Comic Lou Perez expresses dismay in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal at being labelled “far right”:

I’ve been put on a list and not a good one. It isn’t the Hollywood Reporter’s Next Gen Class of 2020 or Forbes’s 30 Under 30—forget the accolade; I’d take being under-30 again. That would be so much better for my career than where I am now: a comedian approaching 39, who finds his work labeled “far-right” in an academic paper titled “Evaluating the scale, growth, and origins of right-wing echo chambers on YouTube.”

Although I’m not mentioned by name, if you turn to the last page of the preprint paper—which has yet to be peer-reviewed or submitted to a journal—you’ll see the words “We the Internet TV” huddled among other supposedly far-right YouTube channels. I was head writer and producer of We the Internet TV before my position was eliminated in October. For five years I was responsible for making hundreds of videos about current events, politics and culture. I was an equal-opportunity offender. Our comedy channel made fun of everybody—left, right, center.

I think he’s missing the point. When moderates and even progressives are being called “far right” it tells you more about the person doing the calling than it does about the called. People tend to make their assessments of where others stand politically relative to where they stand themselves. Most people are centrists in their own minds. If soemone calls progressives “far right”, what can you conclude about the political views of the individual making the determination?

The editors of the Washington Post are concerned that only 10% of the number of inoculations that they expected have actually been administered:

UNLIKE WITH other botched aspects of the pandemic response this year, such as the shortages of diagnostic testing kits and personal protective equipment, the Trump administration has had months to plan for the massive rollout of a vaccine. The officials at Operation Warp Speed knew the nation required a logistics effort never before attempted. Yet instead of warp speed, the rollout has begun at a saunter. It must be accelerated.

Contrary to promises from the chief adviser to the operation, Moncef Slaoui, that 20 million Americans would be immunized in December, the month ends with only about 2 million shots given and 11 million shipped to the states. As Post contributing columnist Leana S. Wen pointed out, at this rate it will take about 10 years to reach 80 percent of Americans with two doses. Over and over again, the administration’s promises have turned out to be as reliable as President Trump’s claim the virus would just go away.

They are confident that President Joe Biden will solve the problem:

By contrast, President-elect Joe Biden reaffirmed on Tuesday his promise to deliver 100 million shots in his first 100 days, ramping up the current pace by five or six times. It is a tall order, but Mr. Biden at least has the right ambition.

The only actual suggestion they make is a dashboard for monitoring how many inoculations have been administered which as far as I can tell would do nothing to administer more inoculations but would handily solve the WaPo’s problem by making it easier to determine how many people had received inoculations. I would be interested in hearing what they think that President Biden would do.

To my ear this sounds at least in part like a “last mile problem”, something familiar to people knowledgeable about telecommunications or supply chain management. The last mile problem is the challenge of getting goods or services to the end customer. Doing that is inherently inefficient. You can only amortize the cost of a cable or wire or delivery that serves one customer over the life of that customer or, in the case or a delivery, over that single vend.

I think there’s some synergy (or actually dysergy I guess) between this point and the observation I highlighted by William Galston yesterday about the value of federal-state or federal-state-private collaborations. Last mile problems are characteristic of centralization—the more centralized a process the more likely they are to encounter last mile problems.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines present special challenges due to their special handling requirements. Due to those we can’t just rely on local Walgreens, CVSes, or Oscos for distribution. AFAICT the only actual solution would be to turn the entire process over the military. They’re the only institution with the necessary infrastructure, culture, logistical ability, and discipline to carry it off. I can see two approaches for doing that:

1. Governors can call out the National Guard to administer the inoculations. I can see how President Trump has been remiss in not warning governors of the challenges ahead.
2. President Trump can declare martial law and use the active duty military. Do the editors really want that?

The pictures of long lines of people waiting for their inoculations and stories of schedules being promulgated to tell people when their inoculations are scheduled suggest that the problem is not one of finding people to inoculate but in administering the inoculations. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests to me that under a best case scenario it would take more than 5 million man-hours to perform the necessary inoculations. That’s a sizeable dedication of resources.

The editors of the Washington Post are unhappy with the relief package enacted by the Congress and signed into law by President Trump:

As we have previously pointed out, there was a case for including modest “checks” to the hardest-hit, low-income segment of the population. In the $908 billion stimulus it did pass, however, Congress went well beyond that, providing $600 payments that will send up to $3,000 for families of five earning as much as $150,000 — and at least a few dollars to those earning up to $210,000, before phasing out entirely. The bill does this while extending unemployment benefits a mere 11 weeks. In short, the measure short-shrifted the neediest and showered billions on people who suffered little or no lasting hardship from the pandemic. This, at a time when the economy has healed significantly and coronavirus vaccinations are underway — unlike the chaotic days of April, when Congress sent checks (of only $1,200) to help people cope with economic free fall.

What do they think of the $2,000 checks that have been proposed?

Yet a just-passed House bill would compound all of those errors by increasing the $600 payment to $2,000, at a total cost of $464 billion. It would phase out completely only for families of five earning above $350,000. Much of this is going to be saved, not spent, since restaurants are closed and air travel limited. The resources would be far better spent, in terms of both economic equity and economic growth, on longer extension of unemployment benefits, aid to state and local governments, and vaccines.

But if the $2,000 payout is a bad idea, it is a bad idea whose time has come because of politics, not economics. President Trump deserves primary blame, by criticizing the initial $600 per-person version as too small and threatening to veto the stimulus bill. That created an opening for Democrats in Congress, who seek to exploit the proposal’s simplistic appeal to help their party’s two candidates in Georgia’s Jan. 5 Senate runoff.

Especially wrongheaded in this regard is the progressive left, spearheaded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who depicts the $2,000 as aid to “desperate” Americans despite the huge amounts destined for perfectly comfortable families. Then again, Republican would-be populists such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) made common cause with Mr. Sanders; and now at least one other GOP politician with presidential ambitions, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), has jumped on the bandwagon, as have the two Republican Senate candidates in Georgia.

Three points. First, that’s what politicians do. Policies are crafted to a) follow the prevailing wisdom; b) be easy to administer; c) not get pushback. Second, every single member of the House who voted for the larger payouts either just won their re-election campaigns or won’t be serving next session. They have absolutely nothing to lose.

Third, if you want something more targeted, it’s got to be done at the state or local level. The federal governments doesn’t have its ear that close to the ground.

If you’re interested in the history of the development of the various institutions that comprise the apparat of the European Union, by all means read this piece by Perry Anderson at the London Review of Books. Here’s a snippet:

The Union, as we know it today, is a complex composed of five principal institutions: the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Central Bank. A consideration of these can begin with the term conventionally encompassing the story of their development, ‘European integration’. This came from America, as Patel has shown, and was adopted to avoid another term too pointed for tactical purposes in the politics of the 1950s. The word it replaced was ‘federation’, rejected by governments and what interested opinion then existed, if ardently espoused by a small but committed minority of activists. For them and their academic sympathisers, ‘integration’ supplied a more neutral term for progress towards an ideal best kept, for time being, in petto.

If you’re not interested in such minutiae, you’ll find it mind-numbingly dull, so I’ll provide a dissenting view. The purpose of the various institutions of the EU is to provide congenial berths for bureaucrats and the European Union itself and most especially the euro are actually stalking horses for the Germanization of the Continent. It’s the continuation of war by other means. Here’s a telling passage from the piece:

For Claus Offe, on the left, it is clear that ‘the euro has rendered European democratic capitalism more capitalistic and less democratic,’ disembedding financial markets from states and exposing states to their vicissitudes, in a system that Offe judges no more favourably, if for opposite reasons, than Bolkestein. ‘The euro under the ECB’s regime over-generalises monetary policy across widely diverging economies and their given position in the business cycle. Instead of “one size fits all” we are left with a situation where “one size fits none” due to the institutional incapacity of monetary policy to respond to the specifics of countries and their situations.’ No sooner has he casually said this, however, than he soberly retracts it. For there is one country of which this judgment does not hold: his own. Given the huge advantages that Germany derives from the euro, Offe writes,

any conceivable German government will do everything in its power to keep the common currency intact by avoiding the default of any member of the Euro club. For this currency allows the German government to live in an ideal world where pleasure is not followed by regret, meaning that an export surplus is not followed, and its continuation thus limited, by the appreciation of the currency of the country.

Matters are otherwise, of course, on the receiving end of such appreciation. The Southern and Eastern belt of states are paying the price of a misconceived currency union that cannot now be reversed. Even if ‘the introduction of the euro into a fundamentally flawed currency zone was a huge mistake, the same applies by now simply to undoing that mistake,’ since the dissolution of the Eurozone would be ‘equivalent to a tsunami of economic as well as political regression’. Hence the ‘trap’ Europe is in – it can neither move forwards, nor backwards.

The problems of Southern and Eastern Europe and not, as the Germans would have it, that its people are lazy wastrels but that it is drastically undercapitalized. Greece, in particular, continues to suffer the consequences of centuries of Ottoman control. That can’t be solved by selling them German goods but it can be solved by German investment in those countries. That’s what would have happened without the euro. Given the euro, it’s politically impossible in Germany.

I catch the same whiff of quiet desperation in Mickey Kaus’s recent piece in Newsweek:

For liberals, this should be especially terrifying–most crucially for backers of “Medicare for All” and other ambitious health plans. I think I’m one of them — I’ve always supported some kind of universal, national health insurance. Medicare seems like a program that works–why not expand it? Claims from conservatives that this gives government too much power have always seemed like a rote application of abstract dogma. Did Medicare — run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — have too much power? Hard to see how. There’s no obvious rationing. No death panels. Of course there are always worries about cost-cutting, and the insidious culture of “good death,” including creepy end-of-life maneuvers (like the UKs infamous Liverpool Pathway). Yet we could seemingly rely on voter demand for care to overhwelm lugubrious proponents of medical austerity.

But what happened last week was not abstract: The near-hijacking of a universal medical instiution, and a potential denial of care, not in the name of budget-cutting but in the name of two-wrongs-make-up-for-racism social justice. Fight it and you’re not just self-interested and wrong. You’re self-interested and wrong and racist.

Where’ll this line of argument crop up next? Do I have to worry that in the future, when I’m wheeled into the ER, some Ivy League bioethicist will have decided I’m too white to get care? Or — further up the medical supply chain — that valuable medicines won’t even be developed because’If the government paid for this procedure it would save lives, but they would not be diverse lives …’

If you thought Woke CDC was bad, wait till you see Woke CMS.

Yes, I’m quite paranoid about this, for good reasons. Put crudely, our colleges have been churning out these Woke folk for many years now. They’ve infiltrated themselves into every institution of society — including the state, apparently– where they reward each other with tenure and civil service protections. They’ll be hard to root out! You can’t fire a civil servant without months, or years, of due process. Even then you can’t fire them just because their loony views clash with the policies endorsed by the voters. That would violate the First Amendment! (See Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347). Now I know how Joe McCarthy felt.

Here’s his conclusion:

If you’re a Big Government liberal, you want to strangle the Woke baby in the bathtub, before it grows up to thoroughly undermine public support for finishing the great Democratic project (including universal health care, but also ending exclusionary zoning and stratified schooling, providing a safe environment, etc.).

Biden’s not ‘the perfect man for the job’–that would be 1992’s Bill Clinton. (Ask Sister Souljah.) But Biden’s a solid candidate. He’s already pushed back against the left wing of his party on Medicare for All, and more recently on immigration– where he contradicted his whole campaign pitch by suddenly worrying, post election, about “two million people on our border” trying to get in. There are signs he’s ready to do the same thing on the HUD “fair housing” plan that Trump warned would “destroy our suburbs.”

It’s not hard to see Biden drawing the line at Woke. He’s not typically mealy-mouthed about such things. ‘C’mon man.,’ he might say. ‘That’s not what this is about.’ It wouldn’t exactly be a Souljah moment — and it would be far more effective if some woke bioethicist were slam-dunked, Souljah-style. (May I suggest Harald Schmidt?) But it’s a start, and it could be enough — especially if it were coupled with a less-publicized plan to keep the Woken out of government.

We’re told Biden doesn’t have a “vision.” He doesn’t. We’re told he doesn’t have an ideology. He doesn’t. But he has a public image, which is that he’s a middle-class guy in the center who knows what he doesn’t like — and he doesn’t like departures from common sense. In this initial, breath-gathering post-Trump moment, that might do as a Vision Substitute. It’s not asking not what your country can do for you or having a dream or a shining city on a hill or “as Americans that is not enough we must be equal in the eyes of each other.” It’s just “C’mon man.” Like Biden, it might do.

Now make the same argument for Kamala Harris.

If it were a dozen years ago, Mickey might be onto something but I’m not sure that the Joe Biden of today has enough energy or acuity to stand up to the torrent of demands from “Wokedom” that will be coming his way.

I can only repeat the question I’ve asked before: the center of what? If, as I suspect, President-Elect Biden has remained steadfastly in the center of the Democratic Party, to Mickey’s dismay inch by inch he’ll embrace “Wokeness” since their influence in the Democratic Party is increasing not remaining the same or decreasing.

There’s another reason that “the Woke” should frighten progressives like Mickey. From their point of view he’s an apostate and for such radicals apostates are worse than infidels. He and other progressives will be the first to be cancelled.

In his most recent Wall Street Journal column William A. Galston posts a manifesto of sorts:

I am a liberal because I believe that the liberal understanding of what needs to be done is preferable to the conservative understanding. But as a liberal, I must remain open to the possibility that the evidence will prove me wrong. I believe that many conservatives share this view.

Recall the words of Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Reagan never said that government would be the wrong response to every future crisis. He spoke of the problems the country faced as he took office 40 years ago.

As a liberal, I believe that government inspired by past successes but chastened by past failures is essential for addressing the crises of the present. I don’t see how the equal protection of the laws can be guaranteed to all without government action that secures rights and rights wrongs. I don’t see how opportunity can be equal without a government that guarantees education and training for all and ensures that discrimination doesn’t close the doors of opportunity for some. I do not see how the general welfare can be promoted without collective action to abate ills that individuals acting on their own cannot address.

Government doesn’t always mean the federal government. Nor does it mean government alone. It means levels of government, often in partnership with private industry and civil society. As a new president takes office, how best to do this is the debate we should be having.

I find that the views expressed above are pretty congruent with my own. Not identical, certainly, but not completely incompatible, either. I consider myself neither a liberal nor a conservative although both liberalism and conservatism inform my views. Perhaps it has escaped Mr. Galston’s notice but nearly all liberals are over 70 and most are over 80. Progressives are not liberals. Just to cite a one example of the difference, you will struggle to find favorable mentions of subsidiarity, the notion that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Quite to the contrary progressives tend to favor government action by the federal government preferentially. Who supports a truly Canadian-style single payer system administered and supported by the states? Not progressives, certainly.

While I’m on the subject, conservatives are few and far between these days as well. Now they’re called “paleocons” with most in their 70s or 80s.

Back to the subject “the Woke” are emphatically not liberals, either. They’re not even progressive. They don’t control the reins of power in the Democratic Party (yet) but they’re certainly getting the bulk of the attention these days and may well hold the “commanding heights” of the political discourse through their influence in universities, the media, and large technology firms.

Maybe I’m seeing something that isn’t there in Mr. Galston’s piece but I catch a small scent of the dog who caught the car in it. I’ll return to that in my next post.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal highlight an important question:

In a 2020 campaign with little foreign policy substance, the idea Joe Biden mentioned most was restoring alliances. Which alliances? With Mr. Biden’s inauguration less than four weeks away, some allies in the Asia-Pacific are apprehensive.

Last week Japan’s number-two civilian defense official told Reuters: “We are concerned China will expand its aggressive stance into areas other than Hong Kong. I think one of the next targets, or what everyone is worried about, is Taiwan.”

Yasuhide Nakayama added: “So far, I haven’t yet seen a clear policy or an announcement on Taiwan from Joe Biden. I would like to hear it quickly, then we can also prepare our response on Taiwan in accordance.” He also asked, according to Reuters, “How will Joe Biden in the White House react in any case if China crosses this red line?”

We’ll need to wait a while for President Biden’s answer. It will not be easy. We cannot be everyone’s friend. We cannot simultaneously be China’s friend, Taiwan’s friend, and Japan’s friend. I’m not sure anyone can be China’s friend other than China.

I agree broadly with Rodney Stevens’s thoughts, as expressed in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. After outlining his experiences of growing up in South Carolina in the 1960s he proposes:

First, every life matters. Mine is not one cell more or less valuable than anyone else’s. That this idea has to be debated or defended is lunacy.

Second, racism still exists but it is no longer systemic. Those who claim that racism is everywhere today are delusional.

Third, we tend to think too highly of our individuality. My color, weight, sex and sexual orientation are four of the least interesting things about me. I am a Southerner and love Southern food. Now that is interesting.

Fourth, policemen have to be held accountable for their actions, as is being done more and more.

Fifth, do what law enforcement officers ask you to do. Obviously that won’t solve every problem because policemen are humans, not angels. But that’s part of life. Simply doing what the people in blue ask you to do would drastically reduce needless confrontations, injuries and deaths.

Sixth, if you must talk about race, be gracious and respectful. Discussions about it shouldn’t be antagonistic—one’s race isn’t a choice, after all—but for some reason many popular figures insist on making the subject as unpleasant as possible.

The one quibble I have is that I don’t think that “those who claim that racism is everywhere” are delusional. I think they’ve been radicalized with respect to race. When one has been radicalized with respect to race you inevitably see race as underpinning everything. If you don’t get an “A” in a class, it’s not because you didn’t know the material or didn’t work hard enough, it’s because of your race. A girl won’t go out with you? It’s because of your race. Didn’t get a promotion? Race. That’s the nature of being radicalized with respect to race.

The problem with radicalization is that, since, as Plato observed a couple of millennia ago, the essential virtue in a republic is moderation and radicalization cannot be reconciled with moderation, it is incompatible with living in a republic. That’s the crossroads at which we have arrived.

I found this op-ed by Robert M. Kaplan and Dominick L. Frosch in the Wall Street Journal interesting and informative. In it the author question the approach being used to promote getting inoculated against SARS-CoV-2:

The current communication strategy—built on listening to advice from trusted leaders—is paternalistic and outdated. Public-health authorities, politicians, sports heroes and celebrities are taking to the airwaves to tout the vaccines. Protecting people from doubt is central to the strategy. That entails suppressing questions rather than answering them. Any hint about vaccine imperfections could make people apprehensive and must be avoided. Anyone who rejects the vaccine is stigmatized as foolish and irresponsible.

A better approach to persuasion is to assume you’re speaking to mature, self-interested decision makers, offer transparent and comprehensive information about the risks and benefits of the vaccine, and engage patients in the decision-making process. Many medical treatments require consideration of the balance between harms and benefits. Over the past 40 years the practice of medicine has evolved to embrace a process known as shared medical decision-making, in which physicians provide patients with the best scientific information about benefits and risks, and patients make decisions in collaboration with their doctors, which balance their personal preferences with imperfect science and uncertain risks. The same decision isn’t right for everyone.

While I agree in general terms that honesty is the best policy and that treating people like adults is generally a better practice, I’m not convinced that we can inoculate enough of the population using that approach to accomplish the presumed objective. Is it possible to adjust the approach to the individual rather than “one size fits all”? A substantial proportion of the population we want to get inoculated will be below average intelligence. Not only does the appetite for risk vary from person to person but the actual risks vary from person to person.

My siblings and I routinely experience rare side effects when we take medications. We just assume that we’re built differently from most people. That won’t stop me from getting inoculated if it’s offered to me, if only to reduce the likelihood of my wife’s contracting the disease.

I found this analysis interesting:

Isn’t avoiding Covid-19 worth these minor discomforts and small risks? That question isn’t so simple either. Articles about the vaccines imply that it raises your likelihood of avoiding infection from zero to 95%. That’s not factually correct. The Pfizer trial observed eight Covid-19 cases among 18,198 people who received the vaccine within two months of completing their second shot, an infection rate of 0.04%. Of the 18,325 volunteers who got the placebo 162, or 0.88%, got Covid. Less than 1% of each group became infected, but among those who got sick, 95% were in the placebo group.

For sure, the vaccines are highly efficacious. But some vaccinated people will still get infected. The 0.04% rate from the study would translate to 80,000 Covid cases among 200 million people vaccinated. In practice, wide immunity in the population would mean fewer actual infections, but it’s important to prepare the public for the likelihood that a few vaccinated people will still get sick.

I find it gratifying that presumably well-informed and knowledgeable individuals are making observations very much along the lines that I have.