Jimmy Carter’s Gettysburg Address

March 9, 2023 // 3 Comments »

The word malaise, a general feeling of uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify, should be starting to creep in to discussions. It’s a word, albeit like most everything these days, politically-loaded, after its use by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 to describe the country he could not figure out to how lead.

Carter’s specific use of the term focused on the energy crisis, when OPEC and the Iranian Revolution monkeyed with America’s oil supply and Americans could not simply buy as much cheap gas as they wanted for their huge cars. It can sound trite, but it was a crushing blow to the American spirit, as somebody got the best of us while we stood aside hopeless. But Carter saw something much deeper than lack of cheap gas was wrong. Not just an oil shortage to manage, but a recession of hope, a crisis of confidence that someone would have to lead America out of. He perceived we were tired, worn down, unable to come together in common purpose to fix something. He was right then; how about right now?

It would be interesting to hear what Carter thinks about Joe Biden and 2023, where lots of things don’t work well. Flights don’t fly. Inflation returned. Gas is expensive in ways 1979 never could have imagined. Supply chain problems mean Americans are since WWII rationing getting used to hearing “We don’t have any and aren’t sure when we will.” Under/unemployment plagues us as Covid tore the wool off many Americans’ eyes about how little meaningless jobs for sub-living wages contributed to their piggy banks or their sense of self-worth.

There appears no definitive end to Covid, with little hope the economic devastation caused by mismanaged restrictions will ever be addressed. There is a declining sense Covid is a problem that can be managed as it has been in much of the world (see Europe, especially Scandinavia.) The conclusion is no one is really in charge who cares. Economic inequality has risen to where there are two systems, one for the wealthy and one for most of the rest of us, for everything. Education, healthcare, travel, shopping, how you are treated by the law, and where you can eat or entertain yourself. Diseases of despair, suicide, alcohol, and drug overdoses, drive a drop in our life expectancy. America is the only developing nation with a rising maternal death rate. We suffer on average more than one mass shooting a day. Is there anyone who can claim, in the American tradition, that our lives are getting better?

Looking for leadership, Americans come up short. The best our system could produce last election was two geriatric candidates. Biden has done little to move the nation past Covid, instead choosing to stand there as it petered out in most places. He hid behind our national exhaustion with Afghanistan to not suffer a greater political defeat over the botched Gotterdammerung in Kabul. His open borders policy created a massive humanitarian crisis, and a growing political one as an unknown number of immigrants play a version of the Squid Game to flood America. The Border Patrol reports 200,000 encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border this summer, with some of the highest monthly totals since Bill Clinton was president.

The president can’t even exercise leadership over his own party, and it appears his signature infrastructure bills and social spending initiatives are more symbolic than transformational. In the background, police reform legislation failed, and most defunded departments have been refunded to face down rising crime. “Disappointed” is likely the term most Biden voters would be apt to use.

America alongside all this has become a deeply cynical place. We once were to the annoyance of most of the world an endlessly optimistic place. We didn’t always know how to solve problems but we were confident we would solve them. Now we take for granted AOC and the media would be at the border for the Trump Kids in Kages spectacular but missing when an even worse situation unfolds on Biden’s watch. We roll our eyes when the media tells us what we’re hearing isn’t what we’re hearing but “Let’s Go, Brandon” instead. MSM will print any Trump gossip but not one actual Hunter Biden email.

All of this bleeds over into how we interact with each other. Never mind the street fights over whether black lives matter, or the hand-to-hand combat on planes, in restaurants, and at Walmart. We don’t discuss things, never mind disagree because we don’t just hate ideas, we hate the people who hold those ideas. When we run out of big issues we discover microaggressions. We enjoy as classist blood sport how businesses care so little about their employees they’ll fire them if a Karen among us makes a scene. We video everything in hopes of settling matters by embarrassing someone virally.

Carter was a decent man, if a poor politician. Seen the latest front-page Carter Center scandal? Hear about the six figure fees former president Jimmy Carter pulls in from shady foreign companies? Maybe not. Many feel Carter has been a better ex-president than he was a president. His Carter Center focuses on impactful but unglamorous issues such as Guinea worm disease. When Carter left office, the disease afflicted 3.5 million people. Now it’s expected to be only the second disease, after smallpox, to ever be eradicated worldwide. Until about yesterday Carter still donated a week of his time yearly to Habitat for Humanity. Not a photo-op, Carter goes out without the media in tow and hammers nails. Carter also tirelessly monitors elections in nascent democracies, lending his stature as a statesman to that work over 100 times. Summing up his own term in office, Carter said “We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war.” That was the last time since 1977 a president could make that claim.

Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” malaise speech, delivered from the Oval Office on July 15, 1979, has since become to  many a symbol of Democratic defeatism. The speech was controversial at the time because it was seen as overly pessimistic and critical of the American people. However, in retrospect, many people view the speech as a courageous and honest assessment of the problems facing the country. But how prescient was Carter in 1979? The seeds he saw being planted have now grown to sad, desperate fruition. What he said then might well describe where we are now:

“There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

“All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path — the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our… problem.”

For all he foresaw in his ferocious tenderness towards America, Carter failed to find a way to lead, and in 1980 suffered complete election defeat at the hands of someone who promised he would. As Carter did not create fully the malaise he spoke about, Biden alone certainly did not create the current malaise in America. But his failures, far too many in too short a time, have not helped fix it. Cheering on Ukraine is not the same as cheering for America. Without Jimmy Carter’s Gettysburg address, telling us where we are and what we have to do, we might forget that.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Lack of Oversight at Wuhan Lab Raises Five Questions to Ask NIH

February 9, 2023 // 7 Comments »

The United States paid for the work that may have created the Covid virus. That research, a virus genetically engineered for the highest possible infectivity for human cells, was subcontracted to the Chinese at Wuhan by an American organization named EcoHealth. And now a new Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report says the National Institute of Health, the originator of the grant, failed to exercise its oversight over EcoHealth, and EconHealth over Wuhan. It’s not a smoking gun but it is pretty damn close. Senator Rand Paul will take up the contents of the OIG report soon in hearings. Here are 5 questions he may want to focus on.

Question 1: Though the new OIG report does not mention Covid specifically, it is scathing in its denunciation of EcoHealth and the NIH in failing to properly oversee the gain-of-function research it paid for at the Wuhan National Lab in China. Not touched on at all is the question of why bioweapon engineering-type research was subbed out to China, an ostensible adversary of the U.S. So why? Did NIH not know the editorial board of the lead researcher’s virology journal included members of the Chinese military?

Question 2: OIG stated “Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, we found that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements. Although NIH and EcoHealth had established monitoring procedures, we found deficiencies in complying with those procedures limited NIH and EcoHealth’s ability to effectively monitor Federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action. Using its discretion, NIH did not refer the research to HHS for an outside review for enhanced potential pandemic pathogens… With improved oversight, NIH may have been able to take more timely corrective actions to mitigate the inherent risks associated with this type of research.” One timely corrective action missed was not insisting EcoHealth produce a required progress report about its subgrants in the summer of 2019, just months before the advent of the coronavirus.

What may have been missed?

Though gain-of-function research does not leave a physical marker to prove origin, to date, there is no evidence Covid was of a natural origin (this is surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses [related to Covid] had left copious traces in the environment.) There is much to show it was not. We do know Wuhan conducted gain-of-function research aimed at doing what Covid does, making a virus originally not dangerous to humans into a super-infector designed to spread quickly while resisting then-existing cures and vaccines. We know the first cases of the virus were in Wuhan, and include researchers at the virology lab who were infected in November 2019. We know precautions at the lab were insufficient to contain the virus. In a murder case this would be enough to show means and method beyond a reasonable doubt.

Question 3: And it is not as if there wasn’t enough bad stuff already out there that NIH and EconHealth might have had their guard up instead of exercising slack oversight. The Wuhan lab was already a nexus of attention pre-pandemic. Following a controversial September 2019 corona lecture the lead researcher gave in Mozambique, Wuhan pulled their virus database offline. The Chinese government still refuses to provide any of its raw data, safety logs, or lab records (the OIG report criticized EcoHealth’s inability to obtain scientific documentation from Wuhan despite having paid for it with U.S. tax dollars.) Another Wuhan scientist was forced to leave a Canadian university for shipping deadly viruses, including ebola, back to China. The lab also tried to steal intellectual property regarding remdesivir, a class of antiviral medications used to treat Covid prior to the vaccine.

As early as 2018, Wuhan alarmed visiting U.S. State Department safety inspectors. “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the inspectors wrote. They warned the lab’s work on “bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.” The Chinese worked under mostly BSL2-level safety conditions far too lax to contain a virus like Covid.

So a key question for Senator Paul to ask is, given this background, why did the NIH fund a place like Wuhan at all?

Question 4: What was the role of EcoHealth and others in promoting the as yet-to-be-proved natural origin theory?

Now years after the pandemic began, Chinese researchers have failed to find the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which Covid might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to late 2019. The search in China for the natural origin of the virus, the zoonotic animal-to-human spillover, included testing more than 80,000 different animals from across dozens of provinces. Not a single case of Covid in animals in nature was found (according to a study published in the journal “Nature Medicine” in March 2020, the Covid virus has genetic elements that are not commonly found in naturally occurring zoonotic viruses, suggesting that it may have been engineered or manipulated in a laboratory.) Chinese researchers did find primordial cases in people from Wuhan near the laboratory with no link to that infamous wet market China claims sold an infected bat eaten by Patient One.

So why does the natural origin theory persist? One of the strongest shows of support was a letter from dozens of scientists published in early 2020 in the British medical journal Lancet. The letter had actually been written not by the scientists, but by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth, the grantee who subcontracted with Wuhan. If the virus had indeed escaped from research they funded, EcoHealth would be potentially liable, as of course would the American government. EcoHealth went on to plant never-challenged stories in the MSM labeling anyone who thought Wuhan was to blame a conspiracy crank. Then, when the pandemic began, EcoHealth president Peter Daszak argued that criticizing the zoonotic hypothesis would only stoke xenophobia toward China.

Meanwhile, a Chinese-affiliated scientific journal at the University of Massachusetts Medical School commissioned commentary to refute that Covid originated in the Wuhan lab, the same position held by the Chinese government. Mirroring the American media, the journal called anything to the contrary “speculations, rumors, and conspiracy theories.” Chinese officials also objected elsewhere to any name, such as the Wuhan Flu, linking the virus to China.

Question 5: Did Dr. Anthony Fauci participate in a cover-up and/or did he perjure himself before Congress? In answer to Senator Rand Paul at a hearing in the midst of the pandemic, Fauci stated “you are entirely and completely incorrect—that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” He appears to have committed perjury, as Fauci later admited “there’s no way of guaranteeing” American taxpayer money routed to Wuhan didn’t fund gain-of-function research, and the recent OIG report confirms it in fact did. Fauci also reversed himself completely in saying he is no longer convinced Covid developed naturally. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of complicity in gain-of-function experiments and called for his firing as the nation’s top infectious disease expert. Fauci has since retired.

Optional Question 6, should Senator Paul call any member of the MSM to his hearings. “Do you now have any regrets over your coverage of the origins of Covid given all of this information, some which existed when you mocked laboratory origin as a conspiracy theory? Anything you’d do differently, such as tell the American public the truth?”

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

I Can’t Sleep

September 28, 2022 // 14 Comments »

When I try to sleep at night, I can’t relax. I blearily turn on the TV. But I can’t change the channel. My TV is telling me I am going to die, maybe by Covid (they say there’s a new variant, you know, called Monkeypox), maybe by climate change because it is likely already too late. Before I drown I’ll be hungry because supply chains don’t work anymore, and inflation is stripping away my purchasing power, and some sort of fascist coup will happen and I’ll probably have to wear all gray clothes all the time like in the dystopian movies. Then there are the TV diseases, bowel disorders and skin problems that medicines I can’t afford might fix except side effects can include blindness, paralysis, saying thingstoofasttounderstandanditallisjustablur of fear. It doesn’t matter I can’t pick out the words, I know what it  means. If only I had that medicine maybe I’d be happy like the people in the commercials, going to farmer’s markets with my racially diverse group of great pals.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Marbury v. Madison v. Joe Biden v. Abortion

August 6, 2022 // 1 Comment »

Joe Biden doesn’t have the the guts to do what people are suggesting he do, be the first president to stare down a Supreme Court ruling and refuse to abide by it. It wouldn’t matter anyway.

Abortion in American should never have been allowed to turn into the judicial and moral circus that it is here and nowhere else on earth. Women even under Roe faced 50 different sets of rules and laws, abortion clinics tried to hide what they did, religious child help centers tried to pretend abortion was an option they offered, and the scene was full of protesters and clinic escorts and dozens of other things which separated a woman from her doctor and possibly her clergy in a regulated environment in which to make a very difficult decision. But that was the world we created out of professed concern for women and for the unborn. It was a system which said the fight would never really end, just change as the Supreme Court changed and saw things differently from 1972 to Roe and Doe in 1973 to Dobbs in 2022 to…

The clarity of Dobbs is unfair to the mess which followed: the Court was very clear, abortion regulation was to be decided on the state level, not the quasi-federal level of Roe and Doe. You know how that works; New York allows third trimester abortions when necessary and Ohio prohibits any abortion past fetal heartbeat, even in cases of rape or incest, and so forth. Dobbs was not intentioned to set off a round of how can we detour around what the Court really said and give abortions in National Parks.

The biggest change since Roe is chemical abortions. Already pre-Dobbs over 50 percent of all abortions were done chemically, with the mother taking one or two medicines to provoke a miscarriage. While typically done under professional supervision (miscarriages can result in dangerous bleeding, and incomplete miscarriages can be fatal to the mother) a single pill taken by a woman on her own will in most cases provoke a safe miscarriage. This is what will replace the horrible “coat hanger” abortions of the pre-Roe days according to many advocates.

If America is good at anything, it is smuggling drugs across state lines, and so certainly “abortion pills” will be readily available to many woman in non-abortion states, albeit illegally the same way other drugs smuggled across borders are illegal and occasionally even prosecuted. In the crudest of practical terms, it is unclear how many women will not have access to an abortion post-Dobbs. However, Biden is being pushed to do something more. He is being pressed to refuse to abide by the Supreme Court.

Joe Biden’s White House is considering executive action to make abortion pills accessible nationwide despite state laws restricting the drug. The administration may seek to use executive power granted under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act to declare a public health emergency to allow abortion providers and pharmacists to distribute chemical abortion pills, even in states where abortion is heavily restricted.

Senators Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, along with 16 of their colleagues, urged Biden to take such action in a July 13 letter. “While it is impossible to immediately undo the damage inflicted by the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, the Biden-Harris Administration must use every tool within its power to fight back,” the letter said. “We urge you to declare national and public health emergencies over Americans’ access to reproductive care.” Technically, powers available under the PREP Act would shield doctors, pharmacies and others from liability for providing abortion pills to people across the country. The exact same law was just used with broad popular support to shield manufacturers of Covid drugs and treatments from legal liability in order to get vaccines deployed expeditiously. The use of such law to expand presidential power past a decision by the Supreme Court to the exact contrary, however, would be devastatingly controversial.

If Biden were to take such a decision, it would put him in immediate legal conflict with those states that choose to regulate chemical abortions and more importantly, the Supreme Court itself, which just ruled this was a states’ right to do, not a Federal one. No president has ever previously directly denied the Supreme Court. Nixon resigned rather than follow or resist the Court’s order to hand over incriminating evidence during Watergate. While many worried Trump would refuse to obey the Court in this situation or that, in the end the Cassandras were wrong, again, and the fight never happened.

The first draft of America circa 1789 or so did not grant the Supreme Court this power of review. Marbury v. Madison, arguably the most important case in Supreme Court history, was the first U.S. Supreme Court challenge to apply the principle of “judicial review” — the power of federal courts to void acts of Congress in conflict with the Constitution and declare other government actions “unconstitutional.” Written in 1803 by Chief Justice John Marshall, the decision played a key role in making the Supreme Court a separate branch of government on par with Congress and the executive.

The actual facts surrounding Marbury are irrelevant to the abortion discussion. Relevant, however, is even though the instant case found Secretary of State James Madison had acted unconstitutionally, the underlying matter was resolved without a head-to-head conflict between the executive and judicial and the doctrine stood. With Marbury a new tool in governance, there exist only three ways to fight back against a Supreme Court decision: Congress can pass a new law (in this case legalizing abortion across the states), the Constitution itself can be amended or the Court can overturn itself, as it just did with Dobbs.

That means should Biden try for option four, executive action, his quest will be Quixotic. Sitting in some Texas government official’s outbox is no doubt a completed challenge to any such action ready to file, meaning a lower court would almost immediately stay Biden as things got sorted out (that is what happened to some of Trump’s early immigration legislation, the so-called Muslim Ban, giving the false impression of early victory to progressives angrily hanging around airports in that instance.) The challenge to Biden would quickly find its way back to the Supreme Court, which would correctly uphold itself. The same result is likely should Biden try some sort of clever end-around, such as abortion clinics on Federal land. The use of PREP would also invite a legal challenge over the point of public health emergencies, and post-Covid utterly politicize what’s left of public faith in public health.

As an aside, despite the noise, there is no likely path toward prohibiting interstate travel for abortions, say a pregnant woman driving from Texas to New Jersey and thus nothing there for Biden to worry over. Crossing a state border for abortion services is not likely to become illegal. Apart from the Constitution’s unambiguous support for interstate commerce, the House recently passed legislation affirming interstate travel for abortion, and no state has any opposing law on its books. And of course no one from Ohio is arrested for gambling coming home from Vegas, either.

Criminalizing activities done out of state, or preventing interstate travel, is basically prevented by the Constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause, which holds a citizen of one state is entitled to the privileges in another state, from which a right to travel to that other state is inferred. There’s also Bigelow v. Virginia which dealt directly with the issue of out-of-state abortion. The Supreme Court concluded “a state does not acquire power or supervision over the affairs of another state merely because the welfare and health of its own citizens may be affected when they travel to that state… It may not, under the guise of exercising internal police powers, bar a citizen of another state from disseminating information about an activity that is legal in that state.”

That a gesture like declaring a PREP emergency accomplishes nothing practical does not mean it would not appear politically attractive to Democrats as they head into what promises to be a very rough midterm election. Biden, however, does not seem like the kind of guy who wants to go down in history as the only president to thumb his nose at the nation’s highest court, and all that for no actual gain. Biden knows any action he could take would simply be struck down by the very court that put him in this place. It is called “checks and balances,” Joe, look it up, and it works well in these cases.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

New York Notes

June 11, 2022 // 6 Comments »

Coming home to New York City after over a year away is like performing cunnilingus on an electrical socket. You’re shocked, and the socket doesn’t feel a thing.

I was driven by that same curiosity that makes you slow down passing a wreck on the highway. I’d read the stories of zombie homeless armies in Midtown, the subway system gone feral, the deserted office blocks, and crime stepping in for Darwin to take care of what was left. Like a last visit to a hospital Covid bedside, I didn’t want to but I needed to see it.

Inevitably someone will say this is all an exaggeration, that they live in NYC and it’s great, or the 1970s were way worse, or they just saw Lion King at Times Square with their grandma. Good for you.

The overall of feeling one gets is a place used up, a failed place that somehow is still around. It’s the ultimate irony; it was Wall Street dealers who manipulated the economy of the 1970s and 80s to create the Rust Belt out of the once prosperous Midwest and now the brokers are gone, too. Pieces of them all left on the ground, too unimportant to sell off, too heavy to move, too bulky to bury, left scattered like clues from a lost civilization. Might as well been the bones of the men who worked there. Now the same way in Weirton or Gary you drive past the empty mills and factories left to eventually be reclaimed by the earth they stand on, so to Wall Street. There are no trading houses left, just one last international bank and it will soon be leasing new space uptown.

The whole “financial district” is empty. On a weekend morning I found myself alone on the old streets off Wall, the ones that went all the way back, Marketfield, Beaver, Pine, Stone, to near-primitive times. There just were no people, nothing open. Most of the old gilded era banks and trading houses are in the process of being converted into condos, though who would want to live there is an unanswered question.

You do see a fair number of homeless in the shadows; the city commandeered empty hotels in the area for them during the worst of the three Covid winters. Left out of the place it created is the famous Stock Exchange. The building is still there and there are people inside, but near-zero trades are done there anymore, nearly everything is remote/online, a trend started after 9/11 and completed by Covid’s arrival. On my next visit it wouldn’t surprise me to see the space has been converted into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Across the street there’s already a TJ Maxx.

Like some elaborate joke about canaries in the coal mine, the condition of New York’s subway system often points the way the rest of the place is headed. With parts of the system still in use that were built 118 years ago, the thing is a testament to just how far the least amount of maintenance will go. Meh, NY grit. You expect it to be too cold in winter, too hot in summer, with no public toilets, and layers of filth which may be what is actually holding it all together.

But the purpose of the subway has changed. With fewer people working out of offices, and more and more of those that do now driving private cars in the city (parking is a new thing to complain about, car theft is up double-digit percent from pre-Covid times) it is no longer common ground for New Yorkers. Most of the real passengers are blue collar t-shirted, and most everyone else is homeless. Vast numbers of visibly mentally ill people inhabit the subway system. It is their home, their kitchen, and their toilet.  The person in Union Square Station pushing a shopping cart and yelling racial slurs may not physically hurt anybody but is a symbol of a city that just gave up caring while lying to itself about being compassionate. There is no compassion to allowing thousands of sick people to live like rats inside public infrastructure.

Not surprisingly, the subway is an angry place. Last year there were more assaults in the subway system than anytime for the last 25 years, including a Covid-era trend of randomly pushing people into the path of an incoming train just to watch them die. I didn’t see that, but I saw the secondary effects: passengers bunched up like herbivores on the African savanna, most with their backs against a wall or post for protection. Fewer people looking down at their phones so as to stay more alert.

If you need to use the subway, you need to acknowledge that you must share it with the predators, under their rules. Like everywhere in this city, navigating around the mentally ill, the homeless, and the criminal is just another part of life. People treat each other as threats, and just accept that, but to an outsider it seems a helluva way to live. The new mayor says he’s gonna clean it all up. so far, four months in office, not so much.

My old Upper East Side neighborhood hadn’t changed as much as mid- and downtown. The doorman at my old building said there were many more renters than owners resident now, and the masking and fear of catching Covid had done away with the lobby chatter that served as a palliative when heading in from the street.

Across the street at the projects the drug dealers were in their usual places; seller, runner, overseer. I knew generally where to look for them so it was an easy spot, but they may have been just a little more obvious than last year. I don’t know where they were during the old “stop and frisk” days but I didn’t see them then. Nearby a good number of the mom and pop restaurants are closed, along with about every other chain drug store outlet (ask a New York friend how many Duane and Reade’s there used to be.)

A couple of those “only in New York places” are holding on, but the effect is grim not scrappy given the gray around them. Passing the United Nations compound, you’re left with the memory that in the 1950s this was once the most powerful city on the globe. My favorite pizzeria, the original Patsy’s at First and 117th in Harlem, is still open and somehow still staffed by old Italian men in an otherwise all-black neighborhood. Nearby Rao’s, an old-school red sauce joint and still one of the hardest-to-get reservations in Manhattan for those of a certain age, is in much the same state, both places in some sort of time-vortex, the old DNA someone will someday use to genetically re-engineer New York for a museum.

The good news is that the NYPD seems to have reoccupied Times Square, as the city is betting big tourism will someday save it. The problem is Times Square shares a border with the rest of New York, and a block or two away places like the Port Authority bus terminal are decaying back into their primordial state. No obvious hookers like in the 1970s, but their space in the ecosystem is taken by the homeless and those who provide them services, usually quick, sharp, young black kids selling what the cops told me was fentanyl, NY’s current favorite synthetic opioid.

Some of the least changed areas were on the Lower East Side. These have always been mean streets, and post-Covidland is far from the first challenge they have faced. It’s not nice but it’s stable, it is what it is and it doesn’t ask for much more. Go tread lightly on the area’s terms and you stay safe.

Covid did its share to the City but every measure of Covid was made worse by bad decision-making on the part of the city. Lockdowns decimated whole industries while leaving New York still one of the red zones of America. Defunding and defanging the police, coupled with no-bail policies drove crime deeper into the fabric of neighborhoods and decent people out to the suburbs. The tax base crumbled. Pre-Covid the top one percent of NYC taxpayers paid nearly 50 percent of all personal income taxes collected in New York, accounting for 59 percent of all revenues. Property taxes add in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue, about half of that generated by office space. Those folks are bailing out and the tourists are largely staying home.

Left is the largest homeless population of any American metropolis, to include 114,000 children. The number of New Yorkers living below the poverty line is larger than the population of Philadelphia, and would be the country’s 7th largest city. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in public housing. Another 235,000 receive rent assistance. They live in the Third World, like a theme park torn out of the Florida swamps unlike its surroundings. You look at it and you cannot believe this is the same country as where you live. New York does that, puts it all right in your face.

New York, at least in the guise of its elected leaders, chose this, participated in its own end game decision by decision. Former mayor and once Democratic presidential candidate Bill De Blasio, who presided over the NY apocalypse, still had the moxie to claim not diversifying the city’s elite public schools was one of his only real mistakes. No one seems to know what to do, how to unwind what was created.

Don’t let anyone tell you New York died. It was murdered. The last time I was this happy to get on a plane and leave somewhere I was in Baghdad.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

What Went Wrong During the Pandemic

May 20, 2022 // 5 Comments »

We were swindled, fooled, bamboozled, and lied to during the pandemic about the value of masking, closures, and things like social distancing. It hurt us. Understanding how badly we failed ourselves is not only an inevitable part of the “told you so” process, but more importantly, a lesson for next time. Ask the Swedes.

Sweden had zero excess deaths. The U.S. had the most excess deaths of all nations. New York had more than Florida. That’s the whole story right there in a handful of words if you understand it.

The key element of misdirection in the American swindle was case counts, those running numbers on all the screens telling how many Americans had tested positive. If you really still wonder, it looks like some 60 percent of us had some flavor of Covid during the pandemic period, most of us with mild (i.e., like a head cold) or no symptoms. How high the numbers went in your neck of the woods depended a lot on how much testing was going on, as obviously more testing equaled more “cases.” For me, with a very mild set of symptoms all clearly in line with Covid, I never even bothered to test. My spouse, with no symptoms, never tested. Both of us fell outside the statistical scary race to ever larger numbers.

Not that it mattered because case count told us nothing but to be scared. Very similar for hospitalizations; useful for work load management, but often just as indicative of changing medical protocols. The initial thoughts were Covid-positive people needed to be hospitalized and put on respirators, until soon enough it was realized the infections associated with long-term respirator use were killing more people than the virus. Protocols changed, hospitalization numbers went down. That stat, too, did not really matter. Since Covid proved fatal primarily to the elderly (below) many hospitalizations began with something else to end with Covid. My own father suffered a blinding, massive stroke, went into hospital, and caught Covid there, to officially die of respiratory failure. I’m not sure if he counted as a statistic or not.

Now the bad news. Modern medicine cannot cure death. Everybody dies. Most in America who don’t die earlier in accidents typically die once past the age of 77. In 2019 and 2020, heart disease and cancer each killed about double what Covid did. Each year about three million Americans die of one thing or another. So the only statistic that really matters then when talking about the roughly two years of the pandemic is “excess deaths,” deaths beyond the usual couple of million. Given the broad spread of Covid and its potential to be fatal, it becomes a valid assumption the excess deaths will be Covid deaths. Death is the only real measure of Covid’s impact because it is the only thing we can’t fix.

Sweden had zero excess deaths. The U.S. had the most excess deaths of all nations. New York had more than Florida. That’s the whole story right there in a handful of words if you understand it.

Sweden did very little in terms of halting work and school, or forcing masking and social distancing. The U.S., quite a bit more. Within the U.S. states known for their Covid “efforts,” particularly New York, had excess deaths worse than or similar to do-little Florida. An awful lot of effort and angst and secondary and tertiary and other collateral damage (addiction, suicide, unemployment, social unrest, failing grades) did very little to change very little. The U.S. had the highest excess death rate among all 11 countries in a Kaiser-run study.

And we were lied to. Writing in July 2020, the New York Times stated Sweden’s “decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage. Sweden’s grim result — more death, and nearly equal economic damage — suggests that the supposed choice between lives and paychecks is a false one: failure to impose social distancing can cost lives and jobs at the same time.” Tsk, tsk, said the media. They’re still saying it. Despite Florida having only 148 excess deaths (per 100k) and New York showing 248, Politico’s May 1, 2022 headline read “Florida lost 70,000 people to Covid. It’s still not prepared for the next wave.”

Much as in Florida, Sweden allowed restaurants, gyms, shops, and most schools to stay open. People went to work, some masked, some not. That stood in contrast to the U.S., where by April 2020 the CDC recommended draconian lockdowns, throwing millions out of work and school. There’s plenty apples and oranges arguments. But they do not explain the disparity inside a particular U.S. state. Nor do they account for how excess deaths compares a country to itself and ignores national differences. If all you want is a locale with statistically low Covid deaths, look to the developing world where numbers are low because most people die of something else well before they reach the Covid danger zone of age 77 and older.

The U.S. is the only major western nation that still demands a negative Covid test for entry, including for its own citizens. The U.S. is the only nation where every Covid palliative, such as new anti-viral drugs to lessen the impact of a positive case, must be run through the gauntlet of Red-Blue politics via a social media-Late-Night-MSM feedback loop that for two years tried desperately to link anything remotely questionable to Candidate Trump, down to repeated death charms raised in the MSM against “Red” events like motorcycle gatherings and Repub rallies. Despite never delivering on the promised viral load, they retain the moniker super spreader event. You’d expect most everyone in Florida to be dead by now if all you listened to was CNN.

Besides blowing the response broadly and leaving our economy in shambles, America’s Covid strategy steadfastly refused to acknowledge the age disparity in excess deaths. Globally the vast masses of deaths were in persons age 77 and older. Among Covid-exposed individuals, people in their 70s have twice the mortality of those in their 60s, and 3,000 times higher than for children (a study found no increased mortality in Sweden in those under 70. The U.S. actually had fewer than normal excess deaths in kids ages 0-5 then in non-Covid years.) But everyone was made to wear a mask, school kids in Hawaii still must, and in New York elderly Covid patients were returned to their nursing homes by a governor who once had a shot at being America’s next president.

The data was known from early days of the pandemic, assembled out of pre-social distancing China. Death rates for Chinese elderly (not social distancing) and American elderly (social distancing) were very similar. Swedish intensive care admission rates showed sharp declines after early pandemic peaks despite a lack of shutdowns. Age-specific solutions were needed for a virus that was age-specific in taking lives, but we instead went for the broadest shut downs across the United States with no regard to collateral affect. We ignored or over-looked the data. We are paying for that mistake now. Savings lives or saving the economy? Both, please. Ask the Swedes.

The what — America’s pandemic response was just wrong across the board — is clear by the numbers. The why, attributable to “politics,” it is an international shame. But the other reasons for failure are equally shameful. American’s underlying health is worse than most developed countries where some form of socialized medicine exists. This is all exacerbated by income inequality, high rates of poverty, and the maddening levels of obesity, diabetes, and “deaths of despair” which plague our underclass. Blacks were hit harder by Covid than whites. The poor were hit harder than the well-to-do. It is more evil Malthusian than Darwinian that the Haves had not Covid and the Have Nots had it. Whatever we did, masking or not, lockdowns or not, would have suffered because of this fundamental deficiency in our system.

For next time, there are two elephants in the room. One would be to avoid politicizing the public healthcare response and truly rely on science to dictate societal actions. The joke that if Trump had recommended oxygen to breath MSNBC would have empaneled experts to demand carbon dioxide is so close to true I had to check for it on Wikipedia. The other elephant is to come to grips with the sad reality the pandemic impacted harder here than anywhere else in the developed world because we as a nation steadfastly refuse to chose from the menu of ways to provide broad-based healthcare, especially preventive care. Fixing the next pandemic means fixing America.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Olympic Drinking Game Fun

February 13, 2022 // 3 Comments »

The thing I am looking forward to the least right now is more Olympics, and I have a colonoscopy scheduled. The only answer is a drinking game.

So enough with “politics by sportscasters for those who only care about politics every four years.” I threw away my Mao (and Che) T-shirt sophomore year. We all know Beijing is not a democratic regime. So for some sort of balance, can we agree for every hundred references to the Uyghurs, Tibet, and Hong Kong, how about one reference to where and how Covid all began? Or will the MSM continue their coverage détente? Bottoms up for every reference to bats, pangolins, and Chinese wet markets.

Speaking of Covid, a drink every time announcers insist China’s Covid crackdown is autocratic draconianism while ignoring much of the same was done in America. A drink for every explanation China’s Covid  autocratic draconianism crackdown is actually keeping the athletes safe, except when it makes China look bad, such as in the case of Belgian Kim Meylemans, who arrived in Beijing positive and was sent to a hotel for three days of isolation. When she was not released to the Olympic Village, she went on social media and cried enough that she was then sent to the Village, where she lives in a single room and eats alone, raising the question of why any of this is happening at all. Somehow despite the pandemic canceling schools, jobs, travel, supply lines, and lives, we’ve had two Olympics in the last six months.

I’ve got $20 on the table in front of me betting someone will later claim the Chinese manipulated the quarantine system to favor their own athletes, and eliminate the competition in crucial matchups, the way the Bulgarian judges always seemed to give U.S. athletes low scores turning the Cold War.

A drink if we ever hear again from U.S. bobsledder Kaillie Humphries, who whined of all the unknowns surrounding the aftermath of positive tests “It’s so confusing. It’s very frustrating. It’s scary” after no doubt being tested a zillion times in the last year so she could live in America. Humphries tested positive and is staying in a hotel isolated from everyone except her bobsled partner, who had to sign a waiver. The whole U.S. bobsled team is a mess, with multiple athletes testing positive, and others demanding to replace them and calling in the Court of Arbitration for Sport to basically sue to be added to the field.

Actually, new rule, just drink as much as you want anytime Covid is mentioned during the Olympics.

There is no value to hearing a twenty-something whose greatest achievement is skating in circles fast offer up her opinions on world events like this was the Oscars. Have a drink the first time you hear someone from Team USA say “As a…” (Latinx, first something, gay man, etc.) Of course the award for the least effective political statement of the Olympic Games goes to Joe Biden and his “diplomatic boycott.” Nothing sends a stronger signal than for the Chinese not see Kamala Harris in the stands.

Things have gotten so annoying I find myself agreeing with the Chinese government’s ruling athletes are not allowed to make political statements. The New York Times reports “China’s Communist Party has also warned that athletes are subject not only to Olympic rules, but also to Chinese law. The warnings have had… a chilling effect on dissent inside and outside the Olympic bubble.” There is no medal for dissent. They’re athletes, not spokespeople. Take a drink right now because the NYT misses the point.

Have a drink every time someone gets emotional talking about American skater Timothy LeDuc, who has already claimed the title of first openly nonbinary Winter Games athlete, a surprise considering nonbinary status is self-proclaimed and why didn’t anyone think of doing that earlier? LeDuc skates as the male in the male-female pair event. He says he and his partner ditched the romantic tropes that dominate pairs skating to focus on personal empowerment in their routines. Have a drink if you understand that.

In fact, enough with all the sexuality. That is so 1980s. Gay people of all flavors have been winning and losing since the Greeks invented the Olympics. Same for women and trans people; each sporting victory does not really mean something significant in the advancement of human rights. Everything does not always need to be about social engineering all the time. Each reference equals a drink.

If Chloe Kim or any other American quits or blames a poor performance on all the pressure, drink. Heavily.

Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka won’t be at the Games. Have a drink.

Any mention of global climate change and China making artificial snow for the Games, throw your drink at the TV.

Free-drinking is allowed during any mini-documentaries about all the adversity an athlete had to overcome. Does the U.S. Olympic Committee screen for misery as part of the selection process? Double-shots every time someone says she snowboards to honor her abuelita. Same for every omission from the biography of how mommy and daddy forced their child to hyper-train into an ubermensch, messing with her growth, and sacrificing her childhood to their show pony dreams. After the tenth utterance of “my journey” or “giving back” finish the bottle and throw it at the screen.

Like in every Olympics some kind of Jesse Owens comparison must be found. The most likely choice will be Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis player who largely disappeared from social media after making sexual abuse accusations against a political official. It doesn’t matter that Peng is not even competing in these winter games. Drink every time her name is mentioned.

The least likely candidate for the Jesse Owens comparison is “American” Eileen Gu. Gu, an 18-year-old born and raised in San Francisco with an American father, decided to compete for China based on mom (who has lived outside of China for the last 30 years) being born there. Gu has millions of dollars in sponsorships inside China, showing the world what the true Olympic spirit looks like in 2022. Every time someone not Chinese tries to justify Gu’s choice, take a drink. For any mentions of heritage, roots, or representation, make it a double. If she falls and fails to medal, stop drinking and switch to heroin as a reward.

The Winter Olympics runs until February 20. Cheers.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

How to End Covid Because It is Already Over

February 5, 2022 // 5 Comments »

1. How can we end Covid the public policy disaster? Because Covid the public health disaster is mostly already over and we’re still dying out here.

It is now the third winter of writing about Covid. Topics come and go in journalism; I wrote what I am sure will be my last story about the Afghan war last year, and about the ones in Iraq and Syria, never mind Yemen, a year or two before that. Remember how urgent all that once was, the dictators who were gassing their own people, the Kurds and Yazidis we had to save from genocide at the cost of American lives? Most of it was an exaggeration, much of it an outright lie. The keywords — WMDs — are now shorthand to refer to a decades-long mess that forever harmed our country.

Two winters ago remember the shortages which were going to kill us, the lack of respirators and masks? Remember the urgency with which we erected tent hospitals and dispatched military hospital ships? We shut down schools and stores and lives, two weeks to flatten the curve which in many forms is still going on now three years later. Each variant is announced like a new Marvel supervillain, with new powers. We still are told the source of the virus is unknown but it is clearer and clearer it was created via gain of function research in China funded by the U.S. We were told the vaccines were completely safe even as research suggests those vaccinated might be more susceptible to Omicron than those unvaccinated. Most of it was an exaggeration, much of it an outright lie. The once-conspiracy theories are now shorthand to refer to a mess that forever harmed our country.

Only three years later do we know that as many as half of the hospitalizations “for Covid” turn out to be “with Covid,” admissions for broken arms and liver cancer of people who may also incidentally test positive for Covid. We learn that nearly everyone who died of the virus was elderly and comorbid (only 2.7 percent of Covid deaths in the UK were in people under 65 with no comorbidities; 78 percent who died in American hospitals were obese or significantly overweight) leaving a gaping question about why the society-wide lockdowns even now driving deaths of despair. The Democratic hero governors are gone or no longer nationally important, their populations and tax bases immigrating elsewhere. Our hero teachers are now hated, lazy unionists.

That was then, this is now. Compared with Delta, Omicron infections were half as likely to send people to the hospital. Out of more than 52,000 Omicron cases reviewed, not a single patient went on a ventilator. Covid deaths per capita are higher in New York and New Jersey, among the most locked-down states, than Florida and Texas, among the least. That has to mean something. But we act policy-wise as if it is 2020 again.

I just saw an immediate relative through a bout of Covid. She wondered about a sore throat on Tuesday, had a bit of a cough on Wednesday, spent Thursday on the coach with a fever and then… felt better. She had been fully vaccinated and it worked. After her initial reaction of anger (“I saw life overturned all around me for three years over what turned out to be a bad cold?”) she grew more angry. Did politicians actually know what they were shutting down travel and ending education over? Maybe not two years ago but in 2022 they have no excuse.

In the early days of the AIDs crisis we lost valuable time on theater. In the mid-80’s 60 percent of Americans wanted HIV+ people to carry a card noting their status; one in three said employers should fire employees who had AIDS. Some 21 percent said people with AIDS should be isolated from the rest of society in leper colonies. Pundits demanded gay men stop having “voluntary” sex as a condition for living among the untainted. Politicians encouraged us to worry about using the same public toilet as a gay man, and asked if we could get AIDs from hugging. Only when we dropped all that and focused policy on real science did we start to fight back, to the point where today AIDs is a manageable medical problem, not a crisis.

Tragically, too many felt the more who died of AIDS the better, and played up the deaths as “Judgement Day.” The rest of us, God-fearing, were safe. Homophobia manifested as fear crushed human compassion. It was like hoping the economy went into recession a few years ago, destroying the savings of millions of Americans, so Trump’s chances of reelection would fall. Or the politician hoping the virus infected those at MAGA rallies.

Covid-era politicians bear much responsibility: they exaggerated the efficiency of the vaccine, comparing it to the polio vax, not the yearly influenza vax, in what it is expected to do. Covid is a new way to die, same as we once lived on a planet without AIDs and today we live on a planet with AIDs. The risk of Covid is now part of our daily lives. Surges will happen, a part of life we need to manage, not panic over.

The crisis was overblown from the beginning, kept alive during the election, and then not allowed to whither away once the vaccines were widely available. It represents one of the worst public policy crises of the modern era.

To begin resolving the crisis of public policy, do away with TSA demanding we take off our shoes at the airport. Seriously. We remove footwear today only because some knucklehead failed to explode his shoe bomb 12 years ago. No one was ever harmed with any shoe-borne weapon, or liquid above three ounces for that matter.  But we still drag out the airport process doing things that do not matter. Because we still won’t admit our mistakes from the Terror Era and re-assess reality, I’ll be taking off my shoes at the airport until I can no longer travel, cursing as I remind young people so numbed by school lockdown drills to safety theatre that they no longer even care how it all started. Let’s get ahead of all that with Covid.

So let’s start to end the public policy crisis by getting rid of the things we do that have little or no affect. No one has or will catch Covid from an unwashed pen or a paper menu. Plexiglass barriers accomplish nothing. Dirty cloth masks, unsealed around one’s face, are not stopping microscopic viruses. Flashing a cellphone pic of a handwritten vaccine card made out to “McLovin” is not ensuring everyone in the restaurant is vaccinated, especially when we can’t agree if that means one, two, or three shots. Unmasked while seated but masked while standing makes even less sense than shoes-off at the airport. Only four to an elevator but unlimited people shoulder-to-shoulder on buses, subways, and planes is silly. We need to stop calling someone without symptoms and with no effect on their daily lives a “breakthrough infection.” Everything should not be a curveball.

We have to stop focusing on case counts and look at impact. For example, there are a yearly average of over 30 million cases of influenza, but only 34,000 deaths. It is time to acknowledge the difference between infection, which means the virus is simply replicating in one’s body in a struggle the immune system will win in the vaccinated, and infectiousness, which means the virus is replicating in parts of the body in such a way that it could infect other people. Instead we bluntly test, add it all together, and scream Fire!

We must realize it is unhealthy to comply because a) we have become germophobic paranoids or b) it is easier to wear a face diaper than listen to Karen or c) we really have to get to Denver for work and the airline simply will not let us on the plane without a mask and shoe inspection. None of that has anything to do with ending Covid. What it does is leave too many Americans angry, paralyzed with doubt, and ever more distrustful in government. It’s time for a full field view.

We pretend the safety theatre is benign, c’mon, it’s just a mask. We ignore the failure to educate our kids, the teen suicides, the deaths of despair among the body of us as more turn to drugs and alcohol to fill in the dark spaces friendships and socialization used to occupy. In 2021 ER visits for suicide attempts jumped 51 percent for adolescent girls compared to 2019. In any other context all we would be hearing was the media claiming some politician had blood on his hands over that. We are social animals denied the chance to socialize. Like the unadopted puppies at the shelter who soon enough just give up, it is destroying us. The worst part is we are cowed or threatened into participating in our own destruction. We need to stop all the pointless mitigation efforts, acknowledge the damage done, and reclaim our lives.

Unless we take the shot at changing public policy, America will be left as it is now, exploring the edges of what it means to be a failing society. Time to choose.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Post-Covid 2021 Thanksgiving Tips

November 25, 2021 // 9 Comments »

It’s time to admit America is facing a crisis. Families are going to have Thanksgiving together this year.

Nobody wants to admit “We may die of Covid” was a better excuse for not getting together last year than “I’m stuck in O’Hara.” Nobody wants to admit chicken tenders from the microwave and a Friends marathon was actually more fun and way less stressful than cooking a mutant breasted 27 pound bird for 12 hours only to find that it was still a little under done. Even the Friends episodes where Jennifer Aniston wore all her underwear were better than Grandpa Mark’s retelling of some event from his childhood or the War of 1812 or whatever the heck he was talking about after four Amarettos. It is thus little surprise seven out of 10 young Americans prefer Friendsgiving to Thanksgiving with the fam. Surveys show two out of five young people anticipate biting their tongue during Thanksgiving dinner. It is unclear if they mean holding back on saying something or actually looking forward to self-inflicted pain as a way to get through the day.

No, this year, because of the Thanksgiving Mandate, it is gonna get ugly. This year it’s family of origin not family of choice. Here are some survival tips.

For Everyone: Anything with three letters is off-limits: AOC, SNL, NFL, BLM, CRT, CNN, Fox, Joe, Vax. Same for anyone known just by a single name: Kyle, Karen, Fauci, Beto, Greta, Brandon, Pete, #, Maddow, Hannity, and unless you have immediate family named “George” or “Floyd,” just no. Same with Loudon County, unless you actually live there and even then it’s weather only. Anyone without an advanced degree in the subject cannot discuss how supply lines, inflation, vaccines or masks work. In fact, things are the way they are in America such that microbiology in general is banned as dinner table conversation. Same for anything to do with law in Texas, Atlas Shrugged, Handmaiden’s Tale, and 1984. Nobody ever really read To Kill a Mockingbird or Tom Sawyer anyway, we just heard about the racist parts somewhere, so skip those, too.

For Younger Folks: This would be a good time to admit your old man was right when he told you for four years democracy was not dying in darkness, Trump was never going to set up labor camps for LGBTQ illegal immigrant POC refugees, and a few Nazi cosplayers were not the same as Kristallnacht. Set some boundaries for yourself. You are allowed only one eye roll and one snarky remark per holiday gathering, such as when your dad says “So Trump wasn’t so bad after all” you can reply “Neither was Hitler — at first.” Also youngster folks, just let the heaving carcass of the turkey sit untouched on your plate; do not say “I guess no one remembers — again — I’m vegan.” Your parents haven’t seen you in a year, so ease them into that additional ink you spent your stimulus check on. Remember, for your parents your #Medusa tattoo is to them what their Trump vote was to you. Save announcements regarding trans anything for later.

If you play nice on all those things you are allowed one bonus exchange over pronouns. Put your phone down. Do not fact check your parents in real time. Spend time not being offended. Pretend it’s organic or keto or paleo enough, Gwyneth Paltrow will forgive you. Basically, lighten up for an afternoon. Accept your personal life is a side dish for this meal, so have a plan to deal with that. Edibles are a better idea than taking the dog for her fifth long walk of the afternoon.

Psychiatrists tell us traditions and rituals help sustain happiness and family bonds. Remember, Detroit losing and someone making light fun of anything that combines the words marshmallow + salad is a tradition. Calling your parents fascist AF misogynist racists is generally not, even though you did it last year over Facetime. Same with ironic “I’m thankful statements,” so no to “I’m thankful the patriarchy didn’t murder Colin Kaepernick this year.” Similarly, there is no need to remind the table that “kids in the third world are starving while we eat ourselves into a coma again, I hope everyone is enjoying dessert. I’m not.” Thanks in advance for not introducing the colonialist roots of Thanksgiving and the genocide of the Wampanoag tribe to your younger nieces and nephews over at the kids table. If you can’t handle when grace is being said, just close your eyes and think about how funny Pete Davidson is. Also, sorry, 1/6 did not change the world.

For Older Folks: Sorry, 1/6 did not change the world. Set some boundaries for yourself. Only one Dad Joke (suggestion: What did Yoda say when he saw himself in 4K? HDMI.) You are allowed two “I told you so’s” about Russiagate among like-thinking adults before the kids arrive from the airport, and only one in front of the kids. Be magnanimous in victory; serve avocados. Put them on everything. Millennials love avocados. It’s their cat-nip. Sigh and accept your kids do not know any history predating Obama. Just let go of any pop culture references or hip hop stars’ you do not understand.

One exception is Pete Davidson. If any of your children can explain why he is a celebrity, write down their answer and share it with others of us olds. Don’t panic, however, if they retort with “So you explain why your generation thought Jack Black was funny.” Just be the bigger guy and say no one knows. Only Joe Biden can use the word negro unironically. “When are you going to get a real job?” is better stated as “So, your Cousin Mandy said Indeed was a good way to find work in her field but then again she studied engineering.” Don’t ask “Are you dating anyone?” unless you’re prepared to know more than you really want to know about pansexuality and fluidity over a carb-heavy meal. Instead, try and make your kids feel at home — use terms like fulfilled, give back, and impactful, and say “research” to mean Googling something. Don’t claim music was better in your day. It was. Your kids will come around to admitting it in a few years but let that slide this holiday season.

For Everyone: For gawd’s sake, remember, they’re your kids. They’re your parents. Kids do stuff, probe boundaries, overreact thinking they’re the first young person ever to notice the Constitution uses only male pronouns, and think podcasts make them experts. Your parents mean well, mis-abled as they are having grown up without social media and irony. They are your kids, good kids. They will figure out the people on late-night TV are comedians not prophets well-before your second stroke. Your parents tried hard, packed you horrible lunches they thought were nutritious, and thought they were doing the right thing not letting you have the car that night.

Thanksgiving is just one meal built around food nobody likes enough to eat twice a year. It’s a Ron holiday, one for the fun Trans-Am Uncle Joe, so save witchy Nancy and the necro-animated Joe for another date and cut everyone some slack. You never know, next year you might not get to see them. Make it count and save the culture wars for the next phone call.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

A Constitutional Crisis If You Will Keep It: Vax Mandates

November 16, 2021 // 7 Comments »

Sometimes a thing can be two things at once, one good and one bad. That requires a choice. In a free society that choice is usually best made by the individual affected. If not, then by an open, democratic process. That is not what’s happening with the vax mandate and why the cure may be worse than the disease. Literally and metaphorically.

It is best to be clear: Like many people, I am, by my choice, thrice vaccinated. I understand the Covid vaccine prevents me from getting sick. I am not anti-science. But vax mandates are an unhealthy thing for our democracy and represent a willful effort by government to exert additional control over an already cowed population. There is a direct line between the Patriot Act, mass surveillance, and vax mandates that allows claims it is all for our own good when it is more broadly for our own bad. We are going to have to chose. This is about politics, not medicine anymore.

Whatever you call a country where a central authority makes unilateral decisions which control its peoples’ lives at a granular level, that is now what America has become. In escalation of that new reality, the Biden administration announced a mandate requiring U.S. employers with 100 or more workers to ensure employees are vaccinated for Covid or tested weekly, likely at their own expense. A separate mandate requires employers participating in Medicare or Medicaid to have a fully vaccinated workforce, with no testing alternative.

The first rule alone covers 84 million U.S. workers, or two-thirds of the U.S. workforce. People who do not comply will lose their jobs. Workers who test positive for Covid will be removed from the workplace.

It is critical to understand that these national-level mandates affecting two-thirds of workers (for now; expansion is likely) have been imposed; there was no legislation, no vote, no public debate, no public record of who supports and who opposes them. It all begs the question of if the threat is so obvious, why has this needed to be so coercive and sneaky? The Biden administration disingenuously created the mandate through the back door of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a sub-office inside the Department of Labor otherwise created to ensure workplace safety. The mandate places an unvaccinated worker (not a diseased worker) in the same category as frayed electrical cords and wet floors, a workplace hazard. OSHA, under threats of penalty, outsources enforcement (i.e., firing the unvaxxed worker) to the conscripted employer. Fines are up to $136,532 for employers who willfully violate standards. OSHA will carry out inspections and a whistleblower hotline is available to rat out your boss.

The Biden administration is also requiring Americans abroad seeking to return to the U.S. to either be vaccinated or test negative, the first time in history something other than citizenship has been a criteria for a citizen’s reentry. The decision to allow an American Citizen to return to his own country, a right seen as guaranteed by the Constitution, has been outsourced to a local airline employee at a foreign airport in contrivance of any due process. That last bit is what’s new; even during the Ebola outbreak screening was done by American government officials at American airports. Not any more. By outsourcing enforcement to an airline clerk in Paris, as with outsourcing censorship to Twitter, Biden disposes of Constitutional 5A protections.

All of this has been justified as a legitimate response to an emergency, albeit an “emergency” now heading into its second year and one which has been essentially put to rest in many other democracies, such as in Scandinavia, with much lower social costs. The problem is that what may seem like a reasonable step in today’s emergency will have a hangover effect when invoked as precedent in less dire circumstances for even more authoritarian rules. The impulse to map restrictive rules on larger and larger populations is also to be expected. In simpler terms, power seized by governments rarely is relinquished, even long after the urgency has passed. That’s why you are still taking your shoes off at the airport. It’s why after “two weeks to flatten the curve” we are talking about vax mandates and the government controlling who can work, travel, go to school. Like terrorism, who can ever say when Covid has gone away forever?

There is some hope already visible. In his dissent on an earlier case in which the Court upheld a state-level healthcare worker vax mandate, Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed cynicism about what he views as the government’s protracted suspension of liberties due to the pandemic. “I accept that what we said 11 months ago remains true today — that [s]temming the spread of COVID–19 qualifies as ‘a compelling interest.’ At the same time, I would acknowledge that this interest cannot qualify as such forever.”

The government’s history of such liberties taken with our liberty is poor. Think back to the powers taken by post-9/11 presidents to address that emergency. The result was ongoing mass surveillance of Americans in America (4A), a global kidnapping and torture program (all laws of decency and human dignity. 5A as Guantanamo is still open to house American permanent residents,) near-endless wars started without Congressional approval (War Powers Act, Article I, Section 8) and drone killings of American citizens abroad (5A.)

If it was still about medicine we would be testing workers and travelers for chlamydia and tuberculosis, deadly and infectious diseases, and making a yearly flu shot mandatory (38 million people in America got the flu last year.) If we shared so much concern for our fellow citizens that we force them to vax, it is important to ask why we don’t show similar concern for their general lack of access to medical care for other life threatening things. Why only Covid? Why not malnutrition, an underlying cause of a third of children’s deaths, 2.6 million every year?

Biden’s assertion of control over who can work and who cannot is clearly overreach when well-more than half of all Americans are already vaccinated. It is also unconstitutional. Cases already filed will inevitably reach the Supreme Court. The cases will likely hang on the hook of states’ rights, or the 14A equal protections clause preventing discrimination based on health status, for example, workers with AIDS. Another hook might be the government violating the 1A by taking it upon itself to adjudicate which religious objections qualify and which it claims are bogus.

But the cases filed will not be at their heart about Covid, or medicine at all, but about our democracy. Any notion that public health demands the government take for itself the power to dictate who can work, or which Americans have the right of return, misses the point. Covid should not be the driving force of life in America. A truly healthy society is one where freedom is its core value, not fear.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Fear Itself, Covid Edition

October 30, 2021 // 5 Comments »

I took a friend of a friend and his wife on a tour of Chinatown the other day. She arrived double-masked and immediately asked if I was vaccinated (I am.) She didn’t say much or eat anything, her husband was the one clearly interested in new foods. The wife, maybe 28 or so, then had a full-on panic attack.

We were inside one of the wet markets when the woman shouted “Covid, I have to get out.” She turned pale and broke out in sweat. She pushed her way through the crowd to get outside, full fight-or-flight mode. Outside, gasping for air, she said she suddenly felt she was going to “get Covid and die” in the market. I suggested sips of water but she said she would not remove her mask. The husband apologized. They were educated. No signs they were Fauci fans, QAnon shamen, or addicted to one biased network or another. What I guess we once called regular people.

I felt genuinely sorry. This is what appeared to be an otherwise healthy woman who had lost her mind over an exaggerated fear of Covid. I see people like this, albeit usually with less physical signs of panic, often. They truly are convinced they will die soon. They are shelter dogs seeking to form coalitions of grievance. No safety measures, including the vaccine, can be sufficient when fear transitions into irrational phobia. I’ve talked more than a few friends off virtual Covid ledges. At best both sides of any sub-argument (say, masks) think the other is kidding.

Meanwhile a new neighbor greets me every morning with the latest local case count and policy rumors, the way finance bros reel off the S&P numbers to each other before saying good morning. He has become a Covid enthusiast. The rest of us, we now snap at one another over petty Covid rule infringements — been on a plane recently? The lashing out is then justified by fear, because that means we don’t have any obligation toward self-examination.

A year and a half ago I never would have believed I’d still be writing about Covid. I now have to wonder if ten years from now will people look back at this all the way we remember a particularly rough winter, or will this truly be something that changes us forever. Even at this point our lives have been altered. If you want to blame one politician or another, take that argument outside. It all matters less and less as the events become not politics but our history. Even with so much road still ahead we can say clearly our economy has been devastated. “Cashing a stimulus check” seems to be one of the Top Ten new careers in America, followed closely by “Collecting Unemployment.” Many people depend on free rent aka the eviction moratoriums, paused student loan payments, and the range of food aid. No one seems to know what happens when those programs sunset.

Education has effectively disappeared for large numbers of kids and despair grows menacingly. A statistic which should set off alarm bells across the nation barely made the scientific journals as suicide attempts by teen girls increased 26 percent during summer 2020 and 50 percent during winter of 2021. We have forgotten the critical role in-person school plays in children and teens’ emotional development. All that rough and tumble adolescent socialization is there for a reason, along with sports and extracurriculars. They make kids normal and when you take them away from already fragile developing minds, kids want to destroy themselves. But we still do not ask if shutdowns actually deter Covid and we never ask what the secondary effects are.

Economic inequality grows. The power of government exploded to reshape how we live, shop, work, and eat, all handed on-the-fly to a near-endless range of actors, from the president to store clerks. None of this was voted on, challenged, reviewed, studied, or even discussed. For people who spent the last four years finding totalitarianism under every rock, they seemed to miss it when it became obvious — a sense of things being out of control is what every wanna-be authoritarian lives to exploit. Americans cleaved into those who welcomed the nannyism as unfortunate but warmly necessary and those who did not. Things went topsy-turvy: once upon a time in a free society the burden of proof was on those who would restrict freedom and not on those who resist such restrictions.

In the face of new dependence on government to eat and to keep a roof over one’s head, and with a core element of growing up stripped away from kids, and with the constant death harping from the media, how can we expect anyone to snap back? As with the pandemic of PTSD-driven soldier suicides after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have little to look forward to but the same thing coming for the rest of us.

It sounds over-dramatic to claim some sort of national-level PTSD is metastasizing among us, but if you understand PTSD as a psycho-physical reaction to a perceived life-threatening event it makes some sense. In the early days of Covid, The New York Times set the tone, calling this a “land of denial and death.” Many of us are now convinced our vote is a literal life-or-death decision because the wrong party will kill us through their flawed Covid policies. We are convinced our unmasked neighbor is trying to kill us. We are convinced our government is trying to kill us with an untested vaccine. We are convinced the schools are trying to kill our kids. We are convinced the same teachers we are ready to trust with our children are lazy, lying bastards who don’t care enough about education to go back into the classroom. Who wouldn’t have PTSD faced with this onslaught?

Anyone trying to think this through drowns in cognitive dissonance. One concert is a superspreader event while another is not depending on whether the bands are mostly country or hip hop. One protest is a superspreader event but another larger one is not. Disney is OK but Sturgis is not. The vaccine is safe but a significant number of medical professionals won’t get it. The vaccine works but vaccinated people still experience breakthrough cases. The vaccine works but vaccinated people still need to social distance. The disease is airborne but you have to prep gym surfaces like you will do surgery on them. European tourists are too dangerous to welcome to the U.S. but Guatemalans on the border are OK.

It is unsafe to gather in parks but OK to gather on airplanes. It is safe to be unmasked eating at a table but unsafe to stand unmasked at the bar. A two foot plexi shield protects us from an airborne disease riding warm currents to the ceiling of the room before descending. It is necessary for nearly everyone to get vaccinated but leaders won’t mandate that. Masks and school and travel can be mandated but not vaccines. Vaccines for smallpox, polio, and hepatitis can be mandated but not Covid. Crossing an invisible state line changes all the rules. There are states with layers of restrictions and states with none at all but everyone isn’t dead in either one.

We know it all can’t be true but in one place it is true, while next door it is untrue.  Alice herself could not make sense of it no matter how many mushrooms she ate.

How can anyone retain their mind when the narrative for the last 18 months has been a largely false series of proclaimed death wishes: we aren’t doing enough testing so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough ICU space so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough ventilators so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough masks so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough nurses so we’re gonna die, we aren’t locked down enough so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough vaccines so we’re gonna die, people won’t take the vaccine so we’re gonna die, there’s now a new stronger form of Covid coming so we’re gonna die. How do we keep faith when life is a video game where every time we surmount a challenge we are told something new has arisen to kill us?

No other nation on earth is fighting two wars, one against the virus and the other against itself. Other countries have Covid. But they don’t seem to have lost their collective minds to where they can no longer tell the real dangers from the shadows, or judge the right amount of caution from a panic that levies the consequences of living higher than those of dying.

At this point my question about the woman in the Chinese wet market having a panic attack has to change. The real question is not why she lost it, it is why the rest of us haven’t yet. I honestly do not know how this all ends.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Old Laws Never Die, A Tale of Covid and the DMV

October 12, 2021 // 4 Comments »

Two weeks to flatten the curve became 18 months of masks and vax mandates with no end in sight. New powers to regulate lives seized from the people by government. Rules which make no common sense dominate our lives, experiments in compliance not science. How do Covid restrictions end? They likely never will.

I learned this at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV.) My re-education started when I was told to prove as an American citizen in an American state that I am “resident” here, not simply being an American in America. I’m a good sport and wanted to comply, just like I try to keep up with the latest rules and Purell my hands 600 times a day against an airborne virus. I knew threats weren’t inherently political, right, and you just can’t be too careful.

For proof of residence the DMV wants some sort of olde timey paper trail, returned check stubs and paper utility bills. No one at the DMV seems aware all this stuff went to “the online” a while ago, and that it is sort of normal to reside in one state with an online bank in another state and no paper bills or statements from anywhere with only a cell phone from an area code from two moves ago and which banks still return cancelled paper checks each month anyway? They growled at me for even raising the question.

“Because of 9/11” the clerk said in that voice used with really stupid children. It was clear she did not know more than that about why she was demanding these things of me, so no point pressing it. It took me a moment to remember 9/11 as 9/11 was twenty years ago. I asked the clerk where she was on that fateful day and she said “In fifth grade.” I can easily imagine my children 20 years in the future having a similar conversation about why they had to prove their 35th booster shot to go bowling.

The problem with old laws that once were enacted for our safety amidst an emergency is they never go away. They don’t adapt to new realities. Power taken is not returned. Fear becomes the standing justification for everything. I realized while threats aren’t necessarily inherently political, the responses sure are. It’s easy, and politically fun, the claim all the fears over Covid restrictions on our liberties are just conspiracy theories, deplorable gasping. It is easy for the media to ignore the many people opposed to masks are not anti-science but anti-politically charged public policy. The media forget once upon a time a driver’s license was just so you could drive not an excuse to gather personal information.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Covid State of Things

October 9, 2021 // 9 Comments »

It is important to stop every once in awhile and sum up where things are, to lay down some breadcrumbs to refer back to when someone asks “How did we end up here?”

In many ways, the story is the same story. The message of 9/11 was give up freedom for safety, trust the government, and treat your neighbors as potential threats. Now 20 years later, you realize you went along with it because you were scared. The message of Covid is to give up more freedom for safety, trust the government, and treat your neighbors as potential threats. Fear is infectious and now we’re here.

As a young David Petraeus asked early in the Iraq War, tell me how this ends. What is the Covid endgame? Victory was once defined as making testing available to all. Then lock downs to free up ventilators. Then vaccinations available to all. No one knows anymore what the goal is but some sort of return-to-normal with 100 percent vaccination and 0 percent infection is as real as a democratic Afghanistan once seemed.

What started as “two weeks to flatten the curve” has metastasized into 18 months of lockdowns, masks mandates, and vax passports. Most of what has already happened was dismissed as conspiracy theories less than a year ago. Our society — work, education, shopping, entertainment, socialization — has been fundamentally changed by decree, emergency powers taken by government not given by the people. Each of the 50 states is its own world now, with its own rules.

We are still somewhat free to move from one to another, though flight may soon be only for the vaccinated. Hawaii has previously closed its borders, then opened them only to people who vaxxed or tested. It became the first state to prohibit Americans from visiting a part of America. The state is looking at publishing the names of those who should be in quarantine so that their neighbors can inform on them. Hawaii also became the first state to arrest American citizens for traveling inside America. Two men are currently locked up for trying to enter the state unvaxxed and untested. Their sentence was 10 days in jail, literal quarantine at gunpoint. The understood right of Americans to travel freely among the states has stood the tests of time, war, and economic crisis, only to stumble on a virus. Such horizontal federalism threatens to stop the Constitution at certain state borders.

Hawaii is just one state. However, the new Biden travel regulations will soon require American citizens returning from abroad to undergo some sort of vax and testing regime. For the first time, Americans will need to demonstrate something other than citizenship to exercise the right to return to their own country. Biden’s plan tasks the airlines with determining overseas who can get on a plane to America, citizen or not. That move is a critical departure. The right to travel has been long understood to be a part of the 5A liberty of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process. Existing quarantine laws (some of which date, ironically, to leprosy scares from when Hawaii was a U.S. territory) required the decision to admit a (sick) American to be made at a U.S. port of entry by a U.S. government official, assuring some modicum of due process. By out sourcing enforcement to an airline clerk in Paris, as with outsourcing censorship to Twitter, Biden disposes of Constitutional protections.

Those who ask to see the science behind decrees (why 50 percent capacity at bars and not 63 percent or 41?) are canceled, shunned, and mocked. How was it determined six feet of social distancing, not four or 12, is best? No one seems to know. And why doesn’t the size of the room and its airflow matter? Can’t talk about that. Oppose some new rule however absurd and be labeled a child killer by your neighbors. The acts of violence connected with masks and duct taping passengers on airplanes are considered ends that justify the means and are growing. One progressive voice advocates treating the unvaccinated last at the hospital (the writer, a gay man, isn’t old enough to remember when people demanded gays not get AIDS treatment because they chose sodomy.) Are masks effective? It doesn’t matter, because it was never just about how effective masks are against the virus. What matters are masks are very effective as a entry-level test of compliance, then later as a symbol, you know, like armbands.

Given how what were dismissed as conspiracy theories only months ago are now policy, it is tempting to take a self-righteous victory lap. We were right. But all that has been finally made clear is the what. The most important question is always why. Cui bono, who benefits?

The Democrats clearly surfed Covid fear to beat Trump. But Biden shows no real interest in following through, assuming the role of tyrant, squeezing Covid for every grand plan he has on his list, as Bush did with playing 9/11 into invading everywhere. Joe’s crimes against liberty add up to something significant, but they have been implemented haphazardly. He never created, for example, a massive overgrinding Covid Security Agency like TSA. Biden and the Dems just wanted to ride a successful vax summer into the upcoming midterms. Other small thinkers like Andrew Cuomo, who wanted to use his new public image as the Trump Covid Slayer into a White House bid were taken care of as needed, much like Bernie was disappeared.

The flow has all been one direction, more control and less liberty. If the threat is so obvious, why has this needed to be so coercive? So here comes the theory we’ll look back on to judge in full: there are powerful forces at work, by design or by luck when a door opened. Covid has not been about small political moves, it has always been about massive societal change.

Education, the absolute only route for advancement out of the 99 percent (albeit not guaranteed) ceased to exist for many, who either stopped attending or merely suffered through thrown together online “classes.” The average IQ of American children fell 22 points during the pandemic and suicide rates exploded. As the pandemic took hold, more than a million children did not enroll in school. Many of them were the most vulnerable: five-year-olds in low-income neighborhoods. Think lack of diversity is a problem? Try ignorance.

Many more were among those tricked into joining Darwin’s club by refusing vaccinations for the dumbest reasons. Large numbers of blacks were convinced the Covid vaccine was a massive medical experiment with them as the guinea pigs (70 percent of black New Yorkers and over half of Latinos aren’t vaxxed; BLM plans an “uprising” against vax mandates) Rural whites were convinced the vaccines contain tracking microchips or were otherwise toxic. Liberals were blunted by Kamala Harris’ claim she would never trust a vaccine developed under Trump. Large swatches of the less useful in society (“deplorables”) are either dead, dying, or effectively mandated off the playing field forever. Someone else now controls who works, who gets educated, who lives.

Economic disparity and homelessness increased. If you are allowed to work (from home) you assume more of the costs of hiring you, like providing office space. More and more people are dependent on debt, with their noses held just above water (i.e., they can make minimum payments) by government money: stimulus checks, unemployment, the whole A-Z of benefits. What little the wealthy pay in taxes is recycled through the poor back upward. Pathetically in the world’s last superpower, the majority of young people now say YouTuber or influencer are their top job choices (true.) Start a GoFundMe and make one frozen burrito last two meals are their budget strategies (kidding, sort of.) The police don’t create safety as much as they manages the results of the inequality by force.

Can’t travel. Can’t work. Can’t go to school. Can’t make medical decisions. Can’t interact with neighbors (they’re dangerous.) Can’t walk into places without government permission (you’re dangerous.) Can’t depend on Constitutional protections in an emergency. Meanwhile the very wealthiest own spaceships. Naw, can’t be.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

An Olympics Without Joy

August 21, 2021 // 10 Comments »

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

It Was Never Just About Masks

August 14, 2021 // 19 Comments »

It was never just a mask, it has always been a way of thinking. “Mask” is just shorthand.

I got fired from my volunteer work at the Hawaiian Humane Society for choosing not to wear a mask outside walking their dogs. Neither science, the CDC nor the state requires a mask outdoors and I’m fully vaccinated. Some minimum-wage staffbot saw my naked face and informed me of their “policy.” I asked why they had such a nonsensical policy, and her only answer was “it is our policy.” The conversation ended like an ever-growing percentage of conversations in America now end, with her saying “Do I need to call security?” I didn’t enjoy it but I think she did.

It made me sad because I was doing something that was just good. I liked the big dogs, the lifers, the ones some other volunteers shied away from, and having brought one abused dog back from the edge in my home, had some small connection with the damaged ones at the shelter, too.

I was left with no good to do this week, and a simple, real COVID question. Why are fully vaccinated people treated the same as the unvaccinated? Everyone on the plane wears a mask and goes through the same mock social distancing. Everyone at a restaurant, office, concert, etc. does the same. The answer lies at the core of whether public policy in America will shift and allow us to crawl back into our lives.

The first answer, how can we know if someone has been vaccinated, is a strawman. Vaccinated people have little CDC cards. If they have no security features to prevent McLovin fakes, the CDC can create new cards and mail them to us; we had to give out all that info to get the shots. Why not have a database? We have NSA databases of all our emails, an international database of no-flys, Ohio can check if a Minnesota driver’s license is valid, and so forth. But vaccine status is somehow the third rail of privacy?

Or is COVID different? When children register for school, they prove their mandatory childhood vaccinations with little cards. My kids, born abroad, effortlessly proved their vaccination status in Virginia with cards issued in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. As an adult, you take me at my word I’m not carrying smallpox and have been vaccinated against measles, no card even needed.

The biggest reason for treating vaxxed and unvaxxed people the same miserable way is the claim that vaccinated people can still get COVID enough to pass it on. Funny thing is you can actually “get” the measles even after being vaccinated. That vaccine works by basically weakening the virus to the point where it does little harm but still exists. The vax is actually only 97 percent effective, similar to the COVID ones. But nobody talks about measles or demands we wear a mask to prevent their spread. We simply accept and deal with the risk, to include vaccination.

The next question is really, really hard to find an answer to. Exactly how many vaccinated people actually get COVID, the so-called “breakthrough” cases? That exact number is critical because it is the pivot point for the risk vs. gain decision our society needs to make. If we cannot make a wise choice we will be struggling with and fighting over the restrictions on our lives and livelihoods forever. If we assume we’ll never have full vaccination and that breakthrough cases are a non-zero number and likely always will be then we need to make an informed decision about risk. So is it a non-zero number like “smoking causes cancer” or a non-zero number like “very few people die from meteor strikes (or from the measles.)”

The current public policy decisions on risk are haphazard. All 50 states have different rules, many large cities, too, and each and every company. There are different rules if you take a bus or want to go dancing. One grocery store demands masks, another does not. It makes no sense. It becomes not a considered decision but an example of lack of public policy leadership. Into that leadership void enters superstition, pseudo-science, politics, voodoo, and most of all, fear.

So what are the chances of a fully vaccinated person getting a breakthrough infection? It turns out this pivotal question is not clearly answerable but we act as if it is, with consequences for our lives, our mental health, education, commerce, and more. Even for our stray dogs.

I started with Google and “What are the chances of getting COVID after being fully vaccinated?” expecting the answer in 0.0039 seconds like when you ask what year some historical event happened. Nope. The response from AARP said “less than one percent of fully vaccinated individuals have been hospitalized with, or have died from, COVID.” That’s a small number but does not fully address the question.

Over to NPR, which reports “On rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others.” What does rare occasions mean? This is supposed to be, you know, science, so we finally get some numbers from the CDC: out of 159 million fully vaccinated people, the CDC documented 5,914 cases of fully vaccinated people who were hospitalized or died from COVID, and 75 percent of them were over age 65. That means only 0.0000037 percent of vaxxed people were hospitalized or died, and most of them were elderly. That is a very small number. It is a lot less than one percent and a lot less than rare. Chances of dying in a car wreck are many tens of thousands of times higher and we drive on.

It still however does not answer the question of how dangerous the vaxxed but unmasked are in terms of transmitting the virus. No one really knows. Recent scare headlines calling for reinstated restrictions and vax mandates are based on a single outbreak, 469 cases, in one city in Massachusetts, that appears to show (at variance with existing studies) 75 percent of those infected had been vaccinated and oddly, almost all of those people (87 percent) were male. Most of the infected were asymptomatic or experienced mild symptoms. No deaths.

What is believed is the a) delta variant of COVID makes a b) temporary home inside a vaccinated man’s nose or upper respiratory area, c) outside the immune system. It waits there to be d) blown out and then be e) received by an f) unvaccinated person. So all of these multiple things have to go “right” for it to matter. It is not simply a matter of toting up how many vaccinated people tested positive and then hitting the panic button. As one doctor put it “We really need to shift toward a goal of preventing serious disease and disability and medical consequences, and not worry about every virus detected in somebody’s nose.”

Requiring everyone to wear masks again based on one outbreak that appears related to gender may seem as if it can’t hurt, but it does. Organizations waste time and credibility enforcing measures that have limited if any impact (and consider how many masks are old, dirty, improperly worn, etc. to be fully useless.) To simply dismiss the reality of numbers with a blithe “well you can’t be too careful” only works if you imagine COVID restrictions have no secondary or tertiary effects.

Via layers of Keystone Kops political gestures, entire cities’ economies have been devastated, with no clear end point for those dependent on renting office space or tourism. Education has near-disappeared for large numbers of kids. Despair grows menacingly. Economic inequality got a booster shot. The power of government has grown in ways that make the post-9/11 shenanigans look like amateur efforts. The ability to shape how we live, shop, work, and eat has been handed randomly to a near-endless range of actors, from the president to governors empowered with “emergency edicts” to flight attendants who can prevent you from seeing grandma in Florida to minimum wage store clerks ever-anxious to call security not on shoplifters but on an exposed nose.

Convincing Americans to set aside their irrational fears is no longer impossible. Those fears were created by politicians and the media, and have become a profit center. The Little Hitlers on the plane are unwilling to return to just serving drinks when they tasted power over lives. The NYT for months ran columns saying Trump’s vaccine was another government syphilis experiment. Vice President Harris refused to take the shot during the campaign. Biden took it, said it worked, then went right on masking as if it didn’t work. It was a very successful organized campaign to propagate uncertainty for a political purpose. Following the election, many right wing media outlets pivoted to pick up a version of the song. It is all their fault vaccine acceptance varies by political party, where we live, and how much education we have. No other country suffers this additional burden to a return to normal.

So we won’t concede the reality kids are unlikely to get sick and should go to school. That the vast majority of deaths occur among the elderly with comorbidities not the general population. That ill-fitting masks and wiping down groceries with Clorox are theatre. That the debate has become a political argument instead of an evidence-based one. That the CDC has lost credibility until one side needs it for some partisan purpose. That previously healthcare decisions started with the premise of “first, do no harm” while today there is no conversation allowed about the balance of benefits and harm. That we simply tally the collateral damage while the virus remains unaffected. That if we are to heal as a society there is only one answer: at some point we must simply ask what works.

We lack the political leadership to say what’s true so we’re going back to “let’s just argue about masks.” Meanwhile the virus continues to find unvaccinated hosts. The economy won’t snap back. Biden is facing a mini-civil war over mandates or restarting lockdowns and has no plan. Things will hit the fan in September as Hot Vax Summer sputters, when every school district does something different, and Federal unemployment supplements run out. People have grown weary of being afraid, and grown weary of being subject to the paranoid demands of safety fetishists. Many did what they were told to do — get vaxxed — only to find themselves stuck inside the same dysfunctional loop. Gonna be some angry folks looking for better answers than their leaders have given to date. So tell us how this ends, Joe.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Sustainable Stupidity in Hawaii

July 18, 2021 // 3 Comments »

Who is making the cascading series of bad decisions about tourism and why are they determined to damage the Number 2 industry in Hawaii? With over a year’s pause to review things like sustainability and overuse why are we only now having such conversations even as we drift from problem to problem?

Tourism is a part of our islands same as the ocean and volcanos. It won’t go away, should not go away if we wish for people to have jobs, and properly managed creates little pollution and lots of revenue alongside a lot of jobs, from restaurant servers to corporate executives. Let’s look at how that has worked out in the hands of incompetent leadership.

-Hawaii is the only state still with COVID entrance requirements. Their ever-changing nature has created confusion in the marketplace. It is easier for visitors to go somewhere else. The crisis has passed yet Hawaii’s government alone clings to its emergency powers.

-Once in Hawaii, the visitor is subject to the last remaining set of comprehensive restrictions, also ever-changing. Rules on masks and gatherings fall into 42 different categories and run dozens and dozens of pages. There are separate rules for botanical gardens and bowling alleys. No one can follow them all, and so visitors are assaulted with constant and often conflicting pleas to cooperate. Even the mayor of Honolulu admits they are unenforceable.

-The ever-changing rules on how many people may gather indoors/outdoor are a death sentence to big-money tourism such as weddings, Asian group tours, and conventions. These need to be planned months or even years in advance, and can in one decision brings hundreds of visitors in. What planner is ready to trust Hawaii to have the same rules in place a year from now (Delta variant!) as today?

-Same for other events planners. Concert promoters looking to fill arenas once again said Tier 5 does not do much for them. Rick Bartalini, the promoter who recently brought Mariah Carey and Diana Ross to the Blaisdell said, “Tier 5 is not a realistic solution to reopen the large scale event industry in the state of Hawaii.”

-The latest rules, which appear to require restaurants to verify vaccination status before seating guests, are so ridiculous major restaurants are simply (finally) refusing to comply. They protest turning their hosts into “cops” and scaring away customers. Never mind the ridiculousness of demanding a minimum wage server check to see if a COVID test was the proper molecular type before reading the day’s specials. Coupled with the labor shortage which makes reservations hard to get, why would a visitor want to try a night out?

-Why would a visitor want to try a night out when bars are still required to stop serving at midnight (is COVID more active after dark?!?) super fun beach vacation, guys.

-In their arrogance, leaders of the state House and Senate said the summer surge in tourists shows that Hawaii no longer needs to be marketed as a tourist destination. They then fundamentally changed the Hawaii Tourism Authority’s funding and left its future uncertain. While Hawaii may be the only product in history which requires no advertising, competitor New York City launched a $30 million “NYC Reawakens” tourism campaign. Florida has numerous advertising campaigns underway, including a $2 million one focused on Orlando alone.

-COVID restrictions saw tourism disappear, and car rental companies sold off their inventory such that visitors can’t find a car, and the news is running features on people renting U-Hauls to visit the North Shore. A rental car company fails to renew a car registration? The HPD tickets the tourist who rented it so they can tell their friends at home how to expect to be treated.

-Uber and Lyft sent their prices skyrocketing. Local people stepped up and started renting out their own vehicles to solve the shortage and make visitors happy. The state’s move? Tax the new business to death, same as AirBnB, in hopes of protecting the old brick and mortar firms who have fewer customers anyway because of the government’s COVID shenanigans. If that play seems familiar, it was a version of the one used to sink the SuperFerry and push intra-island travel money into the airlines’ hands. Or the one which quickly ended Lime’s electric scooters, which remain popular as a traffic solution across the country, just somehow not in Hawaii.

-How to get to your hotel from the airport? Well, the HART will be completed in approximately… never. The Bus does not allow luggage. So as in most third world airports the tired traveler starts his journey being overcharged for a taxi or car.

-Hawaii has never been a budget destination, but taxes and costs for visitors keep climbing, and will reach a point where they consider other options. For visitors settling into a traditional hotel room, there’s a 10.25% Occupancy/Transient Accommodation Tax, followed by the 4.712% State Tax. Most places now stack on a “resort fee” of $35-50, plus usurious parking fees of $30-40 a night. The state’s move post-COVID? Grab more of the existing hotel tax for itself, and allow the counties to add on their own 3% tax. The final price for a room can easily double for guests.

-Meanwhile, because of COVID and at those prices, most hotels won’t change the towels or bed sheets during a stay. Then wait until visitors find out must-see Hanauma Bay is now $25 a person plus $10 parking if they can even pry a reservation away from the tour companies. Diamond Head is headed the same way.

-The operations manager for Roberts Hawaii, the agency hired by the state to handle Safe Travels screening and verify documents summed up Hawaii’s image today, saying “People gonna vent, aggravated, not prepared, in shock after spending so much money. People got to accept these changes, it is challenge, it is a challenge to come to Hawaii.”

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Hawaii Held Hostage

// 2 Comments »

We are being held hostage to a number. Hawaii is the last and only state with COVID entry requirements. Hawaii is the last and only state with broad COVID rules for fully vaccinated people. Hawaii is the last state and only state with emergency powers still granted its governor. Our economy is dependent on a series of one-time Federal handouts and our unemployment is among the nation’s highest. Our freedom is being held hostage by Governor Ige to an arbitrary number.

Ige is holding to vaccinating 70% of Hawaii residents before dropping the majority of the state’s COVID-related restrictions. That number is wholly arbitrary and backed by no science. There is nothing to say 70 matters more than 65 or 89. In addition, the number employs a sleight-of-hand; since the governor insists it must be 70% of the total population, not the population eligible for the vaccine, the actual count is going to have to be much higher. With young children ineligible for the vaccine, we are actually talking about 70% of a subset of the population.

Left entirely out of the clown car calculus is that 5% of the community already has COVID immunity because they contracted and survived the virus.

The other sleight-of-hand is most people who want to be vaccinated already are, around 58%. Supply of the vaccine is plentiful. Anyone who wants it can walk in to clinics, Longs, pop-up sites, and the like. All the corny incentives — free food, airplane miles, admission to the zoo — have run their course. The pace of vaccinations has fallen 75% since early May, according to Hawaii Department of Health figures. The CDC predicts the rest of America, now open for business and a full life, won’t reach 70% until sometime next year. We may be stuck below 70% indefinitely.

That in turn lead Ige to extend his emergency powers, which were set to expire August 6. He also said he will maintain the state’s indoor mask mandate, despite guidance issued a month ago by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks in the vast majority of settings.

It seems of little interest that in the midst of all this Honolulu dropped 42 spots on a popular “Best Places to Live” ranking. US News & World Report tallied the city’s ranking crashing to 113 out of 150 of the most populous metro areas in the country. The biggest factors are our COVID-battered economy and high unemployment rate. Honolulu also ranked poorly in value, quality of life, and net migration, i.e., people are leaving.

When I brought up this fall to a highly unscientifically gathered group of local people who would listen to me at a coffee shop, their response was universal. Great, they said, tell outsiders to stay away. Tell tourists they’re not wanted. Maybe some of the rich mainlanders driving up home prices will move out, too. “Aloha” now seems better translated as insular and frightened of the outside world than anything welcoming.

Outside of the business community people in Hawaii seem just fine with COVID-excuse restrictions extending deep into the future. They shortsightedly like the idea people may not want to visit here, live here, or stay here. People have become rescue dogs.

COVID tapped into something deep and dark inside of many islanders, a fear of outsiders dating back to Captain Cook, and has turned too many of us into a nation of Momos. Momo is my rescue dog. She jumps at noises and shivers uncontrollably when I pull my belt from my pants at night. She invents new fears all the time — out of nowhere today it was a spray can rattle; last week it was the coffee machine beep. Momo never gets back to normal. She is terrified of strangers and does not even enjoy her walks. Best for her to get the business over with within sight of our front door to get back inside that much faster.

I don’t think most dogs are self-aware enough for suicide, but Momo might be. Before we got the right kind of leash, she would slip off and dart into traffic. There were some close calls. For a dog afraid of everything, she has no fear of being run over. So you tell me, because one definition of suicide seems to fit: fearing the consequences of living more than those of dying.

Momo knows there are bears in the woods. But her fears have gotten the better of her and she can’t separate the real dangers from the rustle of leaves in the wind. Soon enough, the grass near the woods has gotten too close and before you know it’s better to just stay on the couch, alongside the rest of Hawaii.

We reprogrammed into one big Crisis News Network, with every story reported with a flashlight held under the announcer’s chin. It seemed as though we needed to be the victim, a nation of special needs people who all have to board first. And don’t forget how overprotected we want to be, wiping down the gym like we’re prepping for surgery, reading the daily COVID count each morning before coffee, dressing like bad cosplayers with ineffectual soggy cloth masks. This fetish of imagined fears doesn’t stop reality so much as it leaves us poorly prepared to deal with it.

Our leaders seem content to hold us hostage to our fears for their own purposes. For many of us, however, it is time for a change. What are you afraid of?

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Tale of Three Travel Destinations (Florida, NYC, Hawaii)

July 4, 2021 // 2 Comments »

As a fairly new resident of Hawaii, I bring an outsider’s perspective, and maybe a bit of uninvited advice. If Hawaii wants to regain its place as a popular tourist destination, it needs to think more like someone from Ohio than Oahu.

Asian travel is at a standstill, and will be for some time. Should someone from Japan decide to visit our beautiful islands, in addition to our COVID requirements, upon returning home he would face a 14 day quarantine, a two-week ban on using public transportation, and location tracking via cell phone from his own government. If he breaks quarantine, among other penalties his name would be made public as someone “contributing to the spread of infection.” You would have to really, really love poi to build all that into a vacation.

That brings us back to our potential Ohio traveler as he weighs his vacation options. He did the right thing and got double-vaccinated right away, and has been happily living and working without a mask for months. The pandemic as we still practice it here ended for most Americans months ago.

Florida looks good to our traveler. Florida dropped all of its COVID restrictions about a year ago, and appears to have survived two Spring Breaks and beyond. Visitors can enter the state without testing, vaccination checks, or threats of quarantine. Disney, et al, are welcoming guests. Cruises look like they are about to restart. Instead of fretting, the governor is hosting a conference in September to bring together tourism professionals, advertising agencies, and state leaders to build on opportunities. They’re looking at $95 billion in revenues from tourism, the good stuff: people drive or fly in, use few governmental resources, and leave behind money. It is a sweet investment, as every $1 put into their tourism promotion agency, Visit Florida, yields a $3.27 return to taxpayers. Visitors save every Florida household more than $1,500 a year on state and local taxes. Florida gets it.

New York City was ground zero once again, the hardest hit COVID site. The city faced some of the nation’s worst COVID management, slamming the door shut on what was a tourism industry that created  400,000 jobs and $70 billion in economic activity pre-pandemic. But slowly the place awoke to discover it was not Judgment Day 2020, but summer 2021. Visitors can enter without testing, vaccination checks, or threats of quarantine. As of mid-June, almost all COVID restrictions were dropped, and the Governor announced the state of emergency was over. Broadway is reopening with Bruce Springsteen, the Garden with the Foo Fighters, and the city is running a $30 million “NYC Reawakens” tourism campaign funded by stimulus money. After a year of some very bad decision making, the pols seem now to get it. Even the neo-socialist mayor says “building a recovery for all of us means welcoming tourists back.”

Hawaii stands alone among the 50 states simply refusing to admit the pandemic is over. Hawaii alone requires not only COVID testing for unvaccinated visitors, but a complex regime of “trusted partners” who in the end administer the same tests through the same national labs as the untrusted partners. Let’s hope some of them are within a day’s drive of would-be tourists. Until a snap decision changed the rules as of July 8, Hawaii stood alone in treating those vaccinated in Hawaii differently from those vaccinated outside of Hawaii. It was always easier for dogs; as of today you can import a dog into Hawaii with an out-of-state rabies vaccine but not a tourist with an out-of-state COVID vaccine.

The funny things is the only thing Hawaii worries about in human travelers is COVID. It neither tests for nor asks for proof of vaccination for yellow fever, malaria, ebola, AIDS, polio, Hepatitis A, B or C, leprosy, dengue fever, or hundreds of other diseases more problematic to the general population than COVID. And of course there is no science saying something magical happens at 70% local vaccination levels that does not happen at 69% or 59%. They’re just arbitrary numbers to create the illusion of control to provincial voters.

Hawaii also seems unaware tourists need to plan vacations well ahead of time. The ever-changing guidance out of the Governor’s office drove people away. Imagine our Ohio tourist approaching his boss a month ago for time off: “Hey boss, can I have my two weeks when Hawaii hits 70%? It might be August, might be December, or they may alter the rules again, so we can stay chill on the dates, right?” That’s one traveler; if you are booking group tours, forget about it and go to Disney. The Governor’s waiting until late June to acknowledge vaccinated people don’t get COVID just wrote off a second summer season.

If our Ohio visitor dips into the local news he sees the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor arguing publically over what the new rules should be. He sees Hawaii is looking to defund its own tourism promotion authority and still can’t get its light rail running.

He reads unwelcoming, almost contemptuous Op-Eds wondering if too many tourists are spoiling things for the locals. He is unlikely to feel welcome with the Third World-like two-tiered pricing regime at popular sites. He sees articles about people sent home from the airport over an innocent Safe Travels mistake, stories suggesting he’ll need to rent a U-Haul as no cars are available, $120 Uber rides in from the airport, taxes going up on accomodations alongside already usurious “resort fees,” and bars and restaurants capped at limited capacity so it could be Zippy’s again for dinner. Hope word reached Ohio reservations are required for Hanauma Bay, and good luck scoring them.

All this accompanied by the Jugend mask patrols, scolding anyone from ABC to CVS who is not wearing a mask, vaccinated or not. Sound like a vacation to you? The July 8 changes are welcome, but are in the end too little too late.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Aloha New York (or, Escape from New York)

June 12, 2021 // 11 Comments »

It’s always the little things that tell the story. For me and New York, it is the dog poop.

I keep wanting to love this city but it keeps fighting back. I finally realized it became an abusive relationship and it was time to leave. I no longer live there. My adult kids and quite a few of my neighbors bailed out months ago.

The final straw was everywhere underfoot. I lived in a “nice” neighborhood. The fact that we so easily accept that we have nice and bad neighborhoods butted up against each other is part of the problem, too. But my neighborhood was nice, mostly residential, with a lot of pets. There was dog poop everywhere such that you learned to look down as you walked and developed a kind of skip and slide move to quickly reroute. You saw the brown skid marks where someone did not nail their landing.

We had human excrement, too. A nice neighborhood means “good” edible garbage for the leagues of Third World homeless who live off our trash. A lot of people tend to throw out their recyclable cans instead of taking them to the recycle point for coins. The spud boy variety homeless who graze these streets can often scrounge up a few bucks in cans each night. Then they have to poop and there are no public toilets. After corporate Starbucks ordered all its stores to make restrooms available to customers and others, many in sketchy areas just locked up their toilets and stuck on a sign saying “Out of Order.”

But I can’t blame the dogs for us leveling down. The issue is with the people walking those dogs who decision by decision choose not to pick up the crap. Every day so many neighbors decide not to pick up, leaving it for the people they live near to deal with. “I only care about me,” there is no better summation of why I left New York.

But alongside the little things are of course the big ones. New York is a failed experiment. Massive public housing estates were built up the east side and northern end of Manhattan, as well as in the outer boroughs, starting in the 1950s. What was once seen as an expedient to get people back on their feet (alongside food stamps and the other A-Z of social welfare) morphed into inter-generational poverty, generations of people who have never really worked and exist on the taxes of those who do. Knowledge of how to best exploit these systems is passed on the way a father might once have passed on his skills as a carpenter to a son.

Though the causes are complex, the reality is very simple. Poverty lines, like most of the city geographically, are sharply racial in division. People proudly claim New Yorkers speak 70 some languages, but in truth not often with each other. Broadly NYC is one of the most racially diverse places in America, but people live close but not together. Everyone knows where the white-black-brown lines are, usually by street (96th Street near me is a marker) but sometimes by housing complex.

Even the magnificent Central Park is racially divided. Check real estate prices at the southern end of the Park, the so-called Billionaires Row, versus the northern end where the Park is capped by liquor stores with bars on the windows and walkup tenements poor people have been swapping out since 1900. Chinatown and Greektown sound fun for tourists, but nobody is comfortable admitting we also have Hebrew Village, Caucasianland, and Blacktown.

The underlying financial system is unsustainable, far too few people (less now with COVID flight) paying too many taxes to support indefinitely too many others. The wealthy still enjoy NYC as long as they stay in their own layer, living hundreds of feet above the city, taking advantage of cheap labor for their needs, and scuttling to cultural events in towncars like cockroaches when the kitchen light flips on. They don’t live in NY, they float above it. Many play at liberalism, supporting the cause of the day espoused by the Daily Show and donating to PBS, but they really have no way to care. They literally do not even see what is happening around them.

New York had great pizza, enough to have America’s only professional pizza tour guide (though the city has fallen to a disgraceful third place nationally for pizza.) Amazing bagels. Shopping to die for, the museums, the energy. Broadway. But the list of what one has to put up with on a usual and customary basis to access all that grows worryingly longer, even without factoring in COVID. Street crime. Homelessness. A deteriorating public transportation system that gets more expensive to use proportionally as it gets less pleasant to use.

Take a non-rush hour bus ride and you will almost certainly be forced to navigate someone with mental illness. A police force that has either pretty much given up doing anything more than keeping the combatants apart or is a racist invading army, depending on where you think. I love a great slice of pizza, but I also got beat up on my own block in what the cops said was some sort of gang initiation and I was damn lucky not to get seriously hurt.

Add in the black slush lagoons that form on every street corner after a heavy snow as the plowed snow accumulates in vast heaps. The co-op apartment system where each building is like a mini-Vatican with its own rules and eccentricities. Some of the highest taxes in the country. Creaky infrastructure that leaks water, steam, gas, and electricity, sometimes all at once, to blend with the street gravy of the homeless.

And what is the city government focused on? Doing away with the rigorous entrance exams at its elite high schools in hopes of balancing them racially. And of course defunding the police and realigning pronouns. The inmates are literally in charge; NYC did away with bail in favor of catch-and-release in most cases.

That NYC’s problems exist in some form in other cities across America is nothing to be proud of. Rather, the prevalence is symbolic of America’s stubborn and globally unique insistence on not providing universal healthcare, of maintaining a tax-stock-economic system which brews economic inequality,  not controlling its immigration, and of not creating infrastructure jobs to bust poverty. The focus remains on NYC in part because of the city’s constant bleating that it is the greatest in the world.

New York has never in its history pretended to be a warm and fuzzy place. It has always challenged its residents to accept a certain amount of guff in return for the shoulder tab “New Yorker.” But the line between that and watching people suffer in the streets is one now for me too far. I’m not alone; people are neither moving in to the city nor staying. A realtor friend in Florida says every phone call these days is from someone in Boston, Chicago, New York or the like. “They ask about schools,” he said. In the last year over 33,000 New Yorkers moved to Florida, a 32 percent increase from the same period the prior year. A drop in the bucket some may say until they realize about that same number of high earners pay 40 percent of the taxes in the city. Florida has no income tax.

If I sound frustrated, like I should be doing a Jeep commercial for next year’s Super Bowl, it’s because I am. I was born here in New York, and have seen these up and down cycles before. This one seems like it will stick for a awhile. That’s enough right there. But this round, driven by a near completely terrible series of COVID decisions, is so clearly man-made. Most of it did not need to happen but it did. Living through it, I can’t say it made me a better man, a happier man, a more caring man. I don’t like what it did to me. Us.

New York, like other large cities in the U.S. fails to understand what was done to it via COVID is no temporary change, even if some of the tourists dribble back in. No one will blow a whistle or yell “cut” and everything resets to March 2020. A profound change occurred in America. For the first time in history, where one lives and where one works have been decoupled. New York City no longer holds the record for most billionaires resident. That’s in Beijing now.

I’ll miss some of the hustle, as well as the symphony of overheard interactions which end with “And f*ck you, too!” And I know New York will be back in some form post-COVID, but it will need in the interim to have a hard conversation with itself along the way. Playground for the rich? Island prison for the poor? Stumbling social experiment while the towers literally deteriorate around us all? As that famous song goes, “it’s up to you New York, Neeeeew Yoooork!” Just do it without me.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

The Case that U.S. Paid for the Work in Wuhan Which Created COVID

June 5, 2021 // 7 Comments »

It reads like science fiction but it is very real. The work which likely created COVID-19 was paid for by the United States. Research which could create a bioweapon — genetically engineering the highest possible infectivity for human cells — was subcontracted to the Chinese government. And thanks to a series of cover-ups, we are unlikely to ever know the full truth. The people who lost loved ones, lost their jobs, who fell into despair under societal restrictions, deserve better.

There are two origin stories for COVID-19. One is that it emerged naturally, evolving from a bat virus to infect humans. The other is COVID-19 was genetically created by China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology via gain of function research funded by the U.S. The virus then escaped into the world. That year you spent at home, those loved ones who died, might have been our own fault. The point is more than assigning guilt; understanding the true origin of the pandemic is critical to preventing it from happening again, as well as as a guide to future gain of function research. It is hard to overstate the importance of this; our lives depend on it.

The first bioscientist to take a serious look at the origins of the virus raised the possibility it had been manipulated by humans, not nature. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists went on to ask directly “Did people or nature open Pandora’s Box at Wuhan?” and goes on to make a strong case it was us.

It starts with EcoHealth Alliance of New York. For 20 years they have routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. In favor of what common sense would immediately see as a bioweapon capable of destroying the human race, some scientists argue by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent “spillovers” of viruses from animal hosts to humans. Like something out of Jurassic Park, this is known as gain of function research, genetic manipulation to “improve” nature. Such work already allowed scientists to recreate the 1918 flu virus, to show how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduce a smallpox gene into a related virus.

Some of that work was done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, teamed with researchers at the University of North Carolina. Specifically, they focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans. In November 2015 they together created a manufactured virus that was once dangerous only to bats now able to infect the cells of the human airway.

The key Chinese researcher in this work at Wuhan Institute of Virology, known as the “Bat Lady,” specialized further, engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells. Her research was funded by the Obama administration’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health. The NIH initially assigned those grants to an American company, EcoHealth, who subcontracted the work to Wuhan. To be clear: the work which likely created COVID-19 was paid for by the United States. Research which along with its medical potential could create a bioweapon was subcontracted to the Chinese government by an American company.

The Wuhan lab was already a nexus of attention pre-pandemic. The Bat Lady had previously traveled to Mozambique in September 2019 to give a controversial presentation on bat coronaviruses. Outcry quickly led Wuhan to pull their virus database offline following the trip. The Chinese government still refuses to provide any of its raw data, safety logs or lab records. Another Wuhan scientist was forced to leave a Canadian university for shipping deadly viruses, including ebola, back to China. The lab also allegedly tried to steal intellectual property regarding remdesivir, a class of antiviral medications used to treat COVID-19 prior to the vaccine. No small connection, the editorial board of the Bat Lady’s virology journal includes members of the Chinese military.

There is also the question of safety at the Wuhan lab. As early as 2018 Wuhan alarmed U.S. State Department inspectors who visited it. “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the inspectors wrote. They warned the lab’s work on “bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.” Though they had higher security facilities, the Chinese were working in mostly BSL2-level safety conditions which were far too lax to contain a virus like COVID-19.

The other origin theory, natural emergence, never has had any evidence to support it. The Bulletin states “This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses [related to COVID-19] had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months.”

Yet some 15 months after the COVID-19 pandemic began, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which COVID-19 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to late 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year. In just one example of that lack of evidence, the search in China for the natural origin of the virus included testing more than 80,000 different animals from across dozens of Chinese provinces. Not a single case of COVID-19 in nature was found. Chinese researchers did primordial cases in people from Wuhan with no link to that infamous wet market China claims sold an infected bat eaten by Patient One.

So why has the natural origin theory persisted in the face of no evidence? One of the strongest shows of support for the natural theory was a letter from dozens of scientists published in early 2020 in the British medical journal Lancet. The letter had actually been organized and written not by the scientists, but by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth the grantee who subcontracted with Wuhan, though his involvement was not disclosed at the time. If the virus had indeed escaped from research they funded, EcoHealth would be potentially liable, as of course would the American government. Ecohealth went on to plant never-challenged stories in the MSM labeling anyone who thought Wuhan was to blame as a conspiracy crank.

Meanwhile, a Chinese-affiliated scientific journal at the University of Massachusetts Medical School commissioned commentary to refute that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan lab, the same position held by the Chinese government. Mirroring the American media, the journal called anything to the contrary “speculations, rumors, and conspiracy theories.” Chinese officials also objected elsewhere to any name, such as the Wuhan Flu, linking the virus to China.

In addition to these cover-up efforts, there were those of Dr. Anthony Fauci. In answer to Senator Rand Paul, Fauci stated “you are entirely and completely incorrect — that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” He appears to have committed perjury, as Fauci now admits “there’s no way of guaranteeing” American taxpayer money routed to Wuhan virology didn’t fund gain-of-function research. Fauci has also reversed himself completely in saying he is not convinced COVID developed naturally. The Senate passed a Rand Paul-sponsored amendment banning funding of gain of function research in China.

The cover-up was aided in every possible way by the media. Though in 2021 The Wall Street Journal reported three researchers the Wuhan Institute of Virology became “sick enough in November 2019 [a month before the first “public” cases] with COVID-19-like symptoms that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report,” they along with their peers showed little curiosity a year earlier.

One important word in the Journal’s sentence is undisclosed. What they mean is the media did not know about the report, but the U.S. government did. When the president tried to talk to the American people about his now-prescient decision to shut down travel from China in early 2020, he knew about the intel report. As in most cases involving intelligence, the president had to act on the information, and inform the public, without without giving away sources and methods. No thinking person today can claim the move to shut down travel was a mistake.

The media, however, had other priorities, especially the task of defeating Donald Trump. They immediately slammed the decision as racist, and promoted the Chinese government’s evidence-free explanation the Wuhan lab had no connection with the pandemic.

A WaPo headline read “Experts debunk fringe theory linking China’s coronavirus to weapons research” and a separate story said believing the Chinese had anything to do with creating COVID was as credible as the Soviet Union in 1985 accusing the CIA of manufacturing AIDS. “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” said the New York Times in February 2020, adding “Scientists have dismissed suggestions that the Chinese government was behind the outbreak.” The Times’ article, however, did not quote or name any of the supposed scientists. Then there was a hagiographic bio piece on the Bat Lady. Later, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2020, claiming her “scientific accomplishments and foresight are exactly what we need if we want to stop more coronaviruses.”

It is only now, months into the safety of the Biden administration, that the media is willing to take a peek inside Pandora’s Box. Politifact walked back its slam dunk “fact check” China had nothing to do with it, and Facebook announced it would no longer censor posts claiming the virus was man-made. Yet despite the deaths of millions of people, Washington still has little interest into the origin story. The Biden administration shut down a State Department investigation in March of this year, claiming the work was politically motivated. Under pressure Biden later asked for his own investigation from the intelligence community, which will by definition produce a paper of ambiguous findings, concluding happily none of the scenarios can be confidently ruled in or ruled out.

There will be no smoking gun. The people who know the truth, the Chinese government and Ecohealth, have already been caught lying. Gain of function research does not leave a physical marker to prove origin. To date, there is no evidence COVID-19 was of a natural origin. There is much to show it was not. To argue any other way requires an expert understanding of terms like furin site, RBM, RaTG13, and spike protein, not Google.

We do know Wuhan conducted gain of function research aimed at doing what COVID-19 does, making a virus originally not dangerous to humans into a super-infector designed to spread quickly while resisting then-existing cures and vaccines. We know the Patient One cases of the virus were in Wuhan. We know researchers at the lab were infected in November 2019. We know safety standards at the lab were insufficient to contain the virus. In a murder case this would be enough to show means, motive, and method beyond a reasonable doubt.

We know the basic gain of function research at the lab was funded by the United States. We know we were lied to about this.

We also know despite the global importance of the story, investigations never mind curiosity were non-existent in the media. They instead promoted the cover-up stories produced by Ecohealth, the WHO, and the Chinese government. The media shut out dissenting opinions by labeling them as conspiracy fodder, even mocking the co-discoverer of HIV and Nobel Prize winner for suggesting non-natural origins.

We are unlikely to definitively ever know the origin of COVID-19, and politicians and pundits will make the most of the ambiguity.  But as the wise man said, cut through all the lies and there it is, right in front of you.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

COVID, Learned Helplessness, and Control

May 22, 2021 // Comments Off on COVID, Learned Helplessness, and Control

In the post-vaccination era, why don’t people remove their masks? Learned helplessness, employed as a control tool.

Learned helplessness is well-documented. It takes place when an individual believes he continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to improve his circumstances, even when he has the ability to do so. Discovering the loss of control elicits a passive reaction to a harmful situation. Psychologists call this a maladaptive response, characterized by avoidance of challenges and the collapse of problem-solving when obstacles arise. You give up trying to fight back.

An example may help: you must keep up with ever-changing mask and other hygiene theatre rules, many of which make no sense (mask in the gym, but not the pool; mask when going to the restaurant toilet but not at your table, NYC hotels are closed while Vegas casinos are open, Disney California closed while Disney Florida was open) and comply. You could push back, but you have been made afraid at a core level (forget about yourself rascal, you’re going to kill grandma if you don’t do what we say) and so you just give in. Once upon a time we were told a vaccine would end it all, yet the restrictions remain largely in place. You’re left believing nothing will fix this. Helpless to resist, you comply “out of an abundance of caution.”

American psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier created the term “learned helplessness” in 1967. They were studying animal behavior by delivering electric shocks to dogs (it was a simpler time.) Dogs who learned they couldn’t escape the shock simply stopped trying, even after the scientists removed a barrier and the dog could have jumped away.

Learned helplessness has three main features: a passive response to trauma, not believing that trauma can be controlled, and stress.

Example: you are being stalked by a killer disease which often has no outward symptoms. There is nothing you can do but hide inside and buy things from Amazon. The government failed to stop the virus initially, failed to warn you, failed to supply ventilators and PPE gear, and failed to produce a vaccine quick enough. You may die. You may kill your family members along the way. You have lost your job by government decree and are forced to survive on unemployment and odd stimulus check, manufactured dependence. It is all very real: WebMD saw a 251 percent increase in searches for anxiety this April.

Americans, with their cult-like devotion to victimhood, are primed for learned helplessness. Your problems are because you’re a POC, or fat, or on some spectrum. You are not responsible, can’t fix something so systemic, and best do what you are told.

The way out is to allow people to make decisions and choices on their own. This therapy is used with victims of learned helplessness such as hostages. During their confinement all the important decisions of their life, and most of the minor ones, were made by their captors. Upon release, many hostages fear things as simple as a meal choice and need to be coaxed out of helplessness one micro-choice at a time.

Example: you cannot choose where to stand, so follow the marks on the floor. Ignore the research saying three feet apart is as useful/useless as six feet apart. Don’t think about why the rules are the same inside a narrow hallway and outside in the fresh air but don’t apply at all on airplanes.

Kin to learned helplessness are enforcers. Suddenly your waitress transitions from someone serving you into someone ordering you to wear a mask, sit alone, eat outside, etc. Flight attendants morph from delivering drinks to holding the power to have security haul you to jail for unmasking when not actively eating. Companies once run by entrepreneurs are today controlled by the harassment stalking undead from HR. We’ve become a republic of hall monitors. And there it is. The wrong people are in charge.

One of the better examples of learned helplessness is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a great book made into an impressive movie starring a lean Jack Nicholson. Nurse Ratched cows a group of mentally ill men into complete learned helplessness, encouraging them to rat each other out for small offenses, and to follow her every order no matter how absurd. The kicker comes near the end when we learn all of the men (except Nicholson) are free to leave the hospital at any time. They just… can’t.

It is amazing how fast people stepped into the Nurse Ratched roll. Within moments of COVID’s arrival in the national conscience, officials like California’s Gavin Newsom, and New York’s power bottom twins Andrew Cuomo and Bill De Blasio raced to assume dictatorial emergency powers. They spent not one moment assessing the impact of their decisions to lock down against the effects of the lockdown. They ignored information questioning the value of lockdown. They turned topsy-turvy the idea in a free society the burden of proof is on those who would restrict freedom and not on those who resist such restrictions.

They were aided in manufacturing learned helplessness by the most sophisticated propaganda operation ever created. Already engorged with the coin of three years of fake news, the legacy media saw the value of a new crisis toward their two real goals: make as much money as possible garnering clicks, and defeating Donald Trump. Previous shows, Russiagate with a hat tip to 9/11 when Americans demanded fewer freedoms to feel safer, illustrated the way. On a 24/7 basis America were injected: you are helpless and Donald “COVID” Trump will kill you. Your only hope is to comply fully with the people at CNN who are administering the electric shocks.

Truth is useless to propagandists, actually a threat. Look at what turned out to be false (in addition to Russiagate): we never ran out of ventilators or PPE or nurses or ICU beds or morgues. Masks were not really needed outdoors. We did in fact develop a vaccine, several in fact, in less than a year. Almost everyone who died was elderly or had serious comorbidities but we salivated over “new case numbers” as the primary metric anyway because they went up so much faster. When people questioned the real world view against the media portrayal, they were told about “asymptomatic COVID” or shunned as hoaxers. Everyone makes mistakes. But just as with Russiagate, all the media mistakes swung one way.

It worked. Condo boards boarded up their gyms. Restaurants forced diners to eat outside in the rain. Entire industries, such as tourism and hospitality, disappeared overnight. New groups were shoved into poverty and unemployment. Children were denied education, criminals released from jails. People were told not to hug their loved ones. Saving Grandma meant she died untouched in a hospital room. The government denied you the chance to say one final goodbye to the person who raised you and you didn’t fight back? Now that’s control.

Every time a bit of dissenting information popped up — Florida opening its beaches for Spring Break, for example — the media rushed in to declare everyone was gonna die. Texas was declared dead, South Dakota was declared dead, and Americans believed it all even when reports of survivors started drifting out of Disney World. Learned helplessness is hard to unlearn. One Harvard professor explains our brains evolved to encode fear so well, it’s hard to turn off.

Americans are not comfortable accepting their lives being manipulated at this level, the way for example many Russians assume it to be so. We tend to dismiss such things as conspiracy theories and make an Oliver Stone joke. But ask yourself how many of the temporary security and surveillance measures enacted after 9/11 are still controlling our lives almost 20 years later. Is the terror threat still so real the FBI needs to monitor our social media in bulk? Was it ever?

Nothing here is to say vaccines don’t work, or are themselves dangerous. That’s another debate. This is about the politics of mass control. Add up the “doesn’t really make sense but we do it anyway” COVID rules and try to make sense of them. Why would otherwise smart leaders implement such rules, for example in New York’s case, purposely impoverishing a city or seeking to defund the police in the midst of triple digit rises in crime? Every time your answer is “it just doesn’t make sense” consider a scenario beyond coincidence where it would make sense however out there that might be. It might be the most important thing you can do.

Then look out the window. Remember “10 days to flatten the curve?” With no voting or debate, a system based on a medical procedure capable of controlling our travel, which businesses we can visit, which hotels we can stay in, what jobs we can hold, what education we can access, at which point it is no more “voluntary” than breathing, was put into place. We no longer need to ask what is happening. The real question is always why.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

COVID Runs the 9/11 Playbook (Against You)(Again)

April 10, 2021 // 1 Comment »

After fanning COVID panic for a year, Democratic newsletter Salon admits it was all for partisan purposes: “Americans have been sucked into an all-or-nothing approach, with your choice of all or nothing depending largely on your partisan identity.”

Salon continues “Trump’s rejection of sensible precautions caused many of his political opponents to run hard in the opposite direction, embracing the lockdowns as if they were a point of personal virtue and inherent good, instead of a temporary and deeply unpleasant measure necessary to contain the virus. Worse, liberals were so protective of lockdowns that even sensible criticisms were ignored, and liberals often acted like, well, cops. They often appeared more interested in lecturing people rather than empowering them through education. There was a lot of social media shaming for any social activity, no matter how safe it was. And in behaving this way, a lot of well-intentioned people made the pandemic much worse.”

The Hill came to the same conclusion, confessing recently “Lockdowns don’t work: Remember 15 days to slow the spread? Well, since those fateful words were uttered, we have had a year of various efforts to slow down a virus that has an infection fatality rate of less than one percent. And what we have learned is that viruses are gonna virus. California, the United Kingdom, Florida and Sweden show the futility of lockdowns.” The Hill adds “The media is complicit in furthering the Panic… how you could die tomorrow, from a virus that kills virtually nobody healthy under the age of 70.”

A study found no correlation between NYC subway ridership and COVID spikes. In other words, few people got sick riding in a poorly-ventilated metal tube with strangers, masked and unmasked, an admission that many of the so-called lifesaving precautions were mostly health theatre, rituals based on fear. It was easier to order people to stay home than to see if the woods really had bears in them.

NY Magazine, after a year of scare stories about scary COVID variants taking over the world, now is running articles headlined “Maybe the Variants Aren’t So Scary After All.”

The Atlantic wrote a year into the pandemic “Traditional and social media have been caught up in a cycle of shaming—made worse by being so unscientific and misguided.” They point out the nonsense of the response: “Cities closed parks even as they kept open indoor dining and gyms. Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts banned students from taking even solitary walks… pictures of people outdoors without masks draw reprimands, insults, and confident predictions of super-spreading—and yet few note when super-spreading fails to follow.”

All but the most serf-like now know the response was partisan, on purpose. We know lockdowns have little effect on transmission even as they devaste people economically and psychologically. The response by government, unscientific and misguided, was encouraged by a media that correlated suffering with virtue, and pain with progress. The draconian measures taken were somewhere between merely ineffective and worse than the disease. If only somehow we could have known this a year ago and used it as a guide toward more prudent, focused, and balanced responses.

If only we’d been able to see the disease wasn’t the hoax, the response was.

As America reprogrammed into one big Crisis News Network, with every story reported with a flashlight held under the announcer’s chin, I first wrote on March 5, 2020 how COVID fear was being used to manipulate people. I said the reaction to the virus will result in long term damage to the nation well beyond the health effects of the virus. I wrote on March 10, 2020 how many of the same COVID-era tricks to create fear to drive policy were used when AIDS broke into the mainstream. On March 26, 2020 I explained how the same playbook (terrify the American people for partisan goals) was run on us after 9/11. I wrote a second article on how the “cure” of lockdown was going to be worse than the disease on March 31.

I’m not bragging. The information was as obvious as you wanted it to be. For example, in October 2020 a group of infectious disease epidemiologists wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, laying out”grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of prevailing COVID policies” such as sweeping lockdowns. They were largely ignored, though US News found time to call them arrogant and recklessness in calling for “focused protection.” The nation was as intolerant of COVID dissent as it was of anti-war dissent in 2001.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Is Everyone in Texas Dead Yet? (Why I Rarely Wear a Mask)

March 19, 2021 // 1 Comment »

Texas governor Greg Abbott announced residents will no longer be required to wear face masks and encouraged businesses to reopen at full capacity. Some 15 other states — Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Tennessee — also do not have mask orders in place. Still more states have thrown off almost all restrictions.

Criticism of the Texas decision (there are not enough votes in the other states to warrant much criticism) was swift.  Joe “Unity” Biden called the unmasking the result of Neanderthal thinking. No less than photogenic loser Beto O’Rourke said the unmandate is a “death warrant” and “Abbott is killing the people of Texas.”

We’ve seen this all before. About a year ago when Florida reopened its beaches for Spring Break everyone was gonna die. The Republican convention was to be a superspreader event, as was the Super Bowl, and some motorcycle rally (here’s a complete list of all superspreader events to include dinner parties for five.) Each new variant of the virus is the end of us, each expansion of dining options a death sentence. Everyone is gonna die. Except they don’t. It works the other way, too. Places proclaimed the Gold Standard for COVID precautions end up with their own upticks. The numbers from place to place should be as dramatically different as the measures implemented and they are not.

As for Texas, the problem is again everyone there and in those other unmasked states is not dead. And in states with the most draconian rules and lockdowns (looking at you New York) people are still dying in healthy numbers. This all used to be the former president’s fault, but inconveniently more than one-fifth of all the COVID-19 deaths occurred since Biden took office. New York leads the nation in virus hospitalizations per one million people. If it were a country, New York would have been the worst performing country in the world at handling COVID, and that’s despite NY’s fraudulent undercounting. In late November, right before New York’s winter spike, Governor Cuo­mo trumpeted mask compliance was 98 percent. Seven out of 10 states with the highest number of COVID deaths per capita have mask mandates. California, formerly an example of the positive impacts of viral fascism, had among the worst winters in the world.

A year’s worth of data (science!) from the four largest states shows lockdowns had little effect other than to drive taxpayers out. Making the pro-lockdown argument even weaker was that the same thing happened with several heavy lockdown nations (most notably the UK) suffering at least as badly, if not worse, than everyone else did. We’re left with something that too many people refuse to consider: it is possible lockdowns and masks have very little effect on COVID. Waves come and go, seemingly independent of what we do or don’t do. Nature finds a way.

I’ve conducted my own sort-of research. In the last year, one of my relatives who is a medical professional was exposed to COVID. She tests negative regularly. I see her in person whenever I can, hug her, we eat together unmasked as a baby’s behind.  And we live in NYC, ground zero, again, this time for COVID. I use public transportation.  Until when the company was forced to shut down by the government, in my day job I worked with people from all over, including enough Chinese from China to fill a Seuss book. In the last few months I was hospitalized twice (heart, not COVID) and saw doctors as an outpatient multiple times.  I went to the gym until it the government closed it. I ate in restaurants and shopped until the government closed them. I stayed in a hotel and drove a rental car in two different states. I attended what the media would have called a superspreader event if it hadn’t been organized by Democrats. I wear a mask only when the hassle factor from the scolds, Karens, and COVID cops rises to the point I can’t get whatever I’m doing done.

I took two long airplane trips. No one had any idea if anyone was infected because the only check was a questionnaire and a temp with no medical training with a temp gun. Waiting a few minutes to board we were aggressively kept six feet apart (while the A/C and ventilation was moving air six feet away toward me) before sitting down for hours zero feet apart. Once at altitude, we were encouraged to spread out but only within our paid for cabin; the nearly empty business and first class sections stayed nearly empty and we all concentrated in the same cabin and used the same toilets. Drinks and then meals were served to the whole cabin at once, meaning everyone removed their masks to breathe recycled air in and out for the same 40 minutes. In the scrum to get off the plane we were literally pressed against each other. I haven’t heard from the airline through its contact notification system that anyone got sick.

The experience was not that different from using the NYC subway, which never shut down throughout the COVID emergency. But there was no need; a recent study shows riding in a poorly ventilated metal tube with often unmasked strangers and no social distancing demonstrated no correlation between NYC subway ridership and COVID spikes. If you weren’t going to get sick that way, you are not going to get sick in most others. The lifesaving precautions were mostly health theatre, stopping infections that never were going to happen the same as TSA stopped terror acts that never existed outside some kid’s Facebook.

My experience of not dying from COVID is not unique. It is shared by some 327,500,000 Americans.

Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for those ages 10 to 24. Since the pandemic began, the CDC reports the proportion of pediatric emergency room visits for mental health increased 31 percent. Reasons include isolation from friends and family, and the effects of parental stress and economic hardship. Government for the most part controls those factors, making conditions worse for children while providing ambiguous protection against the virus. Schools in many areas have been closed for a year, even though the political guidance finally matches what doctors have long been saying: if schools follow basic public health precautions, there is very low spread of COVID.

A peer-reviewed study found “social distance and security measures have affected the relationship among people and their perception of empathy toward others.” That science (!) concludes “a careful evaluation of the potential benefits of the quarantine is needed, taking into account the high psychological costs.” The WHO found “economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic is devastating, with tens of millions of people are at risk of falling into extreme poverty.” In the United States, that poverty risk is fully government-made, based on sweeping non-science based decisions to unemploy people by decree, and make them subject to surviving on unemployment payouts and stimulus check handouts. As for the future, the National Institutes of Health warns “the impact of long-term school closure is yet to be seen.” The American Academy of Pediatrics and Children’s Hospital Association acknowledges “an escalating crisis.” Other studies speak of a “lost generation.” Domestic violence is up. Drug overdoses are up. Crime is up. Academic performance has tanked. Our elderly die alone, unvisitable, in solitary confinement.

Our nation has been suckered into ignoring a tormenting real public mental health crisis in favor of slapped together efforts at social distancing based on as much political as scientific factors (the mayor of NYC is more concerned about “racial equity” in locating vaccination centers then in how many shots can be administered.) False heroes and villains are created to buttress the argument. No one is allowed to seek the calculus, the balance, of prudent protections versus recognizing the cure is worse than the disease. We are literally destroying our society believing we are saving it. Too many are convinced there is zero doubt there is a significant positive result from taking away basic freedoms.

It’s troubling when people decide I must be making a political statement, or am a QAnon member, unmasked. You wear a mask, or hang garlic on your belt if you wish. I’ll get vaccinated when politicians make it easier to get an appointment than front row Springsteen tickets. I do not want to die this year. I don’t want to kill you. But I keep thinking critically and asking questions at a time when I fear too many have either stopped.

COVID solutions and lockdowns have not lead to limits on death. They have tanked the economy and brutalized the people. There is a lot more going on here than inconvenience over wearing a mask. The answers, rationale thinking and vaccinations, are elusive.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Running Biden vs. Governing Biden (Pick One)

March 6, 2021 // Comments Off on Running Biden vs. Governing Biden (Pick One)

Joe Biden and the Democrats did OK getting elected. When do they plan to start the governing part?

Everyone was supposed to calm down once Uncle Joe took office. Good old Joe. CNN got it, running an article about how Joe plays Mario Kart with the grandkids, has a nice non-dumpster wood fire in the Oval Office, and goes to bed early. Politico ran a hard-biting piece on how “the first couple’s romantic gestures aren’t just genuine — they’re restorative.” Mr. Rogers with some PDA. A lot of familiar people are in the cabinet and mid-level positions. It’s almost as if it is 2016 again. Safe, happy 2016. But better, as we now also have Kamala (remember her, the first ever this-and-that vice president?)

It’s nice. But the governing part is off to a slow start. Congress has been busy, albeit with another failed impeachment trial (counting Russiagate/Mueller, let’s call it impeachment shot in the dark III) of a guy who is not even president anymore, with a 9/11 style commission apparently to follow. At his Senate hearing the nominee for Attorney General was goaded into agreeing to some sort of additional investigation. “Hold him accountable” people say. Well, he lost the election, that’s pretty accountable. And why not — hearings are scheduled for the Postmaster General, whose days in the job are numbered, about why maybe some mail-in ballots might have been delivered late on accidental purpose five months ago.

Trump nostalgia? No, keep fear alive seems to be the driver. For the first time in history the Capitol has a non-scalable fence enclosing it, and the Kapitol Kops are asking that the barbed wire stay in place until September “while authorities work to track down threats.” The National Guard is on near-permanent assignment (cost to date $480 million) on the Hill for no apparent reason other than to give directions to a few lost tourists. Political theatre, re-election stunts. A waste of time when the clock is running so hard against us.

Because if we accept the Democratic/MSM campaign premise Trump nearly destroyed America, then this is a time of great urgency, life or death stuff. Things need fixing. But not that you’d know watching Biden and his Democratic Congress run the partisan table while the real problems sit like grandma in a Cuomo nursing home.

Let’s see what the Democrats, in full control of Congress, are really up to. They haven’t been in such a position of power since 2008 during First Obama, and they know it. Their solution to fix America? Stamp out the opposition ahead of the 2022 midterms.

Start with a mess ‘o politically driven Executive Orders canceling Trump. No more Muslim ban! Yea, except nobody can travel anyway because of COVID. Except of course everybody along the Mexican border with hazy asylum claims, whom Biden is fast tracking into America. Business travel from Europe, hmmm, dangerous, but anyone living in a tent outside El Paso, bienvenido.

So it’s no surprise the first major legislation the Democratic Congress is to take up is an amnesty to transform the 11 million illegal immigrants who have collected in the U.S. since the last amnesty into 11 million new Democrats, er, citizens, within eight years (i.e., the next next presidential election but it may not matter because climate czar John “Muppet Lurch” Kerry says we only have 9 years left to live) The bill includes $4 billion to boost economic development in Latin American countries, which are not in the unemployed United States. Viva!

Elsewhere the House wants reparations for slavery ended 150 years ago because that will fix everything on TV. The military has been restocked with transpeople. In another game-changing Executive Order, Biden revoked Trump’s E.O. creating an apprenticeship program paid for by industry to be replaced by one paid for by the Federal government which will favor the unions Dems need to be re-elected. President Biden has shown real concern for the people of Texas, hit by natural disaster, by ignoring them. The Dems in general are no longer demanding Ted Cruz leave the state forever but return to it to stop the blizzards. Outside of the halls of Congress, Democrats are trying to cancel conservative media from major cable providers.

But the real hot button issue is finding a way an Executive Order can wipe out trillions of dollars of student loan debt without any thought to the broader economic consequences of such a decision and without reforming the way higher education is funded going forward. Because giving out free temporary debt relief is a primary function of government, some clause or amendment they talked about in civics class the day everybody faked being sick to go to the KISS concert. The Dems haven’t (yet) gone as far as nominating the corpse of Ruth Bader Ginsburg back to the bench but keep an eye on the news.

What about America’s real issues? Stuff like COVID vaccine availability, the economic and social effect of lockdowns (San Francisco kids are committing suicide at an alarming rate, in New York as well, but at least they’re not in cages), unemployment (millions of people are forbidden from earning a living by their government), maybe the crumbling infrastructure. Or lockdown-driven drug overdoses, with deaths 3x those from COVID in San Francisco. The solution so far? Not school openings, because the Dems owe the teachers unions big time for their votes. Most of Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion Coronavirus Relief Bill has little to do with public health; only 1 percent is allotted to the vaccine. Biden even said after whooping COVID, he is going after cancer. But for now here’s $1400 bucks, knock yourselves out, buy Gamestop.

Remember foreign policy? Joe said recently “diplomacy is back” so, well, OK then. Iran still needs tending to and says we’re moving too slow. Russia must be up to something. Word is China is a big dealio. Anything? Bueller? All we’ve gotten so far is a non-decision to not follow through on Trump’s troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and elsewhere along the failed path of the Global War of Terror. We all know we do have Susan Rice’s next bright idea to look forward to. One hears Libya needs re-liberating.

Everyone knows it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. The problem is the Dems have chosen to only do one, not attempt both.

On the other hand, think about how this might play in the midterms. Obama made the mistake of actually trying to take his election momentum and control of Congress and turn it into history making health care reform. He ended up losing his majority and producing a new half-baked health care system to augment the old half-baked system while creating a political football for all to play with.

Not so for the Biden Democratic party. Their goal is paying off electoral votes while finding ways to make January 6 a 2022 top line issue for voters. That what running looks like, creating a narrative, not governing.

“For four years, all that’s been in the news is Trump. The next four years, I want to make sure all the news is the American people. I’m tired of talking about Trump,” Biden said during a campaign appearance at a CNN town hall tongue bath, albeit a month into his term as president not candidate. But while Biden takes pains to refer to Trump as “the former guy” or “the previous administration” the attention Trump gets from Congress and the media, coupled with Biden’s lack of action, keeps the whole machine in campaign mode and that always requires a villian, an opponent, and that’s Trump. Dems want to run against Trump whether he is or is not ever again a candidate.

We need more than that, you even told us so Joe. Remember during the campaign, Joe, when you promised to “crush” the virus the day you took office? We’re quarantining until our skin becomes translucent for lack of sunlight. Our national symbol is Karen telling someone they need to wear a yellow hazmat suit to Safeway or they’ll have her kid’s blood on their hands. An America with its schools closed, its people out of work due to government decree, its worker’s economy weezing, its faith in itself low, an America where no one believes anything is true anymore and the president is just puddling along playing Mario Kart while settling political debts? Joe, you’ve been in office for six weeks, close to half of those all-important First 100 Days you talked about during the campaign.

Like about half the country, I didn’t vote for Biden, but like all of the country I live here. Unlike some Democrats, who for example realized lockdowns were a useful tool in destroying the economy that was leading to Trump’s re-election, I do not want to see further suffering for partisan gain. If a Democrat can solve some of our problems, I celebrate that. So get started. Fix something. We’re bleeding out here, Joe.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Trump, A Man in Full

January 22, 2021 // 2 Comments »

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

You’ll Vote Next Time with Amazon Prime Points

January 3, 2021 // 2 Comments »

I learned the facts of life from a drunk uncle. He was not an American, and worked in international construction in Asia, mostly Japan and Hong Kong. We were lost in cheap booze at a wedding and he started asking me about how things worked in America. I had just started working for the State Department and he specifically wanted to know how I handled being bribed. How much for a visa? To get someone an appointment at the embassy? I was naive. I wasn’t doing those things, wouldn’t know how.

He explained his main job was to bribe people. He even had a joke to go with — my hands are dirtier than the guys who dig our foundations. Over the course of many tiny glasses of some awful clear Asian liquor I learned every yard of concrete poured required money to gangsters who controlled unions, politicians who controlled permits and inspections, cops who would or would not close down a street to speed things up, and to suppliers for better prices. It went on and on. A fact of life he said. You get used to it. You expect it.

I asked him if, all jokes aside, he indeed felt dirty. It does change your way of looking at things, he said. Nothing is what it seems, you come to realize someone is pulling the strings behind everything and it usually isn’t you. Uncle never heard of George Carlin, who once said “it’s a big club but you’re not in it.” The odd official just doing his job for his salary is a rube, too stupid to bother with. You feel embarrassed for him. Even worse, the guy who says no for moral reasons. You’re just trying to put some extra money in his hands. You learn, uncle slurred, to trust nothing. Everything is available for a price. That politician on TV? The company just dropped off a nice check to his “charity.” Or maybe arranged for him to have some female company on a business trip. Everything was for sale. Play by the rules? Those were the rules. You’ll get used to it, I was assured.

The first bribe I ever paid was to an Indonesian immigration officer, who noticed some small defect on my passport and was going to reject me. Of course, he said, it could be settled between us. With a fine. Off to the side. In cash. Have a nice day. It was all of US$20 to save my family vacation but I felt filthy, cheated, a chump. But I learned the rules. Living in New York, we rarely use the term bribe. We do use the term tip, and call it what you want it is as required to get through the day as oxygen. A table at a pre-Covid restaurant. A last minute anything. A friendlier handling by a doorman. Timely attention to fix-it requests. Servicepeople often won’t charge you sales tax if you pay in cash. My, um, friend, used to pay a lot of money for better hotel rooms until he learned $20 at check in with a friendly “anything you can do” to the clerk often got him the same thing at a third of the price. You get used to it. You get trained to accept it. What, you still paying retail, bro?

I used to think it was all small stuff, like that, maybe with the odd mafia king bribing a judge with real money or something else movie-worthy. In America we were ultimately… fair, right? But things started to add up. We have our petty corruption like anywhere, but our souls are filthy on a much larger scale. America goes big or it goes home.

Things like the Clinton Foundation accepting donations from the Saudis to help with women’s empowerment, an issue of course dear to the heart of the Kingdom. When it looked like his wife was going to be president Bill made six-figure speeches to businesses seeking influence within the U.S. government, earning $50 million during his wife’s term as secretary of pay-for-play state. The humbly named Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Global Foundation, now mostly out of business, was at its peak a two billion dollar financial dangle. It spent in 2013 the same amount of money on travel expenses for Bill and his family as it did on charitable grants. The media, big Clinton fans, told us we should be used to it, accept. Hey, Nixon was so much worse.

Trump refused to be very specific about who his charity donates to. We know its off-shoot, the Eric Trump charity, donated to a wine industry association, a plastic surgeon gifting nose jobs to kids, and an artist who painted a portrait of Donald Trump. Trump-owned golf resorts received $880,000 for hosting Trump charity events. Reports show Trump donated money from his foundation to conservative influencers ahead of his presidential bid, effectively using funds intended for charity to support his own political ambitions. Anybody think his, or the Clintons’, donors didn’t know what they were buying?

As vice president, with his wife Jill teaching at a community college, the couple reported a combined income of $396,000 in 2016. But since leaving the Obama White House, Joe and Jill made more than $15 million. In fact, as his prospects for election improved, Joe and his wife made nearly twice as much in one year as they did in the previous 19 years combined. Joe scored $10 million alone for a book no one read, Promise Me, Dad, roughly 10 times what his first book pulled in. Jill was paid more than $3 million for her book, Where the Light Enters, in 2018, by the same publisher. As soon as he left the Obama administration, Joe set up a tax dodge called an S Corporation that among other things donated money back to his own political PAC.

For all the wrong reasons about half the nation got very twisted over Trump corruption and actively avoided notcing the Clintons and Bidens to the point of covering their ears and singing NYANYANAYNYA.

But even all that money, measured in Epsteins (a unit of measure of influence buying I just made up) is petty cash now in America. The real corruption scales. The New York Times was startled to learn pre-COVID America’s 614 billionaires were worth a combined $2.95 trillion. As the Dow hit record highs this month, there are now 650 billionaires and their combined wealth is close to $4 trillion.

In the COVID-driven economic crisis American billionaires’ wealth grew. Where’d all their new money come from? You, paying interest up to the Lord of Manor. For example, Dan Gilbert, chair of Quicken Loans, was worth $7 billion in March; he now has $43 billion. It takes a lot of poor people taking out expensive loans to sustain that amount of wealth at the top. Listen for the sucking sound as the cash moves.

But it is wrong to think about money in dollars. That’s how small-timer grifters like doormen, waiters, and the Clintons, Trumps, and Bidens think. The real rich understand wealth as power. Basically, the power to shape and control society and government to ensure they make and keep more money for more power until someday they Have. It. All. The 400 richest Americans already own 64 percent of the country’s wealth. You dream of an upgrade to Business class, they own the jet.

Now to talk about conspiracy theories is to imply something “different” happened, that the system did not work as usual and as intended; for example, instead of an election the president was assassinated to change of who was in charge. The term conspiracy has kind of a bad feel to it. So let’s not call whatever happened this autumn to elect Joe Biden a conspiracy. But here is what happened, see if you have a better word.

The corporate media owned by that .01% spent four years attacking Trump. Working as a single organism fused to the Democratic party as its host, they tried to bundle Trump into a SuperMax as a literal Russian agent. When that failed they ginned up an impeachment with more holes in it than a bad joke about Stormy Daniels. The same media then pivoted to defense when it mattered most, sending information about Hunter Biden that would have changed the election down the memory hole, and policing social media to Joe’s advantage. Corporate pharma, also owned by the same people, held back announcement of Covid vaccines until just after the election. Once again the intel community, tightly bound with big tech, did its part leaking and concealing information as needed; for example, they worked to discredit the Hunter Biden story by calling it Russian disinfo. Donations are handy, but money that actually controls information is gold.

Earlier in the contest “something” happened (it was just a coincidence two promising candidates, Buttigieg and Kohlbacher, dropped out nearly simultaneously just ahead of the South Carolina vote Biden desperately needed to end Bernie) again in Democratic primaries that started with some of the most progressive candidates since Henry Wallace to instead push a politician known as the Senator from Mastercard into the White House. Biden of course promptly returned the favors by filling his Cabinet with the same old thinkers corporate America liked from the Obama years. A highlight is Janet Yellen at Treasury, who helped run the massive corporate bailout that created the .01 percent out of the one percent after the Great Recession. No wonder Biden told donors “nothing would fundamentally change” for the wealthy when he’s in charge.

If you are only figuring this out now you are way too far behind to really matter. A tiny percentage of Americans own, control, and benefit from most everything; call it one percent but a large number of the one percent are just slugs and remoras (hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers, etc.) who feed off the crumbs left by the .01 percent You know a handful of the real rich names — Bezos, Gates, Buffet — but only because they own public facing companies. Most of the others prefer less public lives while they control the public. And silly you, you worried that it was the Russians who stole the election. Here’s 20 bucks, go be quiet somewhere now.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

New York Dies for Your Sins

July 25, 2020 // 5 Comments »

With Elderly Caucasian Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, November 3 will be less about the Rise of Progressive politics than the noise of the last four years would have you believe. But while the media shine of AOC and her kind winds down, progressive thought will find at least a petri dish to fester in in a Biden administration, and perhaps even a second media wind if Trump wins.

Since it’s not going away, seeing what would happen if progressives escape the lab and go really viral is important. For that case study, welcome to COVID-laced New York, baby.

COVID is supposed to be, finally, Trump’s white whale, the thing that will bring him down after he wriggled out from under the Russians and the Ukrainians and Stormy. Unlike the made-up thousands not killed by the hurricane in Puerto Rico, these were going to be real. Not enough ventilators! Not enough tests! Mass graves in Central Park! And it is all Trump’s fault. (see “Donald Trump is the Most Successful Bio-Terrorist in Human History.”) That set the stage for Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio to craft a response far more political than medical. New York today is a laboratory for what happens when progressive ideology combined with political opportunism displaces reality.

But first a quick reality check: For every death in this global epidemic, it is critical to remember the virus did not strike masses down in the streets like the Black Plague, and did not create hideous sores like the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s that tore through this city to the point where one hospital was informally called Fort Apache. It is unlikely to infect a third of the world’s population like the Spanish Flu. In fact, it looks like an overwhelming number of those infected never even know they have it, surprised by an antibody test months later. Most infected people do not pass on the virus. The hospitals never overflowed and the military was never needed. As of July 12 New York had zero virus deaths for the first time since the pandemic started even as the lockdown continued. But keeping the emphasis on “cases” and not conclusions keeps the fear alive.

But enough of reality, we’re talking progressivism here. That lockdown has left New York economically devastated, mired in “the worst economic calamity since the 1970s, when it nearly went bankrupt.” The unemployment rate nears 20 percent, a figure not seen since the Great Depression (nationwide unemployment averages 11 percent; in NYC during the 2008 recession it was about 10 percent.) By decree, policy described as a “pause” in March to allow medical facilities to ramp up morphed into a semi-permanent state to keep things bad ahead of the election. While de Blasio authorized nail salons to reopen, he’s kept the city’s core sectors, the stuff that symbolizes New York to the world — Broadway, tourism, conventions, restaurants, hotels, and museums — shut, sacrifices to The Cause. The newly unemployed then strain food banks and soup kitchens. Look what Trump wrought!

So people are leaving. More than 10,000 Manhattan apartments were listed for rent in June, an 85 percent increase over last year. The super wealthy neighborhoods have seen 40 percent migration out. The biggest outward migration is from the once economically strongest neighbors of midtown and the Upper East Side. Enough rich New Yorkers have left that it is affecting the census. That mirrors the outflow of population in the 1970s which decimated the city’s tax base and lead to landlords torching buildings to collect the insurance because they could not collect rent.

So in 2020 it matters that 25 percent of New York tenants have not paid their rent since March. These overdue payments have left 39 percent of landlords unable to pay property taxes. A new NY law prohibiting landlords from evicting tenants facing pandemic-related financial hardships will help on the micro level while contributing to the destruction of the greater economy which of course will eventually devastate everyone. Progressive zeal will create an economic tide to sink all boats.

The mayor, who by decree threw his city out of work, also banned large gatherings through September. He did however say Black Lives Matter protests would be allowed, claiming “the demonstrators’ calls for social justice were too important to stop.” The mayor himself, maskless, took time off to help paint “Black Lives Matter” on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. The central thoroughfare in Manhattan was then closed to traffic to let the paint dry. De Blasio stated (inaccurately) “black people built Fifth Avenue” so it was all quite appropriate. Some are more equal than others; the mayor criticized Trump for putting politics first in coronavirus response.

De Blasio is also allowing an “occupation” to continue at City Hall, where several dozens of people, a mix of activists and the homeless (attracted by donated food) live in makeshift tents. It stinks, a throbbing health hazard island of human feces and drugs and food scraps even before you get to the COVID part but the city allows them even as, until recently, it sent goons to chase unwoke citizens in twos and threes from playgrounds. About half the occupying people had no masks. A woman asked my preferred pronouns while behind her a half-naked homeless man screamed. A reporter was assaulted. A few cops stood in front of a graffitied courthouse and laughed, at some part of all of it, I did not ask which. Maybe they just like graffiti; it is back across New York to add color to the chaos.

So what are cops doing? The former police commissioner criticized city and state leaders for abandoning cops (de Blasio pushed through a $1.5 billion cut to the NYPD on BLM demand) and for helping create a “crime virus” to go along with the coronavirus. Amid defunding elite NYPD units in spite of a 205 percent rise in shootings this year, so many NYPD officers are applying for retirement the department has been forced to slow-walk and otherwise limit applications to get out. One of the most recent shootings was a one-year-old caught in gang crossfire; a 12-year-old was shot separately the same night. Meanwhile, the state legislature is proposing a new law to hold cops personally responsible for any liability occurred on duty. New York City made the use of certain restraints by cops a criminal act. Here’s video of a thug who was not arrested using one of the same illegal restraints on a cop.

De Blasio and Cuomo found other ways to have both fewer cops and more criminals. New York state recently eliminated bail for many misdemeanors and minor felonies, claiming alongside BLM it was unfair to POC without resources to pay. Adding to the criminal population, Mayor de Blasio supported the release of some 2,500 prisoners from Rikers Island due to concerns over the spread of the coronavirus there. At least 250 of those released have been re-arrested 450 times, meaning some have been re-arrested more than once. Since they cannot be held for bail, most of those re-arrested are returned to the street almost immediately under Governor Cuomo’s fairness policy.

The next battleground will be the schools. With only weeks to go in summer, the mayor announced the nation’s largest public school system will reopen with an unspecified mix of in-person and online classes. Teachers say crucial questions about how schools will stay clean, keep students healthy, and run active shooter drills while maintaining social distancing have not been answered. There have been no directives on how to handle online classes, no published best practices, not much of anything. Quality of education, like quality of life, is not on the agenda.

One certainty is that New Yorkers will have fewer options — 26 Catholic schools will not reopen due to low enrollment and financial issues. That affects more than religion. Many of those schools represent the only neighborhood alternative to the failing public system. Closures will drive middle class flight.

And there’s always something more. With indoor restaurant dining prohibited, many places are setting up ad hoc tables and sidewalk tents outside. In addition to adding to the third world Hooverville atmosphere, all that food has brought out the rats, who are attacking patrons.

There is no sense we will ever end this. It’s easy to criticize places that have moved too fast but they had the right underlying idea: we can’t live like this forever. People need to work, not just for money (but they need the money) but to have purpose. So much of what has been done in the name of justice feels more like punishment, suck on this bigots! racial score settling under the guise of social justice.

A lot of people are just sitting around like the Joad family waiting for something to happen. Thing is, we’re not sure what we are waiting for. The lockdown in March was, we were told, to flatten the virus curve. We did that. COVID hospitalizations and actual deaths in NYC are at their lowest levels since March. But the lockdown is still here and nobody seems to know when to declare victory — is the end point zero new cases before we can re-open Broadway? A vaccine? We just wait, the days hot, thick, and liquid. De Blasio and Cuomo are waiting, too, but for November 3 to free us. No need for a continuing crisis after Biden wins.

But maybe the New York case study will serve as a different turning point in the election. Imagine enough purple voters who look at New York and become frightened of what the Left will do with unrestricted power in Washington. They want to work. They want their kids in school. They might just hold their nose and vote Trump.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

The Search for Heroes

June 13, 2020 // 9 Comments »

These are your new heroes: people who invoke the grace of Dr. King to label riots as lawful protests, looting as reparations. To be fair, most of that labeling is not by the thugs themselves, but by the media who elevate them to hero status hoping once again this will bring Trump down. Citing the freedom fighters in the streets, former labor secretary Robert Reich proclaimed “Trump’s presidency is over.”

Not quite yet. So the MSM report on fires outside the White House with a wink; maybe they’ll burn the place down. The Trump family taking shelter in their bunker was met with articles calling the president a coward for not facing down the mob shouting “Get off my lawn!” The implied hope was there — if we can’t impeach him, maybe we can just have someone kill him. They will deny it, but the media encouraged violence. They hoped for it, they egged it on. “Destroying property which can be replaced is not violence,” NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones said. “I think any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property. But these are not reasonable times.”

Meanwhile the media met the prospect of the military’s arrival on mixed ground. The big story was not the standard “order will be restored but my God at what price?!?” but that Trump had “declared war on the American people.” Though 58 percent of voters support the deployment of the military to respond to protests, with only 30 percent opposing, the web is awash in uninformed fear mongering over martial law, posse comitatus, the Insurrection Act, and whatever else a Wikipedia search churns up.

But underlying was a subtext: you know, maybe a military coup, maybe via martial law, would be OK. We’ve heard that actually for four years, with hopes expressed one of the ex-military men in the White House, maybe Mad Dog, John Kelly, or H.R. McMaster would hero up and assume control. If not directly, then maybe by running the country as the patriot behind the throne. Upon General Mattis’ departure, the The New York Times asked “Who will protect America now?” juxtaposing the warrior-monk with the Commander-in-Cheeto.

The search for Trump-smiting heroes has strayed far from anyone deserving the title even as the qualification for the job remained hilariously low. Felon Michael Avenatti was a contender, anal porn star Stormy Daniels, and felon Michael Cohen, too. Along the way James Comey, John Brennan, Michael Hayden, Christopher Steele, and James Clapper were all given some hero time, and of course the run by Robert Mueller as Savior-in-Chief. There was the anonymous whistleblower and a handful of State Department drones at the impeachment hearings whose names are so long forgotten they might as well have been anonymous. Even the virus was given the chance at hero status if it would have been horrible enough to end this presidency.

There were also the mini-heroes like Colin Kaepernick or the women’s soccer team, whose minor protests were turned into national moments by the MSM. They do keep trying for relevancy; pink haired soccer starlet Megan Rapinoe is threatening to run for some office, and joined other minor celebs in signing a petition to defund police forces. Kaepernick started a defense fund for protesters, quoting Malcolm X to warn “Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”

The hero-seeking media partnered them with every Democratic black candidate of any type or plain white woman who could check boxes (single mom, lesbian, HIV+, veteran, etc.) The high point of this low point was reached with AOC and her Squad, whose only real accomplishments have been relentless self-promotion and helping push Nancy Pelosi into an impeachment process that squandered the Blue Wave.

But rioters as the new heroes? That’s who is left? No one wants bad cops, and every day America suffers for its original sin of slavery and 200 year failure to find repentance. The only answer the country seems to have come up with is to allow rioters to run amuck every few years to let the pressure reset. Pick your favorite — the TV version following Rodney King, the blast from Ferguson, or something old school from the 1970s out of Watts or the Bronx.

In New York City we face an 8 pm everyone-off-the streets curfew, the first in 75 years (the COVID lockdown is also concurrently still in effect.) But the protests continue, with several hundred people last night closing down streets adjacent to my apartment building. Many stores in this part of America’s richest city had already been boarded up; the men putting up the plywood coming in from white working class neighborhoods in nearby Queens said to me they’re grateful for the work post-COVID, “but if I ever have to do this for my own neighborhood some mf is gonna suffer.”

The protesters themselves were about two-thirds white, uniformly in their mid-to-late twenties. People wearing Bernie t-shirts outnumbered those still practicing social distancing by about 6:1. Everyone who would tell me where they lived said Brooklyn but if you live here you would have already guessed that. The blacks in the group appeared to be joining spontaneously from the surrounding public housing blocks and not mingling. Their chants weren’t the organized ones of the white kids, mostly “f*ck the police” accompanied by gang signs or middle fingers, just rage cleansed of politics.

None of the black protesters would speak to me, but the white protesters wouldn’t stop. They knew media and my notebook drew them like shadows to a lamp. Asked what they wanted, everyone had their lines down — it was justice and peace — but no one really had an answer to how this demonstration would help create those things. What law could Congress pass to fix any of this? Raising awareness seemed to be the closest anyone could get.

Some apartments in the area have hired private security, those beefy guys you usually see checking IDs at night clubs. One hotel employee said his five-star place had former SEALS at the door. Two NYPD helicopters were overhead for almost two hours, top cover Baghdad-style, watching the rooftops. People living nearby are angry and afraid, and such people will defend themselves, and that will be a terrible, terrible thing. It seems leaders on all sides are setting us against each other and we are embracing that as a new way of life. When was your last pleasant but intense political discussion with friends?

It was hard to connect the odd collection of images and impressions from the street with a new theme among the righteous but uneducated on social media. They seem to think burning a Target is the modern equivalent of the American Revolution against the British. I listened to the Hamilton score twice now, and even read the Klassic Komics version of Federalist Papers, and can’t find anywhere the American side whined about the British being too rough. Instead, they understood a revolution meant risking their lives, their honor, and their sacred fortunes. Denied representation under an undemocratic system, they fought.

The Founders took to the streets with none of the protections of the Bill of Rights. It was only after they won those early heroes created a Bill of Rights. It came as a package deal, because the Founders wanted to create a society where peaceful change was written into the law and so another bloody revolution was something their children would not have to undertake.

That fundamental message was missed by the Democratic Party of Fairfax, Virginia. They tweeted (now deleted but the sentiment is widely shared) “Riots are an integral part of this country’s march towards progress.” No. Riots are not a vehicle for political change in a democracy. They are the antithesis of democratic change, change by force with no desire for compromise.

It was only a week ago people said protests against government (specifically COVID restrictions) were wrong and dangerous, we should listen to the authorities, and were glad the cops were out there enforcing social distancing and masking. The people I saw at yesterday’s protest looked a lot like the people hissing at me in Whole Foods for not wearing a mask. They likely believe the 1A protects their protests but not those of the rednecks at the statehouse. To them every offense is a lynching, every day the apocalypse, every Tweet another final blow to democracy, every misunderstanding another example of systematic racism if not sexism, every non-white non-male non-straight American another victim.

Once you understand how shallow and and tiresome and hypocritical such views are you will understand the 2016 election, and in about 150 very long days from now, the 2020 election. No heroes, or Russians for that matter, necessary.
  

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

The Neverending Trump Story

June 6, 2020 // 5 Comments »

 
If you get to the end of this and think all it’s doing is defending Trump, you’ve missed the point.

For the first time in months there is no front page COVID story. The replacement is the police killing in Minneapolis and chaos everywhere else. But the repurposing is familiar: blame Trump for the tragedy to defeat him in November.

For months there were ran charts and tickers of COVID infections, deaths, missing ventilators, anything countable that made things look bad. When the stock market was hemorrhaging money those numbers were in red up front. Today, if it’s COVID info you seek, look for it where it started, before it was rebooted from Wuhan’s Virus to Trump’s Virus, back in the business section. Somebody else’s blood is going to have to rescue Biden.

The precipitating news peg is the death of another black man at the hands of another white cop under another set of dubious circumstances. If 100,000 COVID deaths can’t shake your faith in Trump, maybe one more of these will. In the eyes of the media, it is of course all Trump’s fault. The problem with that is former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, now charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, previously shot one suspect, was involved in the fatal shooting of another, and received at least 17 complaints during his nearly two decades with the department.

Nobody prosecuted him for any of that, including never-gonna-be-VP Amy Klobuchar, as a county prosecutor. Klobuchar also did not criminally charge other cops in the more than two dozen officer-involved fatalities during her time as prosecutor. She punted those decisions to a grand jury. Current Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who was a lawyer and state legislator when Klobuchar was prosecutor, defended Klobuchar’s record as “a practice that was common at the time.” That’s another way of saying systematic.

One person Klobuchar systematically declined to prosecute was today’s villian Derek Chauvin. In 2006 he was one of six officers who shot Wayne Reyes after Reyes aimed a shotgun at police after stabbing two people. Small world. And that’s before anyone looks again at Biden’s own record on these things, from Cornpop on forward.

See, this week happened before. George Bush had Rodney King. Under Bill Clinton it was Amadou Diallo shot 41 times, remembered in the Springsteen song American Skin (41 Shots). For George W. Bush, it was Sean Bell. Eric Garner was strangled by police during the Obama term, alongside the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

Barack Obama said what happened last week in Minnesota “shouldn’t be normal in 2020 America” when in fact it has been normal for some time now, including under his watch. After the police killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland in 2015, Obama called the protesters “criminals.” Oops. But the media has him covered now; Vox jumped in this round with “being a former president is different. Now that he is out of office, Obama is more free to try to lead the social change his candidacy once promised.” Change? Leadership? Obama’s Justice Department did not prosecute Eric Gardner’s killer. Obama’s Justice Department did not prosecute Michael Brown’s killer. So today there is still no justice, no peace. Blame Trump.

If that Minnesota cop was a violent racist, he certainly didn’t take the red pill from Trump’s hand, not with two decades of personal complaints and two decades of signature national violence and two decades of prosecutorial somnolence behind him. Remind us again, who was the black Democratic president of the United States during most of that time? Who was his black Democratic attorney general? And someone is trying to use racism in 2020 to take down Trump?

Wait, breaking news! Trump is threatening to kill Americans! In what the New York Times characterized as “an overtly violent ultimatum to protesters,” Trump tweeted the phrase “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” and threatened to deploy the National Guard to Minneapolis.

Now of course the Times knows but didn’t let on to the rubes it knows that it is very, very close to impossible for the president to federalize the National Guard for domestic law enforcement (we slogged through the explanations two years ago in another faux-panic Trump was going to order the Guard to enforce immigration laws.) The Guard generally answers to its state governor, and in the case of Minnesota, Governor Walz already called for full mobilization. It was just a tweet, carrying the weight of a feather. So it’s fitting the punishment is a tagged violation of Twitter rules and not impeachment this time.

The problem with COVID as the Trump Killer was the wrong people ended up dying, and not enough of them. Had the early predictions of millions of deaths sweeping across the nation had any truth in them, that would be hard to ignore. Had the early predictions of COVID zombies using their last strength to fight  over the remaining ventilators come to pass, that would have landed a knockout punch.

COVID also killed the wrong people. One can imagine Democratic strategists shouting “Find me some white cheerleaders in Wisconsin who will never realize their dreams, dammit!” Instead, the dead were a majority poor and black, with about half of all COVID deaths in the U.S. in ravaged and neglected parts of the New York City area no one really cared much about before all this. You can see some of those areas on TV today, filled with protesters fighting cops. A few efforts at trying to tie COVID into a greater tapestry of economic inequality didn’t get very far; nobody had much concern for Amazon warehouse workers when they themselves were out of work and waiting on packages of Nutter Butters.

COVID was fundamentally a crisis of economic inequality; the bodies in New York City are the proof. If it was a failure of leadership, then that failure must be traced back some 50 years, and has less to do with a lack of PPE in 2020 than it does with a lack of national healthcare and a living wage contact traced from Nixon to whoever the next guy turns out to be, because both candidates have promised to do nothing new enough to fix those things.

It is sad and cruel and horrible to say no one cared in the end enough for the virus to beat Trump but that is what happened. Remember it in a few weeks when the news has forgotten George Floyd.

The failure of Trump not failing as a leader during COVID, or with police violence, follows a long string of similar stuff, beginning even before his inauguration. For three years we were told the president was literally a Kremlin agent doing Putin’s business out of the Oval Office based on blackmail. Then there was something about the Ukraine that rose to the level of actual impeachment that is still hard to explain and seemed to implicate Biden as much as Trump. Trump will kill us all was a meme Democrats threw against the wall multiple times, with various North Korean and Iranian wars and of course the virus. And now, forget all that. It’s racism, stupid.

Former cop Derek Chauvin didn’t wait for Trump to send out a tweet, or even take office, before becoming violent. He’d been at that for two decades. The systematic racism in Minnesota has roots deep into (d/D)emocratic governance, and wasn’t enabled by a few tweets. This is the same answer for the virus; the economic inequality which drove the virus in places like New York City has very little to do with Trump or his supposed lack of leadership, same as it had nothing to do with the made-up ventilator shortage. It is no surprise in 2020 two leading causes of death among the poor and black are police shooting and COVID.

These things run deep within our society. How obvious does it need to be, it’s not Him, it is Us. The media trying to bundle the latest crisis up and slap a “Trump” label on it, like before with Russia, Ukraine, war, and COVID, will do little to hurt his election chances, and do much to make it clear everyone continues to look the other way. If it is just a Trump problem (or a he’s on Twitter problem), it lives and dies with Trump, whenever that is. That assures us following Biden or Trump this year, or Donald Duck in 2024, there will be another virus which reapers through the poor, and long before then another street killing in a place that should be as far away as Minnesota.

If all we do is play politics with tragedy that’s all we’ll ever do toward resolving tragedy. Resolution lies in looking forward to seeking fundamental solutions over looking backward to assign blame. People in the comments below will claim this is defending Trump. That is as wrong as it is irrelevant. If anyone thinks more violence is the answer, or that this will elect Biden, or that his administration will change things, you’re missing the most important point: the revolution has been televised. You’ve watched it already, you just don’t realize which side won.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy