COVID protection insanity - Sarah Cody

Santa Clara County, which is mostly the megapolis of San Jose, is making its COVID policy through its County Health Officer Dr Sarah Cody, and if there ever was an example of the Peter Principle - Petra Principle? - then she is it.

Witness Friday's announcement about loosening restrictions in Santa Clara:

Santa Clara County loosened some guidelines Friday while keeping others tightly in place. It now says if you're six feet apart, and outdoors, masks are no longer required.

According to Twitter, up until now, many residents of Santa Clara had no idea that they had to wear masks while outdoors and 6+ feet away from anyone else. This is not surprising because it is completely insane. Technically, if you were jogging on a public trail last Thursday with no-one within 100 yards, you were violating these restrictions. There is no evidence that COVID spreads outdoors between people 6ft+ apart - none! Yet Cody found it necessary to impose the restrictions nevertheless.

I've played the ball (the restrictions) so now I feel justified in playing the man (Cody).

Cody was appointed in 2013, succeeding her boss - she had spent the past 15 years working as a Deputy Health Officer at the Santa Clara County Public Health Department. If I saw that promotion profile on a resumé I'd have absolutely no confidence that the promotion was earned. It was either for convenience - the leadership didn't really bother advertising and interviewing - or diversity, where she was the only female candidate. The latter seems a bit unlikely because public health officials tend to be female, so I'm leaning towards "convenience". Definitely not "competence".

Cody has comprehensively screwed up Santa Clara's response to COVID, mounting increasing strict restrictions which have had no differential impact on the spread and effect of the virus compared to elsewhere. She invents random priorities for vaccination just to show that she's involved and hip to minorities - rather than taking hard-won experience from other countries and implementing as-is. She is astonishingly out of her depth. I'm sure she's a competent middle-of-the-road medic, but she apparently has no idea how to consider the business and other aspects of her random pronouncements.

I would like to see every restaurant in San Jose, having suffered 3 months of shut-down indoor dining and 2 months of any dining at all despite their investments in outside facilities, post a picture of Sarah Cody - and her minions - in their front windows. Text underneath: "BANNED: not to be served at this establishment". Hope she likes McDonald's and KFC.

That said, Cody doesn't get the full blame; when the local population is full of neurotics, pandering to them is very tempting.

"It feels good, but at the same time it's nerve-wracking not wearing it, see, that's why I still have it on, you never know, boom, here we go,” said Monica Hernandez of Cupertino.

Monica Hernandez should shut herself in a closet in her apartment if she's that afraid. Let the rest of us try to restart the economy that Dr Sarah Cody has throttled to death.

Asian Lives Matter - arrest the shopkeepers!

I swear, I had no idea this was going to catch light so fast - but apparently it has.

I tagged my previous post with an update about an Oakland Chinatown liquor store owner who was arrested after shooting at someone robbing a woman outside his store. Well, the plot has thickened!

The arrest of the Oakland Chinatown store owner who fired shots while interrupting a robbery has divided the police department [my emphasis]. On Monday, the store owner saw a woman being confronted by men who wanted her camera near 9th and Franklin. The men also hit her with their car.
That's when the store owner fired shots, and the men took off. KTVU has learned that the store owner has a concealed weapons permit from outside Alameda County that's valid statewide.

Side note: this

Oakland police officers and investigators believed the owner, who has helped them find suspects in the past, should be released from custody.
But those officers were overruled by a captain who ordered the owner be jailed, [my emphasis] sources told KTVU.

So: even the local cops thought that the owner made a reasonable decision , but the chief of police wants to arrest him. Where, exactly, does Chief LeRonne Armstrong think this is going to lead?

Asian Lives Matter - the fire rises!

Channelling Tom Hardy here, but the dysfunction and civil rebellion that has started is not a million miles away from Bane and his merry crew...

It didn't take long for my previous post on an 84 year old blind Thai man being beaten to death for other incidents of young-black-on-elderly-Asian violence to happen. In fact, it's spreading:

• Mr Yahya Muslim of Oakland has been assaulting a series of elderly Asians in the city. He came to prominence after a security video caught someone with his description smashing a 91-year-old man to the ground from behind, on January 31
• Graffiti artists have tagged a Japanese immigrant memorial in San Jose's Japantown, making a clear statement about territory;
• and, unsurprisingly, Oakland's Asian community organizes patrols to combat the violence.

The single most telling sign for me is that Bay Area Big Tech companies are sending mails around about this phenomenon. I've had confirmation of three separate companies mailing their Asian employee clubs/groups about the attacks, expressing their shock and horror and offering emotional support. Mind you, they seem to be very careful not to talk about the perpetrators...

One claim I have seen recently, now that people are talking about it, is that it has been triggered by Donald J Trump talking about the "Kung Flu". Setting aside the miniscule likelihood that a 20 year old black thug in San Francisco has even listened to a Trump speech, let's remember Yik Oi Huang who was brutally beaten in SFO in January 2019, over a year before the pandemic - and suffered for a year before dying in early 2020. These are not Trump-driven anti-Chinese supremacists. These are callous racist thugs. Lay the blame for their behaviour at the feet of their parents - if they still care.

The most spectacular feet of mental agility I've seen, though, was from Los Angeles Times writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet T Nguyen:

Horrendous crimes against Asian Americans have happened recently, and it is right that Asian Americans have spoken out against them. But we can be against anti-Asian violence and not resort to knee-jerk calls for more policing, which is inextricable from the policing of Black

— Viet Thanh Nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) February 12, 2021

and Brown communities. Asian Americans need to locate anti-Asian violence as part of a pattern of white supremacy [my emphasis] which also targets Black and Brown and Indigenous people. Even if perpetrators of violence are people of color, the solution is not to fallback on racist assumptions

— Viet Thanh Nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) February 12, 2021

All I can say is that it must take a very expensive education to mess up one's brain that badly. Black people are beating up on the Asian elderly community, and your reflex - as a Vietnamese American - is to blame white supremacy?

I repeat my previous assertion. Unless these attacks are stopped - and it doesn't look like the police are able to stop them - the Asian community is going to turn to organizations which can make it happen. Asian shops are going to stop serving young black people, or make them feel so unwelcome that they leave, further increasing tensions. The almost-inevitable result is going to be a black 20-year old found lying in an alley in Chinatown with severe beating injuries, but it will turn out that no-one around saw anything. I thought we had got past this, but apparently history repeats.

Update: Feb 16th 2021 - a 30 year old was robbed of her expensive camera in Chinatown, Oakland. A liquor store owner saw what was happenening, ran out and fired his gun at the robber - and was promptly arrested and charged with felony assault with a firearm.

The [police] chief's message was that Oakland should come together as a community, but that people should not put one another in harm's way.

Sorry Chief, but there's a section of the black community which has already decided to put the Asian community in harm's way. And when you arrest a Chinese store owner for trying to stop a robbery - where the robber escapes - you send a very clear (unintentional) message to the Asian community about their ability to rely on the police to protect them.

Thai Lives Matter

It turns out that, following my previous notes on the matter, Asian-American lives in San Francisco continue to be rudely shortened:

Police in San Francisco arrested a 19-year-old Daly City man on suspicion of murder for a brazen attack last week on an 84-year-old man in the city’s Anza Vista neighborhood, officials said Sunday.
[...]
The victim was identified by family members as Vicha Ratanapakdee, a native of Thailand who lived in San Francisco.

I've seen the uncensored security video of the incident. It does not make for comfortable viewing. The thug barrels across the road, slams into Mr Ratanapakdee from the side, knocking him hard into the ground and then just lopes away casually. He clearly didn't care whether his victim lived or died. Unsurprisingly it was the latter, but took two days to happen.

Mr Ratanapakdee was 84 years old, and apparently legally blind. The notion that he was any kind of threat - or was even really aware of his assailant before the attack - is ridiculous. The alleged assailant, Mr Antoine Watson, is of course of the same ethnic persuasion as that described in my previously linked stories of elder abuse and grievous harm in peaceful San Francisco.

Even San Francisco's notoriously lax DA has been forced to take this attack seriously, and - should Mr Watson indeed be convicted of the crimes charged - he can expect a good long stint in jail. But the fact that he even attempted this is a recurring reminder of the threat to San Francisco's elderly Asian community that a certain section of its black community poses. Does the city government really think they are going to continue to take this lying down? Sooner or later, something is going to snap. And when the city doesn't show any inclination to protect elderly Asians, their younger relatives are going to find a dai lo who will.

Update: Feb 16th 2021 - a robbery outside a liquor store in Chinatown, Oakland results in a young woman being robbed of her expensive camera, and the liquor store owner being charged with felony assault with a firearm when he tried to intervene. While I'm sure that firing four shots (with, presumably, zero hits) was not the minimal-violence reaction, can you imagine how this is going to play in Chinatown?

The chief [of police]'s message was that Oakland should come together as a community, but that people should not put one another in harm's way.

Sorry Chief, I think that ship has sailed. One small part of the black community is already putting a large part of the Asian community in harm's way. When the Asian community fights back, they're arrested. And Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong is black. It doesn't matter how upright and righteous he is, this is going to appear - unfairly - as the black police chief covering for black criminals.