I materially agree with the view of the editors of the Wall Street Journal on visas for our Afghan interpreters and their families:

Last month Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hinted that the military could evacuate translators and others who worked with the U.S. A Milley spokesman later clarified that “an evacuation is not imminent,” and the Biden Administration doesn’t seem interested. A mass evacuation wouldn’t create the optics the White House wants to see—especially as it insists the U.S. will remain committed to Afghanistan diplomatically. But it could save countless lives, and Guam could be a temporary haven as the visa process plays out.

Congress has a role to play. It likely will include legislation for more visas for the SIV program in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act. But President Biden as Commander in Chief can press Congress to simplify the visa rules or order an evacuation.

“The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese,” then-Sen. Biden said in 1975 as the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam. The result was the exodus of the “boat people,” many of whom died in the open ocean, that was a stain on America. Mr. Biden has an opportunity—make that an obligation—to do better by thousands of Afghans.

If a plan hasn’t been developed for this it would be a grave omission. Let’s see if at 78 Joe Biden has more compassion and prudence than he did when he was in his 30s.

I want to share with you Glenn Loury’s “Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America” at Quillette. I both agreed with it wholeheartedly and found it unutterably sad. Let me share a few brief snippets.

My responsibilities as a black man, as an American, and as an intellectual are not in conflict.

and

Where is the self-respecting black intellectual to take his stand? Must he simply act as a mouthpiece for movement propaganda aiming to counteract “white supremacy”?

and

“Structural racism” isn’t an explanation, it’s an empty category.

That is the view that I have enunciated here. If it’s not an “empty category”, it’s worse. It’s either a powerful argument for strict segregation of the races or an argument for minority rule.

Confronted by someone who is constantly bludgeoning me about the evils of colonialism, urging me to tear down the statues of “dead white men,” insisting that I apologize for what my white forebears did to the “peoples of color” in years past, demanding that I settle my historical indebtedness via reparations, and so forth—I well might begin to ask myself, were I one of these “white oppressors,” on exactly what foundations does human civilization in the 21st century stand? I might begin to enumerate the great works of philosophy, mathematics, and science that ushered in the “Age of Enlightenment,” that allowed modern medicine to exist, that gave rise to the core of human knowledge about the origins of the species or of the universe. I might begin to tick-off the great artistic achievements of European culture, the architectural innovations, the paintings, the symphonies, etc. And then, were I in a particularly agitated mood, I might even ask these “people of color,” who think that they can simply bully me into a state of guilt-ridden self-loathing, where is “their” civilization?

and

If we blacks want to walk with dignity—if we want to be truly equal—then we must realize that white people cannot give us equality. We actually have to actually earn equal status.

Read the whole thing.

In her Wall Street Journal column Kimberley Strassel makes a significant observation:

The president has repeatedly claimed a mandate for action despite knowing better. Even with the Democratic Party’s twin Georgia runoff victories in January, it ended the election with a 50-50 Senate and the narrowest Democratic House majority since before the New Deal. The prudent course would have been to govern from the middle, working with Republicans on incremental change.

Democrats instead decided to “go big” with a strategy that had no margin for error and relied on two big bets. First, that they could juke or blow up the Senate rules to get around the 60-vote filibuster. Second, that they could force or cajole every member of their razor-thin majority to adopt one of the most progressive agendas in U.S. history.

Joe Biden had a single clear mandate: not to be Donald Trump. In that he has been successful. Last week the first alternative noted by Ms. Strassel was vetoed by the Senate parliamentarian. Whether the Democrats can “force or cajole” a majority of their caucus to vote for the administration’s agenda remains to be seen. It may well prove the case that the Congressional leadership will need to cultivate skills that nothing in their backgrounds has granted them experience with: compromise, moderation, and consensus-building.

In 2002 Ruy Texeira and John Judis wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority. It was the book of the year, discussed by practically everybody—left, right, and center. It has been widely interrupted a predicting an inevitable new progressive era, a consequence of demographic shift. In a recent post at Substack he cautions Democrats that they can’t depend on demographics alone. Here’s his conclusion:

Finally, the long-range effects of rising diversity are also an all-else-equal proposition. While cycle-by-cycle voter preference shifts can be volatile and even out over time, sometimes they result in a long-term shift against a party like the Democrats—think of the move of white non-college voters toward the Republicans in the 2000s. This can cancel or even swamp the pro-Democratic effects of demographic change over a lengthy period.

In short, demographics set the playing field, but they are not destiny unless all else remains equal. And all else almost never remains equal. Therein lies a challenge for the Democrats that the simple fact of rising racial diversity cannot solve.

or, said another way, the “progressive centrism” that he and Mr. Judis advocated in their book is a necessary prerequisite for that progressive triumph.

Is that what’s happening? Or is what we see presently more like the neo-feudalism that other both on left and right, starting with John Kenneth Galbraith sixty years ago and most recently Joel Kotkin, have been warning about?

My own view has been that demographic shift doesn’t work exactly as Mr. Texeira has imagined. Blacks and Hispanics tend to be much more conservative than would be required for the sort of progressive parousia that he imagined and today’s progressivism is focused far more on Harvard Yard and Silicon Valley than it is on Back of the Yards and the Salinas Valley.

Consider the 2020 presidential election, for example. Contrary to what you might gather from listening to the Democratic leadership, Hispanic voter turnout in 2020 was actually higher than in 2008, 2012, or 2016 and a lot of those votes went to Trump. Black voter turnout was higher than in 2016. Many of those votes, too, went to Trump.

Former U. S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald E. Neumann makes his pitch for the U. S. military remaining in Afghanistan forever in an op-ed in the Washington Post. He emphasizes the risks of leaving:

Since they had no warning of the direction Biden would choose, neither the U.S. military staff on the ground nor their colleagues in the Pentagon had plans ready to replace the contractors or lessen the impact of their speedy and unexpected departure. Some contractors say they asked after Biden’s decision was announced whether they should prepare to manage operations from locations outside Afghanistan, but were told no.

Some of the gap might be bridged by hiring trained, non-U.S. personnel. Some U.S. companies have indicated a possible willingness to remain — for example, if they were hired by Afghan authorities. Some training and support might be maintained from outside Afghanistan.

One U.S. official has assured me that the Pentagon is doing all it can do for the Afghans, including developing bridging strategies. And there may be exaggeration in some of the stories coming out of Afghanistan, as that country’s government and military, installed and supported by the United States, reel from the shock of the U.S. decision to leave and cope with their own internal problems. But whatever is being planned inside the Beltway does not seem to be getting down to the field.

The only thing that contractors are being told is to get all their personnel out of Afghanistan. A memorandum from the Army Contracting Command at Bagram air base near Kabul reminds them that “the base closure timelines are set for every base at this time and it is imperative that each individual has a ticket and knows the date they are departing.” The Defense Department is requiring contractors to submit detailed plans for leaving Afghanistan for every one of their American employees, on pain of being held in noncompliance of their contract.

In principle, maintenance will be turned over to the Afghans. But they have not yet received any U.S. funding to pick up the operations, and setting up new procedures or contracts takes time. Perhaps we and the Afghans will find ways to manage the problem, but in the meantime, balls seem to be dropping right and left as the U.S. military (or the White House, or wherever the orders are flowing from) pushes to get out of Afghanistan months sooner even than the Sept. 11 date given by the president.

It may well be that feverish work is going on behind the scenes. But on the ground, the withdrawal of contractors is messy, confused and damaging, a process that is not only not continuing to support the Afghan security forces, but is actually weakening them.

Confusion is famously a byproduct of military operations. But this confusion is happening as fighting is intensifying and observers and analysts predict major Taliban offensives. As Afghans look for visible signs that Biden’s promised support will continue, what they see is a rush to the door — and silence about the details that would make the promises real.

Morale is as much a part of combat power as equipment and technology. The current uncertainty undercuts morale and could gravely weaken the Afghan army just as major Taliban attacks begin. And if the army crumbles, it will be the women of Afghanistan, the journalists, judges, democracy activists and the like — the same people now being regularly assassinated — who will be left to the Taliban’s mercy.

Everything he says was as true in 2001 as it is now and, indeed, IMO it’s a powerful argument for not invading Afghanistan in the first place. I find his stance morally vacuous. Where was this blunt assessment while he was serving as ambassador to Afghanistan? That was the point at which he should have made his case for staying permanently. Over the past 20 years we’ve had four different administrations, each of which was publicly committed to leaving Afghanistan. There was no public debate of the prudence of an indefinite military commitment to Afghanistan before the invasion or since. Have career diplomats like Mr. Neumann simply been assuming such a commitment the entire time?

Additionally, I’m skeptical of his claim that the U. S. military is unprepared for withdrawal. That just doesn’t sound like the military that has contingency plans for just about everything, even remote contingencies like an invasion of Canada. Is he mistaken or has the U. S. military been assuming that the commitment to leaving was phony, for the rubes? It all sounds like mutiny on the parts of the State Department and Department of Defense to me.

Republican Rep. Dan Meuser states the entire meat of his op-ed at The Hill in its opening paragraph:

Simply put, inflation occurs when there is too much money chasing too few goods. In the last 15 months, federal spending on COVID-19 relief totaled $5.9 trillion, a quarter of U.S. GDP. This level of spending, paired with the Biden administration’s unwise fiscal and regulatory agenda, poses risks to our economy in the long run and is a wrong-headed approach at the onset of recovery from the pandemic.

In Keynes’s time stimulating consumer spending using the simple expedient of extending credit to ourselves could be an effective strategy for pulling the economy out of recession not because it promoted aggregate demand but because it promoted aggregate product. That remained true as recently as 40 years ago.

It’s no longer true. Today the net effect of using borrowed or printed money to stimulate consumption is to stimulate the economies of the countries from which we import consumer goods and we import more consumer goods from China by far. While there are reasonable economic and geopolitical arguments for stimulating the Mexican and Canadian economies and even more tenuous arguments for stimulating Japan’s economy, there is no similar geopolitical support for stimulating the Chinese economy. It’s the opposite if anything.

There is no longer any practical way of stimulating the U. S. economy in the near term by increasing consumer spending. It can still be accomplished in the long term using carefully crafted policies that will increase domestic production but that is not apparently within the wheelhouse of today’s elected representatives.

It seems that hardly a day goes by without another report of a ransomware attack. Schools, hospitals, oil pipelines, meat-packing plants. I can’t distinguish whether these attacks are actually occurring more frequently or they’re just being reported more frequently. I found two interesting things in this piece by Ken Dilanian at NBC News. First, that the attacks have received the attention of the White House:

The Biden administration is moving to treat ransomware attacks as a national security threat, using intelligence agencies to spy on foreign criminals and contemplating offensive cyber operations against hackers inside Russia, U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the matter said.

Although using the military to take action against criminals wouldn’t be without precedent, it’s controversial in legal circles, and any American cyber action against targets in Russia would risk retaliation. But officials say criminal ransomware attacks from abroad, once a nuisance, have become a major source of economic damage, as the disruption of gasoline and meat supplies in recent weeks has illustrated.

“Right now, they are hair on fire,” a former government official said of the Biden administration.

Are such attacks likely to have political repercussions? I presume that the possibility is gaining traction on the East Coast. I haven’t heard much about that possibility around here.

The other is speculation about the use of Cyber Command in response to the ransomware attacks:

The White House said Biden will tell Russian President Vladimir Putin at their summit June 16 that Russia must stop harboring criminal hackers. But Lewis and other experts don’t expect Putin to cave in to U.S. demands.

If he doesn’t, Biden will have some decisions to make, current and former officials said, including whether to order offensive action by U.S. Cyber Command, the military hackers based at Fort Meade, Maryland, who wield cyber weapons that can take down networks and turn computers into bricks.

The military would be careful to operate in a gray area, just short of the international law definition of an act of war, said Gary Brown, a former Pentagon cyberwarrior who is a professor of cyber law at the National Defense University. That’s exactly what Russia has been doing to the U.S. over the last decade, he said, with a campaign of disinformation, election interference and hacking.

Among the things Cyber Command could do, he said, would be to disrupt the hackers’ ability to access their own networks and tools, “infect their networks with modified tools that have our own little special gifts attached to them” and harass some of the key players.

Indictments by the Justice Department also serve a purpose, he said, by blocking the hackers from most travel and access to the U.S. financial system.

I have multiple problems with all of this. Imagine this scenario. The hackers are using Russian government networks but without the actual support of the Russian government. Cyber Com takes down the network. That would in fact be an act of war and might even be seen as preparation for a nuclear attack. That’s just about the last thing we should want. It seems to me that the risk far exceeds the benefits. Additionally, how can you prevent collateral damage?

Second, why do they think that any of the proposed measures would actually deter the hackers?

I’ve proposed my own set of counter-measures which don’t involve the U. S. military but which I will admit are pretty draconian. I think they could work.

In one of my earliest posts here at The Glittering Eye, lo! those many years ago, I remarked on how being centrist or, as I am, non-ideological is a tremendous advantage from the standpoint of perspective. I find that the more right-wing someone becomes in his or her thinking, the more she or he is likely to identify the views of others incorrectly. They start calling people with very moderate or even conservative views “lefties” or “leftists” or “commies” or what-not. I could produce a long list of policy ideas floated by the leading lights of American conservatism at one point or another that would horrify today’s “conservatives”. I doubt that many of them have ever actually met a genuine communist.

And the same thing goes for those on the left. The increase in identifying even those with very quotidian views as Nazis or racists is quite astonishing.

There is a tremendous tendency for us to view our own views as being reasonable, even centrist where they may in fact be pretty left-wing. Or right-wing as the case may be. Patterns in residence, profession, education, news consumption, and entertainment consumption reinforce that tendency. And social media create the illusion of numbers among people whose views may well be out of the mainstream.

I think that Jonathan Chait’s piece at the New Yorker on the groupthink that led those on the left to reject the lab-leak hypothesis out-of-hand is an interesting case in point. He steps right up to the edge of a very important observation but then shies back. Consider this snippet:

This asymmetry between the mainstream news media and the conservative media that was created to oppose it has long been a source of satisfaction for we liberals. Modern journalism, like think tanks and the bureaucracy, grew out of a Progressive Era belief in disinterested expertise. Guided by the principles of scientific inquiry, these institutions would follow the truth wherever it led.

The conservative movement built a counter-Establishment to oppose this network, but the alt-institutions of the right mimicked the hallowed liberal Establishment only in form. The Heritage Institution, the Washington Times, and Fox News were not mirror images of Brookings, the New York Times, and CBS News — they were parodies of them. Liberals had a phrase to describe this imbalance: the hack gap. The Republican Party had an army of partisans at its disposal, unburdened by any fealty to any scientific or professional norms save the advancement of the conservative movement. The liberal media might make mistakes, and bureaucracies may produce wrong conclusions, but at least they aspire to norms of fairness and impartiality that the right-wing counterparts merely sneer at.

Openness to evidence is the historical strength of American liberalism.

I think he’s confusing causes with effects and engaging in a version of availability bias, recency bias. Is the observable leftward drift of the New York Times and CBS News self-defense in the of post-truth Washington Times and Fox News or did the latter spring from a marketing niche formed by the pre-existing biased coverage of the former? Keep in mind that modern conservatism largely springs from God and Man at Yale (written in 1951). The observable bias in media and education goes back at least that far.

For my part I do my level best to eschew both naked partisanship and ideology and remain as empirically-based in my views as is possible. It’s pretty lonely. You can hardly turn to a news or entertainment program these days without being subjected to a torrent of non-empirical even counter-intuitive propaganda.

Continuing in our discussion of the relative risks of a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 vs. the lab-leak hypothesis, you might find this find these observations from bat researcher Bret Weinstein at UnHerd enlightening:

Having lost the battle to push a natural Covid-19 origin story into the public consciousness, and now thoroughly embarrassed by a grassroots effort to surface the truth, the press, the scientific establishment, governmental regulators, and the titanic social media platforms of Silicon Valley are now desperately seeking a new narrative that will restore business as usual. Damage control is in full swing.

For now, though, allow me to be the bearer of good news, hidden among all of this scrambling and obfuscation. As the public has become ever more aware of in the last few weeks, the concept of a lab leak is, based on the actual evidence, the most compelling hypothesis to explain the origin of SARS-CoV2.

That presentation will, of course, seem counterintuitive. How could anyone think that lab origin is a good thing? Well, consider each of the two proposed scenarios:

If SARS2 — the virus that causes Covid-19 — came from nature then, logically, it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens again. And again. And again. And next time, it could all too easily be worse. Our best recourse, then, is clearly to study potential zoonotic pathogens in the lab. It could even be argued, as it has been by many researchers, that we should enhance these infectious agents to discover their vulnerabilities so that next time, we’ll know just what to do.

How else could we discover what we’re up against? After all, if SARS2 came from nature, then the biologists who were furiously studying its close relatives were, if anything, too slow and too cautious to protect us. The straightforward lesson of the pandemic would be to simply face up to the clear risk of studying dangerous, novel infectious agents in the lab. Indeed, we would be forced to redouble our efforts before SARS3 catches us off-guard.

If, on the other hand, SARS2 emerged from a lab, then the lesson is the opposite. Covid-19 would be, at the bare minimum, the direct result of our failure to heed prior warnings about the possibility of such an accident. Lab leaks are not uncommon, so making already dangerous viruses even more dangerous is a recipe for disaster. If, therefore, we want to avoid a pandemic from happening again, obviously we would need to curtail this research.

And that’s why we should hope that Covid-19 was caused by human error. As terrible as the implications of that are — millions dead, incalculable suffering and loss; all caused by scientific misjudgement — at least it tells us how to make ourselves safer going forward: we should stop doing the thing that creates that danger. If, on the other hand, Covid-19 is Mother Nature’s handiwork, then logically we are condemned to a sequence of pandemics; some natural, others accidental, some better and others far more deadly. Not a happy scenario by any stretch.

That’s pretty much my take as well. Treating all risks as equally likely and in need of mitigation is a formula for doing nothing. Mitigation plans have costs and trying to mitigate every possibility regardless of relative risk would mean who knows how many billions in cost with only marginal benefits.

There is one risk in his handling of bats that he doesn’t seem to appreciate but strikes me as a risk that should be considered. The biggest risk wasn’t that he would contract a virus from a bat that would kill him. The biggest risk was that he would contract a virus from a bat which was reasonably benign for him but which he could pass on to others in a potentially less benign and more contagious form. So, yes, bushmeat and exotic pets present risks but so does research in the byways of the earth that brings researchers into contact with heretofore unknown viruses.