Omicron is in Retreat

by philg

Adding some support to the Vietnam War analogy, today’s New York Times says “Omicron Is in Retreat”, with the implication that any decline in “cases” is due to the efforts of the human army and its generals (the Covidcrats):

In the human v. virus war (it has to be a war because one army is retreating), humans are “winning” and it will be humans who decide on when to “close the books” on the spread of the virus:

Since early last week, new cases in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and New York have fallen by more than 30 percent. They’re down by more than 10 percent in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. In California, cases may have peaked.

“Let’s be clear on this — we are winning,” Mayor Eric Adams of New York said yesterday. Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York State, said during a budget speech, “We hope to close the books on this winter surge soon.”

The Tet Offensive of SARS-CoV-2 may continue through Tet (February 1), however:

The Covid situation in the U.S. remains fairly grim, with overwhelmed hospitals and nearly 2,000 deaths a day. It’s likely to remain grim into early February. Caseloads are still high in many communities, and death trends typically lag case trends by three weeks.

On FaceTime last night with a group of friends back in Lincoln, Maskachusetts, a physician said that his hospital was full and transferring patients to other hospitals. Quite a few of the “COVID cases” within the hospital had been acquired in the hospital, due to folks ignoring the April 2020 idea of building renal dialysis-style clinics for COVID treatment (would keep most COVID patients from going to the hospital in the first place). The Democrats in the group then riffed about their dream of denying medical care to the unvaccinated. In their view, it was inconceivable that a vaccinated (“responsible”) human could require hospitalization for COVID-19, but the unvaccinated were nonetheless making it tough for the vaccinated to get ordinary hospital care, e.g., for cardiac issues.

My response to this virtue-based triage system was that, due to American incompetence with keeping medical records and the country’s persistent refusal to implement a chip-in-the-neck system, anyone who was about to be kicked out of the hospital for being unvaccinated (“Djokoviced,” after the first athlete to be banned and deported for not taking drugs) could simply say “I was vaccinated at a Walmart in Punxsutawney,” but lost my vaccine papers. How would the hospital in Maskachusetts be able to check?

A generally conservative member of the group (though he had voted for Obama) pointed out that we did not deny medical care to the obese, to alcoholics, or to drug addicts (I corrected him using CDC preferred terms, such as “Persons who use drugs/people who inject drugs” and “Persons with alcohol use disorder”). This was not persuasive, however, and the Democrats still wanted to exclude the unvaccinated from health care, as they are already excluded from public places in Boston. Confirming our loyal reader/commenter Mike’s worst suspicions, I suggested that the final stage of the Democrats’ triage system for the unvaccinated could be a job as an extra in the next Alec Baldwin film.

Speaking of Massachusetts, it look as though the January 15, 2022 implementation of a vaccine paper check requirement was highly effective. Nearly 15,000 cases of COVID-19 occurred on January 14. Excluding the unvaccinated from restaurants, etc., reduced infection to 0 cases on January 15. From Google:

Full post, including comments

Will we ever know how the CDC’s cloth mask recommendations changed the COVID-19 death statistics?

by philg

“The C.D.C. concedes that cloth masks do not protect against the virus as effectively as other masks.” (NYT, Friday):

When the C.D.C. finally recommended masks for ordinary Americans, it emphasized cloth face coverings. It took months more for the C.D.C. and the W.H.O. to concede that the coronavirus can be carried by tiny droplets called aerosols, which can linger indoors for hours.

After nearly two years we learn that a bandana is not “the best” PPE.

I’m wondering if there would be any way to tease out the effects of federal and state government mask orders and propaganda campaigns on COVID-19 deaths. (Here’s one place in Jupiter, Florida that takes CDC guidance seriously…

)

Theory 1: while cloth masks are garbage compared to a professionally fitted N95 mask used with a full set of Ebola ward precautions, including frequent hand-washing and disposing of the mask after one use, they “did something.” So COVID-19 deaths were perhaps delayed (14 days to flatten the curve) or maybe even prevented (though the mechanism for prevention is unclear).

Theory 2 (core Church of Sweden): cloth masks had almost no effect, just as other Western government efforts were doomed to fail in a “virus in charge” world.

Theory 3: Anders Tegnell, the MD/PhD at the Swedish public health helm in spring 2020, suggested that European Covidcrats consider whether cloth masks and surgical masks could actually intensify a COVID-19 epidemic due to giving people a “false sense of security.” In other words, people who would have stayed home would instead go out with a cloth mask on. People who would have kept a 6′ distance would instead forget.

A friend criticized me for heaping scorn on well-meaning public health officials in the U.S., e.g., calling them Karens and referring to “face rags” rather than “protective cloth masks.” My response:

You’re basically saying “How can you question the $10 trillion two-year anti-COVID war in which the best and brightest U.S. bureaucrats have embroiled American schoolchildren and taxpayers?” Isn’t this the same question that people who supported the Vietnam War (albeit much much cheaper, even adjusted for inflation, and much less disruptive to the average American’s life, and probably far less deadly to Americans (lockdown-induced extra opioid deaths alone will soon exceed American Vietnam War deaths)) asked of the anti-Vietnam War contrarians? For the supporters of the Vietnam War, anyone who said that it was unwinnable and/or actually immoral was unpatriotic as well as crazy/stupid/unscientific. JFK and Lyndon Johnson had assembled the smartest people in the U.S. to hang out at the White House and they’d proven with charts and statistics that the Vietnam War could be won and was being won. Added to this technocratic competence, the pro-Vietnam War folks were motivated by the purest of intentions.

My mocking the cloth masks that the experts told Americans to wear could actually have saved lives, no? By urging people to use common sense and reflect that a wet bandana was not effective PPE, the term “wet face rag” could have resulted in someone either (a) using an N95 mask that would actually provide some protection, or (b) staying home. Why not reserve your criticism for the public health officials who told people that cloth masks were effective? Isn’t it a far greater sin to have told people to nurture a bacteria colony in front of their piehole as a COVID-preventive than anything I did?

… Because of misplaced faith in masks and vaccines, Americans avoided the hard work of restructuring society to thwart respiratory viruses. Los Angeles will soon host a 200,000-person gathering (Super Bowl). Disney and Universal keep thousands of people from all over the country and the world crammed together in indoor lines every day. If not for faith in masks and vaccines, everyone would agree with me that it is crazy to allow these parks to reopen before they restructure their lines to be outdoors-only.

You can infer from the above that I am a Church of Sweden parishioner. However, as is typical for Church of Swedeners, I admit that I can’t be sure that I’m right.

Will #Science ever convincingly settle this debate? The one good study of masks as a public health intervention (as opposed to masks in a lab setting) is the Bangladesh randomized controlled trial (Nature summary). It showed a slight reduction in infections over an 8-week period with surgical masks (no statistically significant effect with cloth masks), but in a society where people have less control over their environment than in the U.S. The typical resident of Bangladesh can’t choose whether to say home and work via Zoom, whether to use a private car instead of public transport, whether to isolate in a corner of the 2,300 square-foot house shared by 3 people, etc.

Maybe Florida versus California is the best that we can do as a natural experiment within the U.S.? Both have climates that enable a lot to be done outdoors. From a Stanford Medical School heretic:

From the above data we could infer that the central Church of Sweden tenet (Theory 2) is the correct answer, i.e., that masks had no effect. But we could also infer that the (cloth) mask orders increased the death rate (Theory 3). By September 2021, when the above chart was published, California had enjoyed nearly 1.5 extra years of protection via lockdown/shutdown compared to Florida, in addition to the masks. So if we believe that the lockdown/shutdown (except for “essential” marijuana stores of course) orders reduced the COVID-19 death rate, we have to suspect that California’s mask orders pushed California COVID-19-tagged deaths up.

Speaking of risk compensation, here’s a message from a physicians’ discussion forum right at the peak of the Omicron surge:

“My twins turned 14 today and had 8 (immunized and also mostly previously infected) kids over for a party. I was told none of them are straight. They played spin the bottle, apparently, and I thought how awesome a game, when everyone feels comfortable kissing everyone! That was NOT my middle school experience. I know there’s a pandemic, but I still thought: cool.”

Maybe a COVID-19-safe version of spin the bottle could be played on Zoom? Each time a person is selected to kiss, he/she/ze/they kisses his/his/zir/their family pet. Mindy the Crippler would be a fan!

And, finally, since this post mentions Sweden:

In response to a comment below, about the CDC recommending cloth masks only as an emergency measure in spring 2020, a current CDC web page, updated August 2021:

Note that the only example are cloth masks.

Related:

Full post, including comments

The 6-year-old hater

by philg

Rousseau thought that children were innately innocent, but maybe that is because he never reared any.

On the way to the Stuart Boat Show, we stopped at a favorite local restaurant for breakfast. I finished my Egg McMuffin before our 6-year-old had consumed his Big Breakfast with Hotcakes and decided to share with him some news of the world. I stumbled upon “China Bans Flights From U.S. as Covid-19 Measures Intensify” (WSJ):

The 6-year-old’s comment? “But they started Covid.”

Freed from the supervision of Senior Management, the young hater enjoyed his first caramel apple later that day. After sampling this new delicacy, he said, “You know what would be better? A caramel apple with no apple. The same size and shape, but all caramel.”

(Why don’t the Chinese postpone the 2022 Olympics until they’re willing to allow spectators? If the Japanese could kick the Olympics a year down the road, what would be wrong with a postponement to December 2022 or February 2023, for example? If we believe Science, COVID-19 won’t be a problem then. See “Fauci: US can get Covid under control by next year with more jabs” (Guardian, November 16, 2021), for example.)

Related:

Full post, including comments

MIT: Groundbreaking research on politics and racial justice

by philg

The December issue of MIT’s alumni magazine, Technology Review, arrived. this includes a special sub-magazine that is only about things that happen on the MIT campus or that are done by MIT alumni. The cover story: “MIT’s new chancellor laid a foundation for leadership through her groundbreaking research on politics and racial justice.”

What else was in the issue? “Discrimination by the numbers”:

When Phyllis Ann Wallace reached Yale University, in the mid-1940s, she was used to facing obstacles and proceeding anyway. Women weren’t expected to go into economics, especially at the graduate level, and for Black women like herself, breaking into the field decades before schools, buses, or workplaces were legally integrated was practically unheard-of.

Her book MBAs on the Fast Track chronicled how the experiences of men and women with equal education differ, and why women work longer hours for the same compensation.

She arrived [at MIT] as a visiting scholar at the Sloan School and quickly moved up to become the school’s first female professor, in 1975. In her office overlooking the Charles River, she wrote books and papers on women in the labor force, particularly Black women, often inviting students to coauthor or co-edit. She worked to ensure that male MIT students were aware of equity issues, believing that “if you can really educate them now, hopefully they will go out and bring about the revolution wherever they are.”

(Note: Americans upset by “why women work longer hours for the same compensation” and who want to work for just one hour and earn a lot more than the average MBA can refer to “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” and/or the $2.5 million tax-free example of Hunter Biden’s plaintiff (she didn’t waste time getting an MBA!))

Anything about Science (the new capitalized-like-God version)? A brief interior article noted that David Julius, Class of ’77, “shared the 2021 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries about how the body senses touch and temperature.” In other Nobel-ish news, a current MIT professor won the Nobel in economics.

Speaking of elite university experts on comparative victimology, “‘Rhodes Scholar’ claimed she grew up poor and abused — then her story started to unravel” (New York Post):

In November 2020, when University of Pennsylvania graduate student Mackenzie Fierceton won the prestigious and highly competitive Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford — one of just 32 scholars selected from a pool of 2,300 applicants — she was praised by the Ivy League school’s president in a newsletter.

“Mackenzie is so deserving of this prestigious opportunity,” declared president Amy Gutmann of the 23-year-old from suburban St. Louis. “As a first-generation [to go to college] low-income student and a former foster youth, Mackenzie is passionate about championing young people [and] dedicating herself to a life of public service.”

Multiple college consultants told The Post that the college application process now features more questions about overcoming obstacles. The 2021-2022 essay prompts from Common App, the organization that oversees undergrad applications for more than 900 schools, include “Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure.”

Categorizing herself as a first-generation, low-income student with a history of horrific abuse — who also earned nearly straight A’s and was student body president in high school — Fierceton certainly fit the bill. She was admitted to Penn in 2015 to study political science, then began studying for a clinical master’s degree in social work in 2018.

When Fierceton’s Rhodes Scholarship was announced, the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled the academic star in November 2020, noting that she “grew up poor, cycling through the rocky child welfare system [and] bounced from one foster home to the next.”

As Fierceton said in that story: “I would trade [the Rhodes honor] to have been adopted and have a family.”

But after that Nov. 22, 2020, profile ran, an anonymous accuser sent an email to Penn and the Rhodes Trust, claiming Fierceton’s story was “blatantly dishonest.” The email reportedly alleged that Fierceton grew up in St. Louis, Mo., with her mother, an educated radiologist; that her family was upper-middle class; and that she had attended a fancy private high school and enjoyed such high-end hobbies as horseback riding.

According to Winkelstein’s subsequent report, Fierceton was raised in an upper-middle-class household; it also notes her mother is a radiologist and that her grandfather had graduated from college.

The Penn victimological bureaucrats criticize the young student for purportedly lying, but take no responsibility for their own incompetence. These are paid full-time victimologists and they can’t distinguish between true victims and the child of a radiologist? How are ordinary Americans supposed to accept the Ivy League say-gooders as experts on social and racial justice?

Full post, including comments

City of Boston happy to fly rainbow and Islamic flags, but not a Christian group’s flag

by philg

Today at the Supreme Court: Shurtleff v. Boston. Officials of the Cradle of Liberty were happy to fly the rainbow (Pride) flag and the Islamic-themed flag of Turkey, but a Christian-themed flag was unacceptable (284 applications were approved over a 12-year period and this single group was denied).

“Several Juneteenth Events Planned As Massachusetts Observes Official Holiday For First Time” (CBS) and “Boston Raises Pride Flag On City Hall Plaza” (CBS) have videos of example events.

The Christian group’s petition gives the history. According to the city, everyone should feel included (sometimes the best way for a Christian to be included is for Christians to be excluded?):

In my view, the petition incorrectly characterizes Rainbow Flagism as a “cause” rather than as a religion.

Although the city itself says that this is supposed to be a “public forum”, which you might think would require allowing the Christian group to participate, so far the appeals courts have all sided with the city’s policy of excluding this one group.

Given that Boston shut down its schools for more than a year while keeping marijuana stores open, and that marijuana retailers are such big advertisers in the city (see above) and on Mass Pike billboards, I’m disappointed that the petition cannot cite an example of a flag devoted to healing cannabis (Ivermectin for Democrats, as one reader here commented). I think it would be fun to apply to fly the “Rainbow Marijuana USA Stars Flag Gay Pride Lesbian LGBT” flag:

Readers: Where do we think the Supreme Court will come down on this case?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Book to read if you’re upset that everything is out of stock

by philg

Island of the Lost: An Extraordinary Story of Survival at the Edge of the World by Joan Druett is a timely read given for those who are upset that everything has been out of stock for two years. It covers the experience of five guys whose sailing ship wrecked in the Auckland Islands in 1864. They’d been looking for new places to kill seals or, possibly, do some silver mining (their cover story). The Auckland Islands are southwest of New Zealand, 50.7 degrees south latitude (old saying: “Below 40 degrees south there is no law; below 50 degrees south there is no God”).

The weather is miserable, the sandflies are relentless, and they were stuck there for almost as long as 15 days to flatten the curve. The resourceful crew manages to build a hut from the timber of the wrecked ship and they kill enough seals that starvation isn’t an issue. But the sailors have to do their own blacksmithing, sew their own clothes, make their own soap, tan their own hides, make their own cement (from seashells), make a forge bellows, turn wood into charcoal to fuel the forge, and create anything that they would ordinarily have purchased in a hardware store (e.g., nails).

The book will also be helpful if you’re worried about climate change destroying humanity as a species. It turns out that we can be difficult to eradicate.

Finally, the book is also encouraging to those of us who are so old that we are more likely to be killed by Omicron than by Alec Baldwin. Island of the Lost also talks about a shipwreck that happened around the same time, that of the Invercauld. A sailor on that ship sat down and started typing a vivid and useful memoir at the age of 86, six decades after the experience. This is the basis for a great-granddaughter’s book: Wake of the Invercauld.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Martin Luther King Jr. on Freedom

by philg

I hope that everyone who works for the government, at least, is enjoying having today off.

This is a reminder to check Reinterpreting MLK’s ideas of freedom for the Age of COVID (July 4, 2021).

Cited back in July:

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

Should it be rewritten?

Vaccinated people cannot remain vaccinated forever. The yearning for a booster shot eventually manifests itself.

The July 2021 post noted that all of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park buildings had been closed in April 2021 (and, presumably, since the start of coronapanic in March 2020). Do visitors have the freedom to enter today?

“A right delayed is a right denied”?

Full post, including comments

Plural versus possessive at Harvard

by philg

In Teaching Information Security there was a discussion of the fact that young people at a Florida state system university rejected the distinction between plural and possessive. A friend sent me the following:

Trying to wrap my head around my MBB offer

My first two years at Harvard, I was really focused on getting a good offer once I graduated. I think Harvard really acculturated me to the idea that one of those offers is one of the big goals of undergrad.

This summer, I got a full time offer from one of the big three consulting firms, for way more money than I thought, around $140k in total comp.

When I read the offer letter, I felt deeply ambivalent. Obviously I am stoked, and really want to work at the firm. However, it feels weird to make many times more my friends who are graduating from great non-ivy’s and more than my parents, who both make six figures.

For those of you who have received similar offers, how do you feel about salary? And for those who have already graduated, how has your thinking evolved?

(For those who are more familiar with honest labor, “MBB” is for McKinsey, BCG, and Bain. Separately, doesn’t he/she/ze/they realize that $140k will soon be the price of a Diet Coke?)

Note the highlighted section above, in which the fresh Harvard graduate struggles to write “Ivies”.

From Hussain Altamimi, a young person bright enough to work as a legislative assistant for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s primary thought-leader (Fox):

Israel is a racist European ethnostate built on stolen land from it’s indigenous population!

(Can anyone think of a country besides Israel that was built on land stolen by Europeans from an indigenous population? Are the people in the country that you’re thinking of doing anything to restore the land to the rightful indigenous owners?)

Is it time for Joe Biden to outlaw the apostrophe and save us from ourselves?

Related:

  • “California Prison Academy: Better Than a Harvard Degree” (WSJ, 2011): Harvard grads can expect to earn $49,897 fresh out of college and $124,759 after 20 years. … As a California prison guard, you can make six figures in overtime and bonuses alone. … Over 120,000 people apply every year, according to the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, but the academy only enrolls about 900. That’s an acceptance rate of less than 1%. Harvard’s is 6.2%.
Full post, including comments

Why aren’t emails to an at-work lover copyrighted?

by philg

Academia is always great for showing those with inferior credentials (i.e., “inferiors”) how to think and behave appropriately. University of Michigan recently fired its president for having sex with someone else who works at the University of Michigan. The press release:

After an investigation, we learned that Dr. Schlissel, over a period of years, used his University email account to communicate with that subordinate in a manner inconsistent with the dignity and reputation of the University. In the interest of full public disclosure, we have released dozens of Dr. Schlissel’s communications that illustrate this inappropriate conduct …

(He’s actually a real doctor, not merely someone lacking the creativity to quit grad school before getting a Ph.D.: “Mark Schlissel, MD, PhD”)

A 118-page PDF is available as a link. Note that the sex/knish partner is “Individual 1”, implying that this guy had a Cuomo-style stable of females, but no “Individual 2” appears.

Suppose that Mark Schlissel had identified as a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community and used his official email account to make reservations at some of the places featured in “San Francisco tells gay bathhouses, ‘Welcome back!'” (Bay Area Reporter, January 25, 2021, just in time to catch a few more COVID-19 waves!):

The city’s public health department has rescinded the restrictions that have kept such businesses from operating in the city since the mid-1980s. A legacy from the height of the AIDS epidemic, bathhouses in San Francisco until now could not have private rooms with locked doors and were required to monitor the sex of their patrons.

Those regulations, when put into effect, resulted in a de facto ban on gay bathhouses in San Francisco, leaving residents to have to travel to such businesses in Berkeley and in San Jose. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the lone gay bathhouse left in the Bay Area is Steamworks in the East Bay and it remains closed because of the health crisis.

While gay sex clubs without private, locked rooms continued to operate in the city, most eventually closed their doors. There is just one in operation today: Eros on upper Market Street in the city’s LGBTQ Castro district.

The venues must provide safe sex materials free of charge, such as lubricants and condoms. Those establishments with locked rooms must have such materials stocked in each room.

And all such businesses need to provide wash-up facilities for their patrons where they have access to hot and cold running water, liquid soap, hand sanitizer and paper towels.

Presumably the Board of Regents would have celebrated their president’s decision to live the university’s values. Instead of getting to know 50 new male friends at a bathhouse, however, the implication is that President Schlissel was having sex with 1 female friend from work and that they were organizing the sex around athletic events, Saudi filmmaker Safa Al Ahmad events, and articles from Harvard Business Review about how to breathe (a skill that folks who’ve paid $500,000+ in Ivy League tuition may not have mastered, apparently; one tip for easier breathing… move to Florida and then you don’t have to try to do it through a mask). Rather than enhancing campus Pride, as the bathhouse visits might have, the (cisgender?) heterosexual office romance was “inconsistent with the dignity and reputation of the University.” (But if the Board hadn’t fired Dr. Schlissel and released the emails, thus telling everyone about this exciting situation, how would the reputation of the university been affected?)

This post is not about whether the Board made the right decision, but how it is possible for them to publish 118 pages of the president’s emails from a copyright perspective. The university IT folks had the technical means to dig into the president’s account, of course, but can they publish these documents without permission? I guess they can because they did, but how?

Tougher question: What does Mark Schlissel, MD, PhD do now if he wants to continue working? Emigrate to China or France? No American university can hire him, right?

The Michigan commerce mural above is from the Guardian Building, in Detroit (Returning from EAA AirVenture (‘Oshkosh”), August 2021), and contains some job ideas if Dr. Schlissel wants to stay local.

Related:

  • “Why did University of Michigan fire Mark Schlissel? He broke a rule he introduced this summer” (MLive): At the July Board of Regents meeting, he announced an overhaul of sexual misconduct policy changes, particularly the prohibition of relationships between subordinates and supervisors. There would be zero tolerance for someone in a leadership position to “solicit a personal or romantic relationship with someone they have a supervisory authority or career influence over,” he said at the time.
  • The Wikipedia page for this guy mentions that he was criticized for not following the science in maxxing out the university’s level of coronapanic. In other words, a group of elite Americans rejected as unscientific the leadership of an MD, PhD (professor of microbiology and immunology as well as a professor of internal medicine). Paging Dr. Tegnell!
  • Real World Divorce chapter on Michigan (in case the doctor’s wife decides it is time to cash out)
Full post, including comments

The Serbian Mushrik is cast out of the Antipodal Mecca

by philg

From “Why Are Non-Muslims Not Allowed Into The Cities Of Mecca And Madinah?” (Inside Saudi):

In Islam, the cities of Mecca and Madinah are considered as places of peace, refuge, and sanctuary for Muslims only. Non-Muslims termed Mushriks are prohibited in order to keep it that way.

For example, Hindus believe that Brahma is one and many. Also, 80% of Christians believe in the Trinity that God is three equal and eternal persons in the form of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

The very fact that the Mushrik believes and acts on the basis of polytheism makes him/her a Mushrik and in effect spiritually Narjis (unclean) in the eyes of Allah.

It is NOT the case that he/she is unclean in the physical sense but only in the spiritual sense.

From CNN:

“Rightly or wrongly” tennis star Novak Djokovic is perceived as endorsing anti-vaccination views — and his presence in Australia could influence people, said lawyer Stephen Lloyd, who is acting for the government.

Lloyd said it was “common sense and uncontroversial” to assume that people would listen to Djokovic’s views, given what we know about the power of celebrity.

According to Lloyd, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke doesn’t need to show evidence that Djokovic is influencing people’s views to cancel his visa — just that there’s a risk that he might.

He said Hawke made the decision to cancel Djokovic’s visa in accordance with the Australia’s Migration Act that enables the minister to bar someone who “may” or “might” pose a risk to public health.

From an American point of view, the Australian government’s position isn’t novel. While at least 10 million undocumented immigrants are welcome to stay in the U.S. (even after being ordered deported, as with Barack Obama’s Aunt Zeituni) and there is no requirement that those who walk across the border and avail themselves of our multi-year asylum process accept Science and the Sacrament of Vaccination, there is no realistic way for an American to express him/her/zir/theirself if he/she/ze/they endorse anti-vaccination views. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube will ban heretics. I recently met a recruiter who had 5,000 LinkedIn contacts and was subject to a “lifetime ban” in the fall of 2020. (She appealed the decision and got a response that they’d “reviewed [her] private messages” and decided to sustain the ban.) She had posted skepticism that mask orders (bandanas at the time!) and U.S.-style lockdowns were effective in long-term reduction of COVID-19 deaths.

The New York Times says that Djokovic has been cast out via a flight from Australia to comparatively free Dubai. Let’s check “the curve”. From a few days ago:

Now that Djokovic has left via Dubai, and thus the sanctity of Australia has been restored, it does look as though the curve is flattening. From the Google:

Advantage, #Science?

Samizdat currently circulating among Irish sports fans via WhatsApp:

(Facebook owns WhatsApp, but due to tech limitations, it can’t read messages that are exchanged among users and therefore it can’t easily hunt down and ban the unrighteous.)

Related:

Full post, including comments