Here in Chicago today is celebrated as Columbus Day but it will be a very strange holiday in the context of people protesting, occasionally rioting, to have statues of Columbus taken down. I think they are wrong to do so and in this post I will try to explain why, covering some territory I have in the past.

The first part of my observations is a series of questions. Should we romanticize the past? Is it okay to romanticize some of the past but wrong to romanticize all of the past? In particular is it okay to romanticize what you imagine to be your own past but deny to others the right to romanticize what they imagine as their own? My answers to those questions are that romanticizing the past is inevitable and if you reject romanticizing some of the past but insist on romanticizing other parts it is either sophistry, hypocrisy, or both.

In particular I think it is wrong for people of primarily European descent to reject celebrating the discovery of the Americas by Europeans and I think that even people who are primarily of Native American ancestry should celebrate that discovery. Most of the values that we hold dear including democracy, the very concept of fundamental rights, and women’s rights in particular all spring from the superstructure of white Christian Europe. So do both free markets and socialism. So does environmentalism. Believing anything else is romanticizing the past.

The second part is this. Everybody is from somewhere else. Human beings have been migrating around the planet, probably for 100,000 years or more. Columbus’s experience, sailing thousands of miles from home, landing on another continent, and finding people were already there was not a surprise to him. It is what he expected. Europeans had been traveling around for thousands of years, always finding people in the new lands they encountered, and they would do so for 500 years more.

20,000 years ago or so the distant ancestors of today’s Native Americans crossed over via Beringia, the then traversable but now submerged land connecting Asia with North America and over the thousands of years migrated from there all the way down to the very tip of South America. But that’s not the whole story. Some of these migrations took place during historic times. The Kiowa, Comanche, Navaho, and Apache all migrated from farther north after Columbus arrived in the Americas and, indeed, their migrations would not have been possible at all had the Spaniards not reintroduced the horse to North America. I believe wholeheartedly that every present Indian nation moved into their present lands from somewhere else, bringing their languages, cultures, and technologies, and displacing and interbreeding with the people who were there before them. If anybody has a greater right it was the very first people to have arrived in a place and they’ve been dead for thousands of years.

That’s not just true in the Americas, by the way. The Bantu-speaking people of South Africa moved there in history times, starting their migration south from somewhere around Nigeria, and displacing and interbreeding with the people they found on the way. There’s an argument that the Khoi, San, and Xhosa people there are the original original settlers but they are a very small minority of the people in South Africa. The Bantu-speaking people arrived there within a couple of generations of the Afrikaaners.

Here in Chicago there’s a public holiday for each of the major ethnic groups that make up the city’s population. St. Patrick’s Day for the Irish, Pulaski Day for the Poles, Columbus Day for the Italians, Martin Luther King’s Birthday for blacks. I expect that in due course Cinco de Mayo or some other Mexican holiday will be enshrined as a public holiday here and then, who knows?, maybe some South Asian holiday. They will be just as legitimate as any of the others and just as worth celebrating.

You might want to check out the best article I have ever read on the subject of gender reassignment at Quillette.com. It’s written by a transgender man who does not regret the decision but also thinks that forcing such things on children at early ages is a mistake. Here’s a very brief snippet:

I write all this as a 47-year-old transgender man who transitioned five years ago. I’m also a parent to three teenagers. Though I admire the good intentions of parents who seek to support their children, I have serious concerns about reckless acquiescence to a child’s Internet-mediated self-diagnosis. Many older transgender folks share these concerns, too.

and this:

Transgenderism isn’t a vague feeling, or a distaste for stereotypical roles. It’s a serious internal condition that causes you to want to become the opposite sex. Medical transition, such as the kind I went through, can enhance an illusion that helps some gender dysphoric individuals navigate the world with more comfort. It did for me, and it was the right path for me to choose.

I wasn’t “born in the wrong body.” I was born female. But I didn’t like it. So I changed my appearance, at significant monetary, psychological, and physical cost, with plastic surgery and hormones. My sex never changed, though. Only my appearance changed.

Read the whole thing.

The editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s take on the plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is much like mine:

Six men have been charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly planning to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, apparently in an insane plot against overreaching state government. Seven others, linked to a militia group, are facing state charges. The details in an FBI affidavit suggest these people were serious.

The federal court filing says a group of men scoped out Ms. Whitmer’s vacation home and estimated police response times. They built an explosive, wrapped it in pennies, and tested it “in a clearing surrounded by human silhouette targets.” One of them said he bought a stun gun recently. He referred to the Governor as a “tyrant” and spoke of taking her to a secure location for “trial.”

This is tin-hat crazy, and authorities have a duty to act when basement conspiracy chatter becomes overt acts toward a criminal violation. Threats against public officials in particular need to be taken seriously in these polarized times. Recall the shooting by a Bernie Sanders supporter that grievously wounded GOP Rep. Steve Scalise in 2017.

Thankfully, police, undercover agents and the U.S. Justice Department were onto the plot in the Whitmer case. Credit as well to their confidential sources, one identified as a disaffected militia member. In June conspirators met in a basement “accessed through a trap door hidden under a rug,” the court filing says. Cellphones were collected beforehand to prevent monitoring. Yet a confidential source was wearing a wire.

Ms. Whitmer has exceeded her legal authority in the pandemic, and often in arrogant fashion. But the recourse for her critics is politics and the law, not violence and kidnapping. The Michigan Supreme Court proved that point last week by ruling that Ms. Whitmer violated state law in redeclaring the same pandemic emergency after 28 days without the consent of the Legislature.

Sadly, to some degree that is begging the question. The Michigan Supreme Court’s unanimous decision makes it clear that Gov. Whitmer has abused her power and should be impeached. Under Michigan Law the Michigan House of Representatives has the sole authority to do that. Why hasn’t the Michigan House begun impeachment proceedings? Does anyone seriously believe that if the present Republican majority were to be replaced by Democrats that the new Democratic majority would impeach Gov. Whitmer? Said another way, both the governor and the legislature are abusing their power. And what would the political solution be?

And that’s why we have entered such dangerous territory.

I wish you could see the eye-catching infographics in this article at the Wall Street Journal by Rob Barry, Joel Eastwood, and Paul Overberg. Some publications aren’t hiding their COVID-related content behind their paywalls as a public service. Maybe the WSJ is doing the same.

The article is mostly infographics so it’s hard to excerpt. Here are its opening paragraphs:

The Wall Street Journal interviewed disease detectives and reviewed hundreds of pages of new research to piece together how the coronavirus infiltrated the wealthiest nation on earth. The latest genetic, epidemiological and computational research suggests it was spreading inside the country before anyone started looking.

How did this happen?

It goes on to document, practically on a day by day basis, starting January 2, 2020, the spread of the disease in the United States as well as the presumed sources from which it spread. The short version supports a claim I made long ago: for the containment strategy actually to have worked we would have needed to ban all international flights arriving in the U. S. regardless of where it originated as well as all ship traffic originating elsewhere no later than the middle of December 2019. Most lockdowns in the U. S. didn’t begin until after community spread was well under way and they were so political in their structure as to be doomed to poor results from the outset. There is a long string of ifs that would have needed to happen for that to be otherwise. If the Chinese authorities had not suppressed bad news from the outset and if they had been more forthcoming from the outset and if they had banned flights departing China, the virus might have been contained in China. If it had been politically possible to ban all international travel inbound to the U. S. by the middle of December, we might have avoided it spreading in the U. S.

Not only does that explain why containment couldn’t work, it also explains why it was so much more effective in New Zealand. New Zealand is a small, socially cohesive country out in the middle of nowhere much more isolated from the global economy than the U. S. Which brings me around to a question posed by a frequent commenter here:

Here’s a thought exercise — with the exception of sub-Sahara Africa, there is a correlation between the geographic distance from Wuhan, China and severity of the pandemic. i.e. East Asia and SE Asia better then Eastern Europe / Mid East / India, Western Europe worse then Eastern Europe, North America worse the Europe, South America (the opposite side of the Earth from Wuhan) the worst.

Could that correlation be related to exposure to some other factor “X” that provides cross-immunity?

It’s not geographic distance but effective distance or economic distance that makes a difference. The cases per million population in Zimbabwe are higher than in most African countries because it has closer economic ties with China than most African countries.

While I’m on the subject of strategies that won’t work, doesn’t the outbreak at the White House illustrate why mass rapid testing won’t work? Not only does the instant test that produces no false negatives and no false positives not exist, the longer the test takes to produce results the more reliable it probably is. The outbreak at the White House is being used to show how avoiding wearing masks and social distancing leads to spread of the virus but I think it is an even stronger indication of the moral hazard that obtains through excessive confidence in repeated rapid testing.

Would more testing help? Sure. But it’s no panacea. IMO our public priorities should be (in descending order of importance):

• isolating the most vulnerable
• more effective treatment for COVID-19
• a safe, effective, affordable vaccine for SARS-CoV-2
• fast, effective, affordable tests for SARS-CoV-2
• more testing

Of course our public priorities have been almost the reverse of that.

CNN reports that the FBI has rounded up a group plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, kill her, and overthrow the state’s government:

Washington (CNN)Thirteen people were charged Thursday in an alleged domestic terrorism plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, federal and state officials announced.

The alleged scheme included plans to overthrow several state governments that the suspects “believe are violating the US Constitution,” including the government of Michigan and Whitmer, according to a federal criminal complaint.
Six people were charged federally with conspiracy to kidnap, and seven other people, associated with the militia group “Wolverine Watchmen,” were charged by the state, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced.

I honestly don’t know what to say. We’ve got to lower the temperature, starting with President Trump. He needs to stop egging such nutcases on. He hasn’t created their fantasies but he’s encouraging them.

And mayors and governors need to start enforcing and obeying the law. Failing to do so is not public-spirited regardless of how high they might believe their motives are.

As I read this piece at Science Magazine by Ann Gibbons on the zoonotic origins of rubella, “German measles”, I was reminded that as a child I contracted chicken pox, measles, mumps, rubella, a couple of other diseases and I had recurrent strep throat and earaches. IIRC in all cases I was treated with antibiotics which in all likelihood did nothing for any of the underlying diseases but may have prevented opportunistic infections. I also had friends and acquaintances who had recovered from polio.

Those were the good old days.

Those are life experiences which I suspect are common to many people under about 60 years of age but not one shared with younger people. I wonder if that is reflected in age-related differences in attitudes about SARS-CoV-2.

I found Terry Thompson’s piece at RealClearDefense on “how Congress can end China’s theft of U. S. military secrets” terribly myopic:

American innovation is a significant factor in what makes us the envy of the world. But we are becoming increasingly vulnerable to losing that advantage. Our enemies are finding they can steal our technology without creating their own. And, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made clear in a recent speech, no enemy tries to steal our technology more than China. The communist state has a long record of intellectual property theft against the American government and American companies. According to Pompeo, its predatory actions force the FBI to open an IP theft-related case once every 10 hours.

But Congress is considering legislation to counter this threat. Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) recently proposed amendments to the NASA Authorization Act, which passed the Senate Commerce Committee, to protect American space technology. The amendments would order the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review NASA contractors for any possible Chinese ties and require the NASA administrator to review any possible Chinese involvement when awarding contracts. With these safeguards, our most sensitive technology would be much less vulnerable to the claws of Chinese intelligence.

There are at least four different ways that China has stolen U. S. military secrets:

1. Forcing U. S. military aircraft down and stealing their technology.
2. Hacking. Just about every hour of every day there are attempted and many successful Chinese hacks of federal, state, local government and private corporate networks.
3. Chinese nationals employed by U. S. military contractors engaging in espionage.
4. Chinese nationals employed by subcontractors engaged in espionage. Just to cite a handful of cases Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM all employ Chinese H1-B visa holders through agencies. Technologies provided by those companies are used by practically all government agencies.

The amendment proposed only addresses part of one of those approaches and a tiny one at that. We will never prevent theft of military secrets by the Chinese.

At ASPI Strategist Iain MacGillivray analyzes the prospects for Turkey after Erdogan and ultimately decides that it’s not Erdogan it’s Turkey:

A common argument among Turkey analysts is that if Erdogan and his executive presidential system, à la Turka, were replaced, Turkey’s ills would also disappear. But unravelling Erdogan’s influence is unlikely to be that simple. Would his departure mean that Turkey would go back to being a stalwart ally, polarisation would decrease and democracy would return? The answer is yes, and no.

According to recent polling, the AKP’s support oscillates around 35%. This suggests that the polarising, nationalist rhetoric that Erdogan employs is part of a bigger cultural shift that has been happening for decades.

With the 1980 coup, the military junta ushered in an ideological and cultural movement that sought to merge nationalist and Islamic elements of Turkish culture and politics. Its current manifestation, Turkish Islamic nationalism, is a reimagining of this original synthesis and is promoted by ultranationalist elements in Turkish society and, more recently, by the AKP and Erdogan.

Through AKP-controlled media, education and political discourse, Turkish Islamic nationalism has had a transformative effect on Turkish civil society. It manifests in a populist, nationalist and nativist understanding of Turkish culture and politics.

There are already individuals who are being groomed as potential leaders of the AKP after Erdogan goes. Possible contenders for leadership in a post-Erdogan Turkey include two key names, Erdogan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak and Minister for the Interior Suleyman Soylu, who represent two different sides of the same coin of this populist and nativist form of politics.

In a post-Erdogan Turkey with an AKP or opposition successor, it’s highly unlikely we’ll see any immediate change in its foreign policy. Turkey has shown itself to be an independent actor in the region, inclined to use force to bring its interests to the table. It is no longer anchored to an East or West orientation and views itself able to move multidimensionally in its neighbourhood and beyond.

It can’t be emphasized enough. Kemalist Turkey was an ally. Post-Kemalist Turkey is an ally in name only. It’s actually an adversary as it has demonstrated to us, the UK, France, Greece, and other NATO allies. Fear that it will make common cause with Russia assumes that it actually has common interests with Russia. The only common interest it has with Russia is opposition to U. S. imperialism in the region, with good reason. Its differences with Russia far outweigh its common interests as any student of Russian history and politics could tell you.

The same is true in spades with respect to Iran. We should have no fear of Turkey joining forces with Iran or that Russia, Turkey, and Iran will join forces. Russia is more feared by both Turkey and Iran than we will ever be.

In the small part of the debate I saw last night, Kamala Harris did ask one interesting question. Why is the U. S. mortality rate due to COVID-19 higher than that of any other major country? I would interested in an answer to that question.

I recognize that she unquestionably attributes that to the incompetence of the Trump Administration. I suspect that if Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016 we would be hearing complaints about the incompetence of the H. Clinton Administration in slowing the spread of the disease.

I can offer some speculations. There seems to be some evidence that the strain of the virus we have faced is different from that which struck China, South Korea, and Japan. Additionally, those are all countries that are quite homogeneous and have high degrees of social cohesion. I believe those two characteristics are related. I should add that the number of blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans in those countries is quite small. The number of deaths due to COVID-19 among Asian Americans is relatively small, too, albeit higher than in China, South Korea, and Japan.

I also think that the question is overly dismissive of Brazil and Mexico, two countries with which the U. S. has much in common. Our death rate is not dissimilar to that in those countries. As I’ve pointed out before, the mortality rate due to COVID-19 in the U. S. among whites is not dissimilar to the mortality rate among Germans.

I know that the prevalance of obesity in the black population is quite high, high in the U. S. generally, and obesity seems to increase the likelihood of death if you contract COVID-19. I don’t know what the factors behind obesity are. I think in all likelihood it’s multi-factorial including behavioral, genetic factors, and stress.

I also think that lockdowns, at least in the highly politicized way in which they were implemented in the U. S., are very unlikely to be effective in slowing the spread of the disease. How politicized? At least here in Chicago express deliveries continued as usual regardless of how inessential what they were delivering might have been. I think it’s a stretch to think that lawn service workers, city workers performing non-emergent services, and people working at the DMV (it’s the Secretary of State’s Office here) are essential. What percentage of workers are truly essential? I strongly suspect it’s a lot less than 50%.