The editors of the Washington Post are urging the World Health Organization to begin another investigation into the origins of COVID-19:

Another hypothesis, that the pandemic was ignited by some kind of laboratory leak or accident, is denied by China. However, a senior researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, was working on “gain of function” experiments, which involve modifying viral genomes to give them new properties, including the ability to infect lung cells of laboratory mice that had been genetically modified to respond as human respiratory cells would. She was working with bat coronaviruses that were genetically very similar to the one that caused the pandemic. Could a worker have gotten infected or inadvertent leakage have touched off the outbreak in Wuhan?

The joint WHO-China team said in its Feb. 9 news conference in Wuhan that the laboratory hypothesis was “extremely unlikely” and would not be further studied; later, Dr. Tedros said that nothing was off the table. As the 26 scientists point out in their letter, the team lacked the training and forensic skills required to investigate this possibility. They were under strong pressure from China to steer clear of the subject altogether.

What’s needed is an independent, multidisciplinary and unfettered investigation into the origins of the outbreak, both the zoonotic and laboratory hypotheses. China’s obduracy is not going away. The WHO, a membership organization, lacks the powers to pry open closed doors in China, and there is not another good alternative. However, Dr. Tedros could appoint a new team of highly qualified international experts, including forensic specialists, to investigate the laboratory-leak hypothesis, and forcefully insist that China not stand in its way. If he openly challenged China on this matter, he would have the support of a world wanting to know how this nightmare began and how to prevent another.

What I have been hearing lately are somewhat desperate attempts at finding an explanation, any explanation, which does not situate the origins of COVID-19 within China. Frozen food imported from Europe. Zoonotic transmission from Thailand. No explanation has been offered on how the first cases reported in China managed to contract the disease from frozen food or from Thailand while other people more conveniently situated for the virus managed to avoid it.

As Conan Doyle wrote “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”. Perhaps they’re disinterested in the truth.

Speaking of rearranging the deck chairs, I presume you’ve heard about the 30,000, that’s 30,000 organizations whose email systems running Microsoft’s Exchange Server, have been compromised by Chinese hackers, apparently supported by the Chinese government.

What’s the appropriate response?

1. Nothing. What is there we can do?
2. Every single company and every single individual whose information was compromised should sue Microsoft in the largest class action suit the world has ever known. Maybe the company will survive, maybe it won’t.
3. Microsoft should be punished by the government for something-or-other. Show me the company and I’ll show you the crime.
4. We should make it as difficult as we possibly can for China to access the Internet.
5. We should use hackers of our own to take as many Chinese systems down as we can.
6. We should treat it as an act of war.

I have no idea what the U. S. should do. Maybe all of them.

In a piece at the Peoria Journal Star by Bill Ruthhart and John Byrne (which may reproduce a piece originally published in the Trib) the authors muse over what Boss Madigan’s ouster may portend:

The change is being driven by generational, ideological and demographic shifts, with federal law enforcement and organized labor providing major assists. The result is a move away from iron-fist bossism toward a more diffuse leadership structure that’s more diverse and practices an increasingly progressive style of politics centered on economic and racial equity.

Michael Madigan’s departure as party boss and House speaker is expected to accelerate that change, say more than two dozen Chicago elected officials and political operatives the Tribune interviewed. More independent candidates may be emboldened to run for office, leading to a more freewheeling legislature and City Council, and, perhaps, state party. In just the last two months, Illinois Democratic leadership already is more diverse — Emanuel “Chris” Welch is the first Black House speaker, and new state party chair, U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, is the first African American and woman to hold the post.

The optimistic view is that we’ll see a better, less corrupt, more Democratic Chicago and Illinois Democratic Party. My own view is more aligned with that of Fritz Kaegi:

Major reforms around campaign finance, lobbying and transparency need to happen for Chicago’s politics to truly transform, said county Assessor Fritz Kaegi. Modest changes on the margins, he warned, could result in the machine simply giving way to a scattering of smaller fiefdoms still susceptible to corruption.

“The public has realized that Chicago’s old patronage model in all of its different manifestations was not working,” said Kaegi, a progressive who in 2018 ousted assessor and then-county Democratic Chairman Joe Berrios, an old-school patronage chief who oversaw an error-riddled and inequitable property tax assessment system. “No one in the public wants a boss overseeing a black box, and the answer is a more transparent government with a more level playing field.”

Critics of Chicago’s rising progressive reform movement contend it represents a new form of strongman politics, led by unions. Former Northwest Side Ald. Richard Mell said some progressive City Council members “can’t go against anything the teachers union wants.”

IMO the new bosses will just try to take their own places at the trough and very little will change.

The big question is not whether the new faces being elected are white, black, or brown or whether the people with those faces are LGBTQ or heterosexual it’s what they do once they’re in office. If they keep following the party bosses and continue pulling the same cons it won’t matter what their race, ethnicity, gender, identification, or ideology is. It will be the same old corrupt machine with new bosses and faces.

It takes Ross Douthat a very long time to get to his point about “cancel culture” in his New York Times column but he does get around to it eventually:

I don’t expect “The Cat in the Hat” to be unpublished or my own tracts to swiftly vanish. But it was a good thing when liberalism, as a dominant cultural force in a diverse society, included a strong tendency to police even itself for censoriousness — the ACLU tendency, the don’t-ban-Twain tendency, the free-speech piety of the high school English teacher.

Now liberal cultural power has increased, the ACLU doesn’t seem very interested in the liberties of non-progressives anymore, and Dr. Seuss sells as pricey samizdat.

I don’t know what awaits beyond this particular Zebra, and I’d rather not find out.

The problem is that progressives aren’t liberals. Liberals defend freedom. I don’t know what progressives believe in these days. Power, that’s for sure. Beyond that I simply don’t know. I’m not a progressive.

Presumably, he’s making what is another example of a slippery slope argument. It certainly look looks like there’s a chain of steps in a bad direction involved.

I found both things with which I agreed and things with which I disagreed in Gideon Rose’s meandering piece at Foreign Affairs, “Foreign Policy for Pragmatists”. I found this passage, about the events on January 6, thought-provoking:

Was the riot a political protest that got out of hand? An attempted putsch? A heroic defense of the republic against satanic pedophiles? It was all of these and more, because the event was streaming on several platforms simultaneously—not just the conventional tv networks but also the inner mental channels of the deluded rioters. This was history as tragedy and farce combined; the casualties included a woman who was reportedly trampled to death while carrying a flag saying “Don’t Tread on Me.”

The most persuasive reading of the day is as immersive theater, and not just because the marchers came in costume. It played like a mass live production of Euripides’s Bacchae, the tale of a mysterious cult leader who wreaks vengeance on a city that disrespects him by whipping its citizens into a frenzied nihilistic rampage. Some men just want to watch the world burn. And some crowds just like the way it hurts.

The riot’s practical implications are deeply disturbing. But its theoretical implications are more so. For example, one leading proponent of the big lie in question, Peter Navarro, was a crucial architect of the Trump administration’s trade policy. It will be interesting to see how mainstream scholarship on international political economy incorporates conspiracy theorizing into the heart of its analysis.

but I think his conclusion is a gross misreading of American history, recent history in particular:

The Biden administration, in short, does not face a tragic choice of pessimism, optimism, or just winging it. Instead of embracing realism or liberalism, it can choose pragmatism, the true American ideology. The key is to draw on diverse theoretical traditions to develop plausible scenarios of many alternative futures, design and track multiple indicators to see which of those scenarios is becoming more likely, and follow the evidence honestly where it goes.

Wilsonianism, the missionary impulse to spread your philosophy, whether democracy, free markets, or women’s rights to other countries, has dominated foreign policy thought in both Republicans and Democrats for some time. You can find it in Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq War and in Obama’s actions in Syria. It’s only pragmatic to the extent that you consider the acceptance of those beliefs in other countries as a) possible and b) in the U. S. interest. Pragmatic in terms of domestic politics? Perhaps. Pragmatic as foreign policy? That’s not credible.

Additionally, I don’t see American foreign policy as transient and changeable as he does. Quite to the contrary I think it’s been remarkably constant over the years, especially when compared with other major powers. China, Germany, France, and the UK aren’t pursuing the same goals as they were 80 years ago. We are.

Quite to the contrary I see American foreign policy as an emergent phenomenon, composed of the competing forces in American politics, optimistic and pessimistic, pragmatic and idealistic.

Consequently, I see it as highly unlikely that the Biden Administration will learn much from history or that it will be transformative in our foreign policy. It will be buffeted by those forces to form its own synthesis, just as every previous administration has.

It’s gratifying to see others espouse the positions I’ve been arguing here for some time. That’s the case with this Bloomberg editorial, proposing the return of “earmarks”:

Earmarking got a bad rap over the years, and not entirely without reason. Total spending on such measures rose from less than $3 billion in 1991 to $29 billion at its peak in 2006. Tales of misspent funds proliferated. Favors were exchanged. Crimes were committed. You might recall a $223 million set-aside for connecting a remote Alaskan town to a yet more remote island. An uproar over this “bridge to nowhere” was one reason both parties suspended earmarks altogether in 2011.

In fact, though, such boondoggles were the exception. Over the years, lawmakers generally requested small-dollar earmarks to solve local problems or fund workaday projects. The process often made Congress more responsive to regional needs and legislators more attentive to what they were passing. Because earmarks merely directed funds that were already being appropriated, moreover, they required no new spending and added nothing to budget deficits.

More important, they created incentives for compromise. A lawmaker looking to advance a general-interest bill could sweeten the pot by funding local initiatives favored by an opposition member. This gave the minority an interest in governing, encouraged bipartisanship, and helped resolve collective-action problems. Although unlovely, it was often quite consequential: Both George W. Bush’s Medicare expansion and Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act relied on earmarks (broadly defined) for passage.

Eliminating earmarks was seen as a way of cleaning up government and reducing spending. Instead it turned out to be a formula for making it difficult to pass legislation. That is all too frequently the case with such reforms. Take the present civil service system. Please.

As Yogi Berra put it in theory there’s no difference between practice and theory but in practice there is.

While I agree with the editors of the Washington Post that the Biden Administration should take the right lesson from globalization:

BETWEEN THE fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the global pandemic of 2020, the global population grew from 5.2 billion to 7.7 billion. Yet the share living in extreme poverty fell from more than a third to less than 10 percent, according to the World Bank. In other words, hundreds of millions of premature deaths were avoided and a similar number of opportunities for human flourishing were created. While China accounted for much of the progress, World Bank data show that poverty fell at similar rates elsewhere. Not coincidentally, this colossal achievement occurred during three decades of U.S.-endorsed trade liberalization, which brought investment, jobs and income to previously destitute corners of the world.

We reiterate these facts to rebalance the debate over globalization, which is at risk of being won by those who view free trade one-sidedly as a job-destroying disaster for American workers. Alas, Biden administration foreign policy pronouncements this week show how much influence this critique has gained over both political parties.

but somehow they neglect to outline what the right lesson would be. I can tell you what I wish they would learn: China is in a class by itself. There is no other country that is that large, as authoritarian as China, or as dedicated to mercantilist policies that treat trade as a zero sum game.

They also somehow fail to mention that China is presently engaged in cyberwarfare against the U. S. That’s surprising since it’s one of the biggest stories of the day.

Steve Rattner has an op-ed in the New York Times, cautioning against irrational exuberance on the part of Democratic lawmakers in their support of spending plans:

The prices of many commodities are surging — copper and lumber because of a jump in home building. Global steel demand has pushed up iron ore prices. Even tin, heavily used in electronics, has soared as suppliers rush to meet consumer demand for new gadgets.

Inflation expectations are also on the rise among traders. Interest rates on long-term Treasury bonds — a reliable inflation indicator — remain historically low, but have been marching upward. That, in turn, has shaken financial markets, which rightfully view climbing interest rates as the enemy of their investments.

It is against this backdrop that Congress is on the verge of injecting an additional $1.9 trillion into an economy that has already received more than $4 trillion in boosts from Washington. According to several estimates, the measure’s spending far exceeds the extent of the shortfall in economic output caused by the pandemic.

And let’s not forget the effects of easy money from our central bank. The Federal Reserve, which has driven short-term interest rates to near zero, has also injected more money into the economy in the past year than it did fighting the Great Recession in 2008.

advising:

The $422 billion in stimulus checks that will put money in the pockets of millions of Americans financially unaffected by the crisis should be replaced by much more targeted (and less expensive) efforts around those who have been directly hit with economic losses.

Policymakers should explore, for instance, income replacement programs that would help Americans who still have jobs but have had their earnings cut significantly by the pandemic — relying on changes in adjusted gross income from 2019 to 2020, as derived from tax returns.

The $510 billion in aid to states and localities (including for education) should also be dramatically reduced; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently explained how Moody’s Analytics estimates only “an additional $86 billion of aid is needed to cover revenue losses.”

That assistance should also be more concentrated on where the need exists. According to Bloomberg, California’s revenues for this fiscal year are roughly 10 percent greater than expected (partly a result of soaring technology company valuations), while general-fund revenue in New York is estimated to be 11.7 percent lower than prepandemic forecasts.

I have a number of quibbles with his piece. How in the heck did Steve Rattner get to be an economic adviser? His general economic ignorance is on full display in the piece. He jumbles up multiple different things (price increases due to increased demand and inflation) and worries about the wrong things. The Federal Reserve has actually become pretty good over the last 40 years of dealing with ordinary inflation. He is entirely too self-exonerating:

It’s true that, with the benefit of hindsight, we did too little to address that recession. But we are in serious danger of overreacting to this one.

Let me provide an alternative interpretation. Those of us who, correctly, foresaw that the Obama Administration had taken its collective eye off the recession ball and turned its attention to other bright, shiny objects, had foresight. If the Obama Administration had actually believed its proposed measures were necessary and effective, less money would have been spent on politically motivated boondoggles and more would have been spent in recovering from the recession. Maybe funding the politically motivated boondoggles were the point, a motivation Mr. Rattner doesn’t even consider in the present administration’s support for the funds in the “COVID-19 relief” bill to give handouts to people a multiple of the median income, bailouts to state and local governments whose revenues haven’t declined, additional funding for the NEA and NEH, and multiple other provisions.

My concerns are different from his including:

• Economic distortion and deadweight loss
• Reduction in economic growth
• Increased debt overhang
• Risk of loss of confidence in the dollar

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner reflects on the events of January 6, ultimately arriving at this conclusion:

I share Greenwald’s fear of overreaction and the threats to our civil liberties that comes with it. For selfish and ideological reasons, I would like the fences around public spaces in our nation’s capital to come down and the National Guard troops stationed there to go back to their day jobs. They can’t become permanent fixtures “just in case.”

But let’s also not pretend that the greatest danger to our Republic at the moment is coming from Democrats. It would be a lot harder to demonize Republicans if 74 million of them hadn’t voted to re-elect a would-be autocrat and if their elected officials didn’t overwhelmingly go along with his attempt to steal the election and then exonerate his incitement of a physical attack on the seat of government.

Neither James’s piece nor Glenn Greenwald’s, which serves as the point of departure for James’s post, uses the words “slippery slope” but as I see it there are actually four different things going on in the national debate about the events of January 6 and two of them are “slippery slope” arguments.

A “slippery slope” argument in reasoning, rhetoric, or case law is an argument that one step will inevitably be followed by a chain of other steps leading to a significantly negative outcome. For example, it can be argued that the attacks on September 11, 2001 were the culmination of a several different such chains of steps (inadequate airline security, failure to respond to terrorist attacks, etc.). Probably the most famous slippery slope argument in history is the “domino theory”, an argument for the Viet Nam War. Was the domino theory right or wrong? It’s still being debated.

A slippery slope argument may be refuted if the chain of steps can be demonstrated not to occur, if there is no slippery slope.

As I noted above I think there are actually four things going on:

• Extreme right-wing groups are angry and dangerous
• Congressional leaders are pursuing the will o’ the wisp of perfect safety
• It is being argued that we are on a slippery slope to a coup of right-wing extremists
• It is being argued that we are on a slippery slope to becoming a military dictatorship

I agree that extreme right-wing groups are angry and and dangerous. They may or may not be on the rise. I think that extremist groups of all kinds and persuasions are on the rise, facilitated by social media, which makes it easier for like-minded people to find each other. In a country as large as ours there are bound to be a certain number of dangerous extremists, from actual Sig Heil-ing Nazis to anarchists to Marxist revolutionaries to violent radical Islamists to others I probably can’t even imagine. The position presently being argued by the Democratic leadership in particular is that groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are uniquely dangerous. I’m skeptical. I think they’re all dangerous but in terms of ongoing civil disorder it’s hard to match the record of the anarchists in the Pacific Northwest.

Presently our political leadership is very old—most were born before 1946. In the past I’ve observed that members of the Silent Generation tend to be very insecure, understandable under the circumstances of their early lives. When you combine that insecurity with the precautionary principle and an actual threat, it may provoke an excessive response and IMO that’s what we’ve seen.

I think the notion that we are on a slippery slope to a coupe of right-wing extremists has been refuted by events. Has it been categorically disproven? No. But events subsequent to January 6 have not seen an escalation of the threat. Those predictions have all been wrong. While a vestigial threat may remain there doesn’t appear to be a slippery slope.

I don’t think the same argument can be made about the “security state”. The best way to refute the argument that we’re on a slippery slope in that direction would be to remove the National Guard and the barbed wire from Washington, DC and stop talking about increasing domestic surveillance efforts.