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.

I strongly recommend you read the post by Kai Bird, a Jimmy Carter biographer, at The Nation. It has lots of interesting tips for the incumbent including:

• Never promise to never tell a lie.…
• While we’re on the subject, don’t try to balance the federal budget.…
• Realize that trying to make the US broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians will cost you politically. …
• It’s OK to put solar panels on the White House. But if, like Carter, you try to impose a windfall profits tax on the oil companies, know they will hire thousands of lobbyists to destroy your congressional agenda. Ditto Big Tech. So prepare for a big fight.

I especially agree with this one:

Don’t hire a prickly Polish aristocrat who obsesses about the Russians to be your national security adviser.…

That pertains to all foreign policy advice. Even experts have interests and agendas and their interests and agendas may not be yours let alone those of the American people.

But this one is foolish:

Don’t spend more time on foreign policy than on domestic affairs.

Devoting more time to foreign policy is part of the job description. It’s more than just a nuisance as is being the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Vetoing legislation is part of the job description; proposing legislation isn’t.

One of the symptoms of COVID-19 is the loss of the sense of smell. There appears to be some evidence that this symptom is genetic. From an article in medRxiv (preprint):

Loss of sense of smell is a characteristic symptom of infection with SARS-CoV-2. However, specific mechanisms linking infection with loss of smell are poorly understood. Using self-reported symptom data from the 23andMe COVID-19 study, we describe the demographic patterns associated with COVID-19 related anosmia, and find the symptom is more often reported in women and younger respondents, and less often by those of East Asian and African American ancestry compared to those of European ancestry. We ran a trans-ethnic genome-wide association study (GWAS) comparing loss of smell or taste (n=47,298) with no loss of smell or taste (n=22,543) among those with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result. We identified an association (rs7688383) in the vicinity of the UGT2A1 and UGT2A2 genes (OR=1.115, p-value=4×10−15), which have been linked to olfactory function. These results may shed light on the biological mechanisms underlying COVID-19 related anosmia.

The variant occurs very slightly more frequently in those of European descent but the relation between the variant and anosomia in COVID-19 appears to be pretty constant.

James Freeman reports something interesting in his latest Wall Street Journal column:

What will it take to persuade potential workers to join the U.S. labor force? American small businesses have never had such a hard time trying to attract new employees. That’s according to the May employment survey from the National Federation of Independent Business, due out later today.

“Strong job growth eased in May as small businesses struggled to find workers to fill open positions,” reports NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg. He notes that survey respondents with unfilled job openings “increased from 44 percent to 48 percent, seasonally adjusted. May is the fourth consecutive month setting a record high reading for unfilled job openings. May’s reading is 26 points higher than the 48-year historical average of 22 percent.” He adds that the labor shortage is particularly acute in industries like construction, where 66% of surveyed firms reported few or no qualified applicants, an increase of 6 percentage points from the April survey.

I want to point out three things:

1. A lot of the jobs on offer are probably lousy jobs as has been pointed out in numerous articles.
2. Increasing wages for these jobs is a textbook example of inflation.
3. Many of these small businesses are marginal operations which may not be able to increase prices without losing sales, can’t afford to lose sales, and can’t afford to operate on a lower margin.

The chickens of decades of bad fiscal, economic, immigration, and trade policy are coming home to roost.

I’m still trying to figure this one out. The editors of the Wall Street Journal observe:

President Biden wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure, but there’s a contradiction at the heart of his ambition. His own White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council issued a report in May that blacklisted a litany of projects most Americans would think are classic public works.

The council is made up of three members of the Administration and 26 progressives from the academy or activists such as Susana Almanza of People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources. That’s really the group’s name. In March Mr. Biden directed them to recommend federal investments in which 40% of overall benefits would flow to disadvantaged communities.

The report floats some ideas that pass progressive muster, such as renewable energy and worker training, public transportation and “green housing.” But the report also cites more than a dozen “types of projects that will not benefit” poor communities.

These include “highway expansions” and “road improvements or automobile infrastructure, other than electric vehicle charging stations.” The advisers don’t explain why fixing roads wouldn’t help low-income people, perhaps because they can’t. The poor are far more likely to buy used cars that run on gasoline rather than new, expensive EVs. They need the mobility to travel from their homes to where the jobs are, which often isn’t where mass transit goes.

Also on the naughty list are oil pipelines, electrical transmission lines, nuclear power plants, and improvements in power production efficiency. I’m hoping the editors are mistaken or at least President Biden ignores these advisors. An infrastructure spending bill is marginally defensible on the grounds that it’s investment. An infrastructure spending bill that doesn’t even remotely satisfy Lord Keynes’s requirements for fiscal stimulus that builds precious little infrastructure but includes lots and lots of just plain consumer spending can’t be defended on any grounds except political ones.

Contrariwise, I was a bit disappointed by Michael McFaul’s piece in the Washington Post on Joe Biden’s upcoming meeting with Russian President Putin. Here’s the meat of the piece:

The two leaders could launch strategic stability talks. Biden and Putin have rightly extended New START. But a subsequent arms-control treaty will be difficult to complete before New START expires five years from now, since nonstrategic nuclear weapons and new delivery vehicles must be part of a new deal. Negotiators need to start now.

Next, a series of consulate closures and diplomatic expulsions, as well as reduced hiring of Russian staffers at U.S. diplomatic missions, have brought public diplomacy and visa issuance to a near halt. Biden and Putin should reverse this trend. And that’s it — that’s the cooperative bilateral agenda. The remaining time in Geneva should focus on issues of disagreement, such as Putin’s persecution of opposition leaders, the detention of Americans, Belarus, Ukraine, cyberattacks, assassination attempts and microwave-radiation attacks.

The multilateral agenda is potentially broader. Working together with their international partners, Biden and Putin should commit to cooperating on stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program, providing humanitarian assistance to Syrians, fulfilling the Minsk agreement on eastern Ukraine, and working together on covid-19 and climate change. Even in multilateral settings, however, the possibilities for cooperation are limited.

Once the Geneva summit is over, Biden and his team should not hope to forget about Russia. They cannot freeze U.S.-Russia relations in place to focus on the greater challenge of China. As Putin recently proved by amassing Russian soldiers on the Ukrainian border or unleashing more cyberattacks, he’s not going to allow that. Nor should Biden’s Russia policy become a derivative of his China policy. (For Biden to pursue his own version of the Nixon-goes-to-China strategy would be a huge mistake. It won’t work.)

No mention of the Arctic, Syria, or multi-domain operations which I would think to be an excellent talking point. I don’t believe that the Russian government is actually behind the recent spate of cyberterrorism but IMO it should be a major point of discussion. There’s little question the hacks are originating in Russia whether they’re state-sponsored or not and the Russian government should be willing to do something about them.

Seems to me like he’s setting the expectations pretty low.

And two leaders like Biden and Putin wouldn’t even agree to meet unless they expected something specific to emerge from the meeting. What will it be?

This article on the hunt for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 at Vanity Fair by Katherine Eban actually exceeded my expectations. Long as it is I think it’s worth reading. Depending on your preferences you may find the first few opening paragraphs tedious but bear with it—it’s owrth it. I’ll share a few snippets with you:

On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.

Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries. But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.

Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.

and

There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long, well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even when the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery for months and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed oddities of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.

But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

and

The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists but from Chinese social media users, who began sharing their suspicions as early as January 2020. Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?

The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.” The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan…. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Almost as soon as the paper appeared on the internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.

and here

An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible. It had been written in May by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to have been buried within the classified collections system.

Now the officials were beginning to suspect that someone was actually hiding materials supportive of a lab-leak explanation. “Why did my contractor have to pore through documents?” DiNanno wondered. Their suspicion intensified when Department of Energy officials overseeing the Lawrence Livermore lab unsuccessfully tried to block the State Department investigators from talking to the report’s authors.

Their frustration crested in December, when they finally briefed Chris Ford, acting undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. He seemed so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance. But Ford, who had years of experience in nuclear nonproliferation, had long been a China hawk. Ford told Vanity Fair that he saw his job as protecting the integrity of any inquiry into COVID-19’s origins that fell under his purview. Going with “stuff that makes us look like the crackpot brigade” would backfire, he believed.

There was another reason for his hostility. He’d already heard about the investigation from interagency colleagues, rather than from the team itself, and the secrecy left him with a “spidey sense” that the process was a form of “creepy freelancing.” He wondered: Had someone launched an unaccountable investigation with the goal of achieving a desired result?

Those snippets are just short excerpts from the first two-thirds of the piece. Here’s her peroration:

Will we ever know the truth? Dr. David Relman of Stanford University School of Medicine has been advocating for an investigation like the 9/11 Commission to examine COVID-19’s origins. But 9/11 took place in one day, he said, whereas “this has so many different manifestations, consequences, responses across nations. All of that makes it a hundred-dimensional problem.”

The bigger problem is that so much time has gone by. “With every passing day and week, the kinds of information that might prove helpful will have a tendency to dissipate and disappear,” he said. “The world ages and things get moved, and biological signals degrade.”

China obviously bears responsibility for stonewalling investigators. Whether it did so out of sheer authoritarian habit or because it had a lab leak to hide is, and may always be, unknown.

The United States deserves a healthy share of blame as well. Thanks to their unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies had less than zero credibility. And the practice of funding risky research via cutouts like EcoHealth Alliance enmeshed leading virologists in conflicts of interest at the exact moment their expertise was most desperately needed.

Now, at least, there appears to be the prospect of a level inquiry—the kind Gilles Demaneuf and Jamie Metzl had wanted from the start. “We needed to create a space where all of the hypotheses could be considered,” Metzl said.

The account of the hunt is a mystery story worthy of Agatha Christie. All it’s missing is assembling all of the suspects in a posh living room and Hercule Poirot revealing who the culprit is.

I did want to add one small observation. The difference between the nearest relative of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in the wild is about 4%. That’s not particularly similar. It just means that they’re more similar than human beings are to cats and a bit less similar than humans are to chimps.

I don’t know where SARS-CoV-2 originated but I dearly wish I did. Indeed, I don’t know how sensible policies can be formulated in the absence of such confidence. I do think that the preponderance of the evidence as of this writing supports the lab-leak hypothesis.

When I was a kid, growing up in St. Louis in the pre-civil rights era, there was an annual event called the Veiled Prophet Parade and Ball. I believe it continues to this day. The proceedings of this event were all very hush-hush but it was generally believed that a clique of local business leaders elected one of their members as Veiled Prophet for that year and the selected individual’s daughter rode in the parade and presided over the ball as the Queen of Love and Beauty.

Even as a kid all those years ago the whole thing made me queasy for reasons that should be obvious if you look at the two pictures I’ve posted above. The main picture is a fairly recent photo of a Veiled Prophet. You can see “Veiled Prophet” on the poster behind him. The insert is a picture of someone wearing the regalia of a Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan, an officer of the organization in control of a “domain”. No, they’re not identical but there is a strong resemblance. If you don’t hear a resonance between them, IMO you are tone deaf.

At the very least it is an elitist institution and at worst racist or certainly evoking a deeply racist past. I think there are some traditions that really need to go and the VP is one of them.