In his latest Washington Post column David Ignatius remarks on the problem that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia poses for the Biden Administration:

The Biden administration wants to maintain a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, just as the Trump administration did. But any reset should address the broad bipartisan concern in Washington about Saudi human rights abuses. The bogus case against Aljabri’s children would be a good place to start.

The only problem I see is the vain attempt to have our cake and eat it too. Theocracies whether Muslim theocracies, Jewish theocracies, or Christian theocracies cannot be our friends. They can be our clients but not our allies or friends. Our interests are simply too disparate.

Via Kevin Drum (at this new digs) comes a reference to (I think) this study published at Frontiers in Immunology which suggests a genetic basis for the differing prevalences of COVID-19 in different countries:

The world is dealing with one of the worst pandemics ever. SARS-CoV-2 is the etiological agent of COVID-19 that has already spread to more than 200 countries. However, infectivity, severity, and mortality rates do not affect all countries equally. Here we consider 140 HLA alleles and extensively investigate the landscape of 3,723 potential HLA-I A and B restricted SARS-CoV-2-derived antigens and how 37 countries in the world are predicted to respond to those peptides considering their HLA-I distribution frequencies. The clustering of HLA-A and HLA-B allele frequencies partially separates most countries with the lowest number of deaths per million inhabitants from the other countries. We further correlated the patterns of in silico predicted population coverage and epidemiological data. The number of deaths per million inhabitants correlates to the predicted antigen coverage of S and N derived peptides and its module is influenced if a given set of frequent or rare HLA alleles are analyzed in a given population. Moreover, we highlighted a potential risk group carrying HLAs associated with an elevated number of deaths per million inhabitants. In addition, we identified three potential antigens bearing at least one amino acid of the four-length insertion that differentiates SARS-CoV-2 from previous coronavirus strains. We believe these data can contribute to the search for peptides with the potential to be used in vaccine strategies considering the role of herd immunity to hamper the spread of the disease. Importantly, to the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to use a populational approach in association with COVID-19 outcome.

I have been speculating for some time that who you are and where you are may be more determinative than governmental policies in the prevalence and virulence of COVID-19 within a country and this study provides additional evidence that might be the case.

That’s not to say that individual behavior or governmental policy have no effect but I think it’s important to have a clear understanding of the risks faced when formulating a policy.

I don’t know what brought these anecdotes to mind recently. I haven’t practiced judo in nearly 40 years. But I thought I’d share them. The video above is a visual aid for the first memory. The throw being demonstrated is called uki otoshi. It’s considered a “demonstration throw”—very rarely seen in competition. However, I did use it in competition in a tournament whose senior judge was a 9th degree black belt from Japan. He promoted me on the spot—being able to use the throw in competition demonstrated an understanding of the principles of judo far above my rank at the time.

And there’s a relationship between the first and second anecdotes. I’ve mellowed quite a bit over the years. In my younger days I was quite the hot dog. In another tournament I did something I’d heard described but never attempted before or seen. In competition my opponent threw me with a shoulder throw (ippon seoi nage) that was too high and too slow. I flipped in mid-air, landed on my feet, and threw him with a drop seoi-nage for the point. It was a stupid thing to do. I sprained both ankles, not fun. I still feel that sometimes. Maybe that’s what brought these anecdotes to mind.

At the Center for Strategic and International Studies Matthew Goodman identifies three “tensions” in the Biden Administration’s international economic policy:

International economics is one area of U.S. policy where there will be a clear break between the Trump and Biden eras. Whether it’s less obsession with bilateral trade deficits and tariffs, more commitment to multilateral problem-solving, or a more disciplined policymaking process, the Biden administration’s approach will be markedly different from that of its predecessor. But there are three aspects of international economic policy in which President Biden’s impulses appear to pull in conflicting directions. Unless these tensions are reconciled, there is a risk that this important area of policy will get bogged down in the new administration.

The tensions he highlights are between

• Domestic and international economic priorities
• The new administration’s aversion to traditional trade negotiations and its desire to reestablish U.S. leadership in the Indo-Pacific region
• Confronting and engaging with China

On the first unless the Biden Administration is drastically unlike every post-war administration international economic priorities will be overwhelmed not just by domestic ones but by domestic political considerations. On the second I sincerely hope that the Biden Administration doesn’t believe in the trope of U. S. leadership too strongly. To be a leader you must have followers and the U. S. hasn’t been a leader in the Asia-Pacific area or European one for a half century at least.

On the third Mr. Goodman makes an error all too common among American commentators: failing to recognize that the Chinese have a vote. I think that the Chinese have the initiative in whether the U. S. posture with respect to China is one of confrontation or engagement. I don’t believe the Biden Administration will be able to choose.

And what of energy and environmental policies? I think that there’s a fundamental tension between achieving the Biden Administration’s objective of international followership in reducing omissions and reviving the U. S. economy. What about that?

Tyler Cowen does not think highly of a federal $15 minimum wage:

Do you think Puerto Rico should be a state? Should they have a $15 minimum wage too? Come on. Yes, it is easy enough to make an exception for them, and by the way the median manufacturing wage in Mississippi is below $15 as well. Rinse and repeat.

I am sorry to speak in such terms, but the reality is that an allied cabal of activists and left-wing economists have combined on social media to insist on a particular approach to minimum wage economics and to bully those who disagree.

Ask yourself a simple question: were any of them calling for a temporary two-year cut in the minimum wage for restaurants and small businesses during a devastating pandemic? If not, are they really carrying forward the banner of science?

As I’ve said I don’t believe that pressing for a $15 minimum wage is a serious policy. I think its real purpose is to punish Red States, much in the way that limiting the deductibility of state and local taxes punishes Blue States.

The policy that we really need is one that will generate a large number of jobs that are worth paying $15 or more an hour and that can be filled by ordinary Americans. Take a gander at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s monthly sitrep. The bulk of the jobs we’ve been creating for years have been minimum wage jobs and many of those have vanished during the business lockdowns. You may legislate a wage but you can’t make every job worth paying $15/hour.

I don’t view the vanishing of so many minimum wage jobs as a bad thing but I don’t see how it comports with imposing no limits on the number of people with limited English and few marketable (legal) skills.

Here in Chicago we’re off to a bad start. In 2020 homicides outstripped any year of recent memory other than 2017 and we’re already on a path to outdo 2017’s sorry total. There have been 39 homicides so far this month and the month isn’t over yet.

In 2020 the number of carjackings doubled over the previous year. We’ve already had 160 so far this year. ABC 7 Chicago reports:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Chicago’s public safety committee called for several city and council leaders to testify Friday to explain what they are doing to keep people safe from the surge in carjackings.

More than 160 carjackings have been committed since the beginning of this year, according to police. In 2020, carjackings more than doubled over the previous year as police set up a task force to tackle the issue.

“Women are being snatched out of the car. Grandmothers are being snatched out of the car,” said community activist Andrew Holmes.

Police said armed thieves are terrorizing drivers parked in their cars and stopped at lights, rideshare drivers picking up and dropping off passengers. The crimes are accumulating so fast, police can’t possibly keep up.

Many of the carjackers are teens. No one knows for sure whether they’re just doing it for kicks, there are organized carjacking rings, or some other explanation or several all at once. Judging by the map here, the carjackings are concentrated in a few neighborhood and there’s a strong correlation between the start of stay-at-home orders due to COVID-19 and the upswing in carjackings. If, as is suggested, the reason for the increase is boredom, it will be darned hard for the Chicago police to bring it under control.

And if they don’t bring it under control soon there are several possible risks. One risk is that people will leave Chicago at an even faster rate. The other is that people will start to prepare for carjackings.

Andrew Sullivan remarks on Joe Biden’s week:

He is lucky, in many ways, to succeed Trump. Any normal inauguration would feel transcendent after the sack of the capitol. The Covid19 pandemic is cresting as the economy keeps sinking — all of which can easily be blamed on Trump. But, looking forward, vaccinations are finally gaining momentum and the spurt of economic growth this summer and fall is likely to be any president’s dream. The psychological effects of surviving a plague year also tend to be extremely positive, if history tells us anything. People are also exhausted from the melodrama and psychological abuse the last guy put us through. In politics, timing is everything. And Biden has it.

If Biden’s team meaningfully accelerates the pace of vaccination, he will be rewarded handily, as he should be. (He’s already lowering expectations, to maximize any political pay-off.) If he’s capable of passing an economic stimulus that can mitigate some of the extreme social and economic inequality this teetering republic labors under, rescue and grow the economy and help innovate and expand non-carbon energy sources, ditto. These are clear, measurable tasks that most non-ideologues can heartily support. So too would be a fuller extension of universal access to healthcare, via an Obamacare public option, if they can squeak that through the evenly divided Senate.

These are sane, sensible, center-left policies with majority support. He should make his explanations of these policies simple and clear. If he wins some of these battles this year, he would move the country lastingly leftward. Stick to them, and the politics takes care of itself.

But Joe Biden has also shown this week that his other ambitions are much more radical. On immigration, he is way to Obama’s left, proposing a mass amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants, a complete moratorium on deportations, and immediate revocation of the bogus emergency order that allowed Trump to bypass Congress and spend money building his wall. Fine, I guess. But without very significant addition of border controls as a deterrent, this sends a signal to tens of millions in Central to South America to get here as soon as possible. Biden could find, very quickly, that the “unity” he preaches will not survive such an effectively open-borders policy, or another huge crisis at the border. He is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.

I’m even more critical. I think that there are serious internal contradictions in the policies he advocates. You can effect one of them but that will nullify the others. And in the present political climate partially effecting any policy is no better than doing nothing at all. Worse even.

Glenn Greenwald has noticed that Enlightenment values are truly under attack if not moribund, using the recent experience of punditlet Will Wilkikson as an example:

Will Wilkinson is about as mainstream and conventional a thinker as one can find, and is unfailingly civil and restrained in his rhetoric. But yesterday, he was fired by the technocratic centrist think tank for which he worked, the Niskanen Center, and appears on the verge of being fired as well by The New York Times, where he is a contributing writer. This multi-pronged retribution is due to a single tweet that was obviously satirical and sarcastic and for which he abjectly apologized. But no matter: the tweet has been purposely distorted into something malevolent and the prevailing repressive climate weaponized it against him.

Neither Wilkinson nor his tweet are particularly interesting. What merits attention here is the now-pervasive climate that fostered this tawdry episode, and which has unjustly destroyed countless reputations and careers with no sign of slowing down.

He duly notes that cancellation is not the sole province of the left:

The perception that this is some sort of exclusively left-wing tactic is untrue. Recall in 2003, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, Natalie Maines, uttered this utterly benign political comment at a concert in London: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” In response, millions joined a boycott of their music, radio stations refused to play their songs, Bush supporters burned their albums, and country star Toby Keith performed in front of a gigantic image of Maines standing next to Saddam Hussein, as though her opposition to the war meant she admired the Iraqi dictator.

and concludes:

Unleash this monster and one day it will come for you. And you’ll have no principle to credibly invoke in protest when it does. You’ll be left with nothing more than lame and craven pleading that your friends do not deserve the same treatment as your enemies. Force, not principle, will be the sole factor deciding the outcome.

If you’re lucky enough to have important and famous media friends like Will Wilkinson, you have a chance to survive it. Absent that, you have none.

Read the whole thing.

I find myself in a rapidly shrinking and miserable group, people who with Voltaire may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it, who believe in treating others, all others, with consideration and respect to the greatest degree that we can, and believe in exemplifying in their own behavior the behavior they wish to see in others. I have no idea of how to persuade others to those views other than to continue to do my best to exemplify them.

Via The Moderate Voice comes this piece at Reuters by Ned Parker and Chad Terhune on the CDC’s fumbles during the pandemic:

Critics have widely asserted that the CDC fumbled key decisions during the coronavirus scourge because then-President Donald Trump and his administration meddled in the agency’s operations and muzzled internal experts. The matter is now the subject of a congressional inquiry. Yet Reuters has found new evidence that the CDC’s response to the pandemic also was marred by actions – or inaction – by the agency’s career scientists and frontline staff.

At a crucial moment in the pandemic when Americans were quarantined after possible exposure to the virus abroad, the agency declined or resisted potentially valuable opportunities to study whether the disease could be spread by those without symptoms, according to previously undisclosed internal emails, other documents and interviews with key players.

[…]

“Yes, they were interfered with politically,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, referring to alleged meddling by the Trump administration. “But that’s not the only reason CDC didn’t perform optimally during COVID-19. There are a lot of things that went wrong.”

Four top public health experts or ethicists told Reuters that the question of whether to test or engage in research on detained people has always been a sensitive topic. But all said the CDC should have proceeded given the fast-moving public health emergency.

Moreover, the CDC finalized rules in 2017 providing that medical testing was expressly allowed in quarantine, as long as participants were given the opportunity to give “informed consent” or opt out. Informed consent means giving people adequate information to understand the risks and benefits of a test or procedure.

I’m open to the idea that political interference is the source of the problem but I’d like to see evidence more concrete than OMB. I’m also open to the possibility that the CDC is underfunded but this graph suggests otherwise:

which does tend to support an observation I’ve made before: when you cap the supply and increase willingness to pay the foreseeable consequence is that wages will increase.

I’m beginning to think that the real problem was that we had the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong things in the wrong way and we didn’t notice until there was a crisis.