This piece by Andrew A. Michta at 1945 on potential NATO responses to a Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates neatly a point I have been making for some time:

Amidst continued speculation as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will unleash yet another attack against Ukraine, the focus has been on the likelihood of a kinetic conflict in Europe along NATO’s Eastern Flank. Still, judging by the scope of the demands presented by Russia in the two so-called “draft treaties” with NATO and the United States, respectively, Moscow must have no illusions that these would be accepted, for they would remake Euro-Atlantic security, creating conditions that would undermine NATO and America’s ability to work with its allies. Putin may have already decided to move militarily, and calls for the West to negotiate could create a “maskirovka” and in doing so provide a casus belli for Moscow, which would try to claim that Washington had refused to consider its terms.

Mr. Michta is a Pole, born in Poland. As such he has interests in the situation that go beyond American interests. I’m not saying his advice should be rejected out-of-hand. Just that we need to take his advice with a grain of salt. Why does everybody involved with crafting our policy with respect to Russia and Ukraine seem to be a Pole or a Ukrainian?

At any rate he offers what I think is a fantastical scenario:

It is critical to consider what might happen should Russia invade Ukraine, and what might happen if we do not start thinking long-term about the impact of this crisis. A second Russian attack on Ukraine, should it happen, ought to serve as a long-overdue wake-up call for the West about Russia’s intentions to establish an exclusive sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and assert Moscow’s claims to exercising influence in Central Europe, within NATO’s perimeter. Assuming the West finally recognizes the immediacy of the threat, the best ancillary outcome would be the rearmament of European NATO allies and an increase in U.S. military presence along the Eastern Flank, including permanent U.S. bases in Poland and Romania. Next, Europeans would need to spend money, not only on developing real, exercised military capabilities, but also on shoring up the infrastructure across the Continent, especially North-South, to ensure that military mobility requirements are met, and to demonstrate this through a series of exercises. Most importantly, the European NATO allies and partners would need to show that they are capable of reaching consensus to respond with meaningful sanctions, beginning with cutting Russian banks off from SWIFT and stopping Nord Stream 2, as well as showing resolve to respond with force should Putin try to use military threats against the alliance. Last but not least, if Ukraine decides to fight back the West should support its resistance against this new Russian assault on its national sovereignty.

before at arriving at what appears to me to be the most likely outcome:

The worst-case scenario would be yet another round of verbal condemnations and toothless sanctions, which would serve to strengthen Putin’s belief that Europe lacks the will to match his challenge. Should the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine be more of the same, Europe’s security would deteriorate dramatically. The zone of competition would shift from Eastern Europe to Central Europe and the Baltic states, where the next round of Putin’s demands could be a de facto “Finlandization” of the Baltic States and pressure on the United States and NATO to remove military assets from the intermarium between the Baltic and the Black Seas, especially from Poland and Romania. In this scenario Putin would target Germany as his “partner of preference,” with the expectation that by applying its energy weapon Moscow could eventually coax Berlin into a “neo-Bismarckian” accommodation that would in effect divide Europe into two spheres of influence, rendering the United States increasingly irrelevant to the overall strategic balance in Europe.

In my view our actual interests in Ukraine are quite limited. They are, in John Quincy Adams’s words, as the “well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but, continuing with that quote, we should be the “champion and vindicator only of our own”. In that regard we might do well to take our cue from Germany. As long as Germany is content with what’s happening in Eastern Europe, cozying up to Russia, and not preparing for armed conflict, why should we do otherwise?

At UnHerd Tom Chivers asks a serious question: how many lives has bioethics cost?

In April, the US Centres for Disease Control paused the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. They had noticed that among the 6.8 million people who had been given the J&J jab, six people had suffered a rare blood clot known as a “cerebral venous sinus thrombosis” (CVST). They said in a statement that they were recommending that healthcare providers stop using it, until the FDA had reviewed the evidence, and that they were doing so “out of an abundance of caution”.

Caution is a strange word to use. On the day they released the statement, about 70,000 new cases of Covid were confirmed in the United States, and about 1,000 people died of it. Is it “cautious” to stop using a vaccine which would almost certainly reduce those numbers, because of an uncertain chance that it might have negative effects in a tiny cohort?

But caution, in this sense, has been rife during the pandemic. The governments of various European countries stopped the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine over similar concerns. Germany, the Guardian reported in March, “was the first country to refuse to allow people over the age of 65 to have the AstraZeneca vaccine because of the absence of evidence of how well it worked in older people, indicating a more cautious approach than most”.

Over the last two years, again and again, the fears of some possible risk caused by something we might do have outweighed the fears of a thoroughly real, utterly obvious risk which was killing people at the time. And it has, I think, been a failure of the field, or at least the practice, of bioethics.

I think he’s pointing his finger in the wrong direction and, indeed, asking the wrong question. There have been multiple failures in two different political administrations with one thing in common: medical bureaucracies and it isn’t just one. Early in the pandemic the Centers for Disease Control fumbled in developing a test for COVID-19. Right now the Food and Drug Administration is delaying approval of Paxlovid in a wild sort of Catch-22. It has not been proven effective enough to approve but it is too effective to continue testing. To my eye the problem is not politics or bioethics or physicians. It’s bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies live and die by process and they are the outcome of largeness. When an organization grows beyond a certain, small size it will be governed by a bureaucracy. We know of no other alternative. Solve that problem and you’ll have solved one of the greatest curses of the modern world, afflicting both liberal democracies and autocracies.

After reading this piece at The Conversation on misinformation in social media, in which three “experts” weigh in with their observations, I was left with one question: what is “misinformation”? The question is similar to another: what do you mean by “a lie”? I’ve provided my definition of lying previously: knowing telling of an untruth with the intent to deceive. I’m not sure I can come up with a similar definition of misinformation.

Here’s an example of my confusion. One of the experts cited above declaims:

There are two primary challenges in addressing misinformation. The first is the dearth of regulatory mechanisms that address it. Mandating transparency and giving users greater access to and control over their data might go a long way in addressing the challenges of misinformation. But there’s also a need for independent audits, including tools that assess social media algorithms. These can establish how the social media platforms’ choices in curating news feeds and presenting content affect how people see information.

Absent a definition, how do you regulate something? That sounds to me like a sweeping and tyrannical mandate to control speech.

Let’s consider some cases. I think that Biden won the 2020 presidential election beyond reasonable doubt and as evidence I would suhmit that no challenge to date has yet proven otherwise. And yet there are lots of otherwise reasonable people who don’t agree. If you say that Trump won the 2020 election, that is generally given as an example of “misinformation”.

Let’s consider some others.

Is anthropogenic global warming misinformation? It is certainly non-falsifiable. Every occurrence of an unexpected meteorological event these days is submitted as evidence of it. Is that misinformation? The models are only weakly predictive if that.

How about the existence of God? Is that misinformation?

I’m working this week. Practically nobody else working for my employer is—since most are in the UK they’re taking today off (since Christmas fell on a Saturday) and tomorrow off (since Boxing Day fell on a Sunday). It’s making for a quiet week.

I’m guessing that there will be a half-hearted attempt at working on Wednesday and Thursday, substantially impeded by the people prudent enough to take the whole week off, and an even more phlegmatic attempt at working on New Years Eve.

Apparently, there’s a lot of this going around and not just in the UK. I’ve mentioned before that blogging is largely a reactive form, i.e. I react to what other people are writing about. Other than the regular bickering, complaining about people who haven’t been vaccinated, and saber-rattling about Russia, not much is being written for me to react to.

It was a quiet Christmas here and the day after was even quieter. Muy pesents to my wife largely consisted of chocolate or materials for our indoor garden. I’m hoping she’ll plant some lettuce soon. Her present to me largely consisted of kitchen tools—cutting boards and towels. My Christmas dinner menu was pork chop braised with sauerkraut, prunes, dried apricots, and apples; mashed potatoes. My wife and I eat pretty sparingly. That was one pork chop split between the two of us. I’ve calculated out our annual red meat consumption. It’s less than 30 pounds per year—about a quarter that of most Americans.

The merriest Christmas to you and yours!

This post at RealClearMarkets by A. J. Rice caught my eye because it touches on one of my recurring themes. He opens with an anecdote, the first about the “Lost Generation” that included Fitzgerald and Hemingway among others and then with this one:

Apparently, Gen-Z doesn’t read.

Even college students. Especially college students.

How does one learn without reading? Without even paying attention.

University of Tennessee Associate Professor Kenyon Wilson found out just how many of his students were reading – and paying attention.

Which was none of them.

Within the course syllabus he provided to every one of his music seminar students were instructions to open a locker – within which the professor had placed a crisp $50 bill. It was easy money. Free money. Isn’t that what young people want? Free stuff? No strings attached. The locker number – and combination – were provided. All a student had to do was open it. It was a minimal effort exercise.

But that was predicated on their reading about it.

The instructions to the free-and-easy money were embedded within the text, as follows:

“Thus (free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five) students may be ineligible to make up classes . . .”

Right there, in black and white.

But you had to look to see.

And no one did.

Going on to lament:

Those who do not read, who do not pay attention – who think they already know – do not learn differently. Or more. They cannot learn. They are inert, in stasis.

How then can they think?

The answer, of course, is that many do not. They feel – and react, based upon those feelings. Without thinking – the thinking being done for them, by those who have learned the value of thoughtlessness and passivity.

That’s completely consistent with something I have posted about here from time to time, i.e. visualcy. “Literate” does not mean you can read the words on a page. It means you derive information by reading. Increasingly, people today are not literate but visual. They obtain information from images, pictures, graphs, and videos.

I don’t entirely agree with him. People who are visual rather than literate are able to learn but they do learn differently. They tend to follow authorities (“influencers”). They find it difficult to follow or comprehend logical arguments or deductive reasoning. They tend to perceive things as a whole. They are more agonistic in their expression.

Where I agree with him is that I don’t think it bodes well for the future and particularly liberal democracy in the future.

There is a counter-argument. How do you reconcile the fact that the Harry Potter books sold a half billion copies with the claim that young people don’t read? My response to that is that there are 8 billion people in the world, about half of them in the target audience for the Harry Potter books. That’s almost 4 billion young people. It’s completely possible for substantial book sales and young people not reading both to be true.

If the claims in this somewhat rambling post by Peter Hamby at Puck News Online (no relation to the venerable British humor magazine or the San Francisco literary magazine but another Puck) are to be believed it should provide Democrats with some things to think about:

oe Biden has a problem with young voters—and it’s not just because he’s 79. Since the spring, Biden’s approval ratings have fallen across the board, a spiral worsened by the ongoing pandemic, rising inflation and a fragmented media. Gas prices, which always correlate with national sentiment, are a particular source of public dissatisfaction. But one group of voters is making the problem worse—and it’s not S.U.V.-driving, Facebook-addled Boomers. It’s Americans under the age of 30.

Gen Z (and older millennials) showed up in record numbers during the anti-Trump midterms of 2018, and broke for Biden by a more than 20-point margin in the 2020 election. But today, according to Ben Wessel, a Democratic strategist who formerly directed the youth outreach group NextGen, “almost all his negative movement comes from young people. Older voters are wildly stable in mild dislike for Biden.” Data released by The Economist and YouGov last week found that just 29 percent of American adults between the ages of 18-29 approve of the job Biden is doing as president, and a full 50 percent of young people now disapprove of Biden’s performance. Go ahead and read that sentence twice.

I found the post mostly notable in its one-liners. Here’s a sample:

“Young people identify with movements, not parties,” Kawashima-Ginsberg told me.

Like most voters, Gen Z and younger millennials pay attention to politics and issues when they are relevant—when they directly intersect with their lives.

Many millennials, he told me, have found fulfillment in the world beyond politics, and feel somewhat less urgency than Gen Z, which is less likely to sit elections out, even if they aren’t enamored with their choices on the ballot.

A majority of young voters said that American democracy is either “in trouble” or “failing.”

Young people are part of 1:1 messaging with their friends.

Read the whole thing. I at least found it interesting.

To a certain degree it’s self-refuting. Being focused on what affects you directly and being deeply interested in “green issues” are inconsistent. The first is talking about issues (negative risks that have already happened) while the second is talking about risks (things that might or might not happen). I would add that catastrophizing (thinking things are actually worse than they are) is not a healthy behavior.

What I think should concern Democrats is that a lot of Democratic strategizy has been based on a sort of “Brezhnev doctrine”—once a Democrat, always a Democrat—but I don’t believe that’s supported by scholarship. Except for certain groups and young people are not one of those groups, changes in life conditions may result in changing political parties. Things like getting a job, buying a house, having a child, changing where you live. Yesterday’s youth voters may be tomorrow’s revolutionary socialists are they may be tomorrow’s conservatives.

Let’s try this. At the Missouri Independent Dillon Bergin and Rudi Keller report that there’s been enormous undercounting of deaths due to COVID-19:

In Cape Girardeau County, the coroner hasn’t pronounced a single person dead of COVID-19 in 2021.

Wavis Jordan, a Republican who was elected last year to serve as coroner of the 80,000-person county, says his office “doesn’t do COVID deaths.” He does not investigate deaths himself, and requires families to provide proof of a positive COVID-19 test before including it on a death certificate.

Meanwhile, deaths at home attributed to conditions with symptoms that look a lot like COVID-19 — heart attacks, Alzheimer’s and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — increased.

“When it comes to COVID, we don’t do a test,” Jordan said, “so we don’t know if someone has COVID or not.”

In Cape Girardeau County, the coroner hasn’t pronounced a single person dead of COVID-19 in 2021.

Wavis Jordan, a Republican who was elected last year to serve as coroner of the 80,000-person county, says his office “doesn’t do COVID deaths.” He does not investigate deaths himself, and requires families to provide proof of a positive COVID-19 test before including it on a death certificate.

Meanwhile, deaths at home attributed to conditions with symptoms that look a lot like COVID-19 — heart attacks, Alzheimer’s and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — increased.

“When it comes to COVID, we don’t do a test,” Jordan said, “so we don’t know if someone has COVID or not.”

The discrepancy is not limited to Cape Girardeau County, either:

Cape Girardeau County in Missouri; Hinds and Rankin counties in Mississippi; and Lafayette Parish in Louisiana are four of the 10 counties with the greatest spike in deaths not attributed to COVID-19. In those communities, official COVID-19 deaths account for just half of the increase in deaths in 2020.

If official figures are to be believed, in Lafayette Parish deaths at home from heart disease increased by 20% from 2019 to 2020. Deaths from hypertensive heart disease, or heart ailments due to high blood pressure, doubled and are on track to remain that high in 2021.

IMO the reality is actually complicated. For example, do you attribute deaths that can be attributed to lack of care to COVID-19? Or to the political response to COVID-19 which is arguably not the same thing.

It’s not hard to find complaints that the number of deaths due to COVID-19 has been tremendously over-stated. Google it for yourself if you don’t believe me. So, which is it? Are we under-counting deaths due to COVID-19 or over-counting them? My guess is both. I think it’s unconscionable that at this late date we have no solid notion of either the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 or its prevalence. We’ve got lots of estimates and models, based on assumptions you may or may not believe but real measurements are lacking.

What we also have lots of is politicization of something we should unite us. Instead we have lots of finger-pointing and placing blame which puts people who contract the disease “despite doing everything right” in an uncomfortable position which they hardly need at this point.

Does it make any difference? I think so, particularly with respect to prevalence. It should make a difference in the policies advocated whether the number who’ve contracted the disease is 1 in 6 Americans or 4 of 6 Americans. Which in turn would affect the reckoning of the virulence of the disease.

In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger has these remarks about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition to the “Build Back Better” bill:

In a next-day interview with a West Virginia radio station, Mr. Manchin pointed American politics and indeed its culture toward the long-term lesson of his stand:

“They just never realized it, because they figured, ‘Surely, dear God, we can move one person—surely we can badger and beat one person up, surely we can get enough protesters to make that person uncomfortable enough [that] they’ll just say: “I’ll go for anything. Just quit.” ’ ”

Why did it occur to a senator from West Virginia to describe his experience in that way—the belief by his opposition that if they threw enough flak at him, he’d break and give them what they wanted?

The answer, of course, is experience. It’s the shared experience of him and quite a number of people who got in the way of what progressives wanted to do. I think it’s a consequence of a Marcusist outlook. Their mothers certainly did not tell them that they could catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

I also attribute the decline in collegiality in the Congress to trends in the practice of law in which zealous advocacy outweighs all other values. Or possibly the increasing trend in the society at large to see things in strictly Aristotelian terms. Things (and people) are either right or wrong; good or evil.