Today is Kara’s seventh birthday. I took the picture above this morning. I think she was still waking up. Here’s a nicer picture of her:

I think she’s a very fine-looking Samoyed. Type-y as they say.

Kara is my walking buddy. Every day she and I take two good-sized walks together, probably 4-5 miles in all. In all likelihood I spend more time dedicated to her than to the other dogs put together. In the morning we’ll take one walk, typically through the nearby forest preserve while in the afternoon we’ll take a walk around the neighborhood, a slightly different route every day to keep it from getting old.

She’s a very sweet, loving dog with an unfortunate obsession with small dogs, particularly small white dogs, and eating non-food items off the ground—twigs, bark and so on. She’s particularly interested in “fun dogs”. A “fun dog” is a dog that is barking, growling, jumping, and lunging. Not my idea of fun but it’s certainly hers.

I’m guessing that most readers will either find John Tamny’s review at RealClearMarkets of Jeffrey Tucker’s book, Liberty or Lockdown, enraging or exhilarating depending on the reader’s political and policy views. Here’s a snippet:

So what did the great Tucker know? He knew when the virus had become a problem for the U.S., and by extension the world. Crucial here is that Tucker was far too wise to presume that a virus could fell a nation populated by individuals long on common sense. To Tucker, the second “coronavirus,” or the “second wave” to paraphrase the alarmists of the moment, was the political reaction to a virus that had been traveling around the world for months. The politicians easily gulled by the experts would take over. In the 20th century this was called central planning. Tucker correctly referred to it as central planning in the 21st century.

I think that Mr. Tamny is both right and wrong. Where he’s wrong is that he fails to stipulate (as I have) that if we had locked everybody into their rooms we could have stamped out the virus in weeks. That’s an impractical but true statement. He also doesn’t acknowledge that

1. SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus about which we knew very little in the 1st quarter of 2020 and
2. Political leaders had to do something.

Governments and bureaucracies being what they are and politicians having the incentives they have, political leaders deserve to be cut a little slack for things they did early on. They had to do something and what they did had to be equitable and easy to administer.

However, deciding that the majority of workers are essential is absurd on its face. To the best of my knowledge not a single Chicago city workers was either furloughed or laid off as a consequence of the pandemic. That includes things that are emphatically not essential—non-emergent tree-trimming, for example. Are liquor stores and pot shops really essential? If clothing shops aren’t essential, why are warehouse workers packing and shipping clothing and delivery drivers delivering clothing essential? The list goes on and is enormous but there are easy explanations. The rules that were laid down were easy to administer and politicians knew they wouldn’t get much pushback on them. Not as much pushback as if they had furloughed hundreds of thousands of government workers without pay, anyway.

But it’s mot early on anymore and clinging bitterly to the decisions they made ten months ago is irrational and counterproductive. A little more humility might be nice, too. And conforming to the actual law rather than pleading exigent circumstances.

At Politico Alex Thompson and Theodoric Meyer point out something I observed months ago:

RAHM EMANUEL had never lost a political campaign. Until this week.

Over the past few weeks, the former Chicago mayor has been waging a typically relentless but abnormally quiet (for him, anyway) campaign to put himself in contention to be Biden’s Transportation secretary.

He leveraged his platinum rolodexes from Obamaworld and Capitol Hill. He talked up how Biden would need a good congressional partner when pursuing an infrastructure package. Obama’s former secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, reached out to chief of staff RON KLAIN to put in a good word. Other top Obama aides like DENIS McDONOUGH and SUSAN RICE joined the administration, so why not Rahm?

But earlier this week, JOE BIDEN personally called BARACK OBAMA’s former chief of staff to deliver the bad news, according to a person familiar with the call. Emanuel, one of the most powerful Democrats in the country for nearly two decades, was now considered too toxic for the Cabinet. PETE BUTTIGIEG would be Transportation secretary.

“Rahm has former colleagues and friends who are involved and respect him, but no one is worth that sort of headache,” a senior Democrat who is advising the transition told Transition Playbook. “Labor didn’t want him at Transportation, civil rights groups didn’t want him, progressives didn’t want him. There simply is no constituency for Rahm Emanuel at this point.”

which is that Rahm Emanuel has no future in politics. He never had a constituency but ascended through a number of sinecures to become mayor of Chicago where he made too many enemies and too many mistakes. He has always reminded me of Pontie, the main character in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He ascended the ladder without actually doing anything up to a point. Mr. Emanuel reached that point as mayor of Chicago. Now he’s reached the end of the trail.

Although I agree materially with the point in John F. Harris’s post at Politico—that Democratic politicians have nothing to lose by kvetching about Joe Biden and everything to gain, it does contain the funniest line I’ve read so far to day:

Two ingredients are missing. One is an outsize leadership personality of the sort that the genial Biden doesn’t possess. The second, more important, is an instinct for cultlike compliance that isn’t part of the Democratic Party character or tradition.

Let’s ignore that Mike Madigan has been Speaker of the Illinois House for forty years despite most voters believing that he has been crooked nearly all of that time. The actual evidence of that has been growing recently. If that isn’t “cultlike compliance”, what is it? The adulation Barack Obama received on his election in 2008 dwarfed anything of recent memory. “Lightbringer” (an enlightened being), “messiah”, anyone? It was practically literally a cult. During Bill Clinton’s term of office we were treated to multiple cinematic and television representations of presidents that were clearly highly idealized and fictionalized versions of Bill Clinton.

Mr. Harris was an infant when John Kennedy was assassinated so he’s too young to remember but the devotion to John Kennedy during his brief term was not only idealized and fictionalized but astonishing. But it was nothing like the adulation that Franklin Roosevelt received during his presidency.

If those examples don’t illustrate an “instinct for cultlike compliance”, they’re certainly a remarkable coincidence.

Bill Clinton famously said that when selecting a president Democrats want to fall in love but Republicans fall in line. One of the things that I have found amazing about the last 40 years of American political history is how unrecognizable the Republican Party has become. They’re behaving more like Democrats. I don’t believe that is a coincidence—many of the central figures in today’s Republican Party were Democrats or would have been Democrats prior to 1980. And there are only a few holdouts of the Northeastern Republicans of years gone by. Most are now independents.

Perhaps what he is lamenting is that Democrats haven’t fallen in love with Joe Biden.

BlockClubChicago reports that local officials are expressing disappointment that Chicago will be receiving fewer doses of the Pfizer vaccine than originally anticipated:

CHICAGO — Chicago and Illinois will only get about half the amount of Pfizer vaccine doses they expected to get in coming weeks, Gov. JB Pritzker said Wednesday.

The same is true for cities and states across the nation, as the federal government has slashed what it will distribute by nearly half for the next two weeks, Pritzker said.

Federal officials initially told state leaders they would send out nearly 8 million doses of the vaccine next week, distributing them to cities and states based on their population sizes, Pritzker said.

“I’m disappointed to learn … that per the direction of Operation Warp Speed’s General Perna, that estimate was tightened significantly down to 4.3 million doses shipped nationally next week,” Pritzker said during a Wednesday coronavirus update.

Similar cuts will be made in the week after that: The federal government had estimated it’d ship out 8.8 million doses, but officials now say they’ll only send 4.3 million doses to cities and states, Pritzker said.

That’s completely consistent with Pfizer’s announcement of about ten days ago that it had fewer doses of the vaccine on hand than it had previously indicated. I suspect that we will be seeing more reality checks as this process moves forward.

This post is a response to this post at Pat Lang’s place referencing Thucycides’s History of the Pelopponesian War. Much of the information here was drawn from this reference on the work. If you’re not interested in classical literature, I suggest you ignore this post.

When I read the piece referenced above, I was immediately moved to react. If you’re not familiar with Thucycides’s History of the Pelopponesian War, it’s believed to have been one of the most respected historical works of the ancient world, a major source for information about the Pelopponesian War between Athens and Sparta (Athens lost), and very widely cited. The problems as I see it are that it is actually a work of literature rather than history and we don’t reallu know when it was written or by whom.

What we know of the work derives from just eight medieval manuscripts. Eight. The earliest complete manuscript of the work dates from 900AD—a full 1300 years after the war purportedly took place. The earliest fragments of the work date from around 300AD—that’s 700 years after the war purportedly took place—and they’re pretty small. Some of the manuscripts are later, as recent as the 14th century and there’s some differences among the manuscripts. You need to believe a lot of things to believe it’s actually a reliable source.

• You need to believe that the work was faithfully transcribed over and over for 1300 years. Based on our knowledge of ancient literatures and scribes that is extremely unlikely.
• You need to believe that the work was written by an actual eyewitness. We simply don’t know.
• Some of the things reported in the work are now known to be incorrect (based on inscriptions). Not just unproven. Proven wrong. You need to find some way of explaining that away.

If you accept the work as a work of literature (or philosophy) as I do, all of those problems go away. We really just don’t know a lot about things that happened more than about six hundred years ago.

If you apply the same standards to the New Testament as are applied to the War, you must believe in the historicity of all sorts of events that many people reject, i.e. the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Again, the War is known from just eight manuscripts. There are more than 15,000 manuscripts of New Testament books dating from 900AD or earlier.

To me the more interesting questions are why the Christian scribes who continued to copy the work for centuries did so and how they adapted it to their needs. Insistence on the historicity of the work obscures those questions.

This post by Alex Berezow at the American Council on Science and Health reports on a Russian study that found that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom about larks and night owls, the reality is a bit more complex:

The early bird gets the worm. Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. There are plenty of platitudes that justify the widespread belief that getting up early is the best way to start the day.

Nonsense, says an increasing body of research. Human beings have different chronotypes, i.e., natural tendencies to be awake or asleep at various times throughout the day. We often speak of “morning people”/”early birds” and “night owls,” but a new paper written mostly by Russian researchers demonstrates that six different chronotypes exist.

Although I rise between 5:00am and 6:00am, I am actually a дневной тип—a daytime type. I’m most active and mentally acute between 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. Somewhat coincidentally, when I was in college I did the best I could to have all of my classes between 9:00am and 1:00pm (I worked from 6:00am to 9:00am and from 3:00pm to 6:00pm).

At Bloomberg Sam Fazell asks an interesting question: how many COVID-19 vaccines do we need, anyway?

On paper, the U.S. has signed up for more vaccine doses than it needs for its whole population. The issue is that these deals were all done before we had any idea of the relative efficacy of the vaccines. The U.S. will have 300 million doses – 100 million from Pfizer-BioNTech and 200 million from Moderna – at its disposal through the first half of 2021. This is enough for 150 million people, or half the U.S. population, assuming no wastage, because each vaccine requires two shots. While this does not fit with the promise of getting most of the U.S. vaccinated by the middle of next year, it is probably much more realistic, given the massive logistical issues involved and the continuing hesitancy of some people. There will be other vaccine trial results coming out very soon too, and that may lead to more candidates being authorized for use. AstraZeneca’s and J&J’s U.S. trials will be done early in the first quarter, while Novavax will have its large U.K. trial data in the same time frame.

My answer to the question is that we need at least one more, possibly two. We need one vaccine that does not rely on mRNA but on modalities with which we have experience and we need one that uses materials that are different from those used by either Pfier or Moderna. It’s quite possible that although Pfizer and Moderna’s internal projects say that they can produce a total of 300 million doses in reality they can’t reach that many for supply chain reasons.

You might find Zach Mayer’s assessment at STAT of when we can expect enough people to be immune to SARS-CoV-2 tht the pandemic will be over interesting and informative:

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll ignore the phased rollout and imagine that all Americans have the choice to get vaccinated this April. Since both vaccine candidates are a two-shot series separated by three to four weeks, it may take at least an additional month to gain full immunity. At that point, in May 2021, the base prevalence of infection will be 17.7% (1.2% per month from October 2020, when the base prevalence was 9.3%).

[…]

With just 39% of Americans getting a government-approved vaccine, the time to herd immunity is 19 months, meaning December 2022.

Nineteen months is no walk in the park. If 17.7% of Americans are already immune by May, and another 39% would readily get a Covid-19 vaccine, that leaves about 43% of the population who are vulnerable to infection but skeptical of vaccination.

Convincing roughly half of these skeptical Americans to take the shot, boosting Pv to 60.7%, shortens the time to herd immunity to two months, meaning July 2021.

I think the likelihood of having inoculated 39% of the population by April 2021 approaches zero. That would be 128 million people. You’d not just need to assume instantaneous simultaneous inoculations (as Mr. Mayer has), you need to assume

• Our borders remain closed
• Pfizer and Moderna are able to meet their own production estimates
• The supply of materials for the Pfizer and Moderna is sufficiently elastic to meet the demand within that timeframe
• Either the U. S. is the only country receiving the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines OR other vaccines complete their clinical trials and receive emergency use authorization by April 2021
• As many people as have said will actually get inoculated
• No unforeseen effects emerge now that we’re doing mass inoculations to discourage people from getting inoculated

just to hit the high spots. As Yogi Berra observed, in theory there’s no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is.

The estimate of when “herd immunity” will actually happen in the absence of inoculations is some time in 2025. In the presence inoculations, IMO a realistic estimate of when we can expect the pandemic to be over is some time between now and then and certainly no sooner than the 4th quarter of 2021.