“Look, I hope everybody’s realized by now, these masks make a difference,” said President Joe Biden in response to the lifting of mask mandates in Texas and Mississippi.  “[T]he last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that [as vaccines roll out], everything’s fine, take off your mask, forget it. It still matters.”

Biden’s statement abandons “the science” in at least two ways.

Firstly, Neanderthals appear to have been about as smart as their Cro-Magnon counterparts (our most direct ancestors, although many humans have some Neanderthal ancestry as well).

More importantly, published, peer-reviewed scientific studies have yet to demonstrate any significant impact of masks on the spread of viral disease. “The science” doesn’t say that “masks make a difference.”

It’s important to remember that correlation and causation are not the same thing and that there can be many factors involved, but let’s look at some raw information:

America’s two  most “locked-down and masked-up” states — New Jersey  and New York — are also the two hardest-hit. They’ve  suffered, respectively, 264 and 245 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 population.

Meanwhile, Florida — where there’s no statewide mask mandate and where local authorities are forbidden by state law to enforce mandates on individuals with arrests and fines — is in far better shape at 146 deaths per 100,000 population.

Texas, which has been slightly more authoritarian on COVID-19 than Florida, is also in slightly worse shape than Florida (but in far better shape than New York or New Jersey) at 155 deaths per 100,000 population.

Missouri, which seemed ultra-casual about masking when I visited last August for my mother’s funeral (she caught COVID-19 in a locked-down, masked-up nursing home) is doing even better than Florida at 140 deaths per 100,000 population.

Like I said, correlation is not causation. There could be many reasons for those differences, including but not limited to climate, population density, prevalent disease strain, etc.

But for the same reason, what there is NOT is anything approaching certainty that masks in general, or mask mandates in particular, save lives. If there’s a plausible conclusion to be drawn at all, it’s that they don’t.

This time last year, the US Surgeon General Jerome Adams was scolding Americans to stop buying up masks, while National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci was telling 60 Minutes, “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask …. wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”

Adams and Fauci were right back then, before politics pushed them away from the truth.

In the future, the most interesting topic related to COVID-19 will probably be not the disease itself, but the question of how an initially voluntary and seemingly commonsense measure snowballed  into a fad driven by politically cultivated mass hysteria, then into what can only be described as a government establishment of religion.

The Cult of the Sacred Mask is disintegrating. Joe Biden should resign its ceremonial papacy and focus on merely being president.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Mask Mandates: Pope Joe versus ‘The Science,'” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 03/08/21
• “Mask Mandates: Pope Joe versus ‘The Science,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 03/10/21
• “Mask mandates: Pope Joe versus ‘The Science,’” by Thomas L. Knapp, Havasu City, Arizona News-Herald, 03/12/21

Well, at least he hasn’t started any NEW wars!

For four years, that was the excuse I got from anti-war Donald Trump supporters every time he escalated one of the several wars he inherited from George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

I expect to start hearing it from anti-war Joseph Biden supporters soon.

Trump was Schrodinger’s President. He campaigned as simultaneously opposed to “endless wars” and “the most militaristic” president in history.  He presided as mostly the latter, while continuing to campaign as the former.

Exiting stage right, he left Joe Biden teed up for a foreign policy grand slam, with three easy, peasy, no-brainer foreign policy base hits and two chances at a home run.

Potential base hit #1: Holding up the US end of the Afghanistan peace deal Trump negotiated with the Taliban. America’s second-longest war could be ending, but Biden’s still dithering.

Potential base hit #2: Restoring and building on Obama’s attempt at a relationship change with Cuba, which Trump dismantled. Instead of taking the hit, then stealing second base by unilaterally ending more than 60 years of meddling and embargo, Biden’s just quacking about lifting some of Trump’s reimposed restrictions and pitching “talks” about the rest.

Potential base hit #3: Replacing Trump’s fake “withdrawal” of US forces from Syria with a real one (Trump massively escalated the Syria conflict, then drew troops back down to Obama-era levels and pretended that was “withdrawing”). Instead, in late February, Biden authorized US airstrikes in Syria, supposedly to retaliate for an attack on US contractors and troops in Iraq (where they shouldn’t have even been) but more likely to prove his belligerence to doubters in the military-industrial complex’s amen corner.

The grand slam home run: Bringing the US back into compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the “Iran nuclear deal,” which Trump violated (he didn’t “withdraw” from it — it’s a UN Security Council resolution and legally binding on all UN member states).

Biden campaigned on resuscitating the deal, and could have done so on his first day in office by simply bringing the US back into compliance. Instead, he’s hemming and hawing, offering “talks” the Iranians aren’t interested in and trial-ballooning new “conditions” he expects them to agree to before he’ll commit to obeying the law.

That’s four slow, fat pitches right across the plate, and Joe Biden seemingly can’t seem to bring himself to take a swat at them.

On foreign policy, Joe Biden’s presidency is shaping up a lot like Donald Trump’s and Barack Obama’s — lots of promises, with mostly only the bad ones likely to be delivered on.

If you were expecting something different, it looks like you got conned. And the worst is probably yet to come.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Biden’s Foreign Policy: No joy in Mudville,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 03/02/21
• “Biden’s Foreign Policy: No Joy in Mudville,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 03/02/21
• “Biden’s foreign policy: No joy in Mudville,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Arab American News, 03/03/21
• “Biden’s Foreign Policy: No Joy in Mudville,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Creston, Iowa News Advertiser, 03/03/21
• “Biden’s foreign policy: No joy in Mudville,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hopkinsville, Kentucky New Era, 03/03/21
• “Biden’s Foreign Policy: No Joy in Mudville,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 03/04/21
• “Biden’s Foreign Policy: No Joy in Mudville,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 03/04/21
• “Biden’s Foreign Policy: No Joy in Mudville,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 03/04/21
• “Biden’s foreign policy: No joy in Mudville,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Havasu City, Arizona News-Herald, 03/08/21

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel said in November 2008, shortly before becoming White House Chief of Staff in the Obama administration. Left unsaid: Even if you have to make something into a “serious crisis,” molehill-to-mountain style.

There are plenty of real crises. There’s almost always something important that’s going wrong.  But real crises are difficult to exploit. Getting important things done well is hard work, and who deserves credit isn’t always obvious. Political grandstanding is easier, leading to what I call the Dairy Farm strategy of crisis exploitation:

First, have a cow.

Then, milk it.

Democrats have been milking the January 6 Capitol riot for going on two months now. Congress is holding hearings. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wants to establish a “1/6 Commission,” with a pre-stacked 7-4 Democrat/Republican split, to “review” that day’s events and ensure blame for those events falls squarely on Republicans.

Naturally, Republicans object to the partisan imbalance. Some of them loathe the idea in its entirety, some want its purview reduced to Capitol security failures, others want that purview expanded beyond the “right” to include other riots in other places on other issues (i.e. Black Lives Matter and antifa), versus the “right-wing extremism” Pelosi wants to milk and milk and milk.

I’m not saying members of Congress were unjustified in having a cow after a mob overran police lines and chased them from their chambers. But it was what it was: A one-off riot.

Incited? Yes, in various ways and by various people. Planned? Not much if at all, at least so far as the available evidence indicates. Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, et al. spent two months winding up a mob of unstable non-geniuses, then set that mob loose to do short-term, uncoordinated mayhem.

It wasn’t 9/11. It wasn’t Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t the JFK assassination. It wasn’t an “insurrection.” It wasn’t a “coup.” It was a poorly scripted and typically stupid Donald Trump publicity stunt run amok.

The problem with milking the cow you had is that milk goes sour relatively soon.  Pelosi’s pail has become a petri dish for what she sneeringly dismisses as “conspiracy theories” when regular people spout them.

She wants us to drink a tall, warm glass of that sour milk to wash down government censorship of media (both “mainstream” and “social”) and other “emergency” infringements on civil liberties. We should pour it down the drain instead.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 02/25/21
• “Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 02/25/21
• “Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 02/26/21
• “Capitol riot well past its sell by date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hammond, Louisiana Daily Star, 03/01/21
• “Capitol riot story is well past its sell-by date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Fredericksburg, Virginia Free Lance-Star [web and print], 03/02/21
• “Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Roundup, Montana Record-Tribune & Winnett Times, 03/03/21
• “Knapp downplays seriousness of Capitol riot,” by Bobby Anderson, Fredericksburg, Virginia Free-Lance Star [web and print], 03/06/21
• “Democrats have milked Capitol riot long enough,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Kingsport, Tennessee Times News, 03/08/21
• “Capital Riot Well Past Its Sell By Date,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Florence, Alabama Courier Journal [web and print], 03/09/21