Why do the editors of the Wall Street Journal write so many editorials critical of Illinois’s state government? I mean other than it being the best example of a bad example, an object lesson. In their most recent complaint about the Land of Lincoln they call attention to the latest stupidity from the state legislature:

A famous Supreme Court quip is that the U.S. Constitution isn’t a suicide pact, but what about the Illinois constitution? After years of fiscal recklessness, the state’s credit ratings are a notch above junk. Yet the politicians in Springfield now want to add collective bargaining to the Illinois bill of rights, putting union power on the same footing as due process and religious freedom.

The House passed the idea Wednesday after the Senate approved it last week. The proposed constitutional amendment would guarantee a “fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively,” including for better wages, hours, working conditions and a vague catchall of “economic welfare.” The amendment says that no law would be allowed to block labor agreements from “requiring membership in an organization as a condition of employment.”

It’s obvious why they’re doing it—unions and particularly public employees’ unions are their most important supporters and foot soldiers.

It’s not entirely clear that the people of Illinois will go along with them. I would think that the points made by the editors:

Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Kentucky all have banned coerced unionization during the past decade. It’s a bad idea to lock Illinois into an uncompetitive policy for private workers. What’s worse is that the amendment could make it impossible for the state to tweak the public labor rules that are driving its unsustainable finances.

would be persuasive. They certainly are to me.

I really liked Isaac Stone Fish’s Washington Post op-ed, underscoring as it does a point I have made from time to time. Russia and China are not as cozy as many Americans assume:

To begin with, Moscow has more to fear from Beijing than Washington. Like the Philippines, India and Bhutan, Russia is vulnerable to Chinese territorial encroachment. China has supplanted Russia as the most influential nation in Central Asia — Moscow’s traditional geopolitical backyard — and has uncomfortably large influence over Russia’s economy. Despite the countless irritants in the U.S.-Russia relationship, all this means that there is now space to enlist Moscow as a silent but meaningful partner in the global campaign to curb the pernicious aspects of the Chinese Communist Party’s international influence.

The biggest reason for Moscow’s fear is territorial. While there is no good polling in both countries on sensitive issues such as territorial integrity, some Russians fear the Chinese want to invade Siberia, while some Chinese feel that parts of eastern Russia actually belong to China. In 1858 and 1860, early in what the Chinese Communist Party calls the “century of humiliation,” the Chinese and the Russians signed treaties that ceded huge swaths of lands around Lake Baikal to the Russians. Some Chinese want that land back. “Hong Kong and Macau have returned,” to the motherland, the history blogger Yuan Zaiyu lamented in March 2020. “Why not Vladivostok?”

Russians in the country’s sparsely populated Far East fear and resent Chinese immigration and influence. The governor of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which borders the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, has improbably claimed that 80 percent of the land in his region is now “controlled by Chinese.” The Chinese presence in Siberia, said Svetlana Pavlova, the chief editor of a Siberian news website, is like “a red rag to a bull.” (As the pandemic spread in early 2020, Russia became the first country to shut its land border with China.)

Perceptions can create reality. Chinese frustrations with Russia — most Chinese alive today came of age in an era of frosty relations between the two nations, from the Sino-Soviet split in the mid-1950s to the 2001 Sino-Russian strategic and economic treaty — could easily push China’s foreign policy to be more aggressive toward its northern neighbor. Russian analysts watched the June 2020 border clash between India and China that killed at least 20 Indian soldiers closely — and not just because Russia is India’s most important weapons supplier.

As fate would have it there is a country with which Russia has a considerable amount in common and who is not a regional competitor as China is: the United States. Short version of what happened: we blew it.

Also don’t imagine that the Russians are naive about the prospectively tense situation between Russia and China. They’re fully aware of it and, like Americans, they tend to exaggerate threats. So, when President Putin calls President Xi his “best friend”, I generally think of this.

The editors of the Washington Post are coming at the search for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from another direction—who was patient zero? Not to mention where:

IN THE hunt for the origins of the virus that has touched off a global pandemic, the very first cases are extremely important. They could reveal vital information about where the virus came from. China has stated that the outbreak began in Wuhan in December 2019, but this may not be the whole story: There have been suggestions by Chinese and Western scientists that some cases arose earlier. Who were the people who fell ill, and where did they encounter the virus? China should help solve this mystery, but it so far has thrown a cloak over it.

Beijing steadfastly denies there was an inadvertent leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, one of two theories being pursued about the virus origin. The other is a zoonotic spillover from an animal. President Biden announced Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence community was divided over the competing theories and said he had urged further investigation.

Identification of the earliest cases could help resolve the issue. On Jan. 15, outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. government “has reason to believe that several researchers inside” the Wuhan Institute of Virology “became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.” But he provided no further evidence for this vague claim, and when a joint World Health Organization-China mission went to the WIV on Feb. 3, the director, Yuan Zhiming, categorically denied Mr. Pompeo’s assertion. It would help if the administration declassified the U.S. intelligence.

Here’s what’s known so far about early cases: On Dec. 31, 2019, China notified the WHO of 44 cases of pneumonia of unknown cause. By the time China agreed to a joint study with the WHO in summer 2020, the number of these cases had grown to 124. The resulting joint report in March 2021 said Chinese records had established 174 confirmed cases in December 2019, and the first onset among these was Dec. 8.

Were there others before that? In preparation for the WHO-China joint mission, Chinese officials examined 76,253 cases of fever or respiratory illness in 233 health-care institutions from Oct. 1 to Dec. 10, 2019. Out of this mass of records, they identified 92 people who might have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the autumn. However, on further scrutiny, all 92 cases were rejected as covid.

I don’t think they’re looking at the question broadly enough. Could Patient Zero have been in Italy? Australia? The UK? The U. S.? Studies based on viral evolution models have proposed a date of sometime between the middle of September 2019 and the middle of December 2019 with some time in October 2019 looking pretty darned likely. Being open about the suspected cases from 2019 could actually vindicate China’s claims that the virus developed somewhere else.

I wanted to call attention to Farhad Manjoo’s New York Times column, complaining about what he calls the “Apple tax”:

Last week, though, Cook might have felt a bit like a spinning pinwheel under the polite yet relentless interrogation of a Federal District Court judge charged with deciding whether Apple is a ruthless monopolist. In the process, the judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, Calif., highlighted a scourge affecting just about every Apple customer and the software developers who want to build apps for them.

Call this scourge what it plainly is, the Apple tax — the billions of dollars a year that Apple collects from large swaths of the technology industry for the privilege of offering paid apps and in-app purchases to iPhone and iPad users. Once, in the early days of the iPhone, Apple’s 30 percent fee on app purchases, and its restrictive rules, could be defended on the grounds of its great innovation in the mobile market. Apple, after all, was the first to market the modern touch-screen smartphone and the simple, one-tap way of adding apps to it, and it seemed reasonable for the company to collect tremendous winnings from its creation.

But for how many years should Apple get to milk billions of dollars of almost pure profit from an invention first released back when George W. Bush was president? What justification is there any longer for Apple’s severe restrictions on how users and software makers can do business with each other, other than that it has the market power to impose them? Isn’t it time we were all given a break from the Apple tax?

It’s called “abuse of monopoly power” and it illustrates neatly a point I have been making for some time: Apple should be broken up using the power of the Sherman Antitrust Act. And it’s not the only one.

This also ties in with my post on innovation yesterday. Very, very few mobile apps actually end up making a net profit. Increasing the price of apps which is the net effect of the “Apple tax” actually reduces the number of apps earning profits and stifles innovation.

George Will writes favorably about the Endless Frontier Act in his most recent Washington Post column:

To increase society’s supply of pickles, increase monetary demand for them. Increasing the supply of America’s most important product — innovation — is more complicated. It involves money that fertilizes a culture that nurtures talented individuals.

Solving the complexities of this is one purpose of the Endless Frontier Act (EFA), which aims to disburse $100 billion over five years for the purpose of finding and supporting those who will shape the future of science. This is, inevitably, a process of a few spectacular hits among many misses.

The EFA is a perhaps unintentional homage to one source of American dynamism, immigration, because it implicitly embraces an insight of an immigrant from Austria, the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who in 1932 came to Harvard. His theory was that the principal drivers of social dynamism are not workers (as Marx thought) or various impersonal economic forces (as many economists thought) but innovators — inventors of new things and companies. Thomas Edison, working in his Menlo Park, N.J., “invention factory” — he eventually held 1,093 patents — was one. Others include Henry Ford, Thomas Watson, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

and, based on this description, I think he can safely be added to the list of people who drawn the wrong lessons from the Manhattan Project:

The template for successful government-fueled innovation began in September 1942 when the government purchased 58,575 acres of eastern Tennessee wilderness and created the town of Oak Ridge with state-of-the-art physics facilities. Thirty-four months later, an atomic blast lit the New Mexico desert. The Manhattan Project had a narrow focus: the problem of releasing and weaponizing the atom’s explosive energy.

I would also challenge to some degree his list of innovators. Edison’s primary innovation was organizational rather technological. He invented the industrial laboratory. The reason his name is on so many patents is that he insisted on it—that list is actually the work of dozens of “muckers” as he called them. There’s a similar pattern for all of those he mentions with the possible exception of Steve Jobs. In Jobs’s case the innovations of the company he founded slowed to a crawl after his death. Which brings me to my next point.

Individuals innovate. Companies and in particular large companies elaborate. If you want innovation you’ve got to break up the big companies to leave room for the actual innovators.

Third, open-ended funding of R&D by the federal government does not have that great a track record at least not from a ROI standpoint. The projects that have had great ROI include the Manhattan Project and the Mercury-Apollo Project. These are what I’m referring to as “mass engineering projects”: projects with limited, well-defined objectives that we are confident can be achieved.

Fourth, greenfield developments are more likely to result in innovation.

Fifth, don’t compete with the private sector. Doing that will crowd out innovation rather than foster it.

Finally, to encourage individuals to become real innovators there must be real, long-term jobs and career paths for doing it. Letting the wages of engineers and scientists rise will produce a lot more innovation than importing engineers and scientists to push wages down.

In his latest New York Times column Tom Friedman expresses increasing concern over the situation, not solely because of the violence and loss of life but because of the risks it holds for Democrats and for American Jews:

Because without that horizon — without any viable hope of separating Israelis and Palestinians into two states for two peoples — the only outcome left will be one state in which the Israeli majority dominates and Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank will be systematically deprived of equal rights so that Israel can preserve its Jewish character.

If that happens, the charge that Israel has become an apartheid-like entity will resonate and gain traction far and wide. The Democratic Party will be fractured. A rising chorus of progressives — who increasingly portray the Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinians as equivalent to the Minneapolis Police Department’s treatment of Black people or to the treatment by colonial powers of Indigenous peoples — will insist on distancing the United States from Israel and, maybe, even lead to bans on arms sales.

Meanwhile, centrist Democrats will push back that these progressives are incredibly naïve, that they have no clue how many two-state peace plans the Palestinians have already rejected — which decimated the Israeli peace camp — and that none of their causes, from women’s rights to L.G.B.T.Q. rights to religious pluralism, would last a minute on the Hamas-run campus of the Islamic University of Gaza.

As the past two weeks demonstrated, every Jewish organization and synagogue in America will be heatedly divided over this question: Are you willing to defend a one-state Israel that is not even pretending to be a democracy anymore, a one-state Israel whose leaders prefer to rely on the uncritical support of evangelicals than the critical support of Jews?

Finally, Jewish and non-Jewish students on every college campus also will be forced to wrestle with this question or run as far away as possible from the debate. More and more will abandon Israel. You can already see it happening. And anti-Semitism will flourish under the guise of anti-Zionism.

It will get very ugly. All nuance will be lost. Twitter and Facebook will become battlefields between Israel’s critics and defenders, and Donald Trump and the Republicans will fan the flames, telling American Jews that they have no future in the Democratic Party and beckoning them to come over to the G.O.P. — which, with its evangelical base, does indeed unquestioningly support the Jewish state … for now.

He proposes the Biden Administration do the following:

• Act as though the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank is already a Palestinian state.
• Open a diplomatic mission to the Palestinians in Ramallah and invite a diplomatic representative of the PA to Washington.
• Propose negotiations using the plan produced by the Trump Administration as a starting point.
• Encourage the Arab states that have normalized relations with Israel to move their embassies to West Jerusalem.
• Encourage Arab states to “massively increase” their financial support for the PA.

I deeply miss John Burgess. He believed that the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians could be resolved, essentially, by paying the Palestinians off. IMO those days are gone. Contrary to the view being promoted by American progressives, continuing attacks on Israel from Gaza and the West Bank have eviscerated the peace movement in Israel and there are factions within Israel which will accept nothing less than a Greater Israel, absorbing all of the Palestinian territories and more. Meanwhile the corruption and impotence of the PA has rendered it non-viable as a negotiating partner and Hamas is actually gaining steam among Palestinians by its ongoing attacks against Israel. There are factions among the Palestinians which will accept nothing less than pushing the Israeli Jews into the sea.

The effect of more support for the PA will be to finance corruption and create the risk that the money will ultimately end up in the hands of Hamas.

Contrary to what Mr. Friedman seems to believe it’s a truly wicked problem. Not only is there no solution I can’t even envision a meaningful process.

There are a number of good passages in Matt Taibbi’s most recent offering on media fact-checking but I think this is the best:

Like fact-checking itself, the “on the one hand and on the other hand” format is just a defense mechanism. These people say X, these people say Y, and because the jabbering mannequins we have reading off our teleprompters actually know jack, we’ll let the passage of time sort out the difficult bits.

The public used to appreciate the humility of that approach, but what they get from us more often now are sanctimonious speeches about how reporters are intrepid seekers of truth who sit next to God and gobble amphetamines so they can stay awake all night defending democracy from “misinformation.” But once you get past names, dates, and whether the sky that day was blue or cloudy, the worst kind of misinformation in journalism is to be too sure about anything. That’s especially when dealing with complex technical issues, and even more especially when official sources seem invested in eliminating discussion of alternative scenarios of those issues.

From the start, the press mostly mishandled Covid-19 reporting. Part of this was because nearly all of the critical issues — mask use, lockdowns, viability of vaccine programs, and so on — were marketed by news companies as culture-war narratives. A related problem had to do with news companies using the misguided notion that the news is an exact science to promote the worse misconception that science is an exact science. This led to absurd spectacles like news agencies trying to cover up or denounce as falsehood the natural reality that officials had evolving views on things like the efficacy of ventilators or mask use.

The title of this post is derived from a Latin wisecrack: quis custodiet ipsos custodes or “who guards the guards”? It’s from the satirist Juvenal. Another version of the same ancient wisdom is recorded in Matthew 5:13: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?”

Hearkening back to my previous post one of the things that may be irretrievable in the aftermath of the pandemic could be any reputations for objectivity or impartiality or even fairness on the part of many media outlets.

I wanted to pass along one passage from Salman Rushdie rather agonistic Washington Post op-ed:

To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?

The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.

What will prove irretrievable in the wake of the pandemic other than the lives that have been lost? I think the reputation of the Centers for Disease Control, for one. New York City may be among the casualties. We will know in due course.

I have one major objection to the Washington Post’s editorial on how the U. S. should respond to the incident that took place a few days ago in which the government of Belarus intercepted a Ryanair craft and arrested Roman Protasevich, variously described as a “journalist” or “political agitator” depending on your source:

Mr. Lukashenko’s government transmitted a phony report of a bomb to the crew of Ryanair Flight 4978 as it was flying over Belarus en route to Vilnius, Lithuania. Belarus then deployed a MiG-29 fighter jet to intercept the plane, forcing it to land, whereupon 26-year-old journalist Roman Protasevich was arrested. Mr. Protasevich co-founded Nexta, a channel on the social media platform Telegram that has become a leading source of news about the opposition to Mr. Lukashenko, who stole the presidential election last August to prolong his rule, triggering mass protests and a subsequent crackdown.

With the phony bomb threat, Mr. Lukashenko’s government violated the 1970 Montreal Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation, which Belarus ratified. It says, “A person commits an offence if he unlawfully and intentionally . . . communicates information which he knows to be false, thereby endangering the safety of an aircraft in flight.” Mr. Lukashenko also potentially violated the terms of the Chicago Convention, the founding post-World War II rules of international aviation, which say that “in case of interception, the lives of persons on board and the safety of aircraft must not be endangered.”

Maybe it’s just slipped my mind but I don’t remember the WaPo reacting that way when the government of the Ukraine did almost the very same thing a couple of years back. It’s not the hypocrisy to which I object—it’s the piece’s caption: “It’s time to respond forcefully to Belarus’s wily and malevolent dictator” and the word “forcefully”. I don’t think we should contemplate using force against any state that used to be part of Russia. Maybe they’re just writing figuratively. Professional writers should choose their words more carefully.

I don’t know what the U. S. response should be if any. The incident is already straining EU-Russian relations. Maybe we should just sit quietly by as events play out. If we do determine that something must be done, we might consider getting our facts straight before acting. In another piece I’ve read about the affair today there was a characterization of a West-leaning Belarus as “Putin’s worst nightmare”. Is that the case or is a Russia-leaning Belarus the worst nightmare for people trying to orchestrate the same sort of fascist putsch as the one that ousted the Russia-leaning government of Ukraine?

My only suggestion is more carrots, fewer sticks. Economic sanctions applied against Russia haven’t been particularly effective because Russia’s economy has been a basketcase for 200 years. IMO a friendly, prosperous Russia is a lot more in our interest (as well as less in the Chinese interest) than a hostile, hungry one is.