I was so struck by the caption of Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column I didn’t even bother to read the column: “The world saw George Floyd’s final minutes. Now it will see whether he gets justice.”

What would justice be in this case? IMO relatively few people are interested in justice and all that will satisfy the most vocal is vengeance, something else entirely.

Update

The editors of the Washington Post contribute their views as to what would constitute justice in this case:

Jerry W. Blackwell, one of the prosecutors, played the video during his opening arguments to drive home how Mr. Chauvin did not “let up” or “get up.” Floyd said 27 times he couldn’t breathe, and a crowd that formed called repeatedly on police to get up because it was clear Floyd was in distress. “While he’s crying out, Mr. Chauvin never moves,” the prosecutor told the jury. “You can believe your eyes, that it’s homicide, it’s murder.”

Mr. Chauvin’s lawyer argued there is more to the case than the video, contending that Floyd’s death was caused by his underlying heart disease and drug use; he even blamed the crowd for posing a threat and diverting officers’ attention from Floyd. “You will learn,” said Eric J. Nelson, “that Derek Chauvin was doing exactly what he had been trained to do during the course of his 19-year career.”

We hope no jury can accept that a police officer would be trained to be so willing to cause harm and so indifferent to human suffering.

In his latest Washington Post column Josh Rogin expresses his dissatisfaction with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) report on the origins of SAVS-CoV-2:

Determining the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus should have nothing to do with politics. It is a forensic question, one that requires thorough investigation of all possible theories, and one that should encompass both the scenario that the virus jumped from animals to humans in nature as well as one related to human error in a Wuhan lab. But a fatally flawed investigation by the World Health Organization and Chinese officials and experts only muddies the waters, and it places the WHO further at odds with the U.S. government and the Biden administration.

A joint study group, consisting of WHO representatives and 17 Chinese experts, will release its long-awaited report on the origins of covid-19 on Tuesday, but you can read it all here now. Unsurprisingly, the report promotes the theory the virus spilled over to humans in nature, perhaps from a bat through an intermediate animal host, and dismisses the possibility of a lab accident-related origin as “extremely unlikely,” and therefore unworthy of further study.

Of course, we already knew this because all the results were previewed in China’s state propaganda media two weeks ago by the lead Chinese scientist. The Chinese government received the report in advance and had tightly controlled the investigators’ visit to Wuhan, where the outbreak originated and where labs hold the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses. Even before the report was issued, the Biden administration publicly questioned its objectivity and credibility.

concluding:

The Chinese government and the friends of the Wuhan lab want to dismiss any efforts to call for more investigation into the lab-accident theory as conspiracy theories. But that conspiracy now would have to include the Trump administration, the Biden administration, Redfield and the growing list of scientists who insist that this possibility be explored. Critics often conflate the fact there is “no proof” of the theory with the false assertion there is “no evidence” to suggest it.

“When people talk about ‘no evidence’ [of a lab accident], you could argue there’s ‘no evidence’ on either side,” said Flinders University Professor of Medicine Nikolai Petrovsky, one of more than two dozen scientists who signed an open letter calling for a full and independent investigation into the origins of covid-19. “There’s as much evidence for the potential lab leak hypothesis as there currently is for a natural animal crossover event. I think we have to be fair and say it’s a completely open question.”

The WHO team wants to move on to searching for the virus in packages of frozen food in other countries. Let them do it. Meanwhile, somebody else will have to investigate the lab-accident theory, because the WHO and Beijing have no intention of treating it with the seriousness it deserves. The Biden administration can help by releasing all the information it has on the lab now. That would help us to get closer to the truth — and help to prevent future pandemics.

I’d like some likely and confident explanation of the source of the virus as much as the next person but what struck me about his column was how unrealistic it was. All of the entities mentioned (the Chinese government, the U. S. government, the WHO, etc.) are all human institutions and as such are inherently political. As Aristotle put it man is by nature a political animal. You cannot separate the politics from human actions. Even physics, that most rigorous of sciences, is political in nature.

Furthermore, any investigating organization may only conduct its investigation with the permission and cooperation of the Chinese government. There is no authority anywhere which could force them to surrender information they do not wish to be known.

The remedy for this is not endless investigations or futile demands for cooperation but to recognize the limitations and, given the Chinese authorities’ motivations for secrecy take that into account in our relations with China.

As I’ve pointed out before presently electric vehicles (EVs) comprise about 1% of U. S. vehicle sales. As should be apparent without greater market acceptance, it will be darned hard to achieve the reductions in carbon emissions the Biden Administration would like to see. California’s senators have a sure-fire way for EVs to gain greater market acceptance—ban the sale of vehicles using internal combustion engines. From The Center Square:

(The Center Square) – California’s two U.S. Senators, both Democrats, are calling on President Joe Biden to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars in the United States.

Sens. Diane Feinstein and Alex Padilla sent a letter to Biden urging him to “follow California’s lead and set a date by which all new cars and passenger trucks sold be zero-emission vehicles.”

Last September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who now faces a potential recall election, signed an executive order banning the sale of gasoline-powered cars in California by requiring all new cars and trucks being sold in the state to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035. Currently, electric vehicles account for less than 3 percent of all vehicle sales in the U.S.

“We urge your administration to take advantage of this effort and make real progress in coordination with states, like California, that share your goals to aggressively fight climate change by eliminating harmful pollution from the transportation sector,” the senators wrote.

They said they “support aggressive national standards for greenhouse gas emissions, clean transportation technology, and sensible fuel economy for passenger vehicles.”

Feinstein and Padilla asked the Biden administration to require the auto industry to commit to shifting to primarily producing electric vehicles, something some in the industry, like General Motors, has said it “aspires” to do by 2035. Ford has announced its intention to shift its car models in Europe to be solely electric by 2030.

There are a number of impediments to this plan. For example, for the U. S. market the technology will need to improve considerably and realistically there’s little reason to believe the advances necessary will be available that soon. Second, we have little evidence that production of EVs can be scaled up to the requisite level that fast. Ask yourself one question: why is there a waiting list for Priuses? (Admittedly, they’re not EVs—they’re hybrids but the the principle is the same). I don’t believe they can produce them any faster than that.

I’ve also mentioned another impediment: the U. S. electrical grid won’t support the draw that many EVs will impose on it. And the environmental impact of producing that many EVs may not be what their proponents think. Consider the conclusions of the National Bureau of Economic Research on EVs:

First, we find considerable variation in the environmental benefit, implying a range of second-best electric vehicle purchase subsidies from $3025 in California to -$4773 in North Dakota, with a mean of -$742. Second, over ninety percent of local environmental externalities from driving an electric vehicle in one state are exported to others, implying that electric vehicles may be subsidized locally, even though they may lead to negative environmental benefits overall. Third, geographically differentiated subsidies can reduce deadweight loss, but only modestly. Fourth, the current federal purchase subsidy of $7500 has greater deadweight loss than a no-subsidy policy.

The highlighting is mine. They’re worse for the environment than the vehicles they’d replace.

You might be interested in this piece at Atrios by Stef W. Kight outlining what has been happening at the U. S.-Mexican border:

Until this month, the record was 11,475 in May 2019. The minimum projections for each of the next six months are thousands higher than that.

• To give a sense of how out of hand the crossings are getting, the administration projected just a month ago the figure for May would be 13,000. The new estimate is 22,000 to 25,000.
• The Customs and Border Protection range for September is 22,000 to 26,000. Under any scenario, projections include a peak month that would double the record that stood until this month.
• Spokespersons for the White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services referred Axios to DHS.

and she concludes:

Under current policies, the government is facing unheard of numbers of migrant kids illegally crossing the border this fiscal year — from 159,000 to 184,000.

• Even the low-end estimate is double the total number of kids who tried to cross during the crisis year of 2019. In 2014, the Obama administration struggled to care for just 69,000 kids who crossed illegally.
• The data obtained by Axios did not include projections for migrant families, but the Department of Homeland Security is expecting from 500,000 to 800,000 migrants crossing the border this fiscal year in family groups, the Washington Post reported Sunday.
• The numbers would be equal to or greater than in 2019, compounding the growing crisis.

I suppose that whether or not this constitutes a “crisis” will be debated for years to come. Something I find at the very least ironic is that many of the same people who were arguing that COVID-19 imposing a strain on resources was a crisis are insisting that the increased numbers of migrants, particularly unaccompanied children, crossing the border and straining resources is not a crisis.

I do think it’s a crisis for any number of reasons but I have thought the large number of migrants we’ve seen over the last several decades has been an increasing crisis all of that time. We already have the largest number of migrants as a percent of the population in over a century when it was deemed crisis sufficient to sharply limit immigration into the United States. More will mean an even greater crisis.

I can’t support or reject the complaints of Elie Abadie in his open letter to Tom Friedman in The Algemeiner but I did find this passage interesting:

I have lived in several “democratic countries,” including the United States, and have seen the rampant corruption of democratically elected political leaders, their self-interest placed above the interest of the electorate, their broken promises and their egotistical selfishness; what’s good for the electorate is not good for them.

which you may notice aligns pretty closely with how I see government in the United States right now.

His intention with the passage is to praise monarchism. As the Founders knew well there is no guarantee of a benevolent monarchy. Monarchies can be benevolent or malevolent and destructive and—the key point—you don’t get to choose under which you might live.

I don’t believe that “multi-party democracy” or what I would refer to as “liberal democracy” is inherently corrupt but ours has become so over time. IMO the best way to keep government honest is to limit its powers (and be willing to accept the limitations that carries) and keep it relatively small, close, open, and visible. I don’t think that bureaucracies, whether they operate under liberal democracies, dictatorships, or monarchies are inherently corrupt but I do believe that they function in certain ways which have been well known for a century and which have little or nothing to do either with the governments they serve or with their notional jobs.

You might be interested in this piece by Michael Schulman at Politico. Here’s a representative snippet:

HONG KONG — I really don’t want to be a China hawk. The whole idea goes against my belief in openness and the great things that can be accomplished by it. But the current Chinese leadership is leaving me no choice: They are a threat to democracy, and those who care about civil liberties can no longer pretend they aren’t.

My journey to that unfortunate conclusion has been painful. I’ve witnessed the progress achieved by engagement with China for the past 40 years. Like many of us from democratic societies, I’d like to see it continue.

But it’s become increasingly clear that it can’t, because Chinese leader Xi Jinping doesn’t share that vision: He wants a world where China dominates the commanding heights of the global economy and dictates the rules of international diplomacy and discourse. And such a world is not safe for democracy.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t believe he says anything that has not been completely obvious to anyone with actual insights into China. Rather than dividing opinion between “China hawks” and “China doves” a more productive way of looking at things might be by contrasting the idealists and the pragmatists. The idealists have believed and I guess to cling bitterly to the belief that a more prosperous, productive China that trades maintains relations with the rest of the world will necessarily be more politically liberal and democratic. Pragmatists have always realized that was unlikely.

After any mass shooting there’s a furor of articles and opinion pieces about the need for reform. When considering that I think that more attention ought to be paid to the Department of Justice’s report (PDF) on crimes committed using firearms from 2019. The important passage is this one:

An estimated 287,400 prisoners had possessed a firearm during their offense. Among these, more than half (56%) had either stolen it (6%), found it at the scene of the crime (7%), or obtained it off the street or from the underground market (43%). Most of the remainder (25%) had obtained it from a family member or friend, or as a gift. Seven percent had purchased it under their own name from a licensed firearm dealer.

Taking that into account I think the greatest emphasis should be place on enforcing the laws already on the books. I wish that more states required that the transfer of ownership of firearms be done through a licensed firearm dealer which would include gifts to family or friends. That might have some small effect.
Failing that the federal government could require that nationally.

As far as I can tell the reforms that are usually proposed would have little or no effect and are targeted at solving problems that aren’t particularly great for reasons I don’t entirely understand.

In his most recent New York Times column David Brooks puts out as good a definition of American exceptionalism as any:

In an important 2001 paper, the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote detailed exactly how distinct America’s system has always been.

In 1870, they wrote, government in America spent only 0.3 percent of gross domestic product on social benefit programs while France spent 1.1 percent. By 1998, America’s spending on such welfare-state programs as poverty relief and benefits for retirement, disability, unemployment, health care and family care had risen to 11 percent of G.D.P., but France’s had risen to 21.6 percent. Several European countries were typically spending twice as much as America to help the old, the young, the sick and the disadvantaged. Today, America spends 19 percent of G.D.P. on social benefits while France is at 31 percent.

Why have we adopted such a distinct system? Well, we’re a country that came into being through a revolution against centralized power. We have a high suspicion of the state. We’re also an immigrant nation. We put enormous faith in the gospel that hard work leads to success. This has led to an ethos that invests lots of money in future growth and less in a safety net for those who fall behind.

Finally, we’re a diverse country. People support social spending for the poor when they see the poor as members of their racial or ethnic group. People are less likely to support social spending when they see the poor as predominantly members of some other group.

to which I would add that government in the United States is not merely trusted less than that of other countries; it is less worthy of trust. If you’re looking for evidence that’s the case just consider how many elected officials become wealthy in elected office, far wealthier than can be explained by their official salaries.

He then expresses his doubts about current trends:

Ten years ago, I would have been aghast at this leftward shift. But like everybody else, I’ve seen inequality widen, the social fabric decay, the racial wealth gap increase. Americans are rightly convinced that the country is broken and fear it is in decline. Like a lot of people, I’ve moved left on what I think of the role of government and income redistribution issues. We surely need to invest a lot more in infrastructure and children.

But I worry about this new economic philosophy that asserts you can have everything you want without trade-offs. This week I was reading a smart blog post from a progressive economist and I came across phrases that startled me: “Public debt doesn’t matter” and “Work incentives don’t matter.” Really? Have the laws of gravity been suspended, too?

These are not disconnected. For reasons I don’t quite understand progressives tend not to believe that there is such a thing as “human nature” or, at least, they believe that human nature is completely malleable. Furthermore, also incredible to me, they tend not to believe that people follow incentives. If you reject the possibility that history is any guide, you are ipso facto rejecting the lessons of history.

In my view the adverse developments to which he points are a consequence of factors that include the following:

• Financialization of the economy and its handmaiden
• Monetization of the debt
• Deindustrialization, i.e. Loss of productive capacity
• Mercantilism on the part of countries with which we compete
• Passing laws but not enforcing them
• The strategy of improving the lot of the poor by paying people to provide services for them
• Too many poor immigrants too fast

Contrary to what you might conclude from that last bullet item, I am not anti-immigrant. I just think that the U. S. is an outlier and should remain so but at 15% being immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America, we presently have an immigrant population that is more than we can assimilate. We’re changing: we’re becoming more like Guatemala.

Which of these factors does the Republican leadership want to change? None. Which of these factor does the Democratic leadership want to change? None.

That’s why that rather than “investing a lot more in infrastructure and children” we will inevitably end up paying a lot more to construction companies and teachers without improving our infrastructure or educational outcomes. It’s also why what will be billed as “ending the carnage” will do practically nothing to reduce gun homicides but will mostly result in more unenforced laws being broken.

I’m pretty much in agreement with Eric Boehm’s take at Reason.com on the rush to abolish the filibuster:

The idea that the filibuster is a holdover from the Jim Crow era—an idea that is suddenly popping up all over left-wing politics and media—stems from the fact that filibusters were relatively rare until the past few decades. “It was used rarely and almost always for the purpose of blocking civil-rights bills,” explains New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “The filibuster exception to the general practice of majority rule was a product of an implicit understanding that the white North would grant the white South a veto on matters of white supremacy.”

There is no question that the filibuster has been wielded for racist purposes. Sen. Strom Thurmond (D–S.C.) spoke on the Senate floor for more than 24 hours—still the longest filibuster on record—in a failed attempt to block a final vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for example. The bill passed anyway.

But the filibuster is better understood as the product of the Senate’s arcane procedural rules. As such, it is not inherently racist (and, by extension, abolishing it won’t make the Senate as an institution anti-racist). If it was used by racists to advance racist goals, the racists are to blame. Presidents have used the annual State of the Union address to advance all manner of terrible policy, but we rightfully blame them (and the Congress that eventually votes to enact such policies) and not the speech itself.

The debate over the filibuster, like all of the tedious debates over procedural mechanisms in legislative chambers, is really about power. That power can manifest itself in the perpetuation of racist and discriminatory systems, of course, but not exclusively.

“Short-term, pragmatic considerations almost always shape contests over reform of Senate rules,” Sarah Binder, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration last year. She was referring to the history of the filibuster and its evolution over the decades, but the same lesson applies to what’s happening right now.

If the Democratic leadership were really impelled to “anti-racism”, there would be a lot more black representatives and senators in their caucus than there are now. Their present approach to redistricting has multiple objectives: creating “safe” Democratic districts, producing representatives who are more progressive than Democrats are in general but, most of all, protecting incumbents which necessarily means a lot of old, white senators and representatives. FDR’s coalition is no more, black voters are practically its last vestige, and they’re getting short shrift as usual.

All I can say about eliminating cloture rules is be careful of what you wish for. In the near term you may pass a lot of laws. If any of them produce unfortunate unforeseen consequences, Democrats will own them. Their complaints about those evil racist Republicans blocking the things that Americans need won’t have quite the resonance they used to.