Condemned to repeat it?

The New Neo Posted on by

David Foster writes:

We have a century of evidence of what happens to a society when it falls into the traps of centralized economic planning, suppression of free speech, and the categorization of people–especially ethnic categorization. But an awful lot of people, including powerful and influential people, seem to want to go in these directions.

I can have some sympathy for people who became Communists and/or advocates of world government back in the 1920s. The theory of centralized economic planning is very seductive (see this, for the actual practice), and the slaughter of the First World War led people to grasp at any possible way of avoiding such horrors in the future…

And [today] we see the party, the political movement, and the individual politicians behind all of these directly totalitarian policies–many with clearly Fascist and/or Marxist lineage…being winked at or even embraced by many of those who were so quick to accuse Trump–and his supporters–of being ‘Fascists.’

My brothers and sisters, they cannot do it again. Only a race of madmen could do it again—

That last paragraph is a quote from A Canticle For Liebowitz, a futuristic novel about society rebuilding after a nuclear conflagration.

It is easy to understand why it seems “mad” – as in, “insane” – to go this way again. But it is also human nature, I submit, and it is not literally insane although it is tragic. After all, how often do we learn from experience, even in our private lives? Only sometimes, and only some people, and it usually takes an event that’s very personal and dramatic to cause the change. When I wrote “a mind is a difficult thing to change,” I wasn’t kidding and I wasn’t exaggerating.

Why is that the case? I don’t know, but here are certain things I believe may go towards explaining at least some of it:

(1) A person has to be paying attention and be able to connect the dots. There are often ways to rationalize away the conclusions one could and should draw.

(2) Emotions are huge drivers of behavior both personal and political. The leftist dream is enticing (I’ve written many posts about that, some of which you can find by doing a search for “socialism” on this blog), and it’s apparently easy to say “this time it will be different because we’re changing this detail or that one.” In this previous post I listed some of the emotions that drive the attraction to leftist thought: covetousness, anger, guilt, a desire to feel righteous, and the need for simple-sounding solutions.

(3) Leftists are dedicated True Believers, and whether their belief is sincere or just a way to get power, the result is that they are relentless in pursuing their goals. Taking over the educational establishment was the key to almost everything that has followed, and that includes legal education that forms the viewpoints of many judges and lawyers dedicated to The Cause.

(4) To even have a chance of learning from experience one must have more experiences and more knowledge than most young people have today. With a lowered voting age of eighteen, many people delaying adulthood in order to be students past that point, and the corruption of the teaching of history, most young people not only have the usual idealism and naivete of young people, but less experience in the real world and less knowledge of the past with which to compare the present. This is by design, and it is hurting us terribly.

As Santayana said in his famous quote:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

That’s true of the younger people, but it shouldn’t be true of the people in charge right now, who are older (and in some cases old). I submit that it’s not true of them, and that they remember the past but have a different interpretation of it and a different goal for the future. Their interpretation of the past is that all the bad things that happened were the result of the right or of bad luck, and their goal for the future is that the left will be in power forever.

The Biden administration is all too predictable, and the consequences are already awful

The New Neo Posted on by

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Yet between 2017 and 2021 there was relatively little violence in Israel and on the West Bank. Whatever our ideologies and politics, we all know the one reason why there is chaos now and not then.

The Trump Administration assumed that whenever there is perceived distance between the United States and democratic Israel, then unsavory players exploit the void and try things they otherwise would not…

For such a supposedly provocative Trump Administration, peace, not war, followed from its initiatives…

But if we were looking to achieve the exact opposite, then calm can become war in five easy steps:

1) Revive Iran…

2) Discourage Arab moderates…

3) Reboot corrupt Palestinian dictatorships…

4) Adopt globalist moral equivalence…

5) Do the exact opposite of the Trump Administration. In Pavlovian fashion, if Trump was evil and coarse, then erase all his evil and coarse policies without exception. Just as border walls, fracking, pipelines, low inflation, and low unemployment are now inherently bad, so too are all of Trump’s policies in the Middle East.

In the article, Hanson fleshes out each of those five points in some detail. The strange thing is that, to any thinking person following current events, these observations should be obvious – but at least half the country disagrees with them, and/or some even think the current results are good. Hanson then adds [emphasis mine]:

Is such a scenario [Middle East war escalation] alarmist or fantastical?

No more than concluding that printing $5 trillion in new money, while discouraging employment and production, is inflationary.

No more than assuming that halting the southern border wall, rendering immigration law inert, and stopping border enforcement all encourage illegal immigration.

No more than believing that canceling pipelines, stopping new oil and gas leases on federal lands, promising to end fossil fuels in 20 years, and warning of new taxes and regulations, discourage oil producers from gearing up to meet demand, while encouraging foreign criminal hackers to take out our ability to deliver fossil fuels.

And no more than thinking that defunding the police and skipping arrests and indictments empower the lawbreakers and spike crime.

Historians will later calibrate whether in all these policies their authors were simply incompetent, misguided, and naïve, or else nihilists who equated ensuing chaos and pain as precursors to long-overdue equity and social justice.

The new American Middle East policy is an extension of the new American domestic policy. In both cases, malign naïveté leads to clueless hubris that ends in catastrophe.

Fools AND knaves.

The day Biden was elected – no, actually many many months before, when I perceived there was a good chance that Trump would lose and some leftist candidate would win – I saw the writing on the wall. As I’ve said many times, it didn’t take extreme brilliance to see it, either. It was obvious what any of the Democrats who had a chance of winning – Warren, Sanders, Biden, etc. – was going to do, and it was obvious what the results would be. We had a small preview during the Obama years, and this would be Obama redux times 10. Maybe times 100.

I don’t know whether a full-fledged Middle East war is in the cards. But I know that all of the already-terrible things that have occurred since Biden and company took office were utterly foreseeable, and yet were entered into anyway, and that most of the people I know either don’t pay attention, don’t see it, don’t care, or applaud what’s happened. I know that the effects of propaganda and groupthink are astoundingly large, and that the intelligent and well-meaning are not only not immune to them, but seem especially vulnerable.

“Elections have consequences” all right. But so do education, the MSM, entertainment, advertising, the legal system, and a host of other cultural and societal influences – and all of them affect elections and encourage certain results. And so here we are today.

This is the case whether you believe the 2020 election was fair or whether you believe it was not: here we are today. It is also true whether you believe that Joe Biden is in charge or not – or whether you believe, as I do, that he’s taking the advice of others but is still aware enough that he basically understands what he’s doing. Here we are today.

Why write about the Bee Gees?

The New Neo Posted on by

Why do I keep writing about the Bee Gees?

First, there’s the escape from difficult times that music affords. Long ago, dance class would take me away like that. It required my total concentration. And though music doesn’t require that, certain groups grab my concentration. With the Bee Gees, it’s the arrangements, the solo voices, the harmonies, the songs themselves, sometimes the words although that’s not primary, the emotions – and yes, I like looking at them.

But it’s also the fact that they are brothers, as well as their unusual and to me interesting history and the humor they display in so many interviews. I have a brother, my ex-husband has many brothers, and most of my boyfriends over the years were part of sibling groups heavy on brothers, too. Inter-brother humor is something with which I’m familiar, and I used to love to just sit and listen to my husband and brothers-in-law riff off each others’ humor. It sometimes had me literally falling on the floor laughing. They’re not all alive anymore, and that’s a tremendous grief in my life, and the Bee Gees make me think of that, too – loss, and in particular the loss of brothers.

Their story has it all. Rags to riches, literally. They made a decision as tiny children, so poor the three had to share a bed, that they were going to dedicate themselves to writing songs and singing harmony, and that they would become famous and rich (in that order) and someday live in America in houses next to each other. And it worked out just about like that, with more than a few speed bumps along the way. For many years they all had houses in Miami, two almost next door and the third just a few blocks away.

They fought, and they split early on for a while but realized two things. The first was that they missed each other as brothers. The second was that they missed each other musically. Alone they had great voices and could write beautiful songs, but together they were far more than the sum of those parts. In later years they periodically did projects alone, but always remained the Bee Gees and put out albums in five decades. Actually, they had performed in six decades, because as little children they already were the financial support of their parents and two other siblings, baby brother Andy and older sister Leslie.

Maurice Gibb’s death in 2003 is what ended the Bee Gees. Robin, Maurice’s fraternal twin, said he never recovered from it, and he died of cancer in 2012. Now Barry is alone. But there are a ton of videos online – concerts, single songs, interviews, documentaries – with many watchers. I’ve noticed that most of the comments at YouTube to Bee Gees videos take an almost proprietary and familial attitude towards the group: “our” Bee Gees are often mentioned, as though their admirers and they belong to one big family. Another way to refer to the three is “the boys” – there are people online from Australia who saw them as young children on TV and then followed them to the very end. There are many people who say they’ve listened to their music every day for fifty years, often before going to bed. They say it lightens their mood, calms and soothes them.

A lot of the comments are addressed to Barry as survivor, trying to comfort him after the losses of all three brothers (that includes twins Mo and Robin and their younger brother Andy), hoping he lives a long time, talking about their own losses, and saying how much the Bee Gees’ music has meant to them over the years. Here’s one that’s very typical – I chose it rather randomly:

You and your brothers taught me what music was about. As a child of the 80’s all I knew was metal head bangin till it bled, but one day I was introduced to the BEEGEES and my life was never the same. Ya’ll showed me that music was from the heart not the speakers. I mourn your loss. Forever will I be grateful for your music. God bless you and your family. The BEEGEES will forever be in my heart and soul. THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS YOU AND THE MEMORY OF YOUR BROTHERS

Music means different things to different people. For some – actually, for many – music has a direct line to the emotions. It’s often the case that a sorrow is released by music, and tears flow that have been held back for a long time.

I’ve found music to be a solace during the last year of stress. It can be enjoyed alone or in company. With the internet, we have access to so much music, and that includes the music of the past. You or I can watch a concert from decades ago, and then follow a group or a musician in time, up to the present. It’s an extraordinary thing, and I’ve done it for many many groups and individuals in just about every genre of music, because I have eclectic tastes. But the Bee Gees – long thought by me to be uninteresting specialists in one type of music, disco – turn out to be far more fascinating and enormously varied in their output.

So I’m not finished with them yet.

Here is their first TV performance. This is a clip from 1960 in Australia, when Barry was 13 and the twins ten years old. Barry wrote the song, and they had already been performing professionally for about four years. I think they are nervous here because it was their first break on television, but they were already seasoned performers.

And here are their parents Barbara and Hugh talking about discovering the boys could sing:

Every now and then the Bee Gees would reprise a portion of “Lollipop” for their fans. Here’s one example from 1975 in Chicago, with a little bit of their humor leading up to it:

I could choose almost any Bee Gees song to close this post, but here’s one that was written around that same time, 1975. It features the Bee Gees in a country mood, one of so many genres in which they wrote and performed. This was a pretty big hit for Olivia Newton-John, who covered it, but not for the Bee Gees. This is their own version, which demonstrates a favorite practice of theirs, which is to have Robin and Barry alternate solo voices in the same song. Robin is the higher voice and Barry the lower one:

[ADDENDUM: One more thing that occurs to me about my recent fascination with the Bee Gees is the element of surprise. For decades I thought I knew who they were and what their music was about; case closed. But it turns out that I knew nearly nothing about them. I didn’t know that some of my favorite songs from the 60s had been written by the Bee Gees. I didn’t know how varied their songbook was, or that they’d written and performed for close to fifty years. I didn’t know that they sang in anything other than falsetto. I didn’t know they’d written songs I liked for other artists. I didn’t know they were charming, funny, and smart, or that they’d been child performers supporting their family. It’s been a lesson – not the first, and probably not the last – in not assuming that I know more than I actually know about something.]

And now we can add witness coercion to the charges against the prosecution in the Floyd trials

The New Neo Posted on by

Attorneys for one of the three accused police officers in the pending trials concerning the death of George Floyd have made the following claim:

According to a 9-page court document filed Wednesday, May 12, Thao’s attorneys, Robert M. Paule and Natalie R. Paule, are accusing Dr. Roger Mitchell, the “former Medical Examiner of Washington D.C.,” of leveraging [Hennepin County Medical Examiner] Baker by placing a phone call sometime between May 29, 2020, when Baker released a preliminary statement about George Floyd, and June 1, 2020, when Baker signed his findings as to the cause and manner of Floyd’s death. (The full autopsy was released publicly on June 3, 2020.) During the supposed call, Baker is alleged to have said that “he didn’t think the neck compression played a part” in Floyd’s death. Mitchell is alleged to have suggested that Baker “should fire his public information officer” for issuing the May 29 preliminary statement which said, in part, that the medical examiner’s autopsy “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.”

“After the phone conversation between Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Baker, Dr. Mitchell decided he was going to release an op-ed critical of Dr. Baker’s findings in the Washington Post,” Thao’s court document alleges. “Dr. Mitchell first called Dr. Baker to let him know.”

Mitchell is alleged by Thao’s legal team to have said the following to Baker in a subsequent conversation:

“[Y]ou don’t want to be the medical examiner who tells everyone they didn’t see what they saw. You don’t want to be the smartest person in the room and be wrong. Said there was a way to articulate the cause and manner of death that ensures you are telling the truth about what you are observing and via all of the investigation. Mitchell said neck compression has to be in the diagnosis.”

In other words: nice reputation you’ve got there. You wouldn’t want to see it destroyed, would you?

More:

“The final autopsy findings included neck compression,” the Thao motion states. “This was contrary to Dr. Baker’s conclusion before speaking with Dr. Mitchell twice,” the motion alleges…

One of Chauvin’s defense experts, Dr. David Fowler, testified that Floyd’s manner of death was undetermined, Thao’s defense motion pointed out. As an alleged result of Fowler’s testimony, Mitchell subsequently penned letters to various federal and state officials asking, among other things, for an investigation into Fowler‘s medical license, the motion says. “Less than 24 hours after receiving the letter, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office announced that there should be a review of all in custody death reports produced by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner during Dr. Fowler’s tenu[r]e,” Thao’s attorneys stated.

I wrote a post about the post-trial investigation of Dr. Fowler. The investigation affects not just Fowler but any future expert witness for the defense in these pending cases or any similar cases. If a person has the guts to testify in defense of any of these police officers, that person should be prepared to be destroyed in the public eye.

More from the court documents filed by Thao’s lawyers:

The State – specifically prosecutors Lola Velazquez-Aguilu, Joshua Larson, Matthew Frank, Erin Eldridge, and Corey Gorden – knew that a potential expert witness had coerced the State’s main expert witness/the only expert to perform the physical autopsy in the case of State v. Thao. The State did nothing in response to this coercion. Instead, the State knowingly allowed Dr. Baker to take the stand in State v. Chauvin and testified to coerced statements…

Under Minn. Stat. § 609.27 subd. 1(3) Dr. Mitchell’s conduct meets the elements to be found guilty of committing the crime of coercion. Dr. Mitchell orally made the threat to unlawfully injure Dr. Baker’s trade unless Dr. Baker changed his autopsy findings. Dr. Mitchell told Dr. Baker to include neck compression in the final findings and warned Dr. Baker he was going to publish a damaging op-ed in the Washington Post. After Dr. Baker changed his findings, Dr. Mitchell did not publish the op-ed. Moreover, Dr. Mitchell unlawfully injured Dr. Fowler’s trade by penning an open letter which resulted in an investigation into every death report in Maryland during Dr. Fowler’s tenure.

Dr. Mitchell has set the stage that he will threaten the trade and professional reputation of any physician who suggests that Mr. Floyd’s death could be labeled as “undetermined”…

The prosecutors say it’s all lies. I wonder what evidence the defense lawyers have for their allegations. I’m assuming they have some, perhaps from a whistleblower? I wonder whether Baker himself could be the source, although I doubt it. Could there be a recording of the call? Perhaps, but I doubt that as well. Mitchell’s subsequent role in sparking an investigation of Fowler makes it more likely that these allegations regarding Mitchell and Baker are true, although we have no way as yet of knowing for sure.

I’m somewhat confused as to how Mitchell, who was the Medical Examiner of Washington D.C., ended up on a phone call with Baker, who was the Chief Medical Examiner of Hennepin County, Minnesota. Does the DC examiner have some sort of power over all the medical examiners at the state level? I can’t find anything indicating that would be the case, and I very much doubt it is. If so, what is Mitchell’s involvement and motive? If he was in on the call with Baker so early in the case, it is logical to assume that Mitchell is connected somehow to one or several of the prosecutors, or perhaps to someone in the Minnesota Medical Examiner’s office.

By the way, it might be helpful at this point to refresh our memories on the role of these three officers concerning Floyd’s death. That article I just linked is from September of 2020 [emphasis mine]:

Thao’s decision May 25 to help two rookie officers on what seemed a routine call involving Floyd would be his last for the department. He and officer Derek Chauvin, his partner for the evening, could have skipped the call from a Cup Foods employee who reported that Floyd had tried to pass a fake $20 bill. As they headed to the scene, a dispatcher canceled the plea for help, saying the officers appeared to have the situation under control.

But Thao continued on. He and Chauvin found officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, each in their first week on the job, struggling to move Floyd into a cruiser. Chauvin, a 19-year veteran, stepped in to pin Floyd, stomach-down, by kneeling on his neck. Kueng knelt on his back and Lane restrained his legs as Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe, eventually falling silent.

Thao stepped toward a growing, agitated crowd and waved along passing vehicles. He later told investigators with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension that he couldn’t really see what his fellow officers were doing.

Thao told the BCA he was too focused on guarding the scene. “I could have been more observant to Floyd,” he said.

In a Facebook Messenger exchange believed to be with Thao, he told the Star Tribune that he got a degree in law enforcement out of a sense of duty to help protect people and be a community resource.

“Especially to younger, low-income families because that’s where I came from,” Thao told the Star Tribune.

Everything about the Floyd case is terrible, and I think it’s actually getting even worse.

[NOTE: Thao is a member of an ethnic group known as the Hmong. You can read about them here.]

The lingering psychological effects of the pandemic

The New Neo Posted on by

Almost as soon as the pandemic guidelines began to be issued – regarding handwashing, social distancing, and the like – I said to several friends, “We’re all going to wind up with OCD before this is through.”

I was making a joke, but I was somewhat serious, too. Obsessive-compulsive symptoms and phobias are not that difficult to trigger in the susceptible, and they can be especially difficult to eradicate once they take hold.

And so it has come to pass. For example, commenter “physicsguy” describes the following:

One of nephew”s wife just went on a rant about how she was feeling things were getting better then the CDC pulls their “stunt”. She has 2 kids; 4 and 2. Every since this pandemic started she has behaved irrationally. The kids have not had any outside contact in 14 months. It was only in the last month she let the grandparents see the kids but only within 6 feet even though they were all vaccinated. She now is very upset about not being able to take the kids out as people will no longer be wearing masks. Very sad.

Very sad and very predictable, actually. This woman, as the mother of young children, is already in full protective mode anyway. That protectiveness has been ramped up by official declarations that stoke fear, for over a year.

For some people it can actually take quite a lot to undo all of that. And, as in the old “How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to change” joke, the person has to want to change. The person has to force herself or himself to abandon a set of behaviors that have not only made that person and the children feel safe, but that has seemingly kept them safe in actuality. After all, they’re alive and well now, right? They might have remained alive and well even without those measures, but that’s not the way it feels.

I have long felt that there would be people who will never give up the habits they’ve developed during the COVID year. Some of those habits are reasonable, such as more handwashing, although that can get into unreasonable territory, too, depending on how often it’s done. But keeping children home indefinitely is not warranted by any type of scientific fact and is almost certainly damaging to them psychologically, although some will find it tempting.

And some have always found it tempting. After all, isn’t that what the fairy tale Rapunzel warns us about?

The banning of Trump from social media was a watershed moment

The New Neo Posted on by

Joe Concha is correct here [my emphasis]:

This is a “silence of the lambs” moment for media, an industry that should be universally up in arms over the censoring of public figures or other news outlets like the New York Post, the nation’s oldest daily newspaper — before they are all led off, one by one or in groups, to be silenced and effectively slaughtered. But that’s not the case, with some journalists and lawmakers actually cheering this non-fictional version of “1984.”

Love the 45th president, or hate the 45th president, it doesn’t matter. What does matter – and what is profoundly wrong, profoundly un-American – is the number of us who are willing to sit back silently and not condemn the increasing tendency of many individuals and entities, both public and private, to engage in a Soviet-style squashing of those with whom they disagree. It makes this a most chilling time in our nation’s history.

This is why the banning of Trump was a Rubicon-crossing moment. It sharply underlined what was already apparent about the willingness of the left to jettison principles it supposedly held, and the fact that so many people (including “journalists” as well as ordinary Americans) would think it was just fine and dandy.

However, there was an earlier watershed moment, as well – although actually there have been a lot of them. I’m speaking, however, of the quashing of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The speed with which the suppression occurred, and the near-universality of it, was tremendously impressive in terms of driving home the width and breadth of leftist influence.

Mollie Hemingway has written a new book

The New Neo Posted on by

Hemingway (Mollie, not Ernest) is publishing a book in September 2021 called Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Sounds of interest. Here’s an article she wrote that summarizes some of the points in the book:

Across the country at the state, local, and federal level, hundreds of significant structural changes to the manner and oversight of elections were instituted, resulting in what Time Magazine called a “a revolution in how people vote.”… Many changes were allegedly justified by the global pandemic, although Democrats had long advocated for them and now seek to make them permanent.

The bedrock of the American republic is that elections must be free, fair, accurate, and trusted. Election lawyers will tell you that fraud is almost impossible to conclusively find after the fact, and that to fight it, strong rules and regulations are needed on the front end. That’s why Democrats and Republicans fight so bitterly about the rules and regulations that govern the process.

What happened during the 2020 election deserves to be investigated and discussed. It must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to it, but because of that opposition. That is why I am writing a book about what happened before, during, and after the 2020 presidential election.

The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect of flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while outright censoring stories they now admit were true.
The American people deserve to know why courts, without the consent of the accountable legislative bodies charged with writing election laws, were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the game. Voters deserve to know why so many in government so vociferously fought to avoid audits and recounts and hide the vote-counting process from the public.

Republicans began sounding the alarm about how difficult it might be to trust the outcome of the 2020 elections long before November. They talked about how widespread changes in the manner the country conducts elections would lead to uncertainty, confusion, and delays. They were worried about universal mail-in balloting, which led to some addresses getting a half dozen ballots for previous residents who had once registered to vote at the address.

They knew that a bipartisan commission co-chaired by Jimmy Carter himself found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in United States elections. They were worried about how lowering, or in some cases outright eliminating, standards for signature verification on mail-in ballots could make it impossible to challenge fraudulently cast ballots.

…None of those problems went away after the election. If anything, the concern grew as tens of millions more Americans saw the problems associated with sloppy elections in which it takes days to find out just how many people voted, much less how they voted.

…And they saw how the media didn’t even bother investigating before dismissing all concerns about how the election was run.

The fact of the matter is that the elite powers did whatever it took to make sure that Trump lost re-election in 2020. They admitted as much in a victory lap masquerading as a news article in Time Magazine that referred to the individuals and institutions behind the efforts to oust Trump as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

We experienced all of this in real time, but it’s hard to remember the details and put the picture all together. It sounds as though Hemingway has done that in her book.

Why would anyone trust the CDC at this point?

The New Neo Posted on by

I know plenty of people who still seem to trust the CDC, and it’s hard to understand why. “Politics” as an explanation covers a lot of territory and goes a long way towards an answer, but it’s not quite enough to explain why more people wouldn’t acknowledge the wild careenings of the agency in its COVID guidelines and judge the agency itself harshly for it.

It seems like aeons ago, but I once trusted the CDC too. Oh, maybe “trusted” is a bit strong, since I’m somewhat of a natural skeptic and am aware that government agencies are not the most trustworthy entities on earth. Nevertheless, I know there was a time when I thought the CDC was staffed and led by people whose main devotion was to science, and who were fairly competent. Now I have reason to doubt both assumptions.

And so does everyone else. COVID has certainly not been an advertisement for the CDC, right from the beginning when the agency botched the initial testing for the virus. I’m not going to detail the long list of contradictions and reversals in the CDC’s COVID recommendations, but most people probably recall the back-and-forth on masks. Now, as Andrea Widburg points out:

After fervently insisting on continuing in masks even when vaccinated, the CDC made a U-turn so sharp you could see the skid marks shimmering in the air. Henceforth, vaccinated people can abandon their masks. They are, once again, free…

All is not perfect in this allegedly mask-free paradise. Even if you’re vaccinated, you’re still going to have to muzzle yourself “in crowded indoor settings like buses, planes, hospitals, prisons and homeless shelters….” However, among other things, there’s no longer an excuse for teachers to avoid returning to school.

…However, I once again have the feeling I’ve been conned – and that the administration may pull the rug out from under all of us.

Why conned? Because either the vaccination works or it doesn’t. And if it does work, there’s absolutely no reason that everyone in the Biden administration – all people who have been vaccinated for months – have been going around swathed in masks.

I’ve noticed that, since vaccination has been available, even my liberal friends have been ignoring the earlier suggestions from the CDC they seemingly revere, to wear masks no matter what. They therefore have been going maskless outside and even inside with other vaccinated people for quite some time. And yet I bet they would say the CDC is perfectly fine in its pronouncements.

Andrea Widbug points out that either the vaccination works or it doesn’t, and I believe that it works and plan to act accordingly. However, it’s not strictly an either/or proposition. The vaccine supposedly works 90-95% of the time, which means that in a large vaccinated population even some vaccinated people will be susceptible to getting COVID. That’s the way medicine is – it’s not perfect, and in my opinion we need to resume our lives and understand the imperfect nature of prevention and treatment. What’s more, as a greater and greater number of people get vaccinated, the amount of virus circulating will decrease and even unvaccinated people and everyone else will be exposed to it less and less, with a resultant decrease in the chances of getting it.

COVID is hardly unique in these respects. It’s the government’s reaction to COVID that has been unique, and suspect, from the start. As I wrote back in April of 2020, when the pandemic was relatively new:

One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 response is how easily public officials embrace tyranny, and how many people accept it because of fear.

I’m afraid of COVID-19. I’m in a relatively high-risk group, and I’m laying very low. I’ll probably lay low for longer than my state tells me to, but that’s my decision. I didn’t like the initial 2-week shutdown, but I thought I understood the reasons – flatten the curve and keep the health care system from being totally overwhelmed – and I knew it would buy us time to learn more about the illness.

Mission accomplished. It’s been far more than two weeks, and the damage from the shutdown itself has gotten to the point that it becomes crystal clear it needs to be removed. The benefits have been less clear, too. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that shutdowns mattered all that much in the curve of the COVID-19 toll in various states and various countries. We understand more than we did, but although we don’t understand enough, we have to take a few leaps because one thing we do understand (and was clear from the start, actually) is that the shutdown itself is causing tremendous damage. And that damage is not limited to economics; it involves mental and physical health as well.

Almost six weeks ago I wrote this [March 17, 2020]:

“So here’s my question for all you epidemiologists and infectious disease experts out there –

“Wouldn’t it be better to have only high-risk people stay home? People over 60 and those with pre-existing conditions? That way, if all those at low risk kept mingling, a lot of them would get a mild flu and herd immunity will be achieved fairly quickly, to the benefit of all, without overwhelming the health care system.

“I’m not suggesting this as an actual policy right now, but I’m just wondering if my logic is flawed. I suppose the question is how long would it take for it to run its course and achieve sufficient herd immunity, and when would it be safe for us old folks to finally emerge. Also, would there be a lot of deaths among the younger ones in the meantime?

“I just don’t see the end game for the current mitigation strategies.”

It wasn’t rocket science to question what was happening back then. And that was before the worst of the draconian measures were put in place by governors such as Michigan’s Whitmer, which are not only startlingly strict but seemingly unrelated to any public health goal or logic involving such goals.

What’s going on? People in power like more power, particularly people on the left. Tyrants of all stripes have long used emergency powers to increase their control over the people. Sometimes those emergency powers become semi-permanent or even permanent. It certainly doesn’t surprise me that some governors are trying to stretch it out for as long as possible.

I believe that’s one of the reasons the MSM is trying to stoke fear, and has been doing so from the start. There’s plenty of fear to be had, of course, just from the basic facts of the matter without trying to increase it further. But the MSM is strongly motivated in various ways to do just that: in order to get Trump, to give petty tyrants like Whitmer more reasons to clamp down, and to increase traffic because “if it bleeds it leads.”

The real wild card in all this is how long the people are going to take it.

It’s not as though this wasn’t pretty clear over a year ago. And yet, here we are, very much the worse for wear.

As I said in a previous post, why don’t they just stone Chauvin to death and get it over with

The New Neo Posted on by

[See ADDENDUM below.]

I’m referring to this news:

The [Chauvin] prosecution filed a motion to enhance sentencing, something we covered in Chauvin Post-Trial Sentencing: What to Expect. Chauvin opted to have the judge, not the jury, decide the issue.

The Judge just ruled in a six-page Order (pdf.) finding 4 of the 5 possible factors raised by the prosecution…

You can read the factors at the link, but in summary form they amount to the assertions that Chauvin was a police officer, that the death supposedly exhibited particular cruelty, that children were witnessing it, and that the perpetrators were a group.

These sorts of aggravating elements seem rather obviously to not originally have been meant to apply to a public situation in which police officers are trying to subdue a resistant perpetrator and had already called for EMTs, and were also using a form of restraint that had been approved (the only real question being whether they used it for too long and after Floyd had stopped breathing) by the department. One could argue that any group of police would be liable for aggravated circumstances sentencing under reasoning such as this. And perhaps that’s exactly the aim.

Note also that even the prosecutors have not alleged that anything racial was involved, even though that has been the main talking point around Floyd’s death and constitutes the main way in which activists have used that death to push for anti-police change.

This also puts to rest – for me, at least – the idea that Chauvin would have fared better in front of a judge. I very much doubt it.

[NOTE: This was the previous post I referred to in my title for the present post.]

ADDENDUM:

Monica Showalter of American Thinker adds this observation:

Combine that with the fact that Chauvin apparently has to serve his entire sentence in solitary confinement — even at ten years, but now looking at 30 years — is already an enhanced punishment, even at the unenhanced sentencing rates which had been there formerly. That’s known as punishment time, the box, and something which other prisoners, convicted of far more horrible crimes for personal benefit, don’t get unless they do something terrible on the inside, and they do anything they can while on the inside, not to get. In Chauvin’s case, it’s only being meted out because the jailers cannot control their charges. That’s their failure, not Chauvin’s, but he pays for it.

Solitary confinement has been branded ‘torture’ by Amnesty International, particularly when extended, and has been known to drive people insane. In numerous cases, it’s been argued in court to be “cruel and unusual punishment.” They’re proposing 30 years of this? It doesn’t sound like a matter of the punishment fitting the crime, particularly given the flyweight sentences for far more damaging and malevolent crimes that other criminals are serving inside the Minnesota prison system.

I have read many times that Chauvin would have to be in solitary confinement, and I assume that’s correct. But I’m not 100% sure. However, if he isn’t in some form of isolation from the general prison population, there’s little doubt that he won’t be serving very long because someone will murder him.

But would the isolation necessarily be solitary? I read somewhere, quite some time ago, that police officers who are sentenced are sometimes put in a different part of a prison along with other police who are sentenced. However, because Chauvin has been turned into the equivalent of some sort of Hitlerian figure in a lot of people’s eyes, I’m not even sure that being incarcerated with other police officers would protect him. Maybe it would be even worse.

And how many imprisoned police officers are there in Minnesota right now? However many there are, I’m pretty sure there will soon be a few more – one or some or all of the tremendously unlucky officers who were with Chauvin on that fateful day.