In an op-ed in the New York Times former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg presents his prescription for the city’s post-pandemic recovery:

The first is urgent: improving vital services New Yorkers rely on every day, including policing, transportation, sanitation and education.

and

The second broad challenge is more difficult, and inevitably in tension with the first: focusing on the city’s future years from now. Ultimately, the mayor will be judged not by the next day’s newspapers, but by the next generation. It’s his job to look beyond the light at the end of the tunnel and start building more tracks, even when it’s unpopular to do so.

then

In partnership with the state, the mayor can work to get trains on a full schedule again, which would help employers in every industry bring back their workers. It would help thousands of small businesses and their employees reclaim their customers. And it would provide confidence to those who may be thinking about opening a business of their own.

His prescription is conjoined with his endorsement of Eric Adams for mayor.

The one question he doesn’t address, understandable for a New Yorker and a former mayor at that, is whether New York City should recover. Given the obvious increased risk of spreading disease in crowded living conditions, the general movement of the population away from big cities, the near-certainty of future pandemics however good or bad the handling of this one has been, and the increasing acceptability of work-from-home, I think it’s a question worth considering.

The editors of the Washington Post say that President Biden needs to “reset” his policy with respect to COVID-19:

It is time for President Biden to reset the battle against covid-19. The nation’s high expectations for recovery were dashed this summer by the onslaught of the delta variant and the irresponsibility of a large share of unvaccinated people who fell ill. The country has the tools to fight back; it is now suffering through a self-inflicted epidemic. In his planned address to the nation Thursday, Mr. Biden can launch a fresh campaign to use those tools, and the country must help him carry it out, aggressively and wisely.

Let me pause there to question the editors’ interpretation of events. I agree with them that we should be doing more to encourage people to get vaccinated. I think they’re overestimating the degree to which it’s a “self-inflicted epidemic”. Or maybe it’s just poor diction on their part. IMO a “Zero COVID” strategy has always been beyond our reach. How else do you explain the surge in cases in highly-vaccinated Israel? Adjusted for population we’re seeing about the same number of deaths per day as Portugal where the vaccination rate is 86%. If you decide to do your own calculations, Portugal has less than 1/30^th of our population. When you combine ease of transmission, asymptomatic spread, and so-called “breakthrough” contractions of the disease I believe that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that “Zero COVID” is not a practical goal.

But I agree with this:

Most importantly, Mr. Biden ought to give the nation an unvarnished look at where the pandemic response is going. Many people believed, in June and early July, that the end was near. The cruel toll of the delta variant has left them disoriented and worried. In an article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Forever Virus,” experts cautioned the virus “is not going away.” It will not be completely eradicated, new variants are possible, herd immunity is not imminent and the virus may circulate for years to come. Still, we must find a pathway to resilience and survival. Mr. Biden should lay out realistic expectations, setting goals for the government and for the nation as a whole.

I think they’re underestimating the difficulty not just rhetorically but politically in delivering such a message, particularly when so much policy in so many locales has been dedicated to other goals. It would not just require President Biden to admit he was wrong or, perhaps more charitably, that circumstances have changed but that governors and mayors have been pursuing futile strategies as well.

Is that sort of nuance and charm within the president’s range of ability? I guess we’ll find out.

The short version of Australian physician Edward Cliff’s op-ed in the New York Times is that “Zero COVID” is not an achievable goal. Not in Australia. Not anywhere. Here’s his conclusion:

At some point, Australia’s political and health leaders must acknowledge that the country cannot escape Covid forever and must prepare the community to live with Covid.

To do so, Australia must add fuel to its vaccination rollout through incentives; immunization stations in accessible locations such as shopping centers; requiring vaccine passports at venues, for events and for travel; and a targeted marketing campaign to get more people vaccinated.

Australia will also need to keep reasonable public health restrictions for the short to medium term, including indoor masking, avoiding large events and using its test, trace, isolate and quarantine system. As leaders encourage people to adhere to restrictions in the coming weeks, they must simultaneously begin to prepare Australians for the likelihood that there will be high case numbers when restrictions ease. This will be a sizable shift in expectations, given Covid’s relatively low local prevalence so far.

Less than a year ago, people watched Australians enjoy their blissful summer largely free from Covid and from restrictions. Now we watch vaccinated friends in other countries return to a near-normal life amid the harsh reality that Australia may still have months of lockdown ahead. Once the envy of the world, Australia has come to a complete standstill — unable to return to the panacea of Covid zero it once enjoyed, yet far from ready to embrace the Covid normal of tomorrow.

I have always believed that would be the case, again, not just in Australia but everywhere. Rather than trying to achieve “Zero COVID” much more attention needs to be devoted to getting more people vaccinated and what mitigation measures are actually provably effective in controlling the transmission of the disease and keeping the cases minor.

I found this post at Fortis Analysis on the disruption in China’s food imports interesting. Here’s a sample:

In short – China is desperately short of crucial grains and oilseeds needed for domestic human and animal consumption. Understand, food security is not an unknown issue in China. So too is it widely known that CCP media organs and official ministries routinely lie about a range of food-related issues, from grain and oilseed production to hog population and slaughter figures. The CCP even went so far as to engineer the collapse and takeover of Swiss agriculture and chemical conglomerate Syngenta several years ago to short-path China’s rise to being a tier one agriculture research powerhouse alongside the United States, Japan, and the European Union.

The immediate causes of China’s food security woes are twofold:

• An ongoing, multi-year outbreak of African Swine Fever
• Two consecutive years of reduced grain and oilseed production due to widespread catastrophic flooding

Despite China’s rosy claims about its 2020 production, its year-long buying binge for available global inventory of grains and oilseeds indicates significant flooding-related production woes in several major agricultural reasons in the Yangtze River and Amur River basins. 2021 is shaping up to be potentially as bad. Notably, the critical crop-producing province of Heilongjiang (16% of China’s total corn production, and 40% for soybeans) is showing significant excess moisture stress during the critical corn development stages between pre-tassel and silking, with excess moisture also being a major factor in yield drag for soybeans during seed-fill. The general time period for both crops to reach these reproductive stages are July through end of August.

And consider this:

The simple reason is that China consumes enormous quantities of animal protein products. Though it is middle of the pack in annual per-capita consumption at 49.3 kg (compared to the US at 100.7 kg), the overall appetites of 1.41 billion people generates demand for more than 90 million tons of pork, poultry, and beef products. The US, with its population being roughly a quarter of China’s, uses around 44 million tons of the same proteins per year. Further, China is far and away the global leader in aquaculture production (“farmed” marine protein, vice “capture” fisheries in the world’s oceans) at 68.4 million tons produced annually, while the US checks in at 490,000 tons. Similarly, China’s capture fishing activities utilizing its massive commercial fishing fleet is reported to generate another 14.4 million tons of protein, while US fishing is comparatively much smaller at 5.35 million tons. And yet with all of that effort, China cannot catch a break as Brazil has been forced to temporarily suspend all beef exports to China over an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow disease”), cutting off China’s source of around 71,000 tons per month of beef.

To place some of this in perspect the U. S. imports from two to three times the percentage of the food it consumes (15%) than China (6%+). That is simultaneously a “cup half empty” and a “cup half full” situation. Food independence has long been one of China’s primary economic objectives. They’ve been pretty successful at it. Unlike the Soviet Union whose ability to move relatively unproductive labor from agriculture to manufacturing in the 1930s, China has been able to follow the same path without the Soviet Union’s drastic decline in agricultural production.

On the other hand I for one think that China should abandon its objective of food independence and import much, much more food and that the U. S. should import less.

I look forward to additional installments in the series from Fortis Analysis.

Every so often there’s an effort in the press to divide things into pieces. Eleven countries in the United States. Nine states of Illinois. I don’t know what motivates the impulse but it emerges pretty regularly.

A recent example of that is in Lee Drutman’s piece in the New York Times dividing the U. S. into six political parties: the Progressive Party, the American Labor Party, the New Liberal Party, the Growth and Opportunity Party, the Patriot Party, and the Christian Conservative Party. Judging by his descriptions I would probably fit into either the New Liberal Party or the Growth and Opportunity Party. I think his reading of the Democratic Party is wrong, almost comically so. For one thing I think he overestimates the numbers of progressives and underestimates the number of Christian conservatives in the Democratic Party.

His entire scheme is a fantasy for several reasons not the least of which is that first-past-the-post-winner-take-all systems (like the U. S.) tend to coalesce into two political parties. It isn’t true just here. It’s true everywhere.

Another reason is that the two political parties have a solid grip on the reins of power and they won’t relinquish it voluntarily. Not only do they make rules which make things hard on upstart parties, they also tend to cooperate in dividing power between themselves and against anybody else. The erstwhile Trib columnist John Kass called this phenomenon in Illinois “the Combine”.

In his Washington Post column David Ignatius says that Joe Biden is badly in need of a “do over”:

Labor Day always feels like the start of a new year — as classes begin, the season turns, and the joys and miseries of summer recede. The Biden administration badly needs that sort of new beginning.

This was a painful August for President Biden. He promised competent government, restored international leadership, an end to the covid-19 pandemic and a resurgent economy. But after last month’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan, a coronavirus spike caused by the delta variant, and a slowdown in job growth, those pledges seem questionable. Polls show a significant drop in Biden’s approval rating.

We’re living in a seesaw world. Biden got off to a fast start in his first six months, with coronavirus infections falling sharply and the economy rapidly gaining strength. After his June trip to Europe, Biden’s line, “America is back,” seemed plausible. But trend lines are fickle, with politics and pandemics. A bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan amplified other bad news, and Biden’s presidency suddenly seemed to be sputtering.

and he, too, concludes with the “c” word:

Competence begins at home. But the White House wants to demonstrate that despite anger overseas about the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, allies still need and want U.S. leadership. Look for a Biden push on vaccine diplomacy at the U.N. General Assembly this month, a major new initiative with “Quad” partners in Asia (India, Japan and Australia) and a new effort to galvanize the “techno-democracies” through the October meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The White House was battered last month by bad luck, bad policy and bad implementation. The surprising thing, given this gut-wrenching reversal for an administration that had been riding high, is the relative lack of internal backbiting. In other administrations, the leaks by now would have been flowing like a fire hose.

Biden’s inner team sometimes seems more like a Senate staff than a typical elbows-out administration. Congeniality has its advantages. But when mistakes happen, as they did in August, problems need to get fixed. Otherwise, the boss — and perhaps dozens of Democratic legislators — will pay the price.

I think he’s dreaming. It’s looking increasingly as though the internal conflicts in the Democratic Party, which have always been quite apparent, will torpedo any agenda that President Biden may have had. The Congressional progressives won’t settle for anything less than their ambitious and extravagant spending plans while the more centrist members of the caucus are balking at the price tag. That is not a surprise. It has always been apparent.

And there are no mulligans in politics. Can President Biden make better decisions going forward than he has made since January? Or is he caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the wings of his own party?

The first title I thought of for this post was “Return to Normalcy?” If that doesn’t ring any bells for you, it was Warren G. Harding’s campaign slogan in 1920. After World War I, the first Red Scare, and the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, Americans wanted a feeling of stability and more comfortable circumstances, all of which may sound familiar to you. It isn’t a compliment. He often makes lists of the worst presidents. On the occasion of his death the poet E. E. Cummings wrote, “The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.” That, too, may remind you of the present.

The second title I thought of was “Return to Competency?”, taking as my point of departure this passage from Jason L. Riley’s most recent Wall Street Journal column:

Joe Biden was supposed to deliver a return to presidential normalcy, and that may be all he thinks is necessary to satisfy the 81 million voters who elected him. Sooner or later, however, the country will start pining for a return to competency as well, and it’s far from clear that this administration is up to the task.

That is followed by a litany of the promises made and outright whoppers told by President Biden along with notable policy failures by the administration since he was inaugurated, concluded by a lament for what is actually transpiring under the Biden presidency:

In July the black unemployment rate fell by a full percentage point to 8.2%, which is further than it fell for whites, Hispanics or Asian-Americans. However, the decline was not due to more blacks finding work. Instead, it resulted from some 250,000 blacks leaving the labor force and thus reversing a previous trend. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor participation rates in July ticked upward for the other groups but declined for blacks. Mr. Biden likes to talk about “equity,” but that’s not what his policies are producing. Growing the welfare state is unlikely to help.

From my perspective we have suffered from twenty years of less than competent presidents. Maybe more. I’m beginning to think that today’s political climate lends itself not only to presidents who are less than competent but moves them to lie incessantly and transparently. I believe that activists in both parties are much more extreme than most of the parties’ members and maintaining the support of donors, party activists, and the media impels both incompetence and incessant lying.

I don’t believe it has always been this way. I think that Eisenhower was competent. I didn’t agree with him on much but I think that Johnson was competent. I never voted for the man and disagreed on practically everything with him but I think that Nixon was competent. After that it begins to get sketchy. Reagan in his first term but probably not in his second. George H. W. Bush was far too much of an apparatchik for my taste but I think he was competent. I have my doubts about Clinton (appointing his wife to head his health care reform initiative?). And I have more than doubts about the presidents that followed Clinton.

Is it even possible to be a competent, broadly truth-telling president today?

Probably the clearest example of two divergent realities lies in the issue of global climate change. To see one side of the coin you only need tune in to any of the network news stations: California fires, hurricanes in the Gulf, and flooding in New York are all being blamed on anthropogenic climate change. It’s not hard to consider the other side of the coin, either—generally any site in the Right Blogosphere can be expected to scoff at it.

Everyone having their own facts is evident in this column from Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal as well:

After 41 years of promoting a fuzzy and unsatisfying estimate of how much warming might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2, the world’s climate science arbiter has finally offered the first real improvement in the history of modern climate science.

Through five previous U.N. assessment plus their predecessor, the 1979 Charney Report, the likely worst-case was a rise of 4.5 degrees Celsius. This came from averaging the result of inconsistent computer climate simulations about which the IPCC knew only one thing: They couldn’t all be right and perhaps none were.

Using real-world data, the new report now says the worst case is a 4-degree rise. More important, with much greater confidence than before, disastrous outcomes above 5 degrees are now found to be very unlikely.

In another departure, the U.N. panel now says the dire emissions scenario it promoted for two decades should be regarded as highly unlikely, with more plausible projections at least a third lower.

The report also notes, as the press never does, the full impact of these emissions won’t be manifested until decades, even a century, later. The ultimate likely worst-case effect of a doubling of CO2 might be 4 degrees, but the best estimate of the “transient climate response” this century is about 2.7 degrees, or 1.6 degrees on top of the warming experienced since the start of the industrial age.

You might not wish this on your least-favorite planet, but compare it with media coverage of the U.S. National Climate Assessment in 2018, which paraded as a nearly foregone conclusion a temperature increase of 6.1 degrees.

No, the new report isn’t a reason to stop worrying about climate change, on the unlikely assumption that your previous level of worry corresponded to the actual science. But if you’ve been buying the media’s exaggerations, you can relax quite a bit.

My own view is a bit different. I don’t know whether human activity is inducing global climate change but I think it’s obvious that human activity has local effects and those effects can be pretty dramatic. I don’t believe that you can pipe a billion gallons of water per day into Southern California without it having some effect. I also think we should be using resources more prudently and efficiently than we do.

And I do have a question. Why do we encourage people to move to the coasts? There have been hurricanes and other serious storms in those areas for millions, billions of year. What’s new is people building so many homes there.

Speaking of news about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, I thought this piece by Eva Dou, Pei Lin Wu, Quentin Aries and Rebecca Tan in the Washington Post on the history of the WIV was very interesting:

One chilly morning in February 2017, a tall Chinese scientist in his 50s named Yuan Zhiming showed Bernard Cazeneuve, then the French prime minister, around Wuhan’s new high-security pathogen lab.

Built with French engineering, it was China’s first P4 lab, one of several dozen in the world with that highest security designation. Yuan, the director of the lab, had worked more than a decade to make it a reality.

Yuan and his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) hoped they could help prevent another catastrophe like the SARS outbreak in 2003, which embarrassed Beijing and resulted in the dismissal of the health minister.

But just a couple of years after the P4 lab’s ribbon-cutting, China was engulfed in a far deadlier outbreak. Yuan’s team hadn’t prevented it. And worse, some suspected they might have been involved in its genesis.

Here’s a telling quote:

“Scientific collaboration in virology — it’s gone,” said a foreign researcher who has worked for years with the WIV and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the hostile political climate. “Now, the Chinese will not welcome foreigners because their view is you’re coming in to dig dirt.”

and its conclusion:

Yuan and Shi have retreated from the world amid the controversy. The “comprehensive news” section of the WIV’s website once highlighted international collaborations, but has dwindled to politically correct posts about researchers studying the speeches of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Nielsen-LeRoux said she last heard from Yuan in March 2020, toward the end of the Wuhan lockdown.

“We had a very hard time in combating the infection in Wuhan,” Yuan wrote to her in an email. “The virus is spreading in your country, and more people are infected during the last days, and the situation worries me a lot. I am confident that we could finally curb the spreading of the virus with our joint effort, and our life will return back to normal soon.”

Perhaps I’m mistaken but reading between the lines of the piece, it seems to me that the Chinese authorities have a deep-seated inferiority complex and they too have their own facts.