who could drive that change are responding to different incentives.
• Our MSM supremos are trying to spray paint the turd. A WaPo columnist tells us to lower our expectations. It’s just this pandemic and that lying son of a bitch, Trump! They would never hurt you. You know that.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

America funded virus gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab? No, we did no such thing, certainly not.

Oh, THAT gain-of-function research? Oh yeah, we funded that. Our bad.

I’m borrowing Sarah E. Hoyt’s new hashtag, seems appropriate for this situation: #headsonpikes

Joe Doakes

“No, it wasn’t gain of function research. It was research about increasing function. Different thing all together)”

It wasn’t that long ago, really. We had heroes among us. Now they are so hard to find:

These days, the men and women who worked through the whole pandemic are being shamed and patronized by the very people whose cushy existences they facilitated for a year and a half. The liberal elites who holed up in the Hamptons and didn’t have contact with the outside world for a year are ready to get back to their SoulCycle classes, even if it means firing a few people they once called “frontline heroes.” The irony of the same people who screamed in the faces of policemen at the height of a pandemic turning around to demand that these cops now shut up, stop asking questions, and get vaccinated is almost too much to bear.

Hamptons, Bryn Mawr, North Oaks — wherever. As Bridget Phetasy notes in Tablet, it’s the same dynamic we’ve known for decades now: limousine liberals, parlor pinks, trust fund Trotskyites, living their Best Lives and dancing among the ruins:

While normal people tried to figure out how to juggle work, child care, and living under the same roof for 24 hours a day, celebrities were having a ball. Locked up with only their phones and without their handlers, the public was treated to an unfiltered parade of narcissism on fire. Distraught about the postponement of Coachella, Vanessa Hudgens took to Instagram Live to lament that “like, yeah, people are gonna die.” Gal Gadot talked about how “we’re all in this together” and gathered a celebrity cast to sing a horrifying version of “Imagine” from their sprawling mansions.

Nearly any version of “Imagine” is horrifying by definition, of course, but we’ll leave that aside. Now that we’re in our 19th month of two weeks to flatten the curve, the gyre is widening:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote that over 100 year ago. I don’t recall attending any innocence ceremonies recently, but his point stands. We may not have mere anarchy any time soon, either: most self-identified anarchists are totally cool with the State, as long as it does their bidding. But I sense the agents of the State may not be able to make it stick. Back to Phetasy:

In L.A. County, only 54% of the Black population and 62% of the “Latinx” population have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Despite all the resources the city ostensibly devotes to equity and inclusion, it’s clear that these minority populations will be most affected by the mandates. If Black lives matter to you so much, shouldn’t you care that Black people will be excluded from restaurants and movie theaters and nail salons?

Caring is overrated, especially among the best. I don’t know what’s next, but in a world where self-regard has more cachet than self-awareness the center will not hold.

First things first; condolences to the family, and the entire nation, really, on the death of Colin Powell.

Now, let’s talk social media.This was how the “Drudge Report“ posting appeared;

Forget for a moment the “fully vaxxed“ bit; there’s plenty of inadequate reporters jumping up and down yelling “see! See!, Who need to be reminded that Powell was 84, had blood cancer, and was pretty much a poster case for Covid comorbidities.

No, I’m just wondering if that was the best, most tactful place for Facebook to throw its little “fact check“ blurb?

Keeping track of the number of times BigKaren winds up reversing itself on “science“:

I) D’ya think?

II) this is going to cause some intellectual concussions I’m on the “people who got Covid are irresponsible, bad citizens“ mob.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

Which is about 729 times a year more than the New York Times is right.

But here we are.

Excellent piece by David Leonhardt, on how the terrible news coverage of the Covid pandemic is a reflection of human nature (And, I will also infer, some of the worst aspects of modern American media culture). In this case, the fact that people love reductionistic stories with heroes and villains, and that journalists (and the business people they report to) are not only basically human, but know that that bit of human nature brings eyeballs and dollars.

And that’s been on display:

In the case of Covid, the fable we tell ourselves is that our day-to-day behavior dictates the course of the pandemic. When we are good — by staying socially distant and wearing our masks — cases are supposed to fall. When we are bad — by eating in restaurants, hanging out with friends and going to a theater or football game — cases are supposed to rise.

The idea is especially alluring to anybody making an effort to be careful and feeling frustrated that so many other Americans seem blasé. After all, the Covid fable does have an some truth to it. Social distancing and masking do reduce the spread of the virus. They just are not as powerful as people often imagine.

The main determinants of Covid’s spread (other than vaccines, which are extremely effective) remain mysterious. Some activities that seem dangerous, like in-person school or crowded outdoor gatherings, may not always be. As unsatisfying as it is, we do not know why cases have recently plunged. The decline is consistent with the fact that Covid surges often last for about two months before receding, but that’s merely a description of the data, not a causal explanation

People like to see, Or think they see, their actions having an impact on the larger world.

Somebody has found a market feeding that impression, Including The very human tendency for people together in tribes.

The Karen tribe seems to be descended from the crowd of mean girls and bullies in junior high.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve been following the debate on whether vaccine mandates will cause staffing shortages. Had a few tests done at the hospital this morning. Quietly asked the RN about the vaccine. She hasn’t gotten it, does not intend to. She’s with an “agency” which means she’s not part of the giant conglomerate health care provider and isn’t bound by their rules. She’s seen stuff, read stuff, she affirmed – strictly off the record and between her and me – that I’m not the only one with serious doubts. We’re not crazy no matter what they tell us.

I received excellent care from a non-corporate nurse, for which I am grateful and also amused. The regulation says any employer with more than 100 nurses must . . . oh, we’ve only got 90. Our sister (but completely independent) companies also have 90, each. And each nurse only works 29 hours for each company. They’re exempt. No vaccine. But excellent patient care. And the giant conglomerate can proudly announce their in-house staff is fully vaccinated with no staffing shortage.

Potemkin compliance all the way down. You watch, they’ll be ‘independent contractors’ next.

Joe Doakes

People underestimate the cost of widespread ignoring of laws because they are widely considered to be wrong, stupid, corrosive of freedom and the like.

It doesn’t end well. And it’s not the peoples fault.

Is there anything re Covid that Florida’s governor can’t affect?

And I bet the Texas Abortion Law has something to do with it too.

My high school and college classmate Pennie Werth died from Covid a couple weeks ago.

Pennie and me go way back – elementary school, anyway. In high school, we did the various high school plays together. And she played piano in the first band I ever got onstage with. It was in tenth grade, for a talent show, and Brenda Bassett, Troy and Dave Claude, Pennie and me played “Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac, to a panel of judges who had last cared about popular music during the swing era, so we did not win, but it was unforgettable and enough fun to get me hooked on playing in bands – a monkey still on my back today.

She went on to be a special ed teacher, and a great one. She lived in the Houston area for many years, but she called me during the later years of the Pawlenty administration to ask about the then-governor’s “Super Teacher” program, which was going to pay high-achieving teachers six-digit salaries to do what they did well. It would have been great – she’d have been nearer her family – but I warned her, correctly, the MFT would have nothing to do with “merit pay”.

Even as a teenager, she had a sharp wit and a huge heart. And she kept it throughout her life.

I wasn’t the only one that noticed. This AP story came out around the time George HW Bush died, three years back (emphasis added):

Mourners had been lining up since 9 a.m. to attend the viewing. Among the first was Pennie Werth-Bobian, 56, a retired elementary school teacher from the Houston suburbs who first met Bush in the 1990s.

A friend cutting the former president’s hair at the Houstonian Hotel alerted Werth-Bobian, who stopped by and struck up a conversation. Bush asked that she return every month or so when he got his hair trimmed.

The second time they met, Werth-Bobian asked what she should call him, thinking “Mr. President” sounded too formal.

“‘Call me George,’” she recalled him saying.

She did.

“That’s what he liked about me: that I talked to him like I talked to my dad,” she said.

They often shared family stories. Many of his tales involved George W. Bush, who she inferred was his favorite. Once, she said, Bush talked about Robin, his 3-year-old daughter he lost to leukemia in 1953, and his eyes welled with tears.

Werth-Bobian was newly married when they met, and asked Bush for advice.

“He said he and Barbara were best friends,” she recalled.

I’m still young enough to see this sort of thing as terribly unusual.  

The Pioneer Press and MPR report that the state of Minnesota is “selling” the former Bix warehouse – purchased in 2019 to serve as a “back up morgue” for the COVID thousands fatalities the state was predicting.

And since this is a government operation, you may be assured that when we say “selling“, we mean “shifting around the books, to further serve as a wealth transfer“:

The state purchased the refrigerated warehouse at 1415 L’Orient St. and the five acres of land it sits on from private ownership last year for nearly $5.48 million. Under pressure from St. Paul and Ramsey County officials opposed to the idea of warehousing bodies there, the state used the site instead as storage for personal protective equipment. On Tuesday, the board of the Port Authority will meet to vote on whether to purchase the site — which now sits vacant — from the state for $5.65 million, the property’s current appraised value and the purchase amount required under state statute.

Conservative social media or portraying this as a “boondoggle“. Nothing could be further than the truth.

Even if you ignore the conspiracy theory (launched and spread by me) that Ken Martin stored John Thompson there to keep them out of the public eye after the Hugo incident before the 2020 election, the morgue served its primary purpose; as a prop in setting an ominous backdrop for the public health security theater the state has been subjecting us to for the last 20 months.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Two years ago, no one could work from home. Everyone had to come to the office so managers could supervise employees to ensure quality customer service and high productivity.

Last year no one could come to the office. Everyone had to work from home to protect employees from the deadliest virus ever known. Without management supervising us, productivity actually went up.

Starting in November, everyone must work from home, and everyone must come to the office, half and half. It’s a “hybrid” which sounds smart and trendy but actually combines the worst of both worlds. We’re doing it because . . . well, nobody really knows why, exactly. It just is. And since everyone is coming to the office but the deadly virus pandemic is still in effect, everyone must be vaccinated, even those who don’t want to work in the office, who are more productive working at home and who would prefer to continue working from home. Nope, must come to the office, must be vaccinated. And wear a mask plus move your desks six feet apart. But if we’re vaccinated and the vaccine protects us, why wear masks/social distance? If the vaccine doesn’t protect us (and masks/social distance weren’t safe enough to protect us last year), why are we back in the office instead of working from home?

Business magazines are asking what lessons we learned from Covid. Improvements in efficiency, distance working, employee satisfaction . . . no, none of them. We have learned no lessons and have no intention of learning any. It’s our way or the highway. Further proof that the whole thing was not a medical crisis, it was a political stunt.

Joe Doakes

If Dr. Fauci went on CNN and declared wearing aluminum foil Capri pants reduce the spread, I would expect edicts to follow shortly.

…but I believe what goes around, comes around.

Dr. Ana Navaro, celebrity physician of sorts, spends months wishing ghastly ill on the unvaccinated.

Dr. Ana Navaro on The View, last week:

Hope she gets better soon.

And yes, that means I am a better person than her.

A friend of the blog emails:

Everyone deserves Healthcare, Everyone must have health insurance. Unless we don’t like you.
I am seeing all the people who are cheering on Delta Airlines for raising the cost of insurance for the unvaccinated. These are mostly the same people who think everyone must have health insurance in the first place. But even beyond that, I see co-workers who used to complain about our company’s health insurance discount. The discount was given if you were a certain BMI, had low cholesterol, had low blood pressure. They complained because they thought it was so unfair to take all these things into account for their health insurance cost. (Things that actually do have some potential in higher costs for healthcare). But, here these people are now, saying the unvaccinated deserve higher premiums.
Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I do believe in the vaccine myself and so I got it. And I encouraged my family to. And I talked with friends who were hesitant if they wanted to hear from me. And I trust that there will be shots for variants if we need them. But, that is my choice.
I just can’t go to the point of saying the unvaccinated deserve higher premiums more than others. In the hospital, there are plenty of patients who don’t follow medical advice. And we see them again and again. Sometimes we reach them at some point and sometimes we don’t. They suffer their consequences. And their medical bills likely are already higher, even if their premiums are the same. Forced compliance would not change anything. Forced vaccine compliance will not change anything, either, except tear all of us further apart.

It’s fascinating to me how quick DFLers go from “Healthcare is a right – full stop!” to “keep the anti-vaxxers out of the hospital”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

America is a rich and spacious nation while India is a poor but populous nation.

One province that I’ve never heard of – Uttar Pradesh – has about 240 million people, roughly the size of the US if we leave out California, Texas and New York. They are now Covid-free. Seriously, their case rate is less than 1-in-a-million.

What’s the secret? Ivermectin.

Yes, yes, all the usual disclaimers: it’s Gateway Pundit which is unreliable. Here’s the report on MSN, which doesn’t mention Ivermectin but instead credits tracing, vaccination and curfews, all the things that don’t work anywhere else in the world but mysteriously worked in India.

I know what you’re thinking: the reports are clearly fabrications. Indians are ignorant savages incapable of counting correctly so the numbers are clearly wrong. They have religious objections to eating cattle so they’re obviously fanatics who can’t be trusted to tell the truth. Their medicine is so primitive they can’t tell if people are sick or not which is why the case count is so low.

But still . . . if they had bodies piled up in the streets rotting as flies swarmed around them, don’t you think somebody would notice? If nobody in the entire province has severe enough symptoms to be noticed, shouldn’t we ask why not? What do they know that we don’t know? What are they doing that we’re not doing?

I have a suspicion the US suffers from such overwhelming cultural imperialism that we can’t imagine – literally cannot make our minds imagine – that somebody else might have a better solution which does not involve the latest fad, the newest technology, the wokest thinking.

Instead, our cultural leaders tell us to pay no attention to all those healthy people over there. You, you’re going to DIE unless you do as we say. Because those healthy people are stupid, not smart like us. They must be. We’re Americans and they’re not. QED.

Joe Doakes

If there is anything this pandemic – or, really, the messaging response to this pandemic by our authorities and counter authorities Dash has taught me, it is “be relentlessly skeptical of everything and everybody“.

Still – as Joe says, if hospitals in Uttar Pradesh aren’t clogged with covid patients, and the only variable between their response and New York City’s actually is “the I drug“…

According to the associated press, the Covid pandemic has tied a “grim milestones“: The death toll is even with that of the 1918 Spanish influenza:

The delta-fueled surge in new infections may have peaked, but U.S. deaths still are running at over 1,900 a day on average, the highest level since early March, and the country’s overall toll stood at close to 674,000 as of Monday morning, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, though the real number is believed to be higher.

Of course, if you are remotely numerate, you know the lede that got buried – in this case, down in paragraph seven:

The 1918-19 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 675,000 Americans in a U.S. population one-third the size of what it is today. It struck down 50 million victims globally at a time when the world had one-quarter as many people as it does now. Global deaths from COVID-19 now stand at more than 4.6 million.

But watching social media this past few days, it’s pretty clear – they’re not aiming the story at people with math or critical thinking skills.