In his regular Washington Post column David Ignatius interprets the meeting between Chinese and American diplomats that took place in Alaska last week:

The Chinese initially appeared almost cocky in Anchorage, with Yang lecturing his hosts about the United States’ moral and diplomatic shortcomings. This message was probably intended to impress the domestic audience back in China about Beijing’s resolve. But behind this outward confidence, the Chinese seemed peeved that before the Anchorage meeting Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had traveled to China’s backyard to visit neighboring Japan and South Korea.

The Biden administration’s emphasis on “the Quad” — the informal U.S. partnership with India, Japan and Australia — has at least modestly bolstered the United States’ position in the region. India, in particular, has moved further and faster than U.S. officials expected. And Japan, though feeling its way under new Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, remains a committed partner.

China faces a paradox in Asia: The stronger and more confident it becomes, the more it frightens its neighbors and pushes them toward Washington. That’s why the United States’ recent political disarray worries its Asian allies: Against a rising China, they don’t want to bet on a fading superpower.

That’s certainly one interpretation of the meeting but I think there are others. First, trying to put an opponent on the back foot is a pretty standard tactic in Chinese diplomacy. Keeping high-ranking U. S. officials waiting on the tarmc; sending lower ranking officials to meet with the president when he visits. I’ve made my own suggestions about counter-signalling but the White House pays no attention to me.

The Chinese leadership recognizes that the Biden Administration is sensitive about the events surrounding the election and its aftermath. They also think that the openness of our society and diversity are weaknesses rather than strengths. Of course they’ll probe along those areas. Whether they’re right about those things remains to be seen.

But I’m more concerned about what they do rather than what they say and I don’t believe their actions show as much confidence as their scolding of American diplomats might suggest.

In an article in the the Washington Post Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti declaim that there’s a crisis at our southern border:

The last three presidents have each had to grapple with a sudden arrival of thousands of unaccompanied migrant teenagers and children along the Mexico border, but the challenge facing President Biden in recent weeks is an unprecedented one. Never before have so many minors arrived so fast.

Over the last three weeks, the average number of teenagers and children crossing into the United States without their parents has topped 550 per day, according to the latest government data reviewed by The Washington Post. Border officials are on pace to take in more than 17,000 minors this month, which would be an all-time high.

The influx has overwhelmed the government’s ability to safely shelter and care for the minors before delivering them to family members and vetted sponsors living in the United States, a challenge complicated by the coronavirus pandemic. Photos released Monday by Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) showed teens packed into a South Texas tent facility operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection that was at 1,500 percent of its pandemic-rated capacity as of Sunday, per CBP data. Cuellar’s office said the photos were taken over the weekend.

As evidence they produce the graph above. They add an interesting statistic:

The last three presidents have each had to grapple with a sudden arrival of thousands of unaccompanied migrant teenagers and children along the Mexico border, but the challenge facing President Biden in recent weeks is an unprecedented one. Never before have so many minors arrived so fast.

Over the last three weeks, the average number of teenagers and children crossing into the United States without their parents has topped 550 per day, according to the latest government data reviewed by The Washington Post. Border officials are on pace to take in more than 17,000 minors this month, which would be an all-time high.

The influx has overwhelmed the government’s ability to safely shelter and care for the minors before delivering them to family members and vetted sponsors living in the United States, a challenge complicated by the coronavirus pandemic. Photos released Monday by Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) showed teens packed into a South Texas tent facility operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection that was at 1,500 percent of its pandemic-rated capacity as of Sunday, per CBP data. Cuellar’s office said the photos were taken over the weekend.

I wonder how the claimed relationship was established. It should also be noted that projections are not established facts but IMO we’re close enough to the end of March at this point that the projection should be pretty close.

Meanwhile, at The Week Ryan Cooper says that nothing of the sort is happening:

There is a problem at the border, but it is not remotely a “crisis.” It’s an administrative challenge that could be solved easily with more resources and clear policy — not even ranking with, say, the importance of securing loose nuclear material, much less the ongoing global pandemic, or the truly civilization-threatening crisis of climate change. The mainstream media is in effect collaborating with Republicans to stoke unreasoning xenophobic panic.

Here’s what’s happening: in short, the number of people trying to cross the border has skyrocketed over the past month. There has been a particular surge in unaccompanied children — according to the Department of Homeland Security, average apprehensions of unaccompanied children have increased from 313 per day last month to 565, on average. It’s unclear why this is happening exactly, though presumably it has something to do with a new president who isn’t such a racist maniac, and the hope that vaccination is beginning to beat back the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.

Now, there are genuine challenges here. Tens of thousands of people trying to sneak across the border is, at a minimum, unsafe (many have died trying to do so). And as Felipe De La Hoz writes at The New Republic, unaccompanied minors are a particularly thorny issue — the Biden administration wants to avoid the negative press of “kids in cages,” but one can’t simply turn young children loose with no one to care for them. The natural solution is to house them in a decent facility for a short time while host families are located. But then again, the facilities for caring for these kids are typically underfunded and loosely regulated, and often run by unscrupulous contractors with a history of abuse.

But all of these problems are, in principle at least, easily fixable. With some more money the government could build more holding facilities so children aren’t stuck for days or weeks. With more staff the immigration courts system could be beefed up to process asylum applications in a timely fashion (as required by U.S. law, incidentally). Probably most importantly, comprehensive immigration reform could rationalize and streamline the legal immigration process, which is currently a Kafkaesque nightmare.

That actually sounds like he’s describing a crisis to me but he doesn’t like to use that word. Can we agree that tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors presents problems we don’t need? Would that be fair?

There’s a lot to decompress in these pieces. The problem does not primarily belong to the Biden Administration but to the House. Urgent action by the House is needed. The money that Mr. Cooper wants to spend will not appropriate itself.

Which is more humane, more compassionate? Finding “host families” for these young people or returning them to their countries of origin? As Mr. Cooper intimates I don’t think there’s an obviously right answer. Host families can be abusive. Without better resources for establishing the veracity of claimed relationships than we have we may be releasing children into the hands of human traffickers of one form or another.

I would add that for young people over the age of 12 if they do not already speak English fluently they probably never will and the economy of the 21st century is dramatically different from that of the 19th century. Being able to speak and at least to some degree read and write in English is a necessity. Incomes for people with less than a high school diploma have been languishing for decades.

I agree with Mr. Cooper’s observation that devoting more resources to promoting economic growth in Mexico and Central America would pay dividends across many areas. It’s easier said than done and doing it requires Congressional action.

I agree with the overall concept of the editorial at the Deseret News on handling the massive inflow of immigrants at our southern border:

As the United States sees a sharp increase in immigration under President Joe Biden’s administration, the nation must respond from a place of principle — and Utah offers solid foundations from which to start.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to assist as 4,200 children were being kept in poor, crowded conditions in Customs and Border Protection facilities, in cells meant for adults. Biden, who criticized former President Donald Trump for keeping “kids in cages,” is passing the buck to his predecessor for the current situation, with White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying that “the last administration left us a dismantled and unworkable system.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are caught up in semantics, criticizing the Biden administration for calling the situation at the border a “challenge” and urging the president to label it a “crisis.” They say Biden’s rhetoric since taking office has encouraged the surge in immigration and point to the dangers posed to both American citizens and migrants by the COVID-19 pandemic in packed detention facilities.

The particular nuances of 2021 notwithstanding, it’s the same back-and-forth that’s plagued both parties for decades.

But principle is out there, and it can be found right here in Utah. The Utah Compact on Immigration, first signed in 2010 and reaffirmed in 2019, is “a declaration of five principles to guide Utah’s immigration discussion,” such as urging against unnecessary family separation, acknowledging strong families as “the foundation of successful communities,” recognizing the “economic role immigrants play as workers and taxpayers,” and adopting “a humane approach” to the reality that immigrants are integrated into Utah’s communities, which reflects the state’s “unique culture, history and spirit of inclusion.”

The compact is not meant to be a legislative solution — indeed, director of the National Immigration Forum Ali Noorani praised it as “designed to stop harmful legislation with a set of principles based on values fundamental to the broader community” and declared that “culture and values defeated politics and policy” — but it has been the foundation for numerous real-world solutions. In 2011, after the compact was signed, the state passed an immigration reform law that was heralded as a “model for America.” Years later, the principles laid out in the compact served as the bedrock upon which Gov. Gary Herbert requested more refugee resettlement in Utah, even as other states turned asylum-seekers away.

Lawmakers at the federal level can learn from the values enshrined here in Utah, as they balance the rule of law and complex law enforcement with the United States’ history as a nation enriched by immigrants — and as a beacon of hope for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

What’s happening at the border is not a picture of compassion, but neither is an unfettered pipeline into the United States. Between the extremes is reasonable immigration reform that prioritizes families while maintaining order and the rule of law.

but I suspect I differ from them in what I would consider compassion. I’ll give an example. I think the compassionate thing to do with unaccompanied minors who enter the U. S. illegally is to turn them over to the Mexican authorities. They are much better prepared to return those children to their parents than we will ever be. But is that even the compassionate thing?

The issue of what to do with unaccompanied minors is particularly thorny and fraught. An American parent who sent his or her children into the desert alone, gave them to human traffickers, or, in effect, sold them to adults who wanted to get in illegally as a “family with children” would be considered abusive. Their children might well be taken from them. The attitude I hear in the U. S. about Mexicans and Central Americans is incredibly condescending and patronizing. Treating poverty as a legitimate case for asylum is inconsistent with past practice and tremendously impractical. There are nearly three quarters of a billion poor people in the world. We don’t have work for them or even the resources to admit all of them.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Scott Gottlieb offers some advice about the evolution of the CDC’s guidelines that I think is sensible, prudent, and considerate: cut them some slack! He reviews the history of CDC guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic:

More distance is always better when it comes to contagion. But the 6-foot directive might have been the single costliest measure CDC has recommended, which have been largely followed over the past year. So what science went into making—and, more important, sustaining—the recommendation?

Nobody knows for sure. Most agree the guideline derives from a belief that Covid is largely spread through respiratory droplets, like flu. Old studies suggest that larger respiratory droplets are unlikely to travel more than 6 feet, and therefore close contact with an infected person is the primary mode of exposure. This research was hardly conclusive, but by most accounts it formed the basis for the initial Covid recommendations. More-recent research shows that the novel coronavirus can also spread through airborne particles, known as aerosols, especially indoors.

Most planning for a pandemic prepared for a bad flu outbreak. Given how little was known about Covid, it was reasonable to base early assumptions on the flu blueprint. But this doctrine wasn’t revisited as more data became available about the novel coronavirus. The reliance on a flu model caused public-health authorities to underestimate and overestimate Covid in important ways.

They overestimated the role of contaminated surfaces. Some Americans are still wiping down their groceries before bringing them inside. One consequence is that we were slow to recognize the extent of asymptomatic spread. The effort dedicated to scrubbing surfaces wasn’t spent improving air ventilation and filtration, which would have had a greater effect. On the other hand, because of the assumption that Covid spread primarily through droplets and not through smaller aerosols, we underestimated the protective role of wearing high-quality masks.

Experts were trying to protect Americans, and we can’t blame them for being wrong in the absence of good information. The question is whether there is an effective process for establishing these measures and re-evaluating them as new information emerges. Science isn’t a set of unchanging truths handed down by a government agency.

Beyond changing the 6-foot recommendation, the Biden administration should consider reforming the decision-making process. CDC can move fast in a crisis, which is a virtue, but this makes it even more important that its advice is re-evaluated and updated when necessary. The agency’s guidance, even though it is nonbinding, has more impact than many regulations, but much less transparency and public scrutiny. There are no open dockets or opportunities for expert input, such as public advisory meetings.

Moreover, the CDC isn’t always clear on when the science is unsettled. This makes it harder for the American public to identify which recommendations are more open to discretion. The agency also doesn’t always identify the underlying science of its recommendations. We don’t know the exact basis for its initial view to stay 6 feet apart.

I think there’s a tension between providing guidance in the absence or insufficiency of actual scientific evidence and undermining public confidence. Multiple studies have suggested that a little humility and frankness can go a long way in resolving that tension. I know it’s a lot to ask but why not try treating adult Americans like grown-ups?

I continue to believe that the “Swiss cheese strategy” advocated by our cousins Down Under is a sound one. I wear a mask as required when in stores or other indoor venues. The only venue I’ve gone into other than a store, bank, or hospital over the last six months has installed a new AirPhx ventilation system I’ve discussed which I wish more office buildings would adopt. I try to maintain a more than two meter social distance from people other than my wife whenever I can including when I’m out-of-doors.

In her column in the Wall Street Journal Mary Anastasia O’Grady reviews a plan which I think is the best way by far to reduce illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America:

The HUGE Business Council—an acronym for Honduras, U.S., Guatemala, El Salvador—aims to create one million jobs in the next three to five years by “near-shoring” supply chains that serve U.S. manufacturing. It also proposes to attract capital to build or rebuild things like roads, ports and airports and to bring U.S. natural gas to the region.

The council already includes some big players, including Parkdale, one of the world’s largest yarn manufacturers and apparel maker Intradeco.

The idea dovetails beautifully with the vision of a commercially interconnected Central America, Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast—via rail and shipping—laid out in a 2017 report on the Mexico-U.S. relationship from the Mexican Council for International Affairs.

Highlighting “investment in logistics and transport infrastructure,” the report called for “complete modernization” of a train line from Guatemala to the tip of the Yucatán Peninsula to open “a new frontier” with the eastern U.S. “It should also contemplate the extension of this train line to Tegucigalpa in Honduras.” The same rail lines could be used to lay fiber-optic cable.

What are the impediments to the plan?

These are private initiatives, but they need buy-in from government—and that’s a problem. U.S. politicians from both sides of the aisle love to grandstand along the southern border, bemoaning the poverty and misery that sends desperate migrants north. But standing up to progressives who shape counterproductive U.S. foreign policy, and to labor unions that work at cross purposes with risk-taking capitalists, is another matter.

and, contrary to what you might infer from Ms. O’Grady’s column, the need for “buy-in from government” isn’t limited to the U. S. The governments of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador need to be enlisted as well which brings us to the core problem at the root of Central America’s economic woes: bad government. During the Cold War we tolerated and in many cases supported bad governments on the grounds that they were better than pro-Soviet communist governments but the Cold War has been over for 30 years now. Now we’re nervous about Bolivarianism. When will we learn that among the greatest risks we face are unfair, undemocratic, corrupt governments in Mexico and Central America?

If they’re convinced they have something to gain by them, elites in these countries will go along with such plans. The remedy for bad government isn’t more government or less government but better government and whatever we can do to encourage those among our closest neighbors, the better off we will be.

The editors of the New York Times have a plan for increasing federal tax revenues without increasing marginal rates:

Unreported income is the single largest reason that unpaid federal income taxes may amount to more than $600 billion this year, and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade. It is a truly staggering sum — more than half of the projected federal deficit over the same period.

The government has a basic obligation to enforce the law and to crack down on this epidemic of tax fraud. The failure to do so means that the burden of paying for public services falls more heavily on wage earners than on business owners, exacerbating economic inequality. The reality of widespread cheating also undermines the legitimacy of a tax system that still relies to a considerable extent on Americans’ good-faith participation.

Proposals to close this “tax gap” often focus on reversing the long-term decline in funding for the I.R.S., allowing the agency to hire more workers and to audit more wealthy taxpayers. But Charles Rossotti, who led the I.R.S. from 1997 to 2002, makes a compelling argument that such an approach is inadequate. Mr. Rossotti says that Congress needs to change the rules, by creating a third-party verification system for business income, too.

The core of Mr. Rossotti’s clever proposal is to obtain that information from banks. Under his plan, the government would require banks to produce an annual account statement totaling inflows and outflows, like the 1099 tax forms that investment firms must provide to their clients.

Individuals would then have the opportunity to reconcile what Mr. Rossotti dubs their “1099New” forms with their reported income on their individual tax returns. One might, for example, assert that a particular deposit was a tax-exempt gift.

Mr. Rossotti has proposed that the I.R.S. require the new forms only for people with taxable income above a generous threshold. A bill including Mr. Rossotti’s plan, introduced by Representative Ro Khanna of California, sets that threshold at $400,000, to minimize the burden on small business. The money is undoubtedly in chasing wealthy tax cheats, but equity argues that business income, like wage income, should be subject to a uniform reporting standard. Small businesses ought to pay their taxes, too.

The proposal would not increase the amount anyone owes in taxes. It would, instead, increase the amount paid in taxes by those who are currently cheating.

Were it to accomplish that, I’d be in favor of it. I think we should enforce our laws. But it might have some unforeseen consequences as well since it places an additional premium on strategies which may or may not be available to us ordinary citizens for declaring income as not subject to tax. As such rather than generating additional revenue it might be a full employment program for tax attorneys and accountants.

After two months of trying I finally was able to make an appointment to be inoculated against COVID-19. It required a solid hour of effort yesterday and I am quite certain that anyone less determined and knowledgeable than I would have given up in frustration.

I attribute the enormous difficulty to incompetence at all levels of government in Illinois and in the implementation of Cook County’s appointment web site. It took me more than 50 tries on Cook County’s appointment web site, every single try misleading.

The incompetence included but was not limited to:

• How “essential workers” are define here. I learned yesterday, somewhat to my surprise, that I probably could have substantiated a case that I was an essential worker and lined up my appointment weeks ago while only group 1a was being vaccinated rather than after eligibility was opened up to old people like me (1b). The notion that I am an essential worker is arrant nonsense. Defining it so broadly is incompetent.
• According to my contacts around the country the state’s involvement and restrictions in the distribution of vaccine are apparently significantly higher here than in other places including New York, California, Florida, other big states in which I have contacts as well as in adjoining states like Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Missouri. That is incompetent.
• It was pretty obvious that I was subjected to racial discrimination including both direct discrimination based on my race and redlining based on where I lived. I can understand the argument that the discrimination itself was not incompetent but making it so obvious was incompetent.
• I could identify a thousand ways in which the operation of the web application I used to make the appointment could have been made workable, particularly for people who aren’t technologically savvy. Pro tip: it is very, very difficult to make a single app workable for both web and mobile users. One or the other or, in the case of this app, both will find it unworkable. It’s actually easier and cheaper to develop two different apps, one for web users and one for mobile users. But that requires knowledgeable people and I know from direct experience how difficult it is to find them. Apps that time out and require users to start over from the beginning of the process were developed by incompetents. Or, in the case of Cook County’s app, time out and make it easier for users to start the process over than to retry after the timeout. Timeouts themselves are a sign of incompetence but I’m more sympathetic with them. But the design of the app!
  Grrrr.

In downtown El Cajon, not far from where my in-laws lived quite a few years ago, there was a store that had a prominent sign that really caught the imagination: “Guns—Liquor”. That’s as good a summary as any of the last year.

Last year was the best ever in the U. S. for firearms sales:

and it was the best year ever for liquor sales:

The monthly statistics on firearms sales makes it even clearer. I am given to understand there was a spike in marijuana usage last year as well.

There are lots of reasons for these developments: fear, anxiety, boredom. The timing of some of these developments makes it hard not to suspect that the federal handout were not used, at least in part, for buying guns, liquor, and other recreational drugs.

In nearly all major cities there was also a spike in homicides. It’s hard not to suspect that this was related, too.

Stay tuned. If the availability of money was a factor, the COVID-19 relief bill might insure that 2021 is even better for guns and liquor than 2020 was.

You may have noticed that I haven’t remarked on the murders in Atlanta last week. I thought they were horrible but this is not a news blog and I saw it as local news. Since the major news outlets have decided it’s national news and moreover apparently for the wrong reasons, I’ll comment now. Andrew Sullivan declaims that the outlets have let their preferred narratives replace the news:

Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.

Meanwhile at Reason.com Robby Soave documents just how the media got an important part of the story wrong:

A moment from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office press conference on Wednesday quickly went viral: Jay Baker, a spokesperson for the police department handling the investigation into the horrific Atlanta spa murders, said that suspect Robert Aaron Long was having a bad day.

“He was pretty much fed up, kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did,” said Baker.

The comment struck many people as overly sympathetic toward Long, as if Baker was making excuses for someone who stands accused of killing eight Asian-American women in cold blood. A 20-second video clip of Baker’s statement was shared on Twitter by Vox journalist Aaron Rupar and swiftly went viral, earning widespread condemnation. Many saw it as evidence that cops are desperate to discount the culpability of white male criminals. For instance, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor and inventor of the term “intersectionality,” described Baker’s comments as “bone-chilling,” and castigated him for refusing to acknowledge “the misogynistic dimensions of anti-Asian racism.”

A police officer excusing Long’s actions as merely the result of him having a “bad day” would indeed be contemptible. But that’s not what Baker did. In fact, many of the people so infuriated about the quote were misled by Rupar’s edit of the video.

and includes this important observation:

It would be naive of the police—or the public, or anyone else—to accept what alleged killers say at face value. It’s similarly naive to assume that the sex and ethnicity of the victims tells us everything we need to know about the crime.

to which I would add that it is equally naive to decide that the race and gender of the perpetrator tells you everything you need to know about the crime.
The narrative is that

• Any crime perpetrated by a white man against anyone other than another white man must be motivated by racism and/or sexism.
• Police officers are racists and sexists.
• Only whites are capable of racism. And presumably only men can be guilty of sexism.

From that narrative the stories practically write themselves.

When I first heard about the story my immediate reaction was that prostitution can be a dangerous business. I have been acquainted with prostitutes socially in my early childhood (we lived down the street from a brothel) and in my young adulthood. I thought they were sad. But I also part ways with some libertarians. I think that prostitution foments abuse and human trafficking. That was my second reaction on hearing the story. I was unaware that brothels with Chinese, presumably, prostitutes were so common in Atlanta and wondered how many of the girls who had been murdered had been working off their debts.