I am seeing a remarkable number of delusional recommendations in major media outlets. One example was the idea in an op-ed in the New York Times that we should be able to put the economy “on hold”. Spoken like someone who is independently wealthy, has a significant pool of savings, or gets paid whether they work or not. That accounts for, what? 1% of the population? .1% of the population? Even for them were the economy to be “put on hold”, they’d starve to death. What we need to do is to find a way of making political responses to problems more workable.

Or, this piece in the Washington Post: “Think about getting vaccinated like voting. It’s your civic duty.” Let’s do a little reality check. In the 2020 primaries voter turnout ranged from a low of under 3% to a high of 45%. Here in Illinois it was 25%. That won’t cut it for inoculations against SARS-CoV-2. 90% of people speed so that’s not a good analogy, either. How about “think of it like paying your taxes”. Almost 90% of people who actually owe taxes do that.

What should I speculate? That people who write for major media outlets lead very sheltered lives?

At the blog of the Council on Foreign Relations James Lindsay predicts the five big foreign policy stories of 2021:

1. COVID-19
2. Joe Biden
3. An increasingly aggressive China
4. The global economy
5. The decline of democracies

He could be right and those are all important stories but something tells me that only the first will make it into the top five foreign policy stories. Among the things that list ignores are

• The likelihood of a major war, civil or otherwise, breaking out
• Further developments in the Middle East
• Major terrorist attack in a developed country
• A resurgence of mass migration into the developed world
• China or some other country lands a human being on the moon
• North Korea or some other country detonates a nuclear weapon
• Natural disaster
• Other man-made disaster, e.g. famine

any of which would push other stories out of the news.

Yogi Berra may not have said it but the Danish politician Karl Kristian Steincke certainly did: prediction is hard, especially about the future. What will the big foreign policy stories of 2021 be?

I’ll take pleas like this one by Alexander Zaitchik at The New Republic/i> for less economic growth, for the sake of the planet, of course:

Systems scientists and ecological economists have been warning for decades that degrowth is not a political decision that can be put off indefinitely, but a matter of throughput math and physics. The choice before us is the form we will allow degrowth to take—humane and controlled collective action and transformation, or chaotic civilizational tailspin, crash, and ruin.

more seriously when advocates in this country stop flying around in private jets, stop hosting lavish dinners at The French Laundry, take public transportation, stop wearing imported clothing, and stop drinking imported wines and Scotch whisky.

Malthusians have been making statements like those since Thomas Malthus first made them at the end of the 18th century. Since then more human misery has been alleviated by continuing economic growth than in the previous 10,000 years all of that despite Malthus’s incorrect predictions. These predictions have been repeated again and again and they have always been wrong. Inductive reasoning strongly suggests they will be wrong again.

If they had been right, when deposits of obsidian had been exhausted, we would have all died. That happened about 7,000 years ago.

Now they’re saying that they’ve identified the remains of the individual who set off the bomb in downtown Nashville, that it was a guy obsessed with a conspiracy theory about 5G, and that he was working alone. All of that ties in pretty well with the speculations I wrote about yesterday. We may never really know.

Here’s Scott Gottlieb’s assessment of our struggle in the coming year with SARS-CoV-2 in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

The virus is likely to become endemic, meaning it will continue to circulate but at a much lower level than the epidemic. If we are prudent, next fall could look like an especially virulent flu season in which the vaccines are a poor match. Most of the activities Americans enjoy will resume, though some of them will require precautions.

That starts with changes in the way people go to work. It should be frowned upon to come to work sick and try to “brave out” a cold. Testing for flu and Covid will be widespread with home tests. Many people may still prefer to wear masks in public venues, but they won’t be required. We will be more mindful of ventilation indoors and crowds in confined spaces.

These steps will have benefits that go beyond Covid. They’ll also slow the spread of other respiratory infections—including influenza, which exacts a huge toll each year. The flu caused more than 40 million symptomatic illnesses and 650,000 hospitalizations in the 2018-19 season, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A 2018 study in the journal Vaccine estimates the economic damage, including reduced productivity, at $11.2 billion a year. That figure may be conservative; some models say the burden is up to $87 billion annually.

The priorities for next year will be to pass out vaccines widely, hopefully with all Americans eligible by the spring, while continuing to collect information on safety and benefits. It will also be essential to provide easy access to vaccination—preparing drugstores to offer the Covid vaccine like flu shots. If a high percentage of the most vulnerable populations are vaccinated, that would sharply reduce Covid risk. The benefits will be even greater if, as hoped, vaccines don’t merely reduce the risk of severe symptoms but also reduce the chance of being infected and spreading it around.

The coming year will be an adjustment to a new normal. Society won’t return to its 2019 strategy for handling respiratory pathogens, but that isn’t a bad thing. The pandemic response has been plagued by a vocal minority that dismissed Covid’s risks and fought measures like masks. That posture of defiance will have to change for a semblance of normal to return in 2021. But with sensible measures, medicines and vaccines, Covid can be turned into a manageable risk.

I think that’s a best case scenario. More likely will be that fewer than 10 million people will be inoculated by the end of 2020 (half as many as predicted—I’ve heard that the number inoculated to date may be as few as 2 million) and that both production of vaccines and inoculations will lag behind the predictions made to date. It’s possible that inoculations won’t be available to “all Americans” until July or even later.

Questions that I can’t answer include how long will Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines remain the only vaccines even to receive emergency use authorization in the U. S.? Are Pfizer and Modern really able to produce their vaccines at the rate they’ve promised? And will issues that arise as more people are inoculated impede the deployment of the vaccines?

As I’ve said before, my experience in life has been that when you see the light at the end of the tunnel it is generally an oncoming train.

I think that if anything Dominic Green understates our issues with Europe in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1945, most of Europe was nothing but rubble. By 1990 Western Europe had remade itself under American supervision and protection. The EU has since expanded to 27 states and sought to secure a place as an independent node in a multipolar world.

Strategic competition with the U.S. is a natural part of that effort. As Sweden’s then-Prime Minister Goran Persson said in June 2001, the EU is “one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to U.S. world domination.”

To develop that “balance,” France and Germany have cultivated strategic relationships with Russia, Iran and China. Britain has sought to balance its commitments to its European neighbors and its American patron, while being critical of Russia, equivocal on Iran and accommodating to China.

While the U.S. pushes for economic decoupling from China, Germany continues its strategic decoupling from the U.S. Germany, the biggest European investor in China, is open to Chinese 5G technology even though France and Britain have become skeptical. In November Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, was acclaiming Mr. Biden as a “committed transatlanticist.” At the same time, Angela Merkel was promising Xi Jinping that she would complete the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment by the end of the year. Ms. Merkel also remains committed to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia, which is nearly complete and would, a bipartisan consensus in Congress believes, damage Europe’s energy independence.

concluding

The Biden administration will claim that it has restored the old amity with Europe, but the EU’s new world is what it is: a growing strategic problem for the U.S., in which historic partners claim to be allies but act as they choose.

The Europeans, the Germans in particular, are fine with the U. S. as long as the U. S. pursues German and European interests at the expense of its own. Otherwise not so much. How is the euro in U. S. interests? How was German reunification in U. S. interests? How was bombing Serbia in U. S. interests? How was the round of NATO expansion that began during the Clinton Administration and concluded during the George W. Bush administration in U. S. interests? How was Germany’s routinely not living up to its NATO spending commitments in U. S. interests? How was ignoring Germany’s collusion with Iran in Iran’s nuclear development program in U. S. interests? I can see how all of those are in Germany’s interests but not ours or, indeed, in Europe’s.

How was removing Moammar Qaddafi in Libya in U. S. interests? I can see how that was in the UK and France’s interests but not ours. For the last 60 years we have routinely pursued other countries foreign policy interests, frequently at the expense of our own. Of course the Europeans like it that way. Why sh9ould we?

How can we credibly complain about China’s violations of the human rights of the Tibetans, Uyghurs, other ethnic minorities, and even the Han Chinese while the Europeans react to them with a wink and a nod?

If you haven’t heard about the bombing that took place in downtown Nashville yesterday, James’s post on it at Outside the Beltway should get you up to speed on what’s known about it at this point while this Twitter thread provides some pretty fair analysis.

I wanted to toss out a few speculations. It could be that the explosion was the work of a nutcase and its purpose will remain a mystery. The only rational explanation I can come up with is that it was a probing attack of communications infrastructure. If that’s the case we should expect more similar attacks that exploit what has been learned from this attack to make it even more effective.

Thoughts?

In his most recent Washington Post column Josh Rogin is outraged about China’s using the same techniques it has employed against its Uyghur population against Tibetans:

Beijing has forced more than half a million rural Tibetans into these military-style training and indoctrination facilities in just the past six months, Sangay said. Upon their release, thousands of rural laborers are sent to perform factory work or menial jobs in other parts of China, all under the guise of “poverty alleviation,” according to a September report by the Jamestown Foundation. Corroborating documents obtained by Reuters showed that Chinese Communist Party officials were given strict quotas for how many Tibetans to round up.

While Beijing has long operated gulags for political prisoners and dissidents in Tibet, these new facilities represent a huge expansion of China’s years-long program to involuntarily mass relocate rural Tibetans, which Human Rights Watch in 2013 called “unprecedented in the post-Mao era.” The goal of these camps is threefold, according to Sangay: Beijing wants to appropriate Tibetan land to commercialize its natural resources; the CCP uses the camps to forcibly assimilate Tibetans by snuffing out their culture, language and religion; and the third goal, using Tibetans as cheap forced labor, serves the first two.

“ ‘Poverty alleviation’ for us means cultural assimilation,” Sangay said. “In that sense, they want to take away our faith and erase the history of Tibet.”

I’m more outraged that, knowing all of this, we tolerate trade with China in the interest of cheap consumer goods and profits for companies from Walmart to Apple. They pile atrocity on atrocity. It’s one thing for the Europeans who feign concern about human rights while pursuing their own national interests and complain when we do the same. But the notion that we can be a “force for good” while keeping business as usual with China is that much worse.

And none of this is new. The Chinese have occupied Tibet for 70 years.

In a separate editorial the editors of the Washington Post, considering the appointment of Tom Vilsack to another stint as Secretary of Agriculture by President-Elect Biden, call for “fresh thinking”:

The ostensible goal of farm policy, food security, has long since been achieved: Not even a global pandemic caused significant shortages, even if individual families did often struggle to afford what was available due to job losses or other economic hardship. Farms in the United States are so productive that exports are now a major source of their income — though President Trump’s tariff war with China certainly put a crimp in sales to that country. Mr. Trump channeled $28 billion in offsetting aid to farmers; as of mid-2019, 70 percent of the money had gone to just 100,000 individuals, according to an NPR analysis. Buoyed by federal aid, both for the trade war and $5 billion related to coronavirus (a fifth of which went to just 1 percent of recipients, according to the Environmental Working Group), net farm income is set to reach $120 billion in fiscal 2020.

During the campaign, Mr. Biden’s positions on agriculture policy took the form, mainly, of promising rural America that the plans he had for the country as a whole — expanding health-care access, increased taxation of upper-income Americans, investing in clean energy — would benefit small towns and farm areas as well. It was admirable, in a sense, not to pander more directly. (Mr. Biden did pledge to promote ethanol, which is politically sacrosanct in Iowa.) And given the power congressional committees would ultimately exercise over the next farm bill anyway, it may have been politically realistic, too. Still, the result is that Mr. Biden reaches the White House having done little to create a mandate for the fresh thinking that U.S. farm policy needs.

The one change in U. S. agricultural policy that would do the most for developing countries would be to stop subsidizing the production of cotton. It would be more efficient for us, too. Every year we export about $6 billion of raw cotton, wool, mohair, and other fibers to be processed in other countries. Meanwhile over the last 30 years the number of operating cotton gins has plummeted down to about 900, without changes in the amount of cotton processed per gin. How can that be? We’re sending it abroad for processing.

I’m not actually sure what the editors are thinking. If there’s one thing the Biden Administration will not be bringing with it, it’s an infusion of new blood into the federal government. Maybe their experience is different from mine but I generally don’t look to old government hands for fresh thinking.