There are times when having a dog who delights in the cold and is reluctant to eliminate other than on a walk is a real chore. When as today it’s -1°F is one of them. The redeeming quality is walking around my neighborhood with my dog. Few of my neighbors are as hardy (or prepared) as we. As we walk I see sidewalks neatly carved and swept right down to the bare pavement through nearly two feet of snow. It’s things like the pride and care my neighbors and I take not to mention the frequently encountered practice of shoveling the walks of elderly or infirm neighbors for them and digging out each others’ cars that give me hope.

It also shows me how prudent and fortunate I am to live in such a neighborhood and how different the worlds of politics and the news casts are from my lived experience.

I tend to agree with Walter Shapiro’s assessment in the New Republic of the second Trump impeachment proceedings. Democrats botched it:

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump ended with a whimper Saturday afternoon, leaving time for the long weekend in honor of, yes, presidents. And like a veteran mob boss who sneers at justice, Trump beat the rap again as his adversaries fell 10 votes short of the 67 needed for conviction.

Yes, there were small consolations. Seven Republican senators mustered the moxie to find Trump guilty of inciting an uprising that directly led to members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence running for their lives. There were also lasting moments of eloquence from the House Democratic managers, particularly Jamie Raskin and Joe Neguse, even as Trump’s lead attorney Michael van der Veen, a Philadelphia slip-and-fall lawyer, managed to humiliate himself at every turn, at one point even mispronouncing the name of his own hometown.

But what the last day of the impeachment trial will mostly be remembered for is Democratic disarray on the vital question of calling witnesses. As legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel said about the 1962 New York Mets, “Can’t anyone here play this game.” At times on Saturday, it seemed that Chuck Schumer and Company were as lost as a baseball team that blew 120 games.

I guess there are multiple ways of looking at it. One way is that Democratic senators are high-minded philosopher-kings, lovers of democracy and the rule of law while Republicans are evil-minded authoritarians. Or vice versa. Another way is that the outcome was foreordained with just about everybody voting along party lines.

Yet another way, closer to my way of thinking, is that Democrats assumed that the final vote would be basically along partisan lines and didn’t want to be bothered with the trouble and effort of mounting a case capable of changing people’s minds.

I think it’s actually somewhat worse than that. I think that Democrats and Republicans might as well be living on different planets, their views on law, government, justice, and society not just being different but the truth of the views they hold being so self-evident that only malice could explain holding some other view. IMO it’s been this way and getting worse for at least a dozen years now and I see no good way out of it.

As I read this piece in the Wall Street Journal about how the Chinese authorities are, essentially, stonewalling the WHO task force investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2:

BEIJING—Chinese authorities refused to provide World Health Organization investigators with raw, personalized data on early Covid-19 cases that could help them determine how and when the coronavirus first began to spread in China, according to WHO investigators who described heated exchanges over the lack of detail.

The Chinese authorities turned down requests to provide such data on 174 cases of Covid-19 that they have identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019. The investigators are part of a WHO team that this week completed a monthlong mission in China aimed at determining the origins of the pandemic.

Chinese officials and scientists provided their own extensive summaries and analysis of data on the cases, said the WHO team members. They also supplied aggregated data and analysis on retrospective searches through medical records in the months before the Wuhan outbreak was identified, saying that they had found no evidence of the virus.

But the WHO team wasn’t allowed to view the raw underlying data on those retrospective studies, which could allow them to conduct their own analysis on how early and how extensively the virus began to spread in China, the team members said. Member states typically provide such data—anonymized, but disaggregated so investigators can see all other relevant details on each case—as part of WHO investigations, said team members.

“They showed us a couple of examples, but that’s not the same as doing all of them, which is standard epidemiological investigation,” said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist on the WHO team. “So then, you know, the interpretation of that data becomes more limited from our point of view, although the other side might see it as being quite good.”

it occurred to me that whatever the truth, being as guarded as the Chinese authorities clearly are is a darned good way to convince people, especially suspicious people like me, that you’re trying to hide something. It may well be that they’re just highly sensitive about China’s reputation but it seems to me that particular ship sailed a long time ago.

The senate has not convicted Donald Trump, voting largely along party lines. However, seven Republicans voted to convict: those who had voted for the trial to proceed plus two more. I believe neither of those two are seeking re-election.

I don’t honestly know whether voting “aye” will be qualifying for those seeking the presidency as Republicans in 2024 or disqualifying.

I think that Jonas Parello-Plesner is whistling past a graveyard in his plea for an “economic NATO” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

We don’t have to allow autocracies to pick off democracies one by one. The free world can and should do more, by agreeing to an “economic Article 5”—similar to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Article 5, which states that a military attack on one ally is considered an attack on all.

How would that work? An “alliance of democracies” would come together and agree on such a framework, perhaps at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit in May or the Summit of Democracy President Biden has proposed. A democracy subjected to economic coercion by an autocracy could invoke the new economic Article 5 to summon the unified support of fellow democracies.

The joint response should have a bite. It would move beyond statements of support to actions, through a catalog of retaliatory trade measures. Australia wouldn’t face China alone but would be aided by the combined trade power of the world’s democracies which make up more than half of the world’s economic might.

Beyond the economic impact, the symbolism of such solidarity would be a potent deterrent. Bullies respond to strength and exploit weakness. A coordinated response would make them think twice before acting.

I cannot imagine Germany participating in such an alliance in anything other than name, any more than they are a participating member of NATO in anything but name. The Germans’ view is steadfastly pro-German and I’m pretty sure that they’ll take the resolute position that they don’t really care what happens to other economies, as long as the German economy is the last to be “picked off”.

And without Germany’s participation it simply won’t work.

What might be formed is a stronger alliance of the Anglosphere—English-speaking countries, e.g. the U. S., Canada, U. K., Australia, New Zealand, and even others in Africa and Asia.

In a Wall Street Journal interview Shelby Steele echoes some of the same themes Glenn Loury did in the piece cited in my earlier post:

Mr. Steele again invokes his father, born in 1900. Whites didn’t feel “guilty” about blacks back then: “They didn’t give a damn about my father.” Shelby Steele Sr. taught himself to read and write, built a business, a family, a life. “Everybody in the neighborhood I grew up in in Chicago did that.” Blacks were making economic progress, Mr. Steele says, “until American liberalism came in under Lyndon Johnson and said, in effect, to black people, ‘We don’t really have any faith in you. We don’t believe you can do it on your own. We hurt you, so now we’ll make it better.’ ” A downward spiral ensued in much of black America. The three houses Mr. Steele’s father fixed up and rented fell victim to blight. In the end, as he writes in “White Guilt,” “the family signed them over to their nonpaying renters for nothing, happy to be rid of the liability.”

White America continues to determine the lives of black Americans, Mr. Steele says: “Patronizing black people is just a form of white decency,” burnished by concepts like systemic racism and white privilege. “ ‘We’re still in charge of your life,’ ” white Americans say to blacks. “ ‘You do what we tell you.’ ” And so, Mr. Steele says, “we’ve become slaves all over again. And we run around, coming up with words like ‘equity,’ trying to jack the white man up.”

Those doing the “jacking” will do just fine; others not so much.

IMO a lot of today’s frenzy is because some have realized that the influence of black voters has already reached its peak and will decline from here forward. Hispanics will be increasingly important and, the “people of color” trope notwithstanding, many Hispanics see themselves as white and as the years roll on that will increasingly be the case. But Hispanics manifestly don’t feel the guilt or responsibility towards blacks that many white progressives profess.

I think there are a number of interesting and worthwhile notions in this piece by Glenn Loury at Quillette, originally a lecture. In it he outlines five “unspeakable truths about racial equality in America” and proposes a remedy. His “unspeakable truths” are:

• Outcomes for blacks are not disconnected from behavior
• “Structural racism” has no referent
• Police killings must be viewed in perspective
• Pushing the notion of “white fragility” is risky
• Blacks are being infantilized

while his proposed remedy is that blacks must earn equality rather than having it awarded to them by whites. That is no novel proposal. It’s much what figures as disparate as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X have asserted.

I recommend you read the piece in full. You’re likely to learn something. Here’s a snippet:

The “structural racism” argument seldom goes into cause and effect. Rather, it asserts shadowy causes that are never fully specified, let alone demonstrated. We are all just supposed to know that it’s the fault of something called “structural racism,” abetted by an environment of “white privilege,” furthered by an ideology of “white supremacy” that purportedly characterizes our society. It explains everything. Confronted with any racial disparity, the cause is, “structural racism.”

History, I would argue, is rather more complicated than such “just so” stories would suggest. These racial disparities have multiple interwoven and interacting causes, from culture to politics to economics, to historical accident to environmental influence and, yes, also to the nefarious doings of particular actors who may or may not be “racists,” as well as systems of law and policy that disadvantage some groups without having been so intended. I want to know what they are talking about when they say “structural racism.” In effect, use of the term expresses a disposition. It calls me to solidarity. It asks for my fealty, for my affirmation of a system of belief. It’s a very mischievous way of talking, especially in a university, although I can certainly understand why it might work well on Twitter.

My own view, probably equally unspeakable, is that the explanation for so many blacks being trapped in the underclass is that it’s multi-factorial, having its roots in behavior by blacks, behavior by whites, history, and, frankly, that blacks have been sold a bill of goods for the last half century. Both the notions that blacks cannot prosper through their own efforts or that they need to be saved by non-blacks are problematic but that’s where we are now.

One more thought. The present discourse is entirely about power and its thrust does not lead in a direction which will benefit by far the greatest number of blacks in the U. S.

At RealClearPolkcy William Taylor points out something that hadn’t occurred to me. One-term presidents are becoming increasingly common. Four of the last eight former presidents served one term (or less). If you assume that President Biden will only serve a single term (likely considering his age), it will be five of the last nine. Is that the trend of the future?

Normalizing the four-year presidency may have its advantages. Growing economic and military concerns from great power competition contribute to the need for a flexible, responsive, and potentially unpredictable executive and commander-in-chief. A revolving door of presidents allow for more diversity of individuals and philosophies over a briefer period of time. Presidents can focus on enacting the immediate policies elected upon instead of weighing how their actions will impact their viability for a second term.

I think the more concerning question is the advanced age of recent presidents. Biden was older at the beginning of his first term than any president in history but so was Trump. I think that’s a product of zeitgeist, characteristics of the different age cohorts, and some bad strategy on the part of the major political parties.

I think that not seeking a second term will continue to be rare. Whether it will become increasingly difficult to be re-elected I have no idea.

At Bloomberg James Stavridis argues that we should maintain troops in Afghanistan forever:

The case for maintaining a small yet strong military presence in Afghanistan is sound, if not popular. The U.S. doesn’t want to see the country slip back into the essentially ungoverned state that existed before the 9/11 attacks, conditions that allowed al-Qaeda to take hold so strongly and launch the attacks on U.S. soil. Costs have already been reduced enormously by drawing down 95% of the U.S. forces. There are also about 5,000 non-U.S. NATO troops on the ground, more than America’s commitment at this point.

The future of those combined forces will be discussed in depth at this month’s meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. If the U.S. continues to pull forces out, the other NATO members will follow. The right balance would be about 5,000 U.S. troops and 5,000 allied troops — a credible force that would push the Taliban back to the negotiating table.

There is no evidence that the conditions for withdrawal from Afghanistan will ever occur.

Some, incorrectly in my view, compare our presence in Afghanistan with our continuing military presence in Germany and Japan. There are many differences including

• Germany and Japan were states before the war. They were still states after the war. Afghanistan is only a state by courtesy. It’s actually small pockets of governed territory surrounded by large areas of ungoverned territory.
• Our troops haven’t been taking fire or being killed by IEDs on an ongoing basis for the last 75 years. We will continue taking casualties as long as we’re in Afghanistan. 11 U. S. military were killed in Afghanistan in 2020. That’s greatly reduced from the nearly 500 per year during the “Afghan surge”. The reasons it’s reduced is lower troops levels and operational tempo.
• We spent about $38 billion keeping troops in Afghanistan last year. That’s about double Afghanistan’s GDP.