Look who got COVID. Ha!

     "It should hopefully go without saying that we should not applaud or cheer the health misfortunes of others. Let's please not lose our humanity."

               Dan Rather tweet

There is something emotionally satisfying about a person getting his just desserts. We have a rich choice of words for it: Poetic justice; Ironic reversal; Comeuppance; "Hoist with his own petard." Our feeling mixes a sense of justice and glee. We understand that cruelty is wrong, but fairness is right. Just desserts gives us an excuse for glee at the misfortune of another. Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet reversed a plot to have him assassinated and arranged that the false-friend agents for his death be killed instead of him. Shakespeare did not hide from the glee.

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard. . . O, ’tis most sweet.

There are websites awarding "Darwin awards," given to prominent opponents of vaccination who get COVID and die.  Ha! A QAnon star had tens of thousands of fans. "The vaccines kill, don't get it!" she told fans. Then she died.

This story in thehill.com includes a frequent and welcome feature, a too-late expression of remorse. You were right, I was wrong. "I wish I had gotten it!”

A solitary citizen, persuaded not to get vaccinated, dying quietly, does not trigger the emotion of righteous justice. One feels impatience, maybe pity. They died because of gullibility. Many are Christian. It became Christian to refuse this vaccine. People have told me this joke a dozen times in the past few months.

A man in a flood is sitting on the rooftop of his house and prays to God for rescue. A rowboat approaches. The man says, no, God will save him. A short while later a motorboat approaches. No need, the man yells, God will save me. Then a helicopter hovers over him. No, God will save me, he says. The man drowns and finds himself standing in front of St. Peter. "Why didn't God save me?"  Saint Peter said, "We sent a rowboat, a powerboat, and a helicopter. What were you waiting for?"

The joke expresses frustration. They are misguided victims. 

The most satisfying of these stories involve anti-vaccine influencers, an emotion reserved for people in government, social media, talk radio, and maybe just people displaying aggressive lawn signs and bumper strips. They aren't victims. They are perpetrators. They sowed it, reaped it, and sold it to others. They perpetrated both suicide and murder, and did it proudly, in our faces. 

My emotion of glee, of what Hamlet called "sport," comes unbidden when I hear of their misfortunes and deaths. I feel righteous. I recognize it as an all-too-human emotion, but as Dan Rather wrote, it lacks humanity. We risk losing it. I am embarrassed by how I feel. I know better. I was brought up to understand that cruelty is wrong, and death a matter for sorrow. Dan Rather's comment shames me. He is right. I should be sad. But I feel what I feel. They are hoist on their own petard. 

Who is Ray Epps?

Just asking questions.

Just spreading a false narrative.

Just raising money. 

There is more than one way to bear false witness in politics. 

Let me give liars some practical advice. It is smarter to exaggerate than outright lie. Claim something big. Stick to a landslide claim. If you claim a landslide then surely you must have at least won. A big claim moves the area of potential disagreement in your favor. 

Here is another one. When making accusations that embed false facts you want to attach to someone, it is smarter to share falsehoods in the form of questions rather than direct statements. The question works just as well to feed the lie, and it gives the liar deniability in the face of lawsuits. Notice how incautious Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were in saying outright as fact that Dominion machines switched votes. Dominion is both lawyers. They should have just "asked questions" that implied corrupt behavior. Dominion would be just as damaged, but Giuliani and Powell would be in the clear. 

Cruz in South Carolina, 2016

I use the biblical words "false witness," because the Judeo-Christian tradition commands against defaming others. I watched Ted Cruz up close in New Hampshire and South Carolina. His political schtick mixes Texas cowboy boots, political conservatism, and God. He was the leading Christian nationalist candidate in the early months of the 2016 nomination campaign. Cruz was "trusTED." He had the Christian flame of the holy spirit, right there in his campaign logo.

Cruz was overtaken by a celebrity willing to take the fight to liberals, harder and nastier than Cruz, but with more humor. Pocahontas was funny. Cruz was serious. Trump had a better act. Trump understood that in the war for all-American culture, the ends justified the means. There are bad guys: The fake news, the liberals, the socialists, the haughty cosmopolitan elites, terrorist-sheltering Muslims, Blacks with their affirmative action privilege, the immigrants who get everything handed to them. Trump was unapologetic. He proudly asserted it was morally OK to crush losers and enemies. Audiences loved watching it. Voters loved watching it.

Ted Cruz learned from Trump. Voters in the current GOP activist base do not want Christian piety or  sportsmanship. They don't mind exaggeration and lies. They reward strength. I participate in a longitudinal experiment to see what the Ted Cruz base likes and responds to. I am on his email list. He writes me about five days a week for five years with "red meat" and a request for money. He has had over a thousand trial runs to hone a message that delivers for him.

***Ted Cruz's base likes conspiracies. There are dark mysterious forces that threaten people.

***Ted Cruz's base responds to innuendo. The "just asking questions" technique seems to work.

***Ted Cruz's base wants to believe that January 6 riot was the fault of their enemies, not their own teammates.

Ray Epps is an Arizona resident, a Trump supporter, and a leader in the "Oath Keepers." He participated in speeches and rallies on January 5 and 6 near the Capitol. He is not a FBI informant nor employee and has said so adamantly. Ted Cruz knows this. He also knows Justice Department employees cannot comment on ongoing investigations so their refusal to answer was a given and not suspicious. Ray Epps is collateral damage used to feed a debunked conspiracy theory. The irony is that Epps' reputation is being besmirched because Cruz is implying that he works in law enforcement to protect the Constitution. He doesn't and never has. He is a volunteer Trump-activist attempting to stop a Constitutional process, i.e. a "good guy" within the check-writing GOP orbit. Cruz is defaming him.

Here is a portion of the email Ted Cruz sent me this week. It says something about Cruz. It says something about Cruz's audience. This is what works with them.

From:Ted Cruz 

Subject: Who is Ray Epps?

To: Peter Sage

This week I led the search for answers on whether there was any federal involvement in January 6.

I grilled a senior FBI official– and she REFUSED to answer key questions.

 

Who is Ray Epps? Was Ray Epps a federal agent or informant?

Did ANY FBI agents or confidential informants actively participate in the events that day?

We know the FBI has been misused in the past to target President Trump and our conservative movement and run interference for the Democrats.

 

Just look at the Russia Collusion Hoax- James Comey and Peter Strzok...

 

…and now AG Merrick Garland won’t answer questions from Congress. 

What are they trying to hide now about the events of January 6, 2021?

 

I’m working hard to expose the full truth and shine a light on whether there was any FBI involvement on that day... and the liberal media can’t stand it! . . .

Democrats want to twist the events of January 6 to fit their completely dishonest narrative, with their pals in the liberal media all-in on the scam. 

  

Trump 2024

Democrats are poised to lose the White House in 2024.

Unless Trump.

"Too many Republicans embrace Donald Trump’s narcissistic fantasy of a stolen election. . ..  To appreciate how self-defeating this is, consider that Trump’s best shot at winning in 2024 would be to drop his focus on 2020 and continuously assail President Biden’s underwhelming performance in the White House and the overreach of congressional Democrats. Trump has a strong record to run on, and Biden is proving an easy act to follow. The fact that not just he but millions of his supporters are incapable of recognizing this obvious truth shows how polluted our politics have become by the pathologies of victimhood, grievance and division."

               CLICK: J. Peder Zane, Real Clear Politics 

President Joe Biden cannot corral Democrats into a governing coalition. He never had the skillset for the job, even when he was younger, and certainly not now. He cannot articulate a national purpose or policy agenda for Americans, or even for Democrats. We knew his limitations. Some people probably were comforted by seeing them. He was harmless.

Biden did not create a movement. Trump did. MAGA die-hards, including Trump himself, who say that there is no possible way that 83 million people wanted this feeble stuttering guy who broadcast from a Delaware basement. They are partly right. The 83 million votes wanted Trump out.

Hulk Hogan: "Heel."

Today's economy is so good it is overheating. People have money to spend. Home prices are up; stock prices are up; car price are up; unemployment is under 4%; and employees are so confident they are quitting jobs if they feel restless or unappreciated. There are "Help Wanted" signs everywhere. COVID is a downer, but even conservatives see the pattern. The Trump-supporting unvaccinated are filling up hospitals and morgues. The vaccinated and boosted stay alive. It does not get any better than that for a message. 

Biden can talk of progress and success but no one hears him or cares. People think the country is on the wrong track. Democrats need to remember what they knew when they watched JFK in 1960, Clinton in 1992, and Obama in 2008. Charisma matters. Star quality matters. Trump is a tabloid professional wrestling stock-character "heel," the angry antagonist. The bad guy, The rule breaker. Trump, like successful professional wrestling heels, established a vivid character people simultaneously admire and hate. Trump caught the moment and attracted an audience. 

Democrats need to acknowledge the reality that Donald Trump is a star who can persuade. A lot of people like what he says and they even like the pugnacious way he says it. He is fearless. The world is changing toward something more cosmopolitan, diverse,and post-industrial. Or post-post-industrial, a world of Artificial Intelligence. Trump created a political MAGA world of resistance to all that. He is its leader. There is no opposite and equivalent political world for Democrats. 

From Trump's website 

Democrats painted themselves into a political corner. Kamala Harris is badly positioned. Even if Biden leaves office early she would be tainted. She would be an inheritor, not a founder. In 2024 Democrats will be led by Biden, by Harris, or by some newcomer whose elevation would come at the expense of a Black woman-in-waiting Vice President. It is a weak hand. 

It can only beat a weaker one. Trump needs to be the issue, and fortunately for Democrats, he is stepping up. It was very Trump-like to claim to be cheated and to lay a foundation of doubt and conspiracy. It worked with birtherism. Voters enjoy thinking ill of politicians they disagree with. Trump is a master at turning disagreement into detest.

Trump's error is that he cannot let go of the Big Lie. We like "good guy" rogues who take on illegitimate authority, but not crazy ones. Trump's monomania is the GOP's giant vulnerability. He enforces message discipline among Republicans. You are with him or a RINO enemy he will squash. In 2022 Republican candidates in swing states and districts will hedge and muddle. We saw it in Virginia. It works politically. However, if Trump is the 2024 nominee, he is stuck being the human he is, and so is the GOP. He doubled down on his character and his grievance. He really thinks he won. He isn't shutting up. He looks crazy. Democrats should rejoice.

A crazy Trump is the one person Democrats can beat in 2024. 

Breakthrough Infection

Today’s blog post is a happy one.

A man got COVID and got well. The lack of drama is the story.

Gerald Burns, from Facebook 

Gerald Burns, a Medford, Oregon resident in his mid-70s, a friend, a member of my Rotary club, my long-time CPA, got COVID. Then his wife, Connie, got it. He and his wife are both vaccinated and boosted. It was a breakthrough case of the omicron variant of COVID.

His experience is an up close reminder that vaccinated people get COVID. Omicron is different from earlier variants. Vaccination no longer signifies immunity. It signifies not getting hospitalized or dying. That reality is changing the mindset regarding COVID, which will slowly trickle down to public policy. Vaccination no longer means one is substantially protecting others, including co-workers. Vaccinated people may spread disease less, and for a shorter time, but it is now a matter of degree, not spreader vs. non-spreader. The vaccinated-but-infected can spread the disease unknowingly, since they have no symptoms, or mild ones. 

The facts on the ground have changed, so the justification for mandating vaccination has weakened. There is less reason to care if others are vaccinated. The higher hospitalization and death rates for the unvaccinated are the concerns of life insurance companies, health insurers, and businesses with group health plans. It is less so the government or for people standing next to others in a grocery store. Everyone could be a spreader now. Democrats may have policy inertia and be slow to acknowledge the changed reality. They won't want to be accused of flip-flopping and they will want to keep policy options open for the next COVID variant.

There is a good reason to get vaccinated. You will likely survive COVID. Isn't that enough? Gerry Burns' experience isn't "data" or "science." It is the lived experience of one breakthrough case. He fits the profile of people who got hospitalized, ventilated, and died back before vaccinations. 

Guest Post by Gerald Burns

            "My experience with COVID."

Time frame: Christmas weekend through Saturday, January 15, 2022

1. Sunday, December 26, 2021. Had a family Christmas dinner. Learned a few days later that a family member had recently taken a Covid test because a work colleague had been diagnosed with COVID. The test was positive but my family member did not experience any symptoms.

2. Thursday, January 6, 2022. At dinner I experienced a sharp headache. After dinner I began to cough. My sinuses were very congested.

3. Friday, January 7, 2022. Went to my office. My symptoms continued all day. I drove to the Asante Rapid Test Site on Center Drive about 4 pm. By 5 pm I had completed my test and went home. Wife Connie becomes my nurse.

Gerry and Connie Burns

4. Saturday, January 8, 2022. My head-ache, congestion, cough, and sore throat symptoms continued to worsen. Treatment consisted of over-the-counter meds, sinus washing, steam, Chamomile tea with honey, water, and a sports drink.

5. Sunday, January 9, 2022. Symptoms easing. I received phone call from Asante advising that my test was positive. I resigned to isolation/quarantine. Today--day four--my wife began exhibiting similar symptoms. I became her nurse.

6. Monday, January 10, 2022. I began improving rapidly. I still had a lot of phlegm, so I continued sinus washing and blowing my nose.

7. Tuesday, January 11, 2022. I was feeling much better. Stopped the over-the-counter meds. Continue with the steam and hydration.

8. Wednesday, January 12, 2022. I continued getting better.

9. Thursday, January 13, 2022. I left my house for Starbucks.

10. Friday, January 14, 2022. Went to Ashland to pick up dinner from Omars Restaurant.

11. Saturday, January 15, 2022. Went to my office to prepare a To-Do List for the upcoming week. I felt like working.

Conclusion: Based on this experience, I suspect I had the omicron variant of COVID. I compare the level of sickness to a cold, but not a particularly severe one. Connie is getting better, too.

[To subscribe to this blog go to: https://Petersage.Substack.com The posts arrive in your in-box daily. This blog is free and always will be.]

Chicken Pox Party

I attended. 

I left before it started.

I didn't feel comfortable. It looked like a super-spreader event.

It was a GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Forum. There were 110 people in the ballroom, shaking hands and leaning in, talking loud near each other to be heard amid the buzz of competing conversations. It was a good crowd of politically engaged Republicans. They were at a country club lobby and meeting room to listen to seven candidates for governor make their cases. 

I was the only one wearing a mask.

I spent 10 minutes total at the event. I am vaccinated and boosted, but I don't feel invulnerable. People get breakthrough cases, then spread COVID, sometimes to people more fragile than themselves. My longtime accountant, a fellow Rotarian, is vaccinated and boosted. He just caught COVID and gave it to his wife. Both are OK, but I considered it a warning. It could happen to me.  

My county had 424 new cases of COVID yesterday and we are having a surge. The official number for Jackson County is 1,167 cases per 100,000 population in the past seven days. People are infectious for about seven days. This means at least 1.2% of local citizens are infectious. The real number is far more than that, of course. Some vaccinated people are infectious and never know it. They aren't included in the statistics. Other people have symptoms, and maybe take a home test, and learn they are positive. Why bother telling the county health people you have COVID? They were infectious for a while before they tested. Who knows if they isolate? A fellow who helps me at my farm got COVID, and his wife and three preschool children all got it. They never told anyone. COVID is out there. 

I did a seat-of-the-pants calculation. There are over a hundred people here. What subset of the population would be most likely to be COVID-positive and unknowingly exhale omicron into this room? With the possible exception of a rural cowboy bar filled with young male partiers, I could think of no subset of people more likely to be COVID carriers than this one, even as cleaned up and polite as they all were. 

As a group, Republican partisans are vaccine and mask skeptical, and many are adamant and proud of it. They have bumper stickers to say so, like the one on the car parked next to mine. This is a group of extravert activists, happily attending an event where they protest mask and vaccine mandates. They did not seem one bit concerned about getting or spreading COVID. That made me concerned.

 

I was wearing two masks; a tight fitting K-95 mask with a surgical mask over it. Masks like that protect others but don't do much to protect me. I wanted out. While leaving, I noticed an older woman wearing a N-95 mask. There were two of us!

I approached her. I said, "Hello, I see you are wearing a mask."

"Yes. I have lung cancer," she said. "I am trying not to get COVID on top of the cancer." I nodded and hoped my eyes above my mask showed empathy.

"It is inconsiderate for people not to wear masks," she said.

I nodded and said, "Well, they are doing what they want. It's a free country and we are free to leave."

When I attend events like this as a "political tourist," I try not to say much or reveal my own politics. I want to hear what people think when they aren't getting cues from me. But at this candidate forum that was impossible. I was sending a clear body language message with my masks. 

I wish I had left sooner. Omicron is in the air. The event looked like those "chicken pox parties" people used to have. Everyone here was sharing the air. Probably some people were vaccinated, probably some were not. Who knows? Either way, candidates and crowd were back to normal. Maybe one gets COVID, maybe not; maybe one spreads it, maybe not. Who knows? The hospitals are full? Oh, well. Quit fussing. Get on with our lives. Don't let people tell you to do what you don't want to do. Seven GOP candidates for governor were on display and their faces were making clear their position on COVID. 

Head's up to skeptics: This may be a winning political strategy.

[Note: to subscribe for daily delivery of this blog by email go to: https://petersage.substack.com The blog is free and always will be.]

Hometown Newspaper for Ashland, Oregon

This headline has a hot link:  Ashland.news

Click on it and find the first edition of a new "newspaper."

Newspaper is in quotes because it isn't a newspaper. It isn't printed on paper. It is a website, attempting to do the things that local newspapers formerly did, but now do not.

Ashland.news re-creates a local newspaper for Ashland, published via a website. It will present the sort of news that communities create when normal living takes place there. It will publish news about schools, city government, special events, and the goings-on at Southern Oregon University, Shakespeare, and other institutions important to Ashland. Most of what happens in Ashland isn't "newsworthy" to people outside the area: Snow days at Ashland High School, a street closure, a construction project at Lithia Park. Ashland faced the fate of communities all across America. The business model for their local news disappeared. 

The Medford-Ashland area has it better than most places our size. Medford is a TV broadcast center for a region with over 400,000 people. We have four local stations that broadcast news. TV reporters want stories to fill their "news hole" and Ashland gets some of that attention. TV news has a strong bias toward stories that are visually interesting. Fires are visual. Protests with vivid signs are visual. It is the nature of TV.

Ashland.news will publish those stories and more: Newspaper-type stories. Much of what is important for people to know about their community is only accessable to an audience willing to read. That is why newspapers thrived. For most of the 20th century small-town newspapers were monopolies that supported news-gathering through ad revenue. Print newspapers still get public notice revenue and they get paid to run obituaries, but their classified advertising drifted to Craigslist, eBay, realtor.com, and other on-line sites. Display ads nearly disappeared--except for advertisements for the newspaper itself. Newspapers get paid to deliver inserts. Inserts still work. The revenue does not support robust news-gathering, so we got less and less of it.  Ashland residents noticed.

Ashland.news expects to thrive with a different business model from traditional newspapers: Donations. It is the model of public radio and television. People who value the service are asked to pay for it voluntarily. Because it is on-line instead of a physical newspaper, people who donate are paying for news not paper and delivery. 

Ashland.news got started with some founder/angel donors, but it will survive long term by building a subscriber/donor base. People pay for "TV worth watching." People who value public radio donate to it. We are accustomed to subscription services. If people value newspaper-type news, they will pay for it voluntarily. That is the plan.

Will Ashland.news succeed? We don't know yet. If a couple thousand Ashland households value local news, then it will. The old model is broken. This may be the future of local news.

[Disclosure:  I am one of the founding donors to Ashland.news. I have no financial interest in it. The nonprofit paper has a board of directors; I am not on it. I wish Ashland.news well. In the future I might decide to run display ads in the paper to see if people who read Ashland.news find this blog of interest. In that case I will pay the same rate as anyone else.]

Oops. Who knew?

     "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future."

        Attributed to Yogi Berra and others

Forty years ago I was a Jackson County Commissioner.

I was elected just after I turned 31. I can see how things turned out--so far. I was wrong about some things.

Jails are built to deal with both present and future. I was on the jail-size citizen's advisory committee. I got onto TV saying bigger was better. I said bigger was more humane--less crowded. We knew the county would grow, but underestimated how fast growth came. Ours is not an earthquake zone, but in 1993 buildings shook here and fell down in Klamath County, 70 miles away. The jail wasn't designed for earthquakes.  Oops.

We put enormous attention on Southern Oregon's air quality. In winter we had thick particle-rich fog that put a film of gunk onto car windshields and routinely brought visibility down to a few feet. In the summers we had hazardous yellow ozone haze. Air quality was a major negative for Medford. It turns out that the problems we knew about mostly got solved--but only indirectly by what we did.

The lumber mills complained bitterly about being required to install pollution scrubbers. We made slow progress forcing pollution controls onto them. Environmental regulations to protect the spotted owl meant timber harvests in surrounding forests plummeted. A few mills remained and made the investments to install large air-filtering scrubbers, but most local mills closed. They didn't have lumber to mill. That cleaned up the winter air.

We county commissioners addressed summer air by supporting inspection and maintenance of auto exhausts. It turns out that nearly all the problem got fixed because newer cars won't run if the carburetors aren't working well. The former problem of people intentionally removing catalytic converters is long past. Now the concern is that people steal catalytic converters.  

We have a summer air problem in the different direction, and it is worse. The under-managed, unharvested forests catch fire and fill the valley with smoke. That didn't happen back in 1982.

We tried to plan ahead to protect farm land by forbidding division of farm blocks into smaller parcels and forbidding new homesites on farm land. Our assumption was that keeping parcel sizes large would help commercial pear operations--our trademark agricultural use--buy and hold land at farm prices--not homesite prices. The county ended up defining and zoning as farmable some star-thistle-covered areas that were worthless as farm land. That seemed crazy to us, but the law required it.

Surprise. Our expectations were backwards. It turns out that by 2022 some of those hillsides are now in intensive agriculture as prime vineyards. Meanwhile, the pear orchards are being torn out. They aren't worth farming for pears. Some may be replaced by vineyards, but most have turned into--of all things--cannabis farms. That was unexpected. In 1982 people went to prison for growing cannabis.  

In 1982 we assumed that houses on farmland would hurt the ability to farm. I had it backwards. Cannabis farming requires workers to be on site, both for convenience of a labor-intensive crop, and for security. Neighbors, journalists, and public officials complain about the about the inhumanity of workers living in tents or in plastic-clad shelters, and the lack of water and septic systems.  As yesterday's blog noted, it made Southern Oregon a supposed "hell-hole." This situation was the result of public policy I helped enact. We forbade permanent housing on farms. Oops.

As the county created its master plan in 1982, we had ten goals to consider. One was the "housing" goal. It occupied less than one percent of our attention. After all, housing wasn't a problem, except possibly for the fact that it was too easy to build too much of it, too inexpensively, where it was unwelcome. We saw the marketplace was working and assumed that it would continue to provide ample affordable housing. Oops.

The Greenway in flames

A major project for the county was the creation of a linear park of wild-land alongside Bear Creek, the creek that connects the cities of Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, Medford, and Central Point. It is a lovely civic amenity. It became the zone for encampments of unhoused people. It was garbage-strewn, dangerous for park users, and a fire hazard. In the summer of 2020 it became path for the Almeda fire which torched the dry natural vegetation along with over 2,500 homes. We created a lovely park. We also created a difficult-to-manage hazard. Oops.

This is not an apology. We-the-people planned our future and I was part of it. We did our best. I write in humility. We plan. We plant seeds. We imagine the future and build for it. Some of it will turn out as we expect. Some will not. We need to plan for that, too.