Like most Americans I didn’t watch the coverage of the virtual Democratic National Convention last night.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other

John Adams, October 11, 1798

At The Conversation Parker Crutchfield argues for “morality pills”:

Economists use public goods games to measure how people behave in various scenarios to lower collective risks such as from climate change or a pandemic and to prevent the loss of public and private goods.

The evidence from these experiments is no cause for optimism. Usually everyone loses because people won’t cooperate. This research suggests it’s not surprising people aren’t wearing masks or social distancing – lots of people defect from groups when facing a collective risk. By the same token, I’d expect that, as a group, we will fail at addressing the collective risk of COVID-19, because groups usually fail. For more than 150,000 Americans so far, this has meant losing everything there is to lose.

continuing

It seems that the U.S. is not currently equipped to cooperatively lower the risk confronting us. Many are instead pinning their hopes on the rapid development and distribution of an enhancement to the immune system – a vaccine.

But I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body’s ability to fight off disease but the brain’s ability to cooperate with others. What if researchers developed and delivered a moral enhancer rather than an immunity enhancer?

Moral enhancement is the use of substances to make you more moral. The psychoactive substances act on your ability to reason about what the right thing to do is, or your ability to be empathetic or altruistic or cooperative.

For example, oxytocin, the chemical that, among other things, can induce labor or increase the bond between mother and child, may cause a person to be more empathetic and altruistic, more giving and generous. The same goes for psilocybin, the active component of “magic mushrooms.” These substances have been shown to lower aggressive behavior in those with antisocial personality disorder and to improve the ability of sociopaths to recognize emotion in others.

Unfortunately, as he points out, oxytocin also tends to make people more racist or, as he puts it “ethnocentric”. The question I would ask is who decides what constitutes moral behavior? IMO his proposal is out of the question on First and Fourth Amendment grounds.

However, I was interested in Ezra Klein’s recent piece at Vox.com on what he perceives as a basic inability to govern among Republicans:

Different Republican senators have different ideas, but across the party as a whole, there is no plan. The Republican Party has no policy theory for how to contain the coronavirus, nor for how to drive the economy back to full employment. And there is no plan to come up with a plan, nor anyone with both the interest and authority to do so. The Republican Party is broken as a policymaking institution, and it has been for some time.

“I don’t think you’re missing anything,” said a top Republican Senate staffer. “You have a whole bunch of people in the Senate posturing for 2024 rather than governing for the crisis we’re in.”

“There hasn’t been a coherent GOP policy on anything for almost five years now,” a senior aide to a conservative Senate Republican told me. “Other than judges, I don’t think you can point to any united policy priorities.”

He goes on to offer four possible explanations:

• It’s Trump’s fault.
• Conservative thinking has no room for Covid-19.
• They’re worried about Tea Party 2.0.
• They’ve given up on 2020, and many are looking toward 2024.

While I think there’s some merit in each of those, I think that Mr. Klein is missing something basic. Republicans aren’t coming up with policy prescriptions that Democrats would recognize as such because their present operative theory of governance is so much different from that of Democrats. Democrats tend to long for grand, sweeping top-down plans planned and administered from Washington while Republicans don’t. With as many closet minarchists and anarcho-capitalists (like Paul Ryan) among them, what else would you expect?

The uncomfortable truth is that Republican-led states are actually faring better with respect to combating COVID-19 than Democratic-led states. It’s no secret that New York and New Jersey’s responses were disastrous—they have by far the highest number of deaths per 1M population of any state. While California’s deaths per 1M population is much better than most states its number of cases per 1M population is trending in the wrong direction. Given that California shut down early and has remained locked down longer, it’s a bit hard to see how, barring divine intervention or just dumb luck, that will turn around. For all of the complaints about Texas and Florida, their numbers of new cases diagnosed are actually trending in the right direction.

Indeed, I think it’s a bit hard to fault Republicans on their lack of policies given their success at the state level. But at the national level he’s got a point. As far as I can tell, the only thing that Republicans actually agree on at the national level is that taxes are too high.

Don’t expect me to comment much on the Democratic National Convention. I’m not particularly interested in political conventions or even in commentary on political conventions. I wasn’t much into pep rallies in high school, either.

ABC 7 Chicago reports that Dan Webb has released his report on Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx’s handling of the Jussie Smollett case:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Special Prosecutor Dan Webb has released his report Monday into the Jussie Smollett’s case and its handling by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

The report said it found evidence of “substantial abuses of discretion and operational failures” on the part of Foxx’s office.

However, Webb said he did not find evidence that would support criminal charges against Foxx or anyone working in her office. Webb also found there was no third party influence in any decision making.

The report says Foxx made false statements about the case and continued to be involved after she had publicly recused herself.

Webb said in his report that after she made her recusal, Foxx and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office came to the realization that the decision to appoint her assistant Joseph Magats as “Acting State’s Attorney” was “legally defective.”

Webb said Foxx needed to, “recuse the entire CCSAO and petition the court to appoint a special prosecutor. Instead of implementing the proper legal course to carry out the recusal once this defect was brought to their attention, the CCSAO and State’s Attorney Foxx made the decision to ignore this major legal defect seemingly because they did not want to admit that they had made such a major mistake of judgment regarding State’s Attorney Foxx’s recusal.”

The report also said that Foxx made misleading statements on her communications with Jussie Smollett’s sister. Jurnee Smollett. Webb said Foxx learned by February 8, 2019 that Jussie Smollett was a suspect in a Chicago police investigation, but continued communicating with his sister Jurnee through February 13, including five text messages and three phone calls.

Let’s call it like it was. She lied. Those weren’t misleading; they were lies. I could make all sorts of wisecracks about this but I’ll leave it at this. Obviously, following the dictates of the law are for the little people.

She desperately needs to be defeated in her re-election bid in November. I’d vote for a red dog if he were running against Kim Foxx for States Attorney.

At the Harvard Gazette Alvin Powell reminds us why inexpensive paper strip tests (referred to in an earlier post) aren’t presently being used. They’re illegal:

The Food and Drug Administration, in charge of approving diagnostic tests, has held up approval because the tests aren’t as accurate as nasal-swab, lab-based tests.

which is something I’ve been whining about for as long as I’ve had this blog and longer. The standard used by the FDA for approval preclude such tests. Even if there is a niche for their use a less expensive but less accurate testing method just can’t get approved. Medical diagnostic devices have an even higher hurdle to clear: they must be better than a human physician. “As good as” doesn’t get approved.

At his blog, Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen explains why it’s in the interest of media outlets to publish bad news and, generally, create a sense of panic about COVID-19:

if you do public health, your status incentives are to deliver warnings, not potential good news.

Your status incentives are always to hedge your bets, and to be reluctant to introduce new hypotheses.

Your status incentives are to steer talk away from the virus “simply continuing to rip,” even if you are quite opposed to that outcome. Other than hitting it with an immediate scold, you are not supposed to let that option climb on to the discussion table for too long.

Your status incentives are to discourage individuals from thinking that they might be have some pre-existing level of protection. That might lead them to behave more irresponsibly, and then you in turn would look less responsible.

Since public health commentators are so concerned with “doing good by us,” they fail to see that their altruistic (and status) motives in these matters mean they do not end up telling us the truth. Not the entire truth, and not upfront in a very prompt matter.

None of that is a new phenomenon.

When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.

You never read about a plane that did not crash

is a similar sentiment. So what’s different? Two things which may not be unrelated: social media acting as an echo chamber and the extreme polarization of our politics.

As I’ve been whining about for some time, at end of life solar panels and wind turbines need to be recycled and/or disposed of and that is far from easy. The urgency for that is growing as this article at Slate by Maddie Stone points out:

Most solar manufacturers claim their panels will last for about 25 years, and the world didn’t start deploying solar widely until the early 2000s. As a result, a fairly small number of solar panels are being decommissioned today. PV Cycle, a nonprofit dedicated to solar panel takeback and recycling, collects several thousand tons of solar e-waste across the European Union each year, according to director Jan Clyncke. That figure includes solar panels that have reached the end of their life but also those that were decommissioned early because they were damaged during a storm, had some sort of manufacturer defect, or got replaced with a newer, more efficient model.

When solar panels do reach their end of their life today, they face a few possible fates. Under EU law, producers are required to ensure their solar panels are recycled properly. In Japan, India, and Australia, recycling requirements are in the works. In the United States, it’s the Wild West: With the exception of a state law in Washington, the U.S. has no solar recycling mandates whatsoever. Voluntary, industry-led recycling efforts are limited in scope. “Right now, we’re pretty confident the number is around 10 percent of solar panels recycled,” said Sam Vanderhoof, the CEO of Recycle PV Solar, one of the only U.S. companies dedicated to PV recycling. The rest, he says, go to landfills or are exported overseas for reuse in developing countries with weak environmental protections.

Exporting our solid waste does not reduce their toxicity or environmental impact—it just puts them out of sight.

I think that the pressure to deploy more solar and wind power will only get more intense, pretty much regardless of the merits. We can only put off the difficult issue of recycling and disposing of them at end of life for so long. Twenty years ago that was a problem for the future. But it’s the future now.

In another lengthy, rambling article this time by Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal at Atlantic about SARS-CoV-2 testing, they argue for mass daily testing:

So here is what May 2021 could look like: Vaccines are rolling out. You haven’t gotten your dose yet, but you are no longer social distancing. When your daughter walks into her classroom, she briefly removes her mask and spits into a plastic bag; so do all the other children and the teacher. The bag is then driven across three states and delivered to the nearest Ginkgo processing facility. When you arrive at work, you spit into a plastic cup, then step outside to drink coffee. In 15 minutes, you get a text: You passed your daily screen and may proceed into the office. You still wear your mask at your desk, and you try to avoid common areas, but local infection levels are down in the single digits. That night, you and your family meet your parents at a restaurant, and before you proceed inside, you all take another contagiousness test. It’s normal, now, to see the little cups of saliva and saline solution, each holding a strip of color-changing paper, sitting on tables near the entrance of every public place. And before you fall asleep, you get a text message from the school district. Nobody in your daughter’s class tested positive this morning—instruction can happen in person tomorrow.

I honestly don’t think they’ve thought the plan through sufficiently. Even paper strip tests require materials and entail labor costs. And then there’s the disposal costs. The scale they’re talking about would be unprecedented.

As I’ve mentioned before, a majority of pharmaceutical company executives don’t believe that a vaccine will be available in spring 2021—they see the earliest likely delivery as fall of 2021.

Unless the test is failsafe in the sense that it produces zero false positive responses, it is daunting to think of the lawsuits that would inevitably be filed. It would be a full employment program for plaintiff’s attorneys and a nightmare for employers, school districts, and retailers.

And how in the world would the testing regime be enforced? If, on the other side of the coin, the tests produce lots of false negatives, it would in all likelihood be ignored after a while. Employers, school districts, and retailers would just stop administering them. We have ample evidence that local authorities are unwilling to enforce mask-wearing.