The return of the mask: the CDC and the Biden administration keep saying to follow the science. But what science?

The New Neo Posted on by

During the Trump administration, the left demanded the most rigorous of clinical trials and controls before any possible treatment that the right – and Trump in particular – might have suggested was possibly helpful in fighting COVID. And yet this is the situation today:

The nation’s top infectious disease expert [Fauci] says the Indian ‘Delta’ Covid variant has the same viral levels in vaccinated people who have breakthrough infections as in those who are unvaccinated…

But the CDC has yet to publicly share new research on Delta transmission among the vaccinated that would back up its new mask guidance and outside experts are calling for the agency to show them the data.

Data? You don’t need no steenking data from us. We’re the CDC! We’ll show it to you someday:

A citation in the updated masking guidance simply reads, ‘CDC COVID-19 Response Team, unpublished data, 2021.’

These data come from investigations of recent Delta-caused outbreaks, in which researchers compared infections among vaccinated and unvaccinated people, according to the Washington Post.

The findings will be ‘published imminently’ per reporting from The Post.

Some scientists – actual, bona fide scientists – would like to check it out rather than take it on faith:

They’re making a claim that people with delta who are vaccinated and unvaccinated have similar levels of viral load, but nobody knows what that means,’ Dr Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Post.

‘It’s meaningless unless we see the data.’

Other experts aren’t convinced that a higher viral load actually leads to Delta’s transmission among vaccinated people.

There’s a whole chain of assumptions here by the CDC. The first is that the CDC’s data, whatever it is, holds up and that with the Delta strain the vaccinated and unvaccinated who get COVID have the same viral load. The second is that with Delta the nasal viral load really does reliably determine transmissibility, and that this means that both groups are equally likely to spread the disease to others. The third is that masking would significantly protect from such spreading with Delta. The fourth is that the Delta variant will cause a rise in serious cases and deaths and not just in cases and/or positive test results. The fifth is that there are a very significant number of breakthrough COVID cases in the vaccinated in this country, enough to justify requiring their masking.

I’m probably leaving out a few assumptions, but you get the idea.

More:

‘I feel like nasal viral load is one part of a lot of other parts’ that determine how infectious a person is, biostatistician Natalie Dean told The Post.

Dean added that she thinks other important factors may be how much virus is present in a patient’s throat or lungs…

…[T]he CDC is not tracking less-severe breakthrough infections. In May, the agency switched its strategy to only investigate and report those infections that cause hospitalization or death

Scientists have critiqued this move for leaving the U.S. without crucial data to monitor the cases caused by Delta and other variants.

Apparently this recent “masks even for the vaccinated” proclamation was also based on a study from India that was initially rejected by a Nature Portfolio Journal and is currently out for “revision”:

The study in question from researchers in India analyzed vaccine breakthrough in over 100 healthcare workers and claims to show that a COVID-19 Delta variant infection generates a higher viral load in comparison to other variants.

Despite no mention in the study of viral loads from the variant against unvaccinated individuals, the CDC cited it in yesterday’s updated brief as evidence that the Delta variant is transmissible from a vaccinated individual with a breakthrough infection.

This study does not compare vaccinated viral loads to unvaccinated viral loads; it compares Delta viral loads to viral loads in other variants and finds them to be higher. And the vaccination involved in India is AstraZeneca, not used in the US and known to be less effective against COVID than Pfizer and Moderna, which are used here. In addition, the abstract to the article says that “severe disease in fully vaccinated HCW [health care workers] was rare.” So, even if ultimately approved for publication, the relevance of this article to the situation here is highly suspect.

I can’t say exactly where I think the threshold should lie for a recommendation for restrictions like this, but I can say that I don’t think it has been met in this case at all. And on these slender reeds they base a recommendation for the vaccinated to mask up in places experiencing an upswing. Not only that, but a lot of people are taking this to mean that vaccines “don’t work,” which discourages vaccination rather than encouraging it.

What’s going on? Is it just that the authorities are in love with the sound of their own authoritative voices, addicted to restricting liberty and to telling people what to do? And to feeling oh-so-virtuous as they make their proclamations and get people accustomed to the habit of obedience? I think it’s at least partly that. But I think another reason is that they are terrified that the numbers will go up under their watch, and that it will have negative political repercussions for their side. Of course, all this back and forth, masking and unmasking and masking again, will almost certainly have negative political repercussions for them, too.

People arriving in this country illegally are being released…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the vast majority are not showing up again for hearings or other appearances at ICE offices.

No surprise whatsoever.

The White House is doing its best to say this is all just routine and everything will be fine in the end.

“We will always be a nation of borders, and we will enforce our immigration laws in a way that is fair and just. We will continue to work to fortify an orderly immigration system,” the White House said in a fact sheet released Tuesday morning.

Blah blah blah blah blah-blah fair and just. Blah blah blah blah blah-blah fair and just…

Why should we care how how the Capitol Police or members of Congress felt on January 6th?

The New Neo Posted on by

Their therapists should care. Their families and friends should care. But I can’t figure out why the rest of us should – at least, not in the legal, investigative sense of trying to find out what really happened on January 6th and why.

And yet that was certainly one of the major elements of yesterday’s testimony in the Congressional hearings on the matter. Of course, we know that the hearings aren’t really to investigate; they are political theater produced and directed by the Democrats, and the reviews are from their friends in the MSM. But I’m speaking on behalf of the public, and I even mean the Democrat-voting public: why should we care how they felt? It’s irrelevant, although obviously it’s a deliberate way to appeal to people’s emotions and empathy rather than to their logic and judgment.

A person can be part of an event and have a lot of feelings. It doesn’t mean that, in retrospect, those feelings are valid in terms of being an accurate reflection of what was happening that day in the objective sense. But we care less and less and less these days about the objective sense, and when I say “these days” I mean the phenomenon began at least thirty years ago and probably closer to fifty.

I’ve previously described an incident in my life when I recognized this. It happened in the early 90s, when I had gone back to school and was taking one undergraduate course in addition to my graduate courses. I was twenty years or so older than the other students, and we were discussing an incident at the school in which some female students had been offended by something a professor had said, and accused him of sexual inappropriateness. He had been suspended and the case was awaiting adjudication, but I was stunned to learn that all the people in the class who spoke on the matter believed that the students’ perceptions of harassment were all that mattered. No objective standard needed to be applied. It was enough that something he said made them uncomfortable.

His words, however, were not anything that most human beings would find the least bit objectionable. I thought he was being railroaded, and I thought the women who had objected needed professional help to get them to understand that the world didn’t revolve around their perceptions and their needs. When I stood up to say my piece in class I didn’t say it that harshly, but I pointed out that just because a person has a feeling about an incident doesn’t make that feeling objectively true, and that legal matters need to proceed using objective standards that are reasonable.

My words were met with silence and a shrug or two. That was it. Then the class moved on to the next person, who continued in the original vein as though I hadn’t even spoken. It was at that point, thirty years ago, that I realized something had gone very very wrong. I hadn’t been among college-age students for twenty years, but there had been some sort of vast sea change that I didn’t understand at the time.

I think I’ve come to understand it in more recent years, and we’re seeing it bear fruit now in so many ways.

Such as:

Yes, we’ve got voice records

The New Neo Posted on by

I was just on the phone clearing something up with my credit card company, and while I was waiting I got the usual “we will be recording this conversation” message.

I can’t remember when that first began, but I know it was years ago. I’ve always assumed it was for the sake of looking up the conversation in case there was some future dispute about what happened during the exchange, but today they added a new message that indicated my recording was being saved for voice recognition security purposes.

And that’s just my credit card company. I can only imagine what the government has.

It’s said that, before you expire, your entire life flashes before your eyes. But alternatively, if you want to view it while still alive (or at least the most recent decade or so of it), just call the government and ask them for a showing.

Frei and Barnes explain the Whitmer kidnap case, entrapment law, and the track record of the FBI (plus, I take a foray into the history of the Mark Felt prosecution)

The New Neo Posted on by

I know I’ve already written quite a bit about the Whitmer defendants and the issue of possible entrapment, but this discussion by Viva Frei and Robert Barnes on the topic is particularly good and not all that long:

And this is something I came across last night. I was looking up Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat,” who was second in command of the FBI at the time of Watergate. I had forgotten – if in fact I ever even knew – this incident in his life:

By 1972 Felt was heading the investigation into the Weather Underground, which had planted bombs at the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department building. Felt, along with Edward S. Miller, ordered FBI agents to break into homes secretly in 1972 and 1973, without a search warrant, on nine separate occasions. These kinds of FBI operations were known as “black bag jobs”. The break-ins occurred at five addresses in New York and New Jersey, at the homes of relatives and acquaintances of Weather Underground members. They did not contribute to the capture of any fugitives. The use of “black bag jobs” by the FBI was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in the Plamondon case, 407 U.S. 297 (1972).

The Church Committee of Congress revealed the FBI’s illegal activities, and many agents were investigated. In 1976 Felt publicly stated he had ordered break-ins, and recommended against punishment of individual agents who had carried out orders. Felt also stated that Patrick Gray had also authorized the break-ins, but Gray denied this. Felt said on the CBS television program Face the Nation he would probably be a “scapegoat” for the Bureau’s work. “I think this is justified and I’d do it again tomorrow,” he said on the program. While admitting the break-ins were “extralegal”, he justified them as protecting the “greater good”. Felt said:

“To not take action against these people and know of a bombing in advance would simply be to stick your fingers in your ears and protect your eardrums when the explosion went off and then start the investigation.”

Griffin Bell, the Attorney General in the Jimmy Carter administration, directed investigation of these cases. On April 10, 1978, a federal grand jury charged Felt, Miller, and Gray with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens by searching their homes without warrants…

Felt told his biographer Ronald Kessler: “I was shocked that I was indicted. You would be too, if you did what you thought was in the best interests of the country and someone on technical grounds indicted you.”

Note Felt’s attitude towards illegal searches of people who were only related to the suspects. He seemed to think that the prohibition against such searches is a mere technicality, and that his motives – “the best interests of the country” – should justify a federal agency such as the FBI breaking the law. Not only that, but Nixon testified in the trial for Felt’s defense, saying that the Nixon administration had authorized Felt to do it, and that in doing so “was acting on precedents established by a number of Presidential directives dating to 1939.”

So this was apparently commonplace. The 1939 date indicates to me that it may have started in connection with the war in Europe and then our own entry into the war, and investigating possible spies or enemy agents in the US. In addition, during Felt’s trial:

…former Attorneys General Mitchell, Kleindienst, Herbert Brownell Jr., Nicholas Katzenbach, and Ramsey Clark, all of whom said warrantless searches in national security matters were commonplace and understood not to be illegal. Mitchell and Kleindienst denied they had authorized any of the break-ins at issue in the trial. (The Bureau used a national security justification for the searches because it alleged the Weather Underground was in the employ of Cuba.)

So in these older cases – which featured illegal searches by the FBI rather than possible entrapment scenarios orchestrated by the same agency (although the latter also occurred and are discussed by Barnes in the video above) – there was ostensibly a foreign country involved, and the permission was given by the president.

Felt was convicted, but the sentence was light – just a fine, and no prison time. Meanwhile, Reagan had just been elected, and not long after he took office he pardoned Felt (and Miller, who had worked under Felt and had also been convicted). Reagan said that they acted in the interests of the country and “in the belief that they had grants of authority reaching to the highest levels of government.”

I don’t think I followed the case at all at the time. One reason is that I was a new mother with a young baby, and I don’t think I was even watching the news. Even if I had followed it, I would never have understand that Felt was Deep Throat and the FBI source for the Watergate story as told by Woodward and Bernstein; his identity was unknown for many years.

I do recall, however, being perturbed by government overreaches. There is always a conflict between the need to apprehend actual plotters and terrorists, and the need to protect individual rights. Our legal system used to be based on the idea that it was okay if at times a guilty person went free in order to keep the government from infringing too much on the liberty of its people.

But of course, as is often said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Terrorists are sometimes real, and are willing to commit great violence.

By now, though, the government and agencies such as the FBI have amply demonstrated they have little to no respect for liberty, and that they consider infringements on liberty and rights to be mere “technical grounds” that are unimportant as long as the rights of the correct people are being violated. But the rules that are being flouted are not arbitrary. They are there to preserve against just that kind of government tyranny, which always employs rhetoric such as “the best interests of the country” as an excuse for doing whatever it wishes.

[NOTE: It’s also interesting that back in 1980-1981 someone as high up in the FBI as Felt was actually tried and convicted of anything. Of course, the trial was instigated by a later administration controlled by a different party, one that was reacting to Watergate and what was seen as abuse by the executive branch during Watergate. As far as I can tell after reading about Felt, even though he was Deep Throat and helped to bring down Nixon (who apparently was aware by the time of the 1980 trial that Felt had been Deep Throat, and yet testified in his defense), Felt was essentially on the right rather than on the left. And his illegal searches were in the service of apprehending terrorists on the left. Perhaps that’s why the Carter administration was intent on prosecuting him.]

Red sun

The New Neo Posted on by

I happened to go outside yesterday a little while before the sun was due to set, and I saw a most extraordinary thing: the sun, very low in the sky, looked exactly like a bright red ball. Not orange, as it sometimes does at sunset time. Not pinkish. Blood-red, and very large because it was near the horizon.

It was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen in my life. It was also rather frightening, although I realized it must be connected to some unusual atmospheric conditions. And so it was, as this article from a Chicago newspaper explains:

The sun has appeared with a red hue across much of the northern United States this week due to smoke from wildfires on the West Coast and in Canada.

The smoke has blown all the way across the continent due to air currents in the upper atmosphere and has even caused an air quality advisory for some areas.

The smoke essentially acts like an Instagram filter for the sky – sunlight naturally interacts with very small particles in the atmosphere and scatters colors in the visible spectrum. With more scattering taking place than usual, red (the color with the longest wavelength) appears more prominently.

It wasn’t just the red color that was odd, although that was the strangest thing. The sun also had a more circular appearance with sharper borders than usual, because there were no rays emanating from it.

It’s an extremely strange feeling to see a phenomenon so unusual affecting something you see nearly every day. It’s not hard to understand how humans of long ago felt that such things were omens of great import.

Unfortunately, by the time I stopped gaping and thought to try to take a photo, the sun had pretty much disappeared behind the trees near the horizon. But the article at the link above has an older photo that captures exactly what the sun looked like here yesterday, and this Toronto video captures it as well (except a smaller sun, higher in the sky):

FBI informants and the entrapment defense

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a piece in the NY Post about FBI informers entitled, “The FBI is made of snitches, often trapping Americans into committing crimes.” Very timely, for obvious reasons. An excerpt:

[The FBI has] become an organization of snitches and spies, borderline entrapping the angry and the weak-minded into committing crimes. Nearly a decade ago, New York Times’ David K. Shipler listed a series of would-be terrorist plots thwarted by the FBI — only to find that the vast majority of them were facilitated by agents and informers posing as terrorists themselves. They even chauffeured some of the suspects to the would-be crime scenes themselves, only to foil the “plot” at the last minute.

Note, by the way, that back then it was a liberal outfit like the NY Times that seemed aware of the strong possibility that the plot would not have been fleshed out but for the FBI, even though at this point the Times seems to be ignoring the issue. The reason for the switch is obvious. Back then the victims were Muslim terrorist wannabees, and now they are Trump supporters.

I recall that back then, sometimes it seemed to me that the accused might have been led in their plots by the FBI. That was disturbing, but at the time I assumed – wrongly, I now believe – that the FBI was only doing this to people who were determined to commit such crimes on their own and that the agency was probably not overstepping for the most part.

The legal defense of entrapment for defendants is skewed towards empowering the authorities and making it very very hard for the accused to use it as a defense. See this:

A valid entrapment defense has two related elements: (1) government inducement of the crime, and (2) the defendant’s lack of predisposition to engage in the criminal conduct. Mathews v. United States, 485 U.S. 58, 63 (1988). Of the two elements, predisposition is by far the more important.

Inducement is the threshold issue in the entrapment defense. Mere solicitation to commit a crime is not inducement. Sorrells v. United States, 287 U.S. 435, 451 (1932). Nor does the government’s use of artifice, stratagem, pretense, or deceit establish inducement. Id. at 441. Rather, inducement requires a showing of at least persuasion or mild coercion, United States v. Nations, 764 F.2d 1073, 1080 (5th Cir. 1985); pleas based on need, sympathy, or friendship, ibid.; or extraordinary promises of the sort “that would blind the ordinary person to his legal duties,” United States v. Evans, 924 F.2d 714, 717 (7th Cir. 1991). See also United States v. Kelly, 748 F.2d 691, 698 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (inducement shown only if government’s behavior was such that “a law-abiding citizen’s will to obey the law could have been overborne”); United States v. Johnson, 872 F.2d 612, 620 (5th Cir. 1989) (inducement shown if government created “a substantial risk that an offense would be committed by a person other than one ready to commit it”).

Even if inducement has been shown, a finding of predisposition is fatal to an entrapment defense. The predisposition inquiry focuses upon whether the defendant “was an unwary innocent or, instead, an unwary criminal who readily availed himself of the opportunity to perpetrate the crime.” Mathews, 485 U.S. at 63. Thus, predisposition should not be confused with intent or mens rea: a person may have the requisite intent to commit the crime, yet be entrapped. Also, predisposition may exist even in the absence of prior criminal involvement: “the ready commission of the criminal act,” such as where a defendant promptly accepts an undercover agent’s offer of an opportunity to buy or sell drugs, may itself establish predisposition. Jacobson, 503 U.S. at 550.

My interpretation of this – and granted, I’m not an expert – would be that “predisposition” would be deemed to have been present even if that predisposition was only a bunch of bragging hot air blather that would never have turned into an act but for the organizing help and motivation provided by FBI agents. Yes, undercover agents need to be able to infiltrate terrorist groups, but they shouldn’t be the movers and shakers therein, egging the other participants on.

And yet I believe that happens all too often. And now that the left is in the driver’s seat in the FBI and the DOJ, it’s being used to silence and intimidate and punish their political enemies on the right.

I’ll give the last word to the Babylon Bee, which has an article with this title: “FBI Discovers Building Full Of Dangerous Extremists Organizing Acts Of Terror Across Country”:

In a shocking twist, the organization is headquartered right in Washington, D.C., at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building.

The group was uncovered after FBI agents began tracing most of the terror plots in this country back to one giant organization. “This is bigger than any of us realize,” said the founder of the FBI, Bob FBI. “It’s all connected. Pretty much every terror plot of the last few decades was being encouraged in secret by this one giant, shadowy organization. But rest assured, we’re going to make sure these guys pay for what they’ve done to our country. No one hatches terror plots under our watch.”

Funny, but sad.

Why has Australia gone stark raving mad?

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, it sometimes feels as though the entire world has gone stark raving mad lately. But some places have gone more mad than others:

Case in point, Australia:

It’s hard to know exactly when Australia’s pandemic response crossed the line from tragedy into farce. But future historians could do worse than pinpoint the moment when Sydney’s chief health supremo told the city’s residents to stop being friendly to one another when they ventured out to buy essentials, lest they get themselves and others killed.

“Whilst it is in human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately this is not the time to do that . . . don’t start up a conversation,” scolded Kerry Chant, the endlessly tut-tutting chief health officer of New South Wales, at a news conference last week. “We want to make sure as we go about our daily lives that we do not come into contact with anyone who could pose a risk.”

Never mind that you can’t even go near a shop without a mask, she said. Masks aren’t foolproof and this is, in her words, “no time for complacency.” A simple g’day, in other words, could be deadly.

Happily, most of us who live in Sydney ignored the warning.

So maybe it’s not Australia as a whole that’s gone mad, but Australia’s health officials and the politicians who support them:

Australians need permission from the federal government to leave the country—applications succeed about half the time—and Australia’s states throw up their borders against one another at the slightest hint of trouble. Residents of Sydney may leave their homes only if it is “essential,” and not stray more than six miles when they do.

This is before discussing the economic fallout from the latest lockdowns. Billions will be spent by government or lost by businesses as a result.

It’s especially ironic considering that Australia’s case and death numbers are low – but, as the article goes on to explain, that may be part of the reason the government keeps the Draconian rules in place:

So how did Australia become a hermit kingdom? Geography plays a large part. By mistaking their good luck for brilliance in being able to pull up the drawbridge to the world at the start of the pandemic, Australians quickly became trapped in an “elimination” mindset that is now officially referred to as Covid Zero…

Elected officials have allowed their judgment to be replaced by that of the new priestly class of health mandarins like Dr. Chant, on whose edicts the country hangs. Hiding behind the “health advice” of such officials has become the national sport of Australia’s politicians.

I would say “read the whole thing,” but it’s behind the Wall Street Journal paywall. That’s why the initial link in this post is to the Instapundit piece about it, which liberally quotes the article.

I agree that Australia fell into the trap of thinking it could keep COVID at bay almost entirely and almost forever, if it just did the right thing. It was easier for Australia, compared to nations with land borders, to limit the goings and comings of both foreigners and of its citizens. It committed to that, and now it doesn’t seem to be able or willing to turn back.

I’ve never been to Australia, but I heard as a child and young adult that it was a land of bold, independent people. I’m sure some Australians still fit that description; YouTuber “Ozzy Man” certainly comes to mind (an irreverant sense of humor is often part of it). But I’ve heard that in recent years – even prior to COVID – leftism, sheepish obedience, and wokism have taken over to a large extent, particularly in the big cities where the vast bulk of Australia’s population lies. When did it happen?

[ADDENDUM: Australia and the 1918-1919 flu pandemic.]