I think that Megan McArdle’s take in her Washington Post column on the verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is about right:

All 17-year-olds act like fools sometimes, and many of them have grandiose fantasies about themselves. But in Kyle Rittenhouse’s case, those fantasies seem to have involved carrying a gun. And quite unusually, Rittenhouse took his fantasy life, and his gun, into the middle of a riot, where he killed two men and maimed another.

Yet whether or not you think he presented a legitimate claim of self-defense in his now-concluded murder trial, Rittenhouse is not the caricature the left has made of him. When on Friday afternoon the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all counts, it wasn’t yet another triumph of white supremacy, aided by a biased judge. It was the American justice system working as it should: giving the benefit of the doubt to a defendant who was dangerously unwise but didn’t clearly commit murder.

While Rittenhouse dove into the drama of running around with a gun, putting out fires and providing first aid during unrest following a police shooting in Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020, he didn’t act like a hunter, or even a belligerent kid trying to provoke a confrontation. When chased, he retreated, turning around only after something was thrown at him, and then again when one of his pursuers fired off his own gun.

Rittenhouse himself pulled the trigger only when Joseph Rosenbaum was almost upon him — after Rosenbaum, according to witness testimony, “said, ‘F— you’ and reached for [Rittenhouse’s] weapon.” After Rittenhouse killed Rosenbaum, the two shootings that followed were a complex tragedy in which three men tried to disarm what they believed to be an active shooter, while Kyle Rittenhouse sought to protect himself from a mob attacking him with feet, skateboard and handgun.

That’s not to say that Rittenhouse is guiltless — at best he made a fatally stupid decision to bring a gun into a volatile situation, and at worst he panicked in a situation he himself created. But too many on the left rushed to the harshest possible judgment from the moment they heard Rittenhouse’s name, and refused to make the return journey even as new evidence emerged.

How could people believe that a “guilty” verdict was a foregone conclusion? Matt Taibbi points his finger directly at the advocacy journalism in the media:

Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all six charges today, already causing a great exploding of heads in the pundit-o-sphere. Unrest wouldn’t be surprising. How could it be otherwise? Colleagues in national media spent over a year telling the country the 18-year-old was not just guilty, but a moral monster whose acquittal would be an in-your-face affirmation of systemic white supremacy.

[…]

We’ve seen Die Hard-level indifference to social consequence from the beginning of this case. The context of the Rittenhouse shootings involved a summer of protests that began after the police killing of George Floyd, and continued in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake. We saw demonstrations of all types last summer, ranging from solemn candlelight vigils and thousands of protesters laying peacefully on their backs across bridges, to the burning of storefronts and “hundreds” of car thieves stealing “nearly 80” cars from a dealership in San Leandro, California. When the population is on edge, and people are amped and ready to lash out, that puts an even greater onus on media figures to get things right.

In a tinderbox situation like this one, it was reckless beyond belief for analysts to tell audiences Rittenhouse was a murderer when many if not most of them had a good idea he would be acquitted. But that’s exactly what most outlets did.

After the verdict that same advocacy journalism has been doing its level best to stir up enthusiasm for civil cases against Kyle Rittenhouse now that the criminal charges are a lost cause. From what I’ve seen so far Kyle Rittenhouse has better cases for libel and defamation than either the families of his attackers do and there does not appear to be any reason to get the federal government involved.

Before we end our consideration of the entire sorry sequence of events in Kenosha, let’s recall where the finger of blame really should be pointed: the Kenosha police. It was a Kenosha police officer’s shooting of Jacob Blake that impelled the demonstrations in Kenosha that turned into riots. If the police had controlled the situation Kyle Rittenhouse would never have gone to Kenosha and two men who are now dead would in all likelihood still be alive.

The verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse has come in. ABC 7 Chicago reports:

KENOSHA, Wis. (WLS) — The jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has reached a not guilty verdict on five charges against the Antioch, Illinois teen on their fourth day of deliberations.

There were loud outbursts from the crowd gathered outside the Kenosha courthouse as Judge Bruce Schroeder read the jury’s verdict.

Rittenhouse became emotional as the verdict was read, collapsing into his seat and breathing heavily as one of his defense attorneys braced him.

Rittenhouse is now a free man after being cleared of all charges in the shootings that intensified the debates over vigilantism, guns, and racial injustice. Rittenhouse, then 17, repeatedly claimed he fired his AR-15-style rifle to save his own life.

IMO the prosecution screwed up badly. As I believe I’ve said before, based on what I’ve heard of the proceedings, I thought he’d be acquitted on the most serious charges but I’d rather hoped he’d be convicted of something. He’s a guy who shouldn’t have been in that place at that time armed. In other words I agree that he fired in self-defense but I don’t think he was entirely innocent, either. I think that any notion that he’s a hero of some sort is, shall we say, far from hinged.

We’ll need to see if the other shoe drops.

At New York Magazine Eric Levitz, after a lengthy section on inflation that could effectively be summarized as “hoocoodanode”, has some suggestions for the president to reduce inflation:

1. Repeal most (or all) of Donald Trump’s tariffs.
2. Relax the Renewable Fuel Standard.
3. Allow Medicare reimbursement rates to fall.
4. Expand immigration.

and concludes:

It’s substantively important for the president to ease the burdens of rising prices. And it’s politically vital for Biden to demonstrate that he is taking the problem of inflation seriously. Ultimately, however, the primary drivers of contemporary inflation are not subject to Biden’s control. And for now, those forces appear likely to dissipate next year, irrespective of the president’s actions. So, the White House should do what it can to make a difference at the margin. But the foremost imperatives of Biden’s anti-inflation policy should be to “look busy” and “first, do no harm.”

I found his explanation of #4 pretty amusing. Actually, if you could limit immigration to people receiving salaries in the top quintile of income earners, I would agree with him. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case with most immigrants. The median household income for immigrants is slightly lower than the median household income of all Americans and about 16% of immigrants—significantly higher than for all Americans.

So that suggestion amounts to a restating of the “cat and rat farm” or the belief that even if you lose money on every sale you can make it up in volume.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the impending appointment of a Federal Reserve chairman for the next four years:

The Powell Fed has presided over inflation that it failed to predict and has been slow to address. The Fed’s professed inflation target is 2%, but the consumer price index rose 6.2% in October above a year earlier.

By any measure this is an historic failure. Mr. Powell’s credibility has been damaged with his persistent refrain, until recently, that inflation is “transitory.” His new monetary policy framework of average-inflation targeting, unveiled in August 2020, has been a bust.

If Mr. Biden wants to distance himself from this inflation failure, he’d nominate a critic of current Fed policy. Kevin Warsh, whom Mr. Trump passed over for Mr. Powell, would provide market credibility. We never thought we’d say this, but economist Larry Summers would be a logical Democratic choice given his prescience about inflation. But that would cause heads to explode on the Senate left.

Here’s Section 2A of the Federal Reserve Act, the legislation that created the Federal Reserve back in 1913:

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.

The emphasis is mine. Here’s the Labor Force Participation Rate:

the rate of inflation:

source: tradingeconomics.com
and long term interest rates are at historic lows.

I’ll leave it to the reader. Has the Federal Reserve succeeded in its mandates? I think it’s been failing for a long time.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Judy Shelton criticizes the present stance of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee:

Chairman Jerome Powell seems eager to urge patience on raising interest rates for the sake of increasing labor participation. This approach reflects lessons learned about economic growth during the Trump administration, but changed conditions render it inappropriate for the current moment.

It isn’t that the framework is faulty. To the contrary, it incorporates the realization that low unemployment combined with productivity gains isn’t inflationary because it results in increased output. This contradicts the Phillips-curve notion that low unemployment leads to high inflation—which central banks must then counter by raising interest rates.

The Fed’s review of its monetary-policy framework leading to its current approach was conducted over the 18 months before the pandemic began in early 2020. The timing was unfortunate, as the review encompassed the extraordinarily high-growth, low-unemployment, low-inflation environment of 2018-19. Mr. Powell’s mistake now is to ignore the changed circumstances stemming not only from the pandemic but also the Biden administration’s tax and regulatory changes.

If the Federal Open Market Committee, which determines monetary policy, insists on disregarding the structural effects of different administrations’ economic choices, it risks serious error. You can’t make good decisions by following an outdated paradigm.

The Federal Reserve, famously, has a dual mandate: maintaining stable prices and maximizing employment. There is actually a third: regulating banks. Based on the available information how would you explain the Fed’s actions over the last half dozen years:

1. The Federal Reserve governors have abandoned their statutory responsibility to maintain stable prices, first reinterpreting it as to maintain a stable rate of increase in prices (first derivative), and now as to maintain a stable acceleration in prices (second derivative). That’s an obvious abrogation of their responsibilities. Note that they’re not achieving any of those objectives.
2. The Federal Reserve governors have succumbed to a temptation very strong for macroeconomists—ignoring the role of microeconomics in the behavior of the economy. This is manifest in the governors not believing that fiscal policy matters. That is apparently Dr. Shelton’s view.
3. The Federal Reserve governors think they can promote higher labor force participation by keeping interest rates too low for too long. That is the explanation Dr. Shelton expresses in the op-ed. Precisely how this is supposed to work is unclear to me. It’s a weird upside down and backwards version of the Philips Curve.
4. The Federal Reserve governors think that banks are in such a fragile state even more than decade after the financial crisis that they must maintain interest rates as low as possible for as long as possible and similarly retain bank subsidies. What do they know that we don’t know?
5. The Federal Reserve governors think their job is to ensure that the DJIA goes up.
6. They think the only way they can keep their jobs is to keep not doing what they’re not doing.
7. They don’t want to be seen as undermining the Biden presidency.

I’m open to other explanations but those seem the most likely to me.

I feel that I should point out that there is no exemption in the Fed’s empowering legislation for “transitory” inflation or unemployment and under the circumstances I find their behavior bizarre. That’s why I lean to D with a side order of E. I also think they’re ignoring the principles of deterrence. There’s nothing like raising interest rates to convince people that you have the will to raise interest rates.

I found Steve Rattner’s New York Times op-ed, mostly an extended “I told you so”, somewhat puzzling:

Enough already about “transitory” inflation. Last Wednesday’s terrible Consumer Price Index news shifts our inflation prospects strongly into the “embedded” category: Prices are up 6.2 percent from a year ago, the largest increase in 30 years.

While not likely to morph into the double-digit inflation I covered for The New York Times four decades ago, prices may well rise fast enough to trigger higher interest rates. Higher financing costs make it more expensive for consumers and businesses to borrow, which, in turn, throttles growth.

Inflation had already been tagged as a factor in the Democrats’ awful election results this month and in the president’s sagging poll numbers. It also threatens the passage of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which includes expansive new initiatives to address climate change, as well as important programs like paid family leave and universal preschool.

concluding:

For the Fed, addressing inflation will mean raising interest rates, perhaps sooner than it thinks necessary. The Fed targets average annual inflation of 2 percent. So if or when the pace of price increases gets stuck far above that level, the central bank will need to raise interest rates to address the problem. While the Fed thinks this won’t happen until late next year, the bond market believes rates will be hiked by midyear.

The responsibility for easing inflationary pressures also lies with the Biden administration. To its credit, it is scrambling to address the supply shortages, doing things like unclogging ports. But other ideas, such as releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, amount to distracting symbolic moves that are unlikely to have a significant effect on inflation.

The White House needs to inject some real fiscal discipline into its thinking. Given the importance of Mr. Biden’s spending initiatives, the right move would be to add significant revenue sources. Yes, that means tax increases. We can’t get back money badly spent. But we can build this economic plan back better.

There are all sorts of reasons for my confusion. For example, although Mr. Rattner attributes the “transitory inflation” trope to the White House, it is rather the White House repeating the claims of the Federal Reserve than the other way around. And fiscal discipline? It has fallen into bad repute on both sides of the aisle. Republicans appear to think that all tax cuts will immediately pay for themselves in the form of economic growth while Democrats are equally one-noted, apparently believing that increasing consumer spending will lift all boats.

My interpretation of the piece is that Mr. Rattner, like Rahm Emanuel, is desperately seeking a place for himself in a party that is rapidly leaving him behind. I think that was the message of the Virginia governor’s election: it marked the decline in influence of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. However, it was also a rout for the “social democrat” wing of the party. What’s left? People more interested in getting the garbage picked up and potholes filled. They are likely to be disappointed with the “infrastructure bill” just signed into law by President Biden whose results are unlikely to materialize for several years if ever.

Thomas Edsall analyzes the polling data in his latest New York Times column and is in a state of shock:

The rise of inflation, supply chain shortages, a surge in illegal border crossings, the persistence of Covid, mayhem in Afghanistan and the uproar over “critical race theory” — all of these developments, individually and collectively, have taken their toll on President Biden and Democratic candidates, so much so that Democrats are now the underdogs going into 2022 and possibly 2024.

Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News, put it this way in an essay published on the network’s website:

As things stand, if the midterm elections were today, 51 percent of registered voters say they’d support the Republican candidate in their congressional district, 41 percent say the Democrat. That’s the biggest lead for Republicans in the 110 ABC/Post polls that have asked this question since November 1981.

These and other trends have provoked a deepening pessimism about Democratic prospects in 2022 and anxiety about the 2024 presidential election.

What it reminds me of is the old political advice that, whatever else you may do, pick up the garbage and fill the potholes.

Joe Biden rather clearly set out to be the 21^st century FDR; he should take care that he does not become the 21^st century Hoover. In 1928 Herbert Hoover won 40 of the 48 states—an electoral college landslide. The only states he didn’t carry were Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the states of the Deep South. Republicans had overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. As had been the case since the Civil War, most black voters voted Republican.

By 1932 things had changed. Hoover only carried six states, the Democrats had overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate, black voters began voting Democratic and by 1936 71% of black votes went to the Democratic ticket—a situation that has persisted to this day.

The big difference between now and 90 years ago is the enormous increase in independent voters, voters who are comfortable with neither the Republican nor Democratic parties. The progressive belief is that their policies are overwhelmingly popular and they’d win in landslides if a) Republicans weren’t disenfranchising voters and b) the corporate media would provide better coverage for them. My own view is that their policies are popular in theory but in practice they just don’t work—they’re not picking up the garbage and filling the potholes and this is quite obvious in the cities that have had very progressive governments over the last few years.

What you do matters. People can see that. The benignity of your intentions—not so much.

Scott Alexander does a deep dive into the studies of effectiveness of ivermectin in treating COVID-19 and he finds, remarkably enough, that there is some evidence that it does, indeed, have some positive effect even if if isn’t the panacea its most ardent supporters may claim. Here’s an interesting snippet from his conclusion:

If you have a lot of experience with pharma, you know who lies and who doesn’t, and you know what lies they’re willing to tell and which ones they shrink back from. As far as I know, no reputable scientist has ever come out and said ‘esketamine definitely works better than regular ketamine’. The regulatory system just heavily implied it.

I claim that with ivermectin, even the people who don’t usually lie were saying it was ineffective, and they were saying it more directly and decisively than liars usually do. But most people can’t translate Pharma → English fluently enough to know where the space of “things people routinely lie about and nobody worries about it too much” ends. So they incredibly reasonably assume anything could be a lie. And if you don’t know which statements about pharmaceuticals are lies, “the one that has dozens of studies contradicting it” is a pretty good heuristic!

If you tell these people to “believe Science”, you will just worsen the problem where they trust dozens of scientific studies done by scientists using the scientific method over the pronouncements of the CDC or whoever.

So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government campaigns focusing entirely on hand-washing (HEPA filters? What are those?) Not only would a recommendation to trust experts be misleading, I don’t even think you could make it work. People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught.

His final conclusions at the end of a very long post are interesting:

• Ivermectin doesn’t reduce mortality in COVID a significant amount (let’s say d > 0.3) in the absence of comorbid parasites: 85-90% confidence
• Parasitic worms are a significant confounder in some ivermectin studies, such that they made them get a positive result even when honest and methodologically sound: 50% confidence
• Fraud and data processing errors are of similar magnitude to p-hacking and methodological problems in explaining bad studies (95% confidence interval for fraud: between >1% and 5% as important as methodological problems; 95% confidence interval for data processing errors: between 5% and 100% as important)
• Probably “Trust Science” is not the right way to reach proponents of pseudoscientific medicine: ???% confidence

There are a couple of larger issues here. Science is global. How much should we credit studies that aren’t performed in the United States? There may be confounding factors in studies performed in South America, South Asia, or East Asia which physicians in those regions would understand instinctively but which may be quite opaque to us. That doesn’t just pertain to ivermectin. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was used early on in the pandemic by South Korean physicians with extensive anecdotal support and to the best of my knowledge no one has successfully explained that.

Maybe it can all be summarized as “medicine is complicated”.