The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the Democratic presidential candidates are assiduously avoiding Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot:

WASHINGTON — Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democratic progressive, is going to make a presidential endorsement before the March 17 Illinois primary, and after talking to her on Thursday, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to go to progressive rivals Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

“Apparently not progressive enough for them,” Lightfoot said.

I asked her to tell me more.

“It is what it is. They haven’t reached out. They’ve been to Chicago. They were very supportive of the Chicago Teachers Union strike but didn’t feel it was necessary to talk to the new black LGBTQ mayor.”

Warren, from Massachusetts, and Sanders, from Vermont, sent Lightfoot a message with their lack of reaching out about an endorsement when they were in Chicago. The attitude coming from them was “Why bother?” Lightfoot said.

That’s a far cry from the days when people seeking the nomination as well as candidates came to kiss a Daley’s ring. Chicago is no less solidly Democratic than it was then. What’s changed? Flyover country.

At the New York Times Yanzhong Huang recounts the history of the Chinese authorities’ response to the SAR outbreak of 18 years ago:

The Chinese government’s initial response to SARS was, at least at the national level, a combination of inaction, denial and deception. The earliest case of SARS occurred in mid-November 2002; it’s clear that by late January of 2003 the Health Ministry was aware of a dangerous new type of pneumonia in Guangdong Province.

Yet the government did not issue a nationwide bulletin to hospitals with instructions for preventing the spread of the disease until April 3. And it was not until mid-April that it formally listed SARS as a disease to be closely monitored, with daily reports.

In the wake of that debacle, the Chinese government does seem to have become more willing to share disease-related information with both its people and international health organizations. But the government continues its top-down, state-dominated approach in disease surveillance, reporting and response.

suggesting that, like the Bourbon dynasty, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. There is an enormous difference between now and eighteen years ago in China. The people are much more prosperous, three times as many people have mobile phones, and most of those have smartphones. It is much harder to keep a secret than it used to be.

Not only that but there is considerably more travel between China and the rest of the world.

There is nowhere in the world more conducive to the outbreak of zoonotic diseases than China, although probably now less so that at any previous time in China’s history. If a great pandemic occurs, it will probably emerge from China. Although we shouldn’t panic, we should be treating episodic outbreaks as trial runs. It would be nice if the Chinese authorities were more forthcoming but you deal with the China you have rather than the one you’d like to have.

I’m a bit surprised that this op-ed by Josh Blackman at the New York Times headlines its opinion page. In it he articulates the argument that I did here, namely, that soliciting a political benefit is not or at least should not be an impeachable offense:

The way things look, President Trump will almost certainly not be removed from office. The precedents set by the articles of impeachment, however, will endure far longer. And regrettably, the House of Representatives has transformed presidential impeachment from a constitutional parachute — an emergency measure to save the Republic in free-fall — into a parliamentary vote of “no confidence.”

The House seeks to expel Mr. Trump because he acted “for his personal political benefit rather than for a legitimate policy purpose.” Mr. Trump’s lawyers responded, “elected officials almost always consider the effect that their conduct might have on the next election.” The president’s lawyers are right. And that behavior does not amount to an abuse of power.

Politicians pursue public policy, as they see it, coupled with a concern about their own political future. Otherwise legal conduct, even when plainly politically motivated — but without moving beyond a threshold of personal political gain — does not amount to an impeachable “abuse of power.” The House’s shortsighted standard will fail to knock out Mr. Trump but, if taken seriously, threatens to put virtually every elected official in peril. The voters, and not Congress, should decide whether to reward or punish this self-serving feature of our political order.

I made it here some weeks ago. I continue to believe that president’s statement made in the notorious phone call between him and the Ukrainian president was not the way we want presidents to do business with foreign governments and was, as some have put it, “boneheaded”. The president should have been censured for it. The Congress should immediately have enacted a law proscribing such conduct although I honestly don’t believe they could and meet Constitutional muster.

Rather than waiting until November they chose to impeach in December. That’s not only a “no confidence” vote in the president, it’s a “no confidence” vote in the Democratic presidential nominee, whoever he or she might be.

There is an interesting article in Science about something once thought to be impossible—the discovery and recovery of ancient DNA in Central Africa:

In the new study, geneticists and archaeologists took samples from the DNA-rich inner ear bones of the four children, who were buried 3000 and 8000 years ago at the famous archaeological site of Shum Laka. The researchers were able to sequence high-quality full genomes from two of the children and partial genomes from the other two. Comparing the sequences to those of living Africans, they found that the four children were distant cousins, and that all had inherited about one-third of their DNA from ancestors most closely related to the hunter-gatherers of western Central Africa. Another two-thirds of children’s DNA came from an ancient “basal” source in West Africa, including some from a “long lost ghost population of modern humans that we didn’t know about before,” says population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University, leader of the study.

The discovery underscores the diversity of African groups that inhabited the continent before the Bantus began to herd livestock in the grassy highlands of western Central Africa. The Bantus made pottery and forged iron, and their burgeoning populations rapidly displaced hunter-gatherers across Africa. Analyzing DNA from a time before this expansion offers “a glimpse of a human landscape that is profoundly different than today,” Reich says.

Here’s the part most interesting to me:

The team compared the children’s DNA to ancient DNA extracted earlier from a 4500-year-old individual from Mota Cave in Ethiopia and sequences from other ancient and living Africans, using various statistical methods to sort out how they all were related, which groups came first, and when they split from one another. The team’s bold new model pushes back Central African hunter-gatherer origins to 200,000 to 250,000 years ago—not long after our species evolved. The model suggests their lineage split from three other modern human lineages: one leading to the Khoisan hunter-gatherers in southern Africa, one to east Africans, and one to a now-extinct “ghost” population.

An early diversification of modern humans fits the great variation seen in fossils of early Homo sapiens, says paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen, who is not part of this study. The lineages would have parted company and moved off into different parts of Africa 200,000 to 250,000 years ago, preserving their distinctness by only occasionally interbreeding at the boundaries.

IMO the “out of Africa” hypothesis is already teetering on the edge of being disproved and I am one of those benighted souls who believe that the human species is more then 250,000 years old. Making decisions about these things would be facilitated by a more rigorous definition of “species”. When I read about interbreeding between our species, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, it raises my hackles. These are clearly different subspecies not different species. The designation should be Homo sapiens neanderthalensis not Homo neanderthalensis. Heck, I’m still holding out for erectus to be determined to be a localized variant of our species.

Whatever the case, multiple different strains of humans in Central Africa is an interesting discovery. I expect we’ll ultimately determine it was more than three.

Mark Penn’s assessment of the impeachment proceedings, posted at The Hill, echo mine pretty closely:

The first count of the two articles of impeachment against President Trump accuses the president of abuse of power by withholding aid in an attempt to force Ukraine to look into possible corruption on the part of Joe and Hunter Biden. He is called corrupt in motive for asking for an investigation of potential corruption over questions that had been raised in the New York Times, Politico, The New Yorker and other media outlets.

Bringing this up on a call to the president of Ukraine was probably a boneheaded thing to do, but not an impeachable one. Aid was not actually held up. No investigation was ordered. The president of Ukraine and other Ukrainian officials deny that any pressure was applied to them. Trump’s overall policy was, in fact, far more helpful to the Ukrainians than President Obama’s policies that denied them much aid for weapons. There was and is no urgent threat to the national security of the United States.

There is definitely something about all this that the American public doesn’t like, that reasonable people can judge as wrong, but that is quite different than removing a president from office through a process designed to use impeachment as a political vehicle. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was not a truth-seeker — he is on tape soliciting naked pictures of Trump, and he repeatedly exaggerated evidence against Trump over the last three years. He was simply a weapon jamming through impeachment and ignoring fair procedure or legal process.

The last few days in the media have underscored this bias with the release of material from Lev Parnas, who — like Christopher Steele and his dossier before him, or like Michael Avenatti, now out on bail — is a questionable character with obviously wild claims for which he has no proof, including claims against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr, whom Parnas has never met. It was a political dirty trick to release his information and him on the eve of the Senate impeachment trial, and this act alone would have gotten any real prosecutor’s case thrown out.

The second article of impeachment — obstruction of the House by the assertion of executive privilege — is, in my view, wholly without merit. Despite endless allegations of lawlessness, this administration has implemented every court ruling it has lost without exception. Asserting executive privilege is not the same as paying hush money or suborning perjury, as was alleged in the Clinton and Nixon impeachment efforts. President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, frequently asserted privilege in response to investigations and Holder was even held in contempt of Congress, a resolution he promptly ignored.

This article should be immediately dismissed, as there is really no factual basis for it at all, especially since the House deliberately avoided allowing the president to adjudicate the claims in court by failing to subpoena witnesses or withdrawing subpoenas from witnesses who challenged them in court.

I think I called this right back in August. Here we are a half year later and it looks even more right. President Trump’s approval rating, while still extremely low by historical standards, has not collapsed. As long as the economy doesn’t tank between now and November, something that looks decreasingly likely, Trump is likely to be re-elected.

It looks right now as though the Democrats are being held hostage by their most extreme and strident members. It’s not a good look.

After pointing out that Americans tend to return sitting presidents who preside over economic good times to office, the editors of USA Today propose some strategies that Democrats might use to offset that advantage. The best is that they should abandon their present catastrophizing. Here’s the worst:

When Trump tries to argue that electing a Democrat would result in tanking the economy, the nominee might also point out that since World War II, the economy has done better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones. In particular, Democratic presidents have been more fiscally responsible. They ran up big deficits only during wars and deep recessions and, on two occasions, in 1969 and 2001, bequeathed budget surpluses to their Republican successors.

Of the four alternatives

• Running a large surplus i.e. “paying off the debt”
• Running a small surplus
• Running a small deficit
• Running a large deficit

which do you think is the best? I think that running a small deficit is best and it’s pretty easy to explain why. Running at a surplus means that the government is removing more money from the economy than it’s putting in. How is that a good thing? The only thing that would be worse would be removing a lot more money from the economy than is being put in.

Running at a surplus has almost always resulted in a recession but it’s a lagging indicator. That’s certainly not something that should be bragged about.

Running at a large deficit, as President Trump is, under our present heavily financialized economy is doing pretty much what you’d expect—it’s producing asset inflation, something else the president is bragging about, mistakenly in my opinion.

No, running at a small deficit is best. Which of the Democratic presidential candidates is advocating that?

The headwinds favoring President Trump’s re-election are substantial. Although Democrats would do well not to underestimate them, they should do their best to paint the most optimistic picture possible of the United States and its future. Historically, that’s the posture that wins elections.

There’s something that is frequently mentioned but is rarely every defined: the Democratic base. Who, precisely, makes up the Democratic base? That’s the subject that David Edward Burke tackles at the Washington Monthly:

Commentator Jess McIntosch recently described the base quite narrowly. “We all know” the Democratic base is “African-American voters and voters of color,” she said. But activists Page Gardner and pollster Stanley Greenberg think of the base more broadly, as a coalition “of people of color, unmarried women and young people.” Thomas Edsall, on the other hand, has argued that Democrats are effectively three different parties—ranging from “very liberal” and “somewhat liberal,” to “moderate to conservative” Americans—all of which are racially and ethnically diverse.

Not only do these descriptions of the Democratic base vary wildly, but so, too, do theories of how to “excite” or “energize” the base. Progressives like Robert Reich and Michael Moore have argued that candidates like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders are most likely to increase voter turnout because of their transformative plans. As Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s former chief of staff has explained, “You do the biggest, most badass thing you possibly can—and that’s going to excite people, and then they’re going to go vote.” Others disagree and believe the Democratic base will turn out in droves regardless of who the nominee is as long as Trump is on the ballot.

I would define it even more narrowly. The first and foremost requirement is that you’ve got to show up and vote. That cuts out young people, Hispanics, and black immigrants, of whom the number is increasing. All of those groups vote at lower rates than Democrats, generally.

That leaves two major groups: native-born blacks over the age of 30 and college-educated whites over the age of 30.

That group of blacks is ideologically heterogeneous including both some of the most radically left Democrats as well as the most conservative. Their ideological breakdown is 33% liberal, 40% moderate, 24% conservative compared with 54% liberal, 33% moderate, and 12% conservative for white Democrats.

It has been pointed out for most of the last century how fragile the Democratic coalition is with the interests of different factions in direct conflict with one another but IMO it has never been more so than now.

My point here is that it is darned hard to appeal to college-educated whites and blacks simultaneously. When you throw the Democratic Party’s technocratic leanings into the mix it’s even harder.

Pew Research drew the conclusion from its survey of whether the race of the candidates mattered to voters that it didn’t but I disagree. I don’t have the link handy (Google it) but for 17% of Democrats an all-white presidential ticket would discourage them from voting. 17% reduction in not only enough to make or break a presidential candidate, it’s easily enough to flip the House.

There’s plenty to chew on in Andrew Michta’s recent article in The American Interest:

How we see ourselves is not how our adversaries see us, and perhaps more importantly, how we see them is not how they see themselves. When it comes to Russia and China, we have been laboring under a core misconception: that economic modernization would lead to a greater demand for political participation of the kind we find familiar; and that this, in turn, would yield a kind of universal global culture that at its most basic would be at least recognizably “quasi-Western.” The key theory that underpins this worldview, simply put, is that institutions ultimately trump culture. The bold post-Cold War liberal claims—that history had been conquered by economics and institutions, and that culture, in turn, adapts—stand some comparison to the ideological certitude of Marxist revolutionaries of the early 20th century who believed they had unlocked the inner workings of human progress.

In the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the goal of “state-building”—which involved laying the institutional foundations for representative democratic government—has been seen as a self-evidently desirable strategic end state. That these projects have foundered has been acknowledged among more introspective analysts, but even among them, the goal itself has rarely come into question. From a wider perspective, our misadventures in state-building have been costly but ultimately affordable blunders and distractions. But our certainty in the inevitable triumph of liberalism has cost us dearly in our dealings with China, and to a certain extent Russia as well. Since the end of the Cold War, the Chinese have benefitted from decades of unfettered access to American technology and research, while Russia has leveraged America’s preoccupation with counterterrorism to reclaim its sphere of privileged interest along its periphery. Until recently neither was questioned on strategic grounds, since the direction of history was properly understood.

But the ideology was more than just strategically harmful. It provided a set of palatable self-delusions that have hurt us much more profoundly. “Globalization” was a tidy way to explain away concessions on technology and knowledge transfer made to Beijing for the sake of the balance sheet. Short-horizon money-making was given a patina of virtue since it was thought to be fueling systemic modernization. Corporate greed was allowed to masquerade as a respectable ideology. We are now reaping the rewards of this self-delusion. The de-industrialization of America, with the attendant breakdown of our traditional societal bonds, is but the most glaring and politically salient example. Unlike the not insignificant costs surrounding failed state-building, however, these cannot simply be written off. We have been significantly weakened as a society.

How did we get here? A combination of wishful thinking, avarice, and reflexive antagonism. Russia didn’t have to be our adversary. Even in the article Mr. Michta claims that the Russians invaded Georgia 12 years ago. That isn’t what the European investigators determined. They decided that the Georgians had started the war and the Russians had responded.

The wishful thinking was in believing that China would modernize its economy and adopt liberal values along with it. They didn’t. The avarice resides in 98% of the economic surplus from offshoring manufacturing, mostly to China, was captured by producers. I’ve already provided an example of reflexive antagonism. IMO we have far too many Poles and Ukrainians informing our foreign policy with respect to Russia. I wonder who’s informing our Iran policy?

It didn’t help that we sapped our military strength, not to mention our reputation, by decades of quixotic campaigns to create liberal democracies were there weren’t even nations.

We aren’t doomed to a bipolar world and decline is not inevitable but it will be a lot harder and less fun to build ourselves back up than it was to tear ourselves down.

God, I miss Walt Kelly.

I found Robert D. Kaplan’s latest essay in The National Interest on the “second Cold War”, a bewildering and frustrating combination of insight and absurdity:

This second cold war, conducted on a teeming planet whose anxiety is intensified by the passions and rages of social media, is only in its beginning stages. The aim, like in the first Cold War, is negative victory: not defeating the Chinese, but waiting them out, just as we waited the Soviets out: because at some point, as its middle class matures and continues to expand, mainland China may face its own equivalent of the internal upheavals that have roiled Hong Kong, Latin America, and the Middle East.

There are fundamental differences between the two cold wars. But in order to prevail we must concentrate on the similarities: the need for open-ended dialogue and focusing on our strong suit – liberal values in the face of increasingly intrusive technologies. For this cold war could end with echoes of 1989: with one side’s domestic order proving more resilient than the other’s.

I could not disagree with his conclusion more. We didn’t win the Cold War by tenaciously waiting out the Soviets. We won with soft power. The people living under Soviet rule wanted the same things we had and the Soviet regime was not delivering it. The Soviet position became untenable.

The examples of absurdity are not difficult to find:

The benefit of a wide-ranging and confidence-building dialogue with China, of the kind pursued by Washington throughout the middle and latter parts of the Cold War with both Beijing and Moscow, is that a human rights issue like the treatment of the Uigurs can be brought up and discussed, with the possibility of some improvement in the situation that will not be seen as a concession by the Chinese, and not trumpeted as such by us.

To what end? All that run-on sentence illustrates is that Mr. Kaplan is still clinging bitterly to the belief that liberalization of trade and open discourse will impel the Chinese Communist Party to soften its hardline policies. We now know with a confidence born of experience that will not be the case.

IMO the best insight in the piece is this:

After all, globalization was never a conflict-free security order, as originally advertised, but merely a value-neutral, temporary stage of economic development.

but he fails to ask the follow-up question: if we had known globalization would be “a value-neutral, temporary stage of economic development” would it have taken the form it took? That isn’t how it was sold. It was sold not merely as a money-making scheme but as a means of democratizing and liberalizing China.

I always recognized the absurdity of that position which is why I advocated for an interaction based on reciprocity in which we maintained a discreet distance from China, considering it with a skeptical eye.

The only way we will win this second Cold War is the same way we won the first—by maintaining the vigor of our own economy and reinforcing liberal values at home. I think that will be a harder task than the first time around because so many people owe enormous fortunes to maintaining things as they are.