I found this conversation between Yascha Mounk and Vinay Prasad at Persuasion about the U. S. policy response to COVID-19 thought-provoking. Here’s a snippet:

I just want to be clear: My criticism is not a referendum on your involvement in all this, it’s not about your article, which I think was perfectly reasonable to have written at the time. And it’s really a criticism of the people who are in charge of the policy. I think Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci were aware that many scientists disagreed with their point of view. They held zero debates on the topic. They refused to entertain those opinions. We have emails from Francis Collins saying, when he read the Great Barrington Declaration, “We need a quick and devastating take-down” of this. He didn’t write an email saying, “Maybe we should have some public discussions and put these on YouTube and let people hear the pros and cons to this.”

I think there were plenty of people at the time who were opposed to these measures. Jeff Flier and I wrote some articles critical of this early in the pandemic saying that we need to listen to scientists from different points of view and we need to think about all the negative consequences of lockdown. We had data from China very early on that it essentially had no lethality in young people. There is a rate of death in people under the age of 18, but it is so fleetingly low it makes no sense to restrict their movements and restrict their school given the value of school. But the bigger point is that it seems like Monday morning quarterbacking because the people who set the policy squelched all attempts at any dissenting opinion and did not allow the public to hear the points of view of people who disagreed at the time.

I don’t entirely agree with their remarks. In some cases I think they’re being too lenient and in others too critical. Additionally, I think they ignore the “Politician’s Syllogism”. As an example of “too critical” IMO I believe they’re too critical of the shortcomings of facemasks as a strategy. As I said from the start, I suspect that there are differences between the use of masks in a healthcare setting and their use in, say, a grocery store not to mention on the street or on the beach.

As an example of “too lenient”, I have very strong opinions of appointed officials who lie knowingly to the American people. I think they should be punished very harshly.

I particularly found this assessment of the futility of our initial efforts interesting:

Could this disease ever have been contained? Maybe, but only if China had been cooperative early in December of 2019. I think by January and February, the horse was out of the barn. It’s a highly contagious virus. It had seeded the entire globe. By March, I think we had widespread transmission in every continent. And so I think containment was always not possible. There are some people who believed in Zero-COVID even in June and July in 2021. They thought we could stop all transmission. I think that was incredibly naive. COVID-19 has animal reservoirs; we had data that it infected the majority of white-tailed deer, for instance, in Michigan. It’s affected other animal species. Containment, I think, was not an option from the moment in which US policymakers took it seriously.

I understood that containment was futile the first time I saw a group of five or six Chicago police officers huddling together closely without facemasks of any kind or any attempt at “social distancing”. When the enforcers of public order aren’t maintaining that order among themselves, it’s all just kabuki, just for show. It’s abusive.

Well over 60 years ago my mom planted jonquils at our house on Winding Brook. After she died and her house was sold (a story in itself), one of my siblings considerately dug up some of the bulbs and sent them to all of us. As you can see my mother’s jonquils are flourishing in our yard now.

When my wife and I die I hope that someone digs them up and sends them to one (or more) of my nieces and nephews or their children.

The news of the day is that Iran has fired (they say) 300 missiles and drones at Israel. The world is on tenterhooks waiting to see whether and how Israel will respond. A few observations.

To my eye President Biden has seized the worst of his possible courses of action. After telling the Iranians not to attack Israel which they went ahead and did anyway he apparently is telling the Israelis a) we stand by them and b) don’t retaliate against Iran. It combines futility with the impression of weakness. Better by far just to maintain a low profile. I recognize that such a course is counter-intuitive for a politician.

Any notion that the Gulf States will come to Iran’s aid should Israel counter-attack is far-fetched in my opinion. The Iranians are only slightly less popular than the Israelis.

The thought patterns behind both the Israeli and Iranian courses of action elude me. Did the Iranians really think they could supply and support Hezbollah and Hamas in their attacks against Israel without Israel attacking them? Did the Israelis really think the Iranians would not react to the Israeli attack on their consulate in Syria? I suspect that the irony of their responding to an attack on a diplomatic office with a massive retaliation is lost on them.

Did the Israelis really think the Iranians would not respond to the attack on its Syrian office and the deaths of several high-ranking officers? What are both sides thinking now?

And what would the effect of an attack like Iran’s against Israel be on American military bases and cities? Would we fare as well as the Israelis have?

Update

The estimates of the costs of Israel’s defense last night are around $1-$1.3 billion while the cost of Iran’s attack are estimated at a fraction of that. Should Israel counter-attack, I suspect that tells us something about the nature of that counter-attack.

On the positive side it will be a lot easier for the Biden Administration to justify giving Israel defensive weapons to aid in its missile defense that offensive weapons to use against Hamas.

Ohio Sen. J. D. Vance has an op-ed today in the New York Times. Here’s its opening:

President Biden wants the world to believe that the biggest obstacle facing Ukraine is Republicans and our lack of commitment to the global community. This is wrong.

Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.

Although I materially agree with what he says in the piece, I draw a different conclusion from the uncomfortable facts he presents than he does. I think that we should continue to provide aid to Ukraine to prevent an outright Russian victory and I think that President Biden should speak frankly and publicly. He should urge Ukraine’s government to accept goals short of the return to pre-2014 borders.

We shouldn’t lose sight of the reality of the situation. There is no amount of aid we’re actually capable of providing which will enable Ukraine to achieve its maximalist goals.

This morning shortly after rising I checked my blog as I always do and found to my dismay that The Glittering Eye was inaccessible. I scrambled around for a while checking my various hosting providers and trying to submit support requests. As an aside one of the effects of chatbots is that it has become extremely difficult if not impossible to get technical support.

I had a number of meetings scheduled this morning, starting at 8:00am and running back to back until just a few minutes ago. Once my rash of meetings had ended I performed a tracert. Somewhat to my surprise it succeeded. Buoyed by that success I pinged the site (earlier pings had failed). That worked, too. I signed back in and checked things out.

Now I’ve got to go back and cancel my support requests.

I wonder how many people in April 1993 realized how greatly the Internet would facilitate the distribution of propaganda? I certainly didn’t and I’ve been using it almost since then. Now we are positively deluged with information from every source imaginable. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low and an enormous amount of it is propaganda of one form or another.

For example, how many people have the IDF killed in Gaza? If you answer 30,000, you are repeating what is materially Hamas propaganda. Is it true or false? We have no idea. We also have no idea how many of those killed were civilians and how many Hamas fighters (also civilians but let’s not mince words).

Here’s another example. Practically everything you know or think you know about what’s going on in the war in Ukraine is somebody’s propaganda. Russian, Ukrainian, U. S., British. There’s very little we can really rely on other than that Russia invaded Ukraine and a lot of people on both sides have been killed.

How propagandized information has become (or maybe always has been) is what caught my attention in this passage from Lee Fang’s piece on pro-Ukraine propaganda at RealClearInvestigations:

American influence in Ukraine’s media environment stretches back to the end of the Cold War, though it has intensified in recent years. Since the outbreak of the war, USAID support has extended to 175 national Ukrainian media entities.

Over the last decade, efforts to crack down on speech have been increasingly justified as an effort to protect social media from disinformation. The U.S. helped set up new think tanks and media watchdogs and brought over communications specialists to guide Ukraine’s approach. Nina Jankowicz, the polarizing official whom President Biden appointed to lead the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board to police social media content, previously advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on its anti-disinformation work.

In response to questions about the U.S.-backed anti-disinformation groups in Ukraine targeting Americans, the U.S. State Department provided a statement saying it defines disinformation as “as false or misleading information that is deliberately created or spread with the intent to deceive or mislead.” It added, “We accept there may be other interpretations or definitions and do not censor or coerce independent organizations into adopting our definition.”

but

Last September, journalist Jack Poulson reported on a leaked report from the Zinc Network’s Open Information Partnership, which helps coordinate the activities of several anti-Russian disinformation nonprofits around Europe backed by NATO members, including Detector Media.

The lengthy report defines disinformation as not only false or misleading content but also “verifiable information which is unbalanced or skewed, amplifies, or exaggerates certain elements for effect, or uses emotive or inflammatory language to achieve effects which fit within existing Kremlin narratives, aims, or activities.”

In other words, factual information with emotional language that simply overlaps with anything remotely connected to Russian viewpoints is considered disinformation, according to this U.S.-backed consulting firm helping to guide the efforts of Ukrainian think tanks and media.

The emphasis is mine. That definition of disinformation is in direct conflict with the State Department’s (quoted above). Or, in other words, organizations whose mission is to identify and counter disinformation are themselves spreading disinformation. Talk about a wilderness of mirrors.

What then is a person to believe? My general strategy is to view just about everything skeptically but especially statements that are contradicted by the actions of people making them and to place special credence on declarations against interest.

As matters look now President Biden and Democrats more generally will run on abortion as their lead issue. That has worked well in the elections since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. I have a question.

There are two distinct issues: the policy and the law. My question is not about the policy. It is about the law. I am not a lawyer so bear with me.

My understanding of the joint dissent in Dobbs was that the primary legal argument made by the dissenters was stare decisis, i.e. the legal concept that decided law should remain decided. I had made that point myself. Dobbs overturned roughly 50 years of precedent.

What I missed in the dissent was any test for when stare decisis should or should not apply. Clearly, they did not intend for stare decisis to be unequivocally binding. When Brown v. Board of Education was rendered in 1954 it overturned Plessy v. Ferguson which had permitted state-mandated racial segregation for 57 years. Do the dissenters believe that Brown was wrongly decided? It is my understanding that the majority in Dobbs believed that Roe v. Wade had been wrongly decided and constituted considerable judicial overreach.

I found former immigration judge Andrew R. Arthur’s observations about immigrations court no-shows and the Biden Administration at the Center for Immigration Studies interesting:

The latest disclosures from the Department of Justice (DOJ) reveal that the number of alien respondents who failed to appear for removal proceedings is soaring — on track to exceed 170,000 in FY 2024, which would best last year’s record of nearly 160,000. Those aliens may be under orders of removal, but the Biden administration has no inclination — let alone plans — to remove them. Which is why so many aliens likely didn’t bother to appear.

In Absentia Orders of Removal. Section 240 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), governs removal proceedings in immigration court.

Removal cases are heard by immigration judges (IJs), a position I held for more than eight years. Those IJs determine whether alien respondents are removable, consider bond requests, adjudicate applications for “relief” from removal (asylum, adjustment of status, cancellation of removal, etc.), and when appropriate, issue orders of removal.

That entire process is generally dependent, of course, on respondents actually appearing in court. While the Biden administration detains a tiny fraction of the three million-plus aliens currently in proceedings, the vast majority are free to live here while their cases are proceeding.

It’s not as though enforcement is impossible:

In its most recent report, current through the end of December, OHSS reveals that DHS removed just over 179,400 aliens in FY 2023. That may sound like a lot, but it’s important to keep in mind that CBP alone encountered more than 3.2 million aliens at the borders and the ports last fiscal year.

Those 179,400-plus removals in FY 2023 are even less impressive when you place them into historical context. In FY 2014, under the Obama administration, DHS removed just fewer than 405,000 aliens, and as recently as FY 2019, removals exceeded 347,000.

Were I to assign the most benign possible explanation to the Biden Administration’s unwillingness to enforce the law it would be that a) they think their engaging in an act of virtue by rescuing Central and South Americans and others from their countries of origin and b) they have a lot on their plate.

The problem is that it’s not an act of virtue. The mass immigration we’re presently experiencing is pushing and will push wages down for people with whom those migrants do or will compete, mostly young black men and previous migrants. They’re being kind to one group by being cruel to another. That’s not virtuous.

The author concludes:

I can’t tell you dispositively why the number of aliens who failed to appear at their removal hearings has soared under President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas, but I do have an educated guess.

In all of its policies — from its announcement the day of the 2021 inauguration that it would pause alien removals for 100 days, to its “overarching non-detention” regime for illegal migrants, to the Mayorkas guidelines themselves — the administration has signaled to aliens with no legal right to be here that it has no interest in enforcing Congress’ dictates in the INA. If the White House doesn’t care, why would the aliens?

In much the same way, Secretary Mayorkas has concluded he has the discretion to determine which immigration laws he’ll enforce — few, if any, as it turns out — and so alien respondents in removal proceedings have concluded that they, too, had the right to decide which court orders they’ll comply with.

What happens if 725 IJs held removal proceedings in three months and 42,714 respondents failed to appear? For the time being, not much. Immigration enforcement has become kabuki theater. Enjoy the show — you’re paying for the enforcement the administration refuses to provide.

That the enforcement mechanisms are overwhelmed is not a credible explanation: there were four times as many removals under the Obama Administration as at present.

I found this report by the Wall Street Journal’s Konrad Putzier sad. When I was a kid, well over 70 years ago, downtown St. Louis was a busy, thriving place. St. Louis proper had a population of more than 800,000 people and growing suburbs. At least once a week my mom would take me downtown and we’d have dinner with my father who was an associate at one of St. Louis’s biggest law firms. We’d park on the street and go up to his office in an elevator with a gate separating the carriage area of the elevator from the door and an elevator operator who was invariably pleasant and courteous. We’d go past the receptionist’s desk (everyone else had gone home) and find my dad. We’d go back down in the elevator and walk to a restaurant—you could walk everywhere and everywhere was safe. We’d eat in one of the many restaurants nearby. Rosa’s, an Italian place. O. T. Hodges for chili. Miss Hulling’s. They’re all gone now.

Here’s his description of downtown St. Louis today:

The Railway Exchange Building was the heart of downtown St. Louis for a century. Every day, locals crowded into the sprawling, ornate 21-story office building to go to work, shop at the department store that filled its lower floors or dine on the famous French onion soup at its restaurant.

Today, the building sits empty, with many of its windows boarded up. A fire broke out last year, which authorities suspect was the work of copper thieves. Police and firefighters send in occasional raids to search for missing people or to roust squatters. A search dog died during one of the raids last year when it fell through an open window.

“It’s a very dangerous place,” said Dennis Jenkerson, the St. Louis Fire Department chief.

It anchors a neighborhood with deserted sidewalks sprinkled with broken glass and tiny pieces of copper pipes left behind by scavengers. Signs suggest visitors should “park in well-lit areas.” Nearby, the city’s largest office building—the 44-story AT&T Tower, now empty—recently sold for around $3.5 million.

Today St. Louis’s population is below 300,000.