The editors of Bloomberg second the observations I made in my post of a week or so ago. Here’s it’s opening:

Florida’s home-insurance business was in trouble even before Hurricane Ian tore across the state last month. Big insurers were taking their business elsewhere, smaller ones were going broke, costs due to litigation and fraud had soared, and so had premiums. The private market was pulling back as the risk of weather-related damage mounted, leaving homeowners to buy protection from the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. and the federal National Flood Insurance Program — or else to go uninsured.

This creaking system could be flattened altogether by Ian. Expect an epidemic of new litigation as insurers and policy holders fight over what destroyed their homes. (Standard policies cover damage from wind but not from flooding.) Costs to private insurers alone could reach $63 billion. This worsening mess proves, for the umpteenth time, that rebuilding homes and other structures isn’t good enough: The public and private treatment of weather-related risks needs to go back to the drawing board.

and here are a few more nice snippets:

Insurance is a crucial part of the problem. Correctly priced protection for buildings in high-risk areas would be unaffordable for many low-income households. This squeezes the private market and leads the federal government to cover flood-related risks, often charging premiums lower than they should be. Put that another way: The federal government helps families live in places that jeopardize their own (and everybody’s else’s) wealth.

There are some places in the continental United States that are more costly and risky to live in than others. Traditionally, those areas have had lower populations. For the last fifty years the populations of those areas have been rising sharply and I would claim that the subsidies being provided to live there are among the reasons why.

Here’s their conclusion:

Layer upon layer of hidden subsidy pushes the same way, separating choices and their consequences. Mortgage securitization, for instance, obscures differences in location-based risks attached to particular loans, meaning that borrowers in low-risk places end up supporting those inclined to gamble. (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayer-supported quasi-government entities, helped develop this model.) Another example: When infrastructure is rebuilt after a hurricane, the cost isn’t confined to those who like the odds of living in a high-risk area. The list is endless. Despite its narrow focus, one recent study counted numerous actual or proposed federal policies on weather-related disasters that invite added risk.

No doubt, the political obstacles to better aligning risks and incentives are daunting. A pattern invariably repeats itself: Disasters strike, public funds (understandably) flow to help the victims, and the underlying problems only get worse. Still, policy makers owe it to voters to look beyond relieving the immediate hardships and attend to fundamentals. An approach that prioritizes rebuilding and carrying on as before, rather than reducing risk and improving resilience, is a formula for continually escalating harms.

Nearly a third of the U. S. population lives in just three states. That was true 200 years ago, too, but the states with the largest populations back then had large populations before Columbus and as long as anyone can determine. The three states with the largest populations now had small populations 200 years ago. Only modern society and technology have made them livable.

The famine in opinion pieces worth commenting on continues. What struck me about David Brooks’s New York Times column reacting to the brouhaha in the Los Angeles City Council (obvious racism being expressed), is how many falsehoods underpin the situation. Here’s Mr. Brooks’s description:

Council President Nury Martinez — who has since resigned from the Council — along with two colleagues and a labor ally talked about a range of subjects, including redistricting, but two assumptions undergirded much of what they said. Their first assumption was that America is divided into monolithic racial blocs. The world they take for granted is not a world of persons; it’s a world of rigid racial categories.

At one point Martinez vulgarly derided someone because “he’s with the Blacks.” You’re either with one racial army or you’re with another.

The second assumption was that these monolithic racial blocs are locked in a never-ending ethnic war for power. The core topic of their conversation was to redraw Council districts to benefit Latino leaders.

Let’s start enumerating them. The first, never mentioned by Mr. Brooks, is that there is a static amount of wealth so the only option or become wealthier is to take from somebody else. If that were true we would still be living on the amount of wealth we were 200 years ago. We aren’t. We’re much wealthier. That “exploitation model” is Marxist and wrong but it also the prevailing view among those who produce nothing themselves other than, possibly, discord. It is a view commonly encountered among politicians.

But that’s not the only misconception involved. All but one of the members of the Los Angeles City Council are Democrats (there is also a lone independent). Anyone who believed that all that is needed to achieve comity is single party hegemony was sadly mistaken. Republicans may be reveling in the Los Angeles City Council’s conflicts but they didn’t cause it and they aren’t responsible for any impasses that arise. Squabbling for primacy among Democrats is.

And look how well that comports with what I’ve been predicting for the last 20 years (since Judis and Texeira’s Towards a Permanent Democratic Majority). The increasing percentage of Hispanics would result in a racial spoils system which blacks would inevitably lose. We’ll see if the other part of my prediction holds true—the beneficiaries of conflicts between blacks and Hispanics will be white.

I want to call attention to a final misconception: the notion that only Anglos can be racist. How anyone could believe that eludes me but people clearly do. My Irish and Swiss ancestors would recoil at being referred to as “Anglos” but that’s the racial divide that has emerged—blacks, Hispanics, and Anglos. There aren’t enough “Asians” yet to add to the cacophony.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Kevin Rudd engages in a little public prognostication about the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party:

The big news from this National Congress won’t be senior personnel appointments. It will be the ideological content of Mr. Xi’s formal work report. In his regime, communist ideology is no longer a cosmetic formality draped over a de-facto system of unrestrained state capitalism. Mr. Xi is an ideological fundamentalist who has moved the Communist Party to the Leninist left, the economy to the Marxist left, and China’s foreign and security policy to the nationalist right. Throughout this process, shifts in ideological formulations by Mr. Xi have also been the best predictors of later changes in policy. Ideology, as under Mao, has become the embedded code language by which real policy change is signaled to China’s 96 million Communist Party members.

On the economy, Mr. Xi recognizes that China’s growth is faltering. Demographic pressures are a major headwind; China’s population is aging and its workforce shrinking. Mr. Xi’s decision to rebalance the relationship between the private sector and the state has been a drag on growth. His zero-Covid policy continues to shut down major cities. And an unsettled geopolitical environment is disrupting global supply chains and broader trade.

Mr. Xi needs to decide which of these four factors to target to restore growth. He can do little about demography, but he can do a lot about Covid restrictions. He might declare a “people’s victory” over the pandemic before rolling out a more limited form of medical surveillance.

Ideology is the main problem. Mr. Xi believes the private sector is a long-term challenge to the Communist Party’s power. He has deep reservations about private control of the tech sector and what he calls the “fictitious economy” of property and finance. Don’t expect any dramatic ideological recommitment to the market from his work report. Mr. Xi could well decide to move further to the ideological left, despite the predictable effect it would have on growth.

On foreign policy, party congresses have declared since 2002 that China enjoys “a period of strategic opportunity.” This was ideological code. It meant that no major wars were on the horizon so China could maintain rapid economic development as its core strategic priority. Starting in 2019, such language began to change in official documents. The Communist Party has concluded that there has been a long-term bipartisan hardening in U.S. strategy, including deep changes on Taiwan and the “one-China policy.” In China’s view, Japan, Australia, India and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have also grown more adversarial, looking to balance Chinese power through institutional arrangements. Beijing’s “wolf warrior” approach to diplomacy has had real-world consequences.

Mr. Xi is likely to use his report to define China’s new strategic environment in a manner that gives national security priority over the economy. This may signal that China is gradually moving toward a long-term war footing. In the short term, however, Mr. Xi may still seek to stabilize (although not to normalize) U.S.-China relations. He doesn’t want an accidental conflict with the Americans in the 2020s. Under present conditions, the risk that China might lose is still too great. He hopes to change that by the 2030s.

I try to avoid offering advice to people in countries other than my own. I don’t believe I understand the context well enough to do so.

I’m more interested in the United States than I am in China. I think that, if the United States is to remain the country it is has been for the last century, we need to be considerably less dependent on China than we are at present. That’s not for China; it’s for us. It’s also not to aggravate or alienate China but to preserve the United States.

The editors of the Washington Post wonder what a post-Putin Russia would look like. They offer multiple, contrasting views. For example, this dystopian view is probably the closest to what will actually happen:

One dark scenario is that Mr. Putin’s anti-Western, authoritarian kleptocracy, mixing crony capitalism and despotism, will endure with or without him. A significant part of Russia’s population remains enamored with him, angry and inchoate, making it a ready constituency for a demagogue. As analyst Nikolai Petrov noted before the invasion, Mr. Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric “has taken a firm hold in the hearts and minds of many Russian citizens,” who are in a “state of deep resentment towards the West” and believe that it has prevented Russia from regaining great-power status.

Also reinforcing continuity are the powerful security and military structures that Mr. Putin has exploited and expanded for more than two decades. But key questions, impossible to answer now, surround the fallout a defeat in Ukraine would have: Would the military, humiliated and resentful, turn against the Kremlin power structure? Would the population at large?

There is something they rather clearly do not understand. The United States does not have a foreign policy worthy of the name and never has had one. Due to the nature of our society and our government we have an emergent foreign policy which is not really a policy as such.

But that’s not true in Russia. Russia has a foreign policy and it has been largely unchanged over the last 200 years. Just to take one aspect of that foreign policy, preserving access to a warm water port is considered a vital Russian national interest. That’s the problem with the Ukrainians’ pledge to recapture Crimea. The Russians invaded in 2014 and annexed it to preserve their access to the port at Sevastopol. The impetus was the putsch that replaced the legitimately-elected pro-Russian government with, roughly the present anti-Russian government. The Russians understood that meant that their access to Sevastopol was threatened and, predictably, they acted to preserve it.

As usual keep in mind that I’m not justifying the Russian view. I’m just explaining it.

More surprises from the New York Times. The title of Tom Friedman’s latest NYT column is “We Are Suddenly Taking On China and Russia at the Same Time”. Here’s its opening paragraph:

In case you haven’t noticed, let me alert you to a bracing turn of events: The U.S. is now in conflict with Russia and China at the same time. Grandma always said, “Never fight Russia and China at the same time.” So did Henry Kissinger. Alas, there is a strong case in the national interest for confronting both today. But have no doubt: We are in uncharted waters. I just hope that these are not our new “forever wars.”

I strongly suspect that if you took an opinion poll of the American people they wouldn’t favor “taking on” either China or Russia let alone both at the same time if by “taking on” you mean military conflict.

Although his choice of words is making matters worse, I doubt that President Biden actually wants to go to war with them, either, let alone go to war with both of them at the same time.

But our chickens have come home to roost. Decades of bad policy are all coming to a head at the same time. Remember that in war the enemy gets a vote.

I was pretty surprised by Charles Blow’s latest New York Times column. He has lurched uncontrollably onto a point I have been making for decades but I suspect his conclusions differ from mine. Consider this snippet:

I have a theory about the future of America that I don’t want to come true.

It is a theory that worries me and that I have written about: that with the browning of America, white supremacy could simply be replaced by — or buffeted by — a form of “lite” supremacy, in which fairer-skin people perpetuate a modified anti-Blackness rather than eliminating it.

The racist comments revealed this week on a recording of Latino leaders in Los Angeles — three City Council members and a labor union leader — did nothing to allay those fears.

So many surprises in so short a passage! Is it possible that Mr. Blow is not aware that there is a social hierarchy within the black community and that skin tone is one of the factors in that hierarchy? Maybe it’s regional but I’ve been aware of that for three-quarters of a century. Isn’t Mr. Blow from Louisiana? I’m confident it’s true there.

And then there’s the other surprise. Is it possible that Mr. Blow does not realize that Mexicans can be racists, too?

One of the articles of faith among progressives seems to be that anti-black racism is unique to the United States. That’s not true. The United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy are all more racist than the United States. One of my Nigerian friends once told me that, while he had never encountered real, hardcore anti-black racism in the United States he had in Italy.

Maybe it’s just Europeans who are racists. Nope. China, Japan, and Mexico all have plenty of anti-black racism. Amazingly, they don’t even see it as racism. They’re practically where we were in the 1930s on the subject. Golliwog-type characters are still widely used in advertising, for example.

IMO there was a brief window of opportunity a half century ago to create a truly post-racial country here but it was thwarted through a combination of white segregationists, black nationalists, business interests, and progressives. Instead of mainstreaming black Americans into our economy and society, we imported tens of millions of Hispanics, mostly Mexicans, who came from countries more racist than the United States. Now we’re importing Central Americans and Asians but the story’s the same. As I have pointed out ad nauseam, while immigrants leave most of their possessions behind when they leave the Old Country, they bring their customs and political and social views, including racism.

If the objective of our approach to immigration in this country was to reduce anti-black racism, we blew it.

In the Daily Mail Morgan Phillips quotes James Carville as hammering home a couple of points I have been making for some time. While Democrats are running primarily on abortion, that’s not a strategy that’s likely to work. Here’s the telling quote:

Democratic strategist and Clinton advisor James Carville is warning his party against laser-focus on abortion in the run-up to the November midterm elections.

‘A lot of these consultants think if all we do is run abortion spots that will win for us. I don’t think so,’ the famed strategist told the Associated Press. ‘It’s a good issue. But if you just sit there and they’re pummeling you on crime and pummeling you on the cost of living, you’ve got to be more aggressive than just yelling abortion every other word.’

IMO Democratic strategists are gravely overestimating the number of voters whom the issue will get to the polls. We’re not the only ones who think so. So does Bernie Sanders:

In my view, while the abortion issue must remain on the front burner, it would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered.

What I’m seeing here in Illinois is 20 Democratic political spots in which abortion is the focus to each spot in which something else is the focus. That’s true regardless of the office for which the candidate is running: legislators, states attorneys, judges, anything.

Hearkening back to a point I made earlier, I wonder if they realize that strategy increases their vulnerability to events. If inflation gets significantly worse, if crime gets worse, if the price of gas goes back up, they will look woefully out of touch.

At The Daily Sceptic Will Jones asks an interesting question, “Why Did the Coronavirus Suddenly Cause Thousands of Deaths in Spring 2020 When it Had Been Hanging Around Quietly All Winter?”. For those who find the piece too long to read, he basically makes a two points. SARS-CoV-2 had been circulating since no later than October 2019:

So the evidence all points to a picture of SARS-CoV-2 being widespread in the winter of 2019-20 but not being the dominant virus, circulating at a low level, before exploding into a large outbreak – and getting into the care homes – in the spring. It was thus this explosion in spread that primarily caused the explosion in deaths (though some were caused by poor treatment protocols of course, and a sizeable number of care home deaths were due to mistreatment of residents). The deadliness of the virus didn’t change a great deal; the IFR didn’t suddenly leap up; it’s just that suddenly many more people were catching it and spreading it, and it was getting into many more care homes. (Discharging hundreds of infectious hospital patients into care homes to free up beds won’t have helped with this of course.)

but it took quite a while for the number of deaths to ramp up.

I think he substantiates his first point pretty will but I don’t find his second point particularly convincing. I suspect that’s an illusion caused by exponential growth.

As far as I can tell there’s one conclusion that should be drawn from that—the policy responses aimed at containing the spread of the disease couldn’t have worked by the time they were put in place and with how porous they were. They would need to have been put in place almost six months earlier than they were and, for various reasons, that information was just not available then. File that under “lessons learned”.

Angela Lansbury has died. From Variety:

Actress Angela Lansbury, whose 75-year career encompassed triumphs on the big screen, in musical theater and on television, died at her Los Angeles home on Tuesday, her family announced in a statement obtained by Variety. She was 96 — five days shy of her 97th birthday.

Nominated for three Oscars, she won seven Tony Awards and holds the record for Emmy actress nods with 12 for her role on “Murder, She Wrote.”

For those of you who only know of Angela Lansbury from Murder She Wrote or as a singing teapot, she was a Hollywood star since her first movie appearance at age 19. That was in 1944 in Gaslight. In it she played the “bad girl”, one of a series of femmes fatales she portrayed in her early days in movies.

Take a gander at her in 1946’s The Harvey Girls. She’s playing a dancehall girl and she was quite beautiful. It’s a shame they didn’t let her sing—she had a pretty fair singing voice as she demonstrated in years on Broadway. Among her memorable roles there were the title role in Mame and Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd.

The last role I’ll mention was as Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), despite being just a few years older than Harvey. It wasn’t that she had aged but that she had the presence, the poise to carry the role off. She carried it off well enough that her performance garnerd an Academy Award nomination (she’d already won one Academy Award for Gaslight).

I mourn her passing but celebrate her many contributions. She was one of the last surviving bona fide stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s a shame her performance as Mame wasn’t captured on film (Lucille Ball championed making the movie—clearly, she wanted the role).