I thought I’d pass on some links to a couple of pieces relating to COVID-19. First, here’s a paper positing that East Asians have developed genetic resistance to coronaviruses (PDF). And CNN remarks on a cache of “Internal Only” papers documenting how initially China covered up the scale of the COVID-19 outbreak there.

When I see all of the backstabbing, sniping, and trash-talking going on in the opinion pages among Democrats jockeying for power in the Biden Administration, I can only wonder in amazement at what they would have done if Biden had lost. I’ll get to another example later but my first example is this assessment of Rahm Emanuel by Ben Mathis-Lilley at Salon. Its opening conveys the meat of the piece:

Two weeks ago, rumors bubbled up on CNN that former Barack Obama chief of staff and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was being considered to lead Joe Biden’s Department of Transportation. Monday of last week, rumors bubbled up in Crain’s Chicago that Biden is considering Emanuel for the job of U.S. trade representative. Sunday night, rumors bubbled up at Axios that Biden is now “strongly considering” Emanuel for the DOT job. (Strongly!) Someone—maybe it’s Rahm Emanuel—thinks Rahm Emanuel should play a role in the next presidential administration.

Why? What would Emanuel contribute to the public good and to the Democratic Party in one of these jobs?

It continues with a mostly negative assessment of Emanuel’s performance with the Obama White House and as Chicago’s mayor, generally eliding over his years with the Clinton White House, with a private equity firm, and as a Congressional representative. It concludes:

In any event, the subsequent dozen-plus years of Emanuel’s career are marked not just by his advocacy of bad ideas, but by his efforts to talk other Democrats out of ideas that turned out to be good ones. His two years in the White House were the least politically successful of Obama’s tenure, which, accounts from the time suggest, is a matter of more than just correlation.

Emanuel, operating from a worldview formed during his time as an adviser to the endlessly triangulating Bill Clinton, believed that Obama should pursue relatively unambitious, “centrist” goals. The idea was to pressure Republicans into supporting the president’s initiatives, achieving frequent news cycle “wins” that conveyed to the public that their chief executive was always making their lives better in little ways. As Clinton’s popularity demonstrated, this is not an inherently flawed model of governance, at least from the perspective of public relations. But it proved unsuited to the scope of the challenges that Obama faced: the worst economy since the Great Depression, a mangled and corrupted health care system that he’d promised to fix, and a completely intransigent opposition party fueled by the resentful, conspiratorial concerns of the “Tea Party.”

or, said another way, he didn’t have much to do with the Democrats getting control of the House in 2006 and that the Democrats lost control of the Congress in 2010 because the Obama Administration wasn’t progressive enough. Uh-huh.

Let me offer my own assessment. Rahm Emanuel flitted from one sinecure to the next over a period of about 20 years. He made a fortune as what’s called a “Rolodex hire” at a private equity firm, i.e. hired for his contacts not his abilities. During his brief tenure in Congress he was the worst Congressman I’ve ever had, more interested in fund-raising and strategizing than in the job itself. After his stint as President Obama’s Chief-of-Staff, I think he mistakenly believed that being mayor of Chicago was another sinecure, a stepping stone on the way to even higher office (governor? president?). He was wrong. I think he had a clear vision for Chicago. He wanted it to be like Seattle, San Francisco, New York, or Boston and, consequently, emphasized amenities for the “Creative Class”. That reflected an utter misunderstanding of those cities, Chicago, or the job of mayor. But I think that his views and attitude are sadly typical of far too many Democrats these days. As evidence I would submit Bill DeBlasio, Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, and Illinois’s own governor, J. B. Pritzker.

I don’t know whether Rahm Emanuel would be an asset or a handicap to the Biden White House. It depends on the direction it takes and, by all signs at present, it will not be nearly as progressive as Mr. Mattis-Lilley would like.

I do have some questions. Mayor Emanuel has two brothers. One is a Hollywood agent (what did he know about Harvey Weinstein and when did he know it) and the other a physician who has recently been appointed as a health care advisor to Joe Biden. To me they all appear to be people who have benefited by their contacts rather than their accomplishments. If Rahm Emanuel is unacceptable, why is Zeke Emanuel a suitable advisor on health care policy?

The editors of the Washington Post weigh in on something they want the Biden Administration to do—reform Internet regulation:

There is ample room for regulating the online realm domestically, though doing so may first require cooperating with a divided Congress. Reinstalling some form of the net neutrality regulations rolled back by the current Federal Communications Commission promises to prove controversial; expanding broadband access to low-income and rural households, on the other hand, should appeal to legislators mid-pandemic regardless of party. Just as high on the agenda ought to be forging a federal privacy framework at long last: A stalled-out effort in both legislative chambers could benefit from a jolt of jump-starting executive leadership. And then there’s the matter of reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields websites from lawsuits for hosting illegal content.

These last two issues are obviously significant to American companies and civilians alike: What information can social media sites hoover up to serve targeted advertisements, and what should be off-limits? What forms of facial recognition are acceptable in a society that respects civil liberties, and under what circumstances? What obligations must platforms meet when it comes to protecting against illegal content — and what role, if any, should government take in regulating online speech? Our businesses will benefit from clearer guidance, our people from more protection. But just as important, these are questions that countries around the rest of the world have been asking and answering for some time now, while ours has stayed largely silent.

They conclude by contrasting the wide open spaces of the U. S. Internet with the same network as practiced by Russia and China:

The United States has long taken the view that the Web was built for interconnection, and so ought to remain as open as possible. Meanwhile, China and Russia have adopted a competing vision in which countries control the movement of information in, out and within their borders to promote censorship, trample on privacy and establish a sweeping surveillance state. Democracies used to think their perspective would naturally prevail, and yet the opposite seems to be happening: Because authoritarian countries have presented clear principles and a willingness to wield their power to exclude those who don’t obey, they’re winning the fight.

Mr. Biden, with the aid of Congress and allies abroad, now has a chance to establish principles of our own. With them, he can present a compelling alternative to the Chinese model of so-called cybersovereignty to those nations still on the fence about their digital futures — besides helping this nation chart a more promising path for itself. He must not let the opportunity pass him by.

I wish they had spelled out the “compelling alternative to the Chinese model” they have in mind other than the Internet as it actually exists. By design the Internet is hard to control. Even in China people routinely find ways to evade state control.

There’s seems to be a consensus of sorts that the new Biden diplomatic team will be disappointed in any attempts at reviving the Obama Administration’s agreement with Iran. First, Tom Friedman gives his take in his column in the New York Times:

The best way for Biden to appreciate the new Middle East is to study what happened in the early hours of Sept. 14, 2019 — when the Iranian Air Force launched 20 drones and precision-guided cruise missiles at Abqaiq, one of Saudi Arabia’s most important oil fields and processing centers, causing huge damage. It was a seminal event.

The Iranian drones and cruise missiles flew so low and with such stealth that neither their takeoff nor their impending attack was detected in time by Saudi or U.S. radar. Israeli military analysts, who were stunned by the capabilities the Iranians displayed, argued that this surprise attack was the Middle East’s “Pearl Harbor.”

They were right. The Middle East was reshaped by this Iranian precision missile strike, by President Trump’s response and by the response of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to Trump’s response.

A lot of people missed it, so let’s go to the videotape.

First, how did President Trump react? He did nothing. He did not launch a retaliatory strike on behalf of Saudi Arabia — even though Iran, unprovoked, had attacked the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure.

A few weeks later Trump did send 3,000 U.S. troops and some antimissile batteries to Saudi Arabia to bolster its defense — but with this message on Oct. 11, 2019: “We are sending troops and other things to the Middle East to help Saudi Arabia. But — are you ready? Saudi Arabia, at my request, has agreed to pay us for everything we’re doing. That’s a first.”

It sure was a first. I’m not here to criticize Trump, though. He was reflecting a deep change in the American public. His message: Dear Saudis, America is now the world’s biggest oil producer; we’re getting out of the Middle East; happy to sell you as many weapons as you can pay cash for, but don’t count on us to fight your battles. You want U.S. troops? Show me the money.

That clear shift in American posture gave birth to the first new element that Biden will confront in this new Middle East — the peace agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and between Israel and Bahrain — and a whole new level of secret security cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which will likely flower into more formal relations soon. (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel reportedly visited Saudi Arabia last week.)

In effect, Trump forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like Palestine. This may enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant foreign policy achievement.

while the editors of the Wall Street Journal have a somewhat different view:

After last week’s assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist, it’s hard to tell who is more upset: Iran, or Barack Obama’s foreign-policy team. Tehran is blaming Israel and promising revenge, but consider the tweets by the men who gave the world the flawed 2015 nuclear deal.

Former national-security aide and media spinner Ben Rhodes: “This is an outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy between an incoming US administration and Iran. It’s time for the ceaseless escalation to stop.”

And this from former CIA director John Brennan, leading promoter of the false Russia collusion narrative: “This was a criminal act & highly reckless. It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict. Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits.”

This turns the Middle East upside down, as the Obama foreign policy also did. The 2015 deal was supposed to restrain Iran’s nuclear-weapons development and moderate its regional behavior. It has done neither. But now the architects of that deal blame not Iran for its behavior but whoever is trying to slow Iran’s nuclear progress.

In other words, the Obama crowd is siding with Iran against Israel and the U.S. (though neither of the latter have claimed responsibility for the killing). The Obama crowd’s continuing illusions about their Iranian diplomacy shows that they have learned nothing in exile. Yet if Israel did plan the assassination, it surely did so because it fears that the same illusions about Iran are returning to U.S. power with the Biden Administration, and so it must act on its own.

While I have never opposed the Obama Administration’s agreement per se, I was never much of a fan, always suspecting it was more about burnishing resumes than any practical effect. What puzzled me in particular was that it was most useful if we assumed that we already knew where all of Iran’s nuclear development was taking place and practically useless if it had covert nuclear weapons development. I was actually more concerned about Iran’s missile development which the agreement unintentionally facilitated. It appears that my concerns were well-founded. I’m pretty sure that Iran could buy as many nuclear warheads as it wanted from North Korea.

U. S. policy with a respect to the Middle East has been in a shambles for decades, at least since the Iranian Revolution. Once upon a time we had something called the “Twin Pillars strategy” in which two U. S. allies—the Shah’s Iran and Saudi Arabia—furnished a bulwark against Soviet interests in the region. It was always flawed but it fell apart completely after the Iranian Revolution. Since then we’ve been assuming, incorrectly, that the Saudis were allies where actually they were among our worst enemies. We are opposed to nearly everything they support and vice versa. A marriage of convenience against common enemies is the most we could expect.

We are so gullible.

One more observation. I oppose foreign policy by assassination. Whether it’s us or the Israelis or anybody else. When we assassinate people we don’t like on what basis would we condemn it when people we don’t like assassinate our political leaders? Because we’re the good guys? Please.

In his Washington Post column E. J. Dionne surveys the list of worthies on Joe Biden’s prospective foreign policy team and is clearly worried that they’ll return to the foreign policy that provoked a reaction from ordinary middle income Americans:

When President-elect Joe Biden introduced his national security team this week, a line that received almost no attention defined what may be the most important challenge confronting his able group of experienced professionals.

Biden was referring to his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, when he said: “Jake understands my vision, that economic security is national security, and it helps steer what I call a foreign policy for the middle class, for families like his growing up in Minnesota.”

Talk of a “foreign policy for the middle class” may sound like campaign boilerplate, but it accurately describes one of the central obligations this band of liberal internationalists has assumed. They need to demonstrate to Americans on Main Street that the diplomats in Foggy Bottom have their interests in mind.

That’s the same internationalism that has led us into war twice in the last thirty years. There’s also a direct link between the internationalist admission of China to the World Trade Organization and a massive reorganization of the U. S. economy away from manufacturing with the attendant loss of manufacturing jobs. Since then there has been little prospect of much of the population’s earning other than minimum wage.

He continues:

One need not agree with Warren or Sanders on everything to accept that the long-term durability of an internationalist foreign policy depends on reviving public confidence that its architects regard the home front as more than an afterthought. It’s worth remembering that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman — the presidents who built the post-World War II alliance systems and an impressive array of international organizations — inspired confidence among U.S. workers that they had their backs.

It’s also worth mentioning that one of the factors that has kept us at war in Afghanistan is it’s what the very best experts have recommended. Perhaps internationalists and experts have learned their lessons.

I think that internationalists operate under a faulty premise—that regional allies like Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea have anything but their own interests in mind when they attempt to persuade us to take a course of action. Maybe things will be different this time around. My advice is trust everybody but cut the cards.

At Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Duyeon Kim reminds us of a time-honored North Korean tradition—testing the incoming U. S. administration:

North Korea has both military and geopolitical drivers to stage another provocation. The question is when and what type. Once Pyongyang realizes Biden is in fact the president-elect, there are two possible scenarios regarding timing. On the one hand, Pyongyang might cross Trump’s “red line” by testing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and nuclear devices during the transition period if it feels pressed to continue refining its nuclear weapons capability and believes that Trump cannot retaliate during his remaining weeks in office. Launching an ICBM (or any class of missiles for that matter) would simultaneously achieve the geopolitical objective of gaining leverage in future negotiations and testing an incoming Biden administration.

On the other hand, North Korea is heavily consumed with a fierce “80-day battle”—a national productivity campaign that began in October during which North Koreans are required to work extra hours to achieve national and economic goals before a rare Workers’ Party congress set for next January. These “battles” are also meant to firmly consolidate domestic unity around the Kim dynasty. State media say their priority this time is typhoon recovery, anti-coronavirus campaigns, farming, coal mining, and scientific research without outside help over fears of viral infections. This means that Pyongyang may wait until after the regime cements next year’s goals during its January party congress. If so, the window for a provocation would be between January and March, when President Biden’s team is not yet complete after inauguration and before the US and South Korea hold their annual spring military drills.

That is the same period during which Pyongyang has tested missiles or nuclear devices in the past after a change in American administrations. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the regime may even wait until it assesses an incoming Biden administration’s attitude toward it. But Pyongyang may not wait—candidate Biden personally called Kim a “thug” (although Pyongyang previously called Biden a “rabid dog” and “fool of low IQ”), which could be enough justification to provoke Washington, especially when Kim’s sister in July expanded the scope of “US hostile policy” to include rhetoric (insults) and human rights criticisms.

It could also provide the incoming Biden Administration with an opportunity, for example to show how tough they are or how effective they are at rebuilding alliances and just how effective those alliances can be. Or it could ignore “provocations” while trying to get itself organized and deal with an ongoing pandemic.

There are quite a few articles being published these days in anticipation of Joe Biden’s repeated and reaffirmed campaign promise on educational loan forgiveness. There’s a statistic that’s frequently cited in the discussion: an average of $50,000 in educational debt.

But there’s another statistic that’s just as important, quoted in this article at Forbes. The median student loan debt is $17,000. To get the average debt you sum the total amount of debt and divide by the number of borrowers. The median debt on the other hand is the amount for which half of the borrowers owe more and have less.

With such a large discrepancy between the average and the median it suggests that most borrowers owe a lot less than $50,000. My intuition is that there’s a fairly small number, probably mostly professionals, with educational debt much higher than $50,000.

I don’t think that educational debt forgiveness is a good policy at all but how you craft it depends on what you want to accomplish. If you were to set the cap on forgiveness at $30,000, I think that most of the people you’d be helping would be the poor and the middle class while when you set it at $50,000, by far the greatest benefit would be to the upper middle class and the rich. I’d means test it and limit forgiveness to certain degrees.

It would be nice to know what the standard deviation is but that’s another subject.

In an article at Wire Adam Rogers asks a very good question. Is a vaccine that prevents symptoms of COVID-19 enough?

The problem is, a Covid-19 vaccine that only prevents illness—which is to say, symptoms—might not prevent infection with the virus or transmission of it to other people. Worst case, a vaccinated person could still be an asymptomatic carrier. That could be bad. More younger people tend to get the virus, but more older people tend to die from it; socioeconomic status and ethnicity also have an impact on death rates. Some people have relatively light symptoms; other people have symptoms that hang on for months. And perhaps most importantly, a vaccine is the only way to reach herd immunity without a bloodbath. As politicized as the notion has become, herd immunity is essentially the sum of direct protection—what you might get if you’re vaccinated—and indirect protection, safety afforded by the fact that people around you aren’t transmitting the disease to you because they either already had the disease themselves or because they got vaccinated against it. If vaccinated people can still be asymptomatic spreaders, that means less indirect protection for the herd.

That really matters, because there isn’t enough vaccine to go around. Not yet, anyway. Some groups of people will go first. The characteristics of the available vaccines would, in a perfect world, determine who those people should be. One that only prevented illness might go first to the elderly, in whom severe illness is more likely to lead to death. One that prevented infection and transmission might go to essential workers and frontline caregivers. “Part of our worry is, we want to get it right in the early allocation phase, making sure we’re targeting the vaccine as best as you can,” says Grace Lee, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford School of Medicine and a member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. “If the only thing it did was protect against severe disease, you’d want to look at the population that has severe disease and only use it there, and nowhere else.”

That’s almost certainly not going to be the situation. The vaccines will probably all have some effect on transmission. But right now no one knows how much, or which one is better, or for whom—because so far only AstraZeneca has even a hint of data studying the problem.

We’re still largely operating in the dark. It makes considerable sense to know more about what we’re doing before inoculating billions of people with vaccines before we know whether they’ll actually prevent the spread of the disease or have serious long-term effects. At the very least why not wait long enough for the various studies to be published and reviewed by peers?

There is considerable anxiety about the surge of new cases and new deaths due to COVID-19 here in the U. S. Those are particularly severe in the Upper Midwest, i.e. North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan but isn’t limited to those states—California, Texas, and Florida are seeing surges in new cases as well albeit not as dramatic as in the Upper Midwest. The states that first experienced large numbers of cases back in the spring, e.g. New York, New Jersey, are experiencing surges in new cases although, interestingly, the surges in new deaths in those states don’t appear to be as great as in the Upper Midwest.

It isn’t just the United States. Not only is Europe having its own surge of new cases, South Korea and Japan are as well. At this point Taiwan is not.

My question is why now? I recognize that the popular explanation and that, apparently, relied on by elected officials is that the people in the Upper Midwest have not been taking the prudent steps, i.e. wearing facemasks, social distancing, etc. that might have prevented these surges and, indeed, I suspect that’s part of the reason. But, unless you believe that the Japanese and South Koreans have abandoned the practices that insulated them from the worst effects of the virus in the spring, something else is going on as well.

My own view is informed by the following beliefs:

• Not everyone is equally susceptible to the virus even when exposed to it.
• Not everyone has an equal likelihood of dying if they contract COVID-19.
• The risk factors include age, genetics, pre-existing conditions, behavior and probably some other unappreciated factors.
• Exposure to sunlight mitigates the risks somewhat.
• Interior air circulation mitigates the risks somewhat.
• Previous exposure to related viruses mitigates the risks somewhat.
• Concentration of the virus increases the risks somewhat.

Some of those have evidence to support them, some stand to reason, other are speculative. I cannot disaggregate the relative importance of any of these factors.

Taiwan is in the tropics. That means more sunlight at a different angle at this time of year than is experienced, for example, in the Upper Midwest of the U. S. Heating is rare in homes there and many do not have air conditioning either. Due to its commerce with the mainland many Taiwanese people may have been exposed to viruses related to COVID-19 in the past. In addition most Taiwanese people are Han Chinese and may have genetic predispositions to be less susceptible to the virus. Also wearing facemasks is practically universal.