February 2021 Archives

Yes, you can still get COVID-19 and get very sick or die, but cases are down 77% over the past six weeks and it looks like the pandemic is basically over. The disease will never disappear completely, but we should be able to return to normal soon.

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we'd call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

If this was published on some far-right website I'd never read it or comment on it. But Lefty Time Magazine reveals the "shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election". The article spins the conspirators as heroes, but if you look past the leftward slant it seems like Time is confirming most of the Populist Right's craziest accusations. The bipartisan globalist establishment crushed the populist political uprising.

Personally, I don't believe all the claims in this article -- I think some political operatives are trying to burnish their resumes by claiming credit for this boondoggle election. But still, this is an insane revelation from a Lefty publication.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election-an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America's institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump's conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. "The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation," says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

The bolding above is mine. Obviously this shadowy cabal of establishmentarians was completely neutral and didn't care if Trump or Biden won. Totally.

So why is this "secret history" being revealed now that Biden has been inaugurated? For our benefit! Or maybe because the participants want some credit.

That's why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream-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. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.

The election wasn't "rigged" -- it was "fortified"!

Eamon Javers is right that the r/WallStreetBets and GME battle is the latest round of the class war. Just like Trump, GME is an effect not a cause of the ongoing disruption of America's class system.

Josh Holmes spent much of Wednesday in Washington watching the populist uprising over GameStop in the stock market with fascination - and a growing sense of familiarity.

He has seen this movie before.

Holmes, president of the issue management firm Cavalry, is best known as the former chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Holmes has spent his career among the Republican establishment, which has spent the past five years getting steamrolled by the populist force of Trumpism - a grassroots movement that stormed the ramparts of the GOP, ousted the establishment and remade the party in its image.

Almost no one in the party saw it coming. When it did, few of the establishment players understood just how vast the force was that suddenly lined up against them.

On Wednesday morning, as GameStop shares continued to surge, Holmes took to Twitter and typed out a simple message: "Wall Street, welcome to our world."

Trump didn't cause the political realignment he benefited from -- he was just willing to ride it faster and harder than anyone else. Trump was an effect. Similarly, the self-described "retards" and "smooth brains" at r/WallStreetBets didn't cause the resentment between hedge funds and retail investors. The GME squeeze is yet another manifestation of the class war.

The old coalitions were (broadly) centralization/populist Left and Democrat vs. liberty/elitist Right and Republican. If the realignment continues, the new coalitions will be liberty/populist Right and Republican vs. centralization/elitist Left and Democrat. Basically, the populists and elites are swapping sides. Of course each individual is more than a simple category, which is why so many people feel "politically homeless" right now.

The parties are also in flux because they aren't sure what combination of positions will yield a winning coalition. The Left seems to be exerting itself to enforce uniformity on its members, while the Right seems to be opening itself up to socially-liberal libertarians and populists. Who knows how this will shake out.