There’s a rather fascinating debate going on about a subject you might have thought thrashed out to death—to wear a facemask to prevent the transmission of COVID-19 or not? What got the ball rolling was apparently this post analyzing the Bengladeshi study which is, apparently, the largest one of the use of masks in a non-healthcare setting and to which Scott Alexander reacted earlier.

A few days ago Tyler Cowen entered the lists with this post, following up with this response from the author of the first post linked and there’s a rather sharp post from Greg Piper summarizing it all at Just the News.

Tyler’s view approximates my own:

To be clear, I am fine with wearing masks myself, I am used to it, and I dislike it but I don’t hate it. On this issue, I am not one of those people translating his or her own snowflake-ism into some kind of biased policy view.

and I did want to highlight what I found to be Tyler’s most astute observation:

Any good assessment of mask efficacy has to be radically intertemporal in nature, and I mean for the entirety of the pandemic. “Not getting infected” now may well raise your chance of getting infected later on, and that spans for longer than any feasibly designed RCT.

Said another way it’s not enough to measure the effectiveness in preventing contracting the disease today. Just how important delaying contracting the disease for two weeks, four weeks, or a year when you will, ultimately contract it is important as well. It seems to me that the honestly remarkable pace at which new treatments are being introduced makes delaying when you will contract the disease that much more important rather than less.

I find that the weakness of the supportive evidence casts a bit of a pall on mandates to wear masks but IMO mask mandate by presidential executive order is itself problematic since

• I do not believe that a mask mandate is within the authority of the president even under emergency conditions
• Although such a mandate might be within the power of the Congress as a temporary emergency measure, a permanent mandate or one of unspecified duration is outside the Congress’s power and
• Such mandates are within the power of the states

As usual I think the underlying problem is not COVID-19 but the Congress and in this instance the torpidity of state governments. That echoes all sorts of other issues much in the news these days including anthropogenic climate change and abortion.

Under the circumstances G. K. Chesterton’s wisecrack rings true to me: it is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged in this country.

William Galston has stunning advice for President Biden in his latest Wall Street Journal column on how the president can recover the popularity he’s lost since January which I feel confident he will not take—do what he campaigned on doing:

To retain a share of power in Washington, Democrats must craft a three-year plan to climb out of the deep hole they have dug for themselves, by limiting their losses next year and then cooperating with the president to restore his public standing. This means paying attention to what most Americans think, not only the party’s base.

and even that is a misstatement of what has happened. Far from honoring the wishes of “the party’s base”, he has done precisely what I predicted he would: moved to the ideological center of the party. As the progressive caucus has bolted leftwards with Bernie Sanders who isn’t even a Democrat leading the charge, so has President Biden, leaving the actual base which largely consists of moderate and social conservative Democrats far behind.

The most important issues for Mr. Biden today are COVID-19, inflation, order on the border, and crime in the streets. With glacial slowness he’s doing a course correction on the only one of those actually within his power to change, order on the border. Without much fanfare his policies on that are coming to resemble those of his despised predecessor. If no one notices it won’t give him the boost he needs.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal chortle over the most recent Fed pronouncement:

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell finally jettisoned the word “transitory” to describe today’s inflation, and we suppose it’s better late than never. Asked by Sen. Pat Toomey on Tuesday how long inflation would have to persist before the Fed no longer considers it to be transitory, Mr. Powell abandoned the word.

The chairman acknowledged that inflation has long since gone beyond the central bank’s 2% target. He then said that some people define transitory to mean “short-lived.” But at the Fed “we tend to use it to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation.” He added that perhaps it’s time for the Fed to “retire” the word and “try to explain more clearly what we mean.”

That sounds good to us, though it does invite the question of what he means by a “permanent mark” from inflation. The current annual rate of 6% is already permanent in the sense that the inflation of the last year is built in and prices won’t fall to erase it. Transitory or permanent, we’d prefer that Mr. Powell act to stop it.

As I and others have pointed out the Fed appears to have adopted as it mandate a second derivative approach, i.e. managing the rate of change in prices. However, that is not its charter and the empowering legislation could not be clearer: its charter is to maintain stable prices to the greatest degree possible. What Mr. Powell and the Fed governors are presently doing is non-feasance, dereliction of duty. Not only should they not be reappointed, they should be fired for cause.

In his regular Washington Post column David Ignatius sets out to explain why the U. S. intelligence apparatus is worried about Russia’s invading Ukraine:

The CIA discovered something scary in October: Russia was moving troops toward the Ukrainian border — and, unlike in previous border thrusts, was making secret plans about how to use them.

The agency also worried that the potential conflict zone didn’t appear to be just the eastern sliver of Ukraine occupied by Russian-backed separatists, which Russian troops had approached the previous April, but a much broader swath of the country. Alarm bells rang at the agency, and then across the U.S. government.

going on to propose that President Biden talk to President Putin, explaining to Mr. Putin how bad such an invasion would be for Russia:

How do you stop a “master of audacity,” as a former CIA official describes Putin? One way is to talk to him, as Biden is planning to do, and offer a dignified retreat. But if that fails and Putin invades Ukraine, the United States and its allies are discussing this week how to make him pay as heavy a cost as possible.

I think he’s looking at the matter through the wrong prism. More than a century ago Lord Palmerston said of the British Empire that it had no permanent friends or enemies but it did have permanent interests. So does Russia. Among those interests are:

• Russia seeks to be the leading Slavic country and the defender of all Slavs.
• Russia seeks to be the leading Orthodox country and the defender of the Orthodox.
• Russia wants a warm water port.

Those have been Russian national goals for hundreds of years. Ukrainian rapprochement with the West threatens all of those goals.

If we are genuinely interested in preserving anything like Ukrainian independence, I would like to suggest the following:

• End all talk of Ukraine joining the European Union (unless you’re prepared to admit Russia, too).
• End all talk of Ukraine joining NATO (ditto).
• Accept permanently the notion of a neutral Ukraine.

Anything short of those steps are just non-starters for Russia.

Canadian writers comparing Canada nd the U. S., almost always to Canada’s advantage, is practically a cottage industry. At the Washington Post J. J. McCullough considers the differences between Canadian politics and U. S. politics:

Neither Canada nor the United States is in the best political health these days, but the symptoms plaguing each country run in sharply different directions. If excessive division is preventing Americans from getting much done, too much consensus in Canada makes doing the wrong things too easy.

and identifies three major differences:

1. It’s easier to get elected in Canada — even if you’re unpopular
2. Canadian political parties are much more powerful
3. Canadians vote less than Americans

Although he almost gets to the real difference between Canada and the U. S. in his opening his three points miss the essence of the difference between the two.

First, a point on which both Canadians and Americans are confused. Canada is a different country from the U. S. just as Mexico and Canada or Germany and Canada are different. They resemble each other superficially but it is, indeed, a superficial resemblance. We have different histories, different economies, different expectations, different politics.

The main difference between the two is that Canada is much more ethnically and culturally homogeneous than the U. S. even taking the Anglophone/Francophone dichotomy into account. 75% of Canadians are of primarily European descent, a considerable decline, and 70% of Canadians are Christians (or post-Christians). Fewer than 5% of Canadians are black or Hispanic compared with 30% of Americans.

Consensus-based government is enormously easier in Canada than in the United States.

In his New York Times column Bret Stephens pleads that we stop pointing fingers to assign blame for COVID-19:

Let’s quit arguing that Covid is a red- or blue-state thing. Yes, Republican areas have tended to have lower vaccination rates, but disease trends have a way of switching directions for reasons none of us really understands.

Let’s stop imputing bad faith or recklessness or greed to our partisan opponents. They have loved ones who are just as much at risk of infection as our own.

Let’s accept that people have needs and ideas that differ from ours, whether on account of health status, livelihood or deep-seated belief. Lectures, condescension and scorn aren’t going to change the way they think.

I have no idea what Omicron will bring, and very slight hopes that we’ll be able to exercise any effective form of control over it. But it shouldn’t be beyond asking that we stop being beastly to others. We are all riding out the same storm.

That plea follows a list, by no means exhaustive, of the finger-pointing going on. Let’s focus on just one, shall we?

Trump is responsible for hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths that might have been avoided if only someone else had been in the White House! But now Biden has presided over even more deaths, not that anyone should blame him for it.

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. I think that Candidate Biden was out-of-bounds in blaming President Trump for the COVID-19 deaths on his watch but once he had said that it became completely fair game to blame President Biden for the COVID-19 deaths on his. It’s a near-perfect example of something I’ve held up as the gold standard: model in your own behavior the behavior you want to see in others.

Additionally, I think there’s a distinction that needs to be made between commission and omission. If the policies you put in place, the acts you commit, have adverse consequences, it should always and everywhere be completely fair to assign blame for them. However, if you are actually working with alacrity, blaming you for not doing enough should be out-of-bounds it is equally always and everywhere wrong to assign blame unless you have set the precedent by doing that to your political opponents.

“Myside bias” is an impediment in dealing with any realworld problem not just COVID-19 but it appears to be a dominant feature of today’s debate. IMO it’s a factor in the positions on wearing masks, lockdowns, vaccines, non-vaccine treatments, etc.

I also think that there was no real hope of containing or, indeed, doing anything but adapting to COVID-19 after around September 2019 and the issue quickly became tangled with national standing on the part of the Chinese. But that’s a topic far-removed from the point Mr. Stephens is making.

We need a 12-step program. That was my immediate reaction when I read this editorial at The Economist, “Why the situation on America’s southern border has become unmanageable”. The first step in AA’s recovery program is recognizing that you’ve failed and that the situation has become uncontrollable.

The number of illegal border-crossers is the highest for 21 years. The number of “encounters” in the 2021 fiscal year (which ended in September) was the highest on record. (“Encounters” and the number of border-crossers are different, since one person may attempt several crossings.) The perception that Mr Biden is less hostile to migrants than Mr Trump was one factor in the rise, but not the only one. Covid-19 has hit economies to America’s south, adding to the poverty, violence, natural disasters and autocracy which many people are eager to escape. As more migrants arrive at the border it becomes harder to manage them in a consistent way.

The situation can no longer be explained away as seasonal variance.

The two stories dominating the opinion pages today are abortion and the latest COVID-19 variant dubbed “omicron”, abortion because of the impending Supreme Court case and omicron because if it bleeds it leads. I don’t much care to write much more about either one of them.

I find extremism in just about any form distressing and that obtains to both abortion rights absolutists and those who want to ban abortion entirely. The Texas law seems pretty extreme to me but the Mississippi law seems to be pretty closely aligned with the laws of France, Germany, and most liberal democracies. The only country I know of that has abortion on demand right up to term is China. When you’re in that sort of company you might want to reconsider your position.

Until we have more information I’ve already written what I have to say about omicron. We’ll see.

Doomberg makes some interesting observations about what would happen if electricity were free:

• Efficiency of transmission or utilization wouldn’t matter
• We would use a lot more of it
• It would kill EVs

All of those strike me as right even if counter-intuitive. Free electricity would kill EVs because it would make what has been called the “hydrogen economy” possible. Vehicles would be powered by hydrogen which would be enormously easier than changing to EVs. Using present technology trucks, cargo ships, and aircraft call all be powered by hydrogen using present technology. What impedes its adoption is the expense of releasing the hydrogen.

Free electricity would also make life easier in places where it is now quite difficult.