Yesterday I listened to quite a bit of the funeral of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The rabbi devoted considerable attention to and lavished praise on the late justice for her efforts in doing justice. She was apparently unaware that was scathing criticism rather than praise.

Under our system it is the responsibility of the executive branch of government which includes presidents, governors, mayors, attorneys general, states attorneys, and law enforcement officers to enforce the law. Interpreting the law is the responsibility of judges, the judicial branch of the government. Whose responsibility, then, is it to see that justice is done? That is the responsibility of the legislative branch.

If you don’t like the law—blame the Congress. If you don’t like the power of executives—blame the Congress. If you think the system is unfair or racist—blame the Congress. If you think incomes are too unequal—blame the Congress. If you think that there’s too much money in politics—blame the Congress.

The calls to “defund the police” or devote more money to housing or infrastructure or just about anything else are being misdirected. They should be directed at the Congress, legislatures, county boards, and city councils. Over the years jobs that were originally envisioned as part-time jobs that would be held for limited periods have transmogrified into permanent full-time jobs with lifetime tenure. Congressmen are enormously overpaid and overstaffed, devoting much of their time to raising campaign treasure chests and running for re-election. It’s bad enough that there are Congressmen who’ve held their seats since Reagan was president. There are Congressmen who’ve held their seats since Nixon was president.

It’s hardly any wonder that they can’t enact coherent legislation or be bothered to enact actual budgets, instead being content to pass continuing resolutions which most of them can’t bothered to read.

They should be too ashamed to run for re-election.

Defund the Congress!

While walking around the neighborhood this morning, I saw five times as many signs for the Republican challenger for Cook County State’s Attorney, Patrick O’Brien as I did for any other candidate for any office. I saw no signs for the Democratic incumbent, Kim Foxx. I do not live in a Republican neighborhood.

I wanted to react to this piece by Matthew Sussex at RealClearDefense on crafting a better U. S. policy with respect to Russia:

An open letter signed by 103 experts recently called for the U.S. to re-embrace its Cold War strategy for dealing with Russia. It argued that competition should be balanced with diplomacy and identified arenas for U.S.–Russia cooperation: countering nuclear proliferation, protecting the environment and stabilising regional flashpoints. Above all, it advocated combining deterrence with détente.

That’s a laudable goal, but it’s also deeply flawed.

First, Russia has shown no signs whatsoever of being deterred by U.S. policy. The opposite is true, as demonstrated by its adventurism in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria and its disinformation operations against the West.

Second, the Kremlin has no real interest in long-term détente with the U.S., mainly because Moscow’s price to assure its security—a privileged zone of influence in the former Soviet space—isn’t something that the U.S. will agree to or be supported by Washington’s NATO allies.

Third, the rules that helped underpin Cold War stability no longer apply. Even if the international system becomes bifurcated again, China, not Russia, will occupy a major pole. Globally, nuclear politics is no longer dominated by the U.S.–Soviet dyad. Nuclear multipolarity is shaping strategic interactions in far more complex ways than Cold War–style deterrence could mitigate. And the technological revolution has been a bonanza for hostile actors seeking to weaponise information, exacerbate divisions and degrade trust in democratic institutions.

The reality is that U.S.–Russia competition is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That means that another tepid ‘reset’, paying lip-service to Russian insecurities while not actually addressing them, is similarly doomed to failure. But so, too, is symbolic posturing, such as stationing a few thousand troops in Poland and the Baltic states to mask a net drawdown of U.S. forces in Europe. Equally unhelpful are suggestions about recreating the Sino-Soviet split in reverse to prompt Russia to balance against China. Such signals are read in Moscow as proof of Western weakness.

Instead of advocating a Russia policy based on old solutions or half-measures, the U.S. needs a more comprehensive Russia strategy that responds to new strategic, economic and transnational realities.

Before leaping ahead to a more aggressive strategy with respect to Russia, I think some soul-searching is in order. I have a pretty good notion what Russia’s interest is in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. What are our interests in those countries? We went ahead willy-nilly and advocated the admission of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to NATO which gave us interests which I would submit we did not previously have. That die is cast. But what are our interests in Ukraine, Georgia, and now Belarus?

Why have we been interfering in Russian elections? That we did is beyond dispute—the Clinton Administration bragged about it. I see a potential for negative reciprocity in this matter. That is mentioned nowhere in Dr. Sussex’s piece.

Why do we have Poles and Ukrainians guiding our policy with respect to Russia? Do they really have no conflict of interest?

I doubt there’s anyone who would relish a “clear-eyed U. S. strategy on Russia” more than I. A good place to start would be with clear eyes. There’s a passage from the New Testament that comes to mind:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

I found this article about contacts between the Norsemen and the indigenous people of the Americas by Valerie Hansen at Aeon extremely interesting:

Who, besides the indigenous peoples from Asia who crossed the Alaskan land bridge in prehistory, arrived in the Americas before Columbus? The question has fascinated generations of scholars. Could a Chinese tribute ship, as Gavin Menzies proposed in 2002, have departed from the rest of the Ming fleet in East Africa in 1421 and sailed to North and South America, Australia and the Arctic? Could fishing vessels from the British port of Bristol, as David Beers Quinn suggested in 1974, have followed schools of cod across the north Atlantic and reached the fishing grounds off the Canadian shore in 1480 or 1481? No persuasive evidence supports the claim about the 15th-century Chinese. The voyages of the Bristol cod fishermen are more likely, but no documentation concerning them predates 1492, possibly because they wanted to keep the location of the fishing grounds secret.

The most credible claim – that the Vikings reached North America around the year 1000 – deserves more attention.

The short version is

• the evidence that the Norsemen actually reached the New World before Columbus is pretty good and getting better all of the time
• the indigenous people of the Americas had extensive trade routes long before Columbus
• the Norsemen may well have penetrated the interior of the country as well as having short-lived settlements on the coast

You might find this piece at STAT by Andrew Joseph, presenting a possible, maybe even an ambitious calendar of COVID-19 developments:

In this project, STAT describes 30 key moments, possible turning points that could steer the pandemic onto a different course or barometers for how the virus is reshaping our lives, from rituals like Halloween and the Super Bowl, to what school could look like, to just how long we might be incorporating precautions into our routines.

This road map is informed by insights from more than three dozen experts, including Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates, people on the frontlines at schools and hospitals, as well as STAT reporters. It largely focuses on the U.S.

Perhaps making forecasts during what’s habitually described as “unprecedented” is foolish. “I’m kind of done predicting — none of my predictions worked out for me,” Kelly Wroblewski of the Association of Public Health Laboratories said, with a resigned laugh, about when she thought the testing problems that have dogged us from the earliest days might get resolved. And indeed, some of the events will unfold in different ways and at other times than we’ve charted out.

The TL;DR version of the piece is that it will probably be years if ever before things get back to normal. I’m guessing that the new normal will be substantially different from the old one and mostly not in good ways.

The reason my posting was limited yesterday is that I was so discouraged at the material that was presented to me to work with. Everything I saw was incredibly biased, one-sided, and misleading. Fisking becomes tedious. I shouldn’t need to point out the fallacies, the most popular of which are guilt by association and hasty generalization.

I did find some interesting science pieces I want to comment on which I will do in due time. Today is another day but I’m still seeing a lot of terrible writing.

Here’s the conclusion of the Washington Post editorial on the city’s settlement with the family of Breonna Taylor and the news from Louisville that only one police officer will be indicted on charges of wanton endangerment:

These are welcome measures that may do much good, particularly if they are accompanied by robust accountability efforts that ensure the reforms aren’t walked back after the national gaze turns elsewhere. Still, there is so much a settlement like this cannot do: It cannot change the fact that Black women too often have lethal brushes with the law, simply because of the company they have once kept; it cannot change the fact that too many cases are ignored, as Ms. Taylor’s case could easily have been without the tireless efforts of advocates; and it cannot bring her back.

and here’s the conclusion of the corresponding Wall Street Journal editorial:

Mr. Cameron [ed.: Kentucky’s Attorney General] said his “heart breaks” for the Taylor family, that Breonna’s death is a “tragedy,” and that “as a black man” he understands the pain the community feels. But he says this has made his team all the more determined to get to the facts. Now, he says, it is up to the community: “Our reaction to the truth today says what kind of society we want to be. Do we really want the truth, or do we want a truth that fits our narrative?”

and here’s the news report from CNN on the situation in Lousiville:

(CNN)Two Louisville police officers were shot Wednesday night as protesters marched following news that only one of the three officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s death was indicted on first-degree wanton endangerment charges.

The other two officers who also fired shots during the botched March raid were not indicted, meaning no officer was charged with killing the 26-year-old Black emergency room technician and aspiring nurse.

Who’s got it right? Both? Neither? Are the “protesters” seeking justice or vengeance? Or something else?

The editors of the Chicago Tribune, with an unerring instinct for the futile, call for ethics reform in the Illinois legislature. Following a litany of recent indictments of legislators on corruption charges they declaim:

Voters are sick and tired of public servants in this state using their offices to enrich themselves. So what can be done to hold them more accountable? Mandatory disclosure of outside jobs, clients, income and relationships that pose conflicts of interest, and penalties if they fail to fully disclose those interests.

The state legislature needs to overhaul its Statement of Economic Interest requirements during the fall veto session, no stalling.

The statement is a document required of most candidates who run for office, some government employees and those appointed to boards and commissions. On it they are asked about sources of outside income, business relationships with lobbyists and gifts received from outside groups, among other questions. But the questions are vague by design. Many lawmakers breeze past them without answering completely, and there is little in the way of policing or monitoring their answers.

Do we know, for example, the identities of clients that House Speaker Michael Madigan serves at his law firm? The clients of other lawyers who also serve in the General Assembly? Spouses’ occupations and those potential conflicts? Real estate matters? Investments?

There is no prospect whatever that the present sitting legislators will do what they ask. Blaming the voters is easy but the point of the editorial is that voters don’t have the information to know what their elected representatives are doing behind the scenes. There is only one solution: throw the bums out. If your representative is an incumbent, vote against him or her. An all-novice legislature should have as its first agenda item putting anti-corruption reforms like this into place. Otherwise we’ll just continue in the same downward spiral we’ve been in for twenty years.

I also found this observation by Howard Husock and John Tierney at Quillette about city recycling programs interesting:

When recycling programs became common three decades ago, they were sold to taxpayers as a win-win, financially and environmentally: Cities expected to reap budget savings through the sale of recyclable materials, and conscientious taxpayers expected to reduce ecological destruction. Instead, the painful reality for enthusiastic, dutiful recyclers is that most recycling programs don’t make much environmental sense. Often, they don’t make economic sense, either.

The chief buyers of American recyclable materials used to be Asian countries, chiefly China, where wages were low enough to justify labor-intensive recycling operations. But as part of Beijing’s “National Sword” policy, China began banning imports of “foreign trash” in 2017. Other Asian countries also began imposing their own restrictions. Meanwhile, reduced demand sent prices tumbling. The market price for mixed paper, for example, dropped from $160 to $3 per ton from March 2017 to March 2018.

As a result, cities that once collected some revenue for bales of recyclables (though typically not enough to cover the extra costs that recycling introduces into a municipal budget) must now pay to get rid of them. In many cases, they simply send them to landfills.

Here in Chicago we residents dutifully put our clean recyclables into blue cans like the ones pictured above and it’s picked up every two weeks by Waste Management who then takes it and puts the contents of six of ten blue cans into a landfill. Waste Management is paid a fee for collection and receives an additional fee for putting what they’ve collected into a WM-owned dump. It’s perfect. Unless, of course, you actually believe the hooey about protecting the environment in which case it’s a scandal and an outrage. How in the heck can such a situation have happened?

The answer, which many people proposing government-based solutions to problems frequently fail to understand, is that government programs have a natural lifecycle. Let’s say arguendo that the lifecycle begins with a need. The more cynical will have other suggestions about the beginning of the process.

Strategies for dealing with the need are proposed and it’s there that things almost immediately begin to go awry. The strategy must be advocated for, sold, and adopted and that very frequently requires some incentives which necessarily are accompanied by undesireable outcomes. Advocacy goes from True Believers to paid advocates to people getting a kickback of some form for specific solutions.

Over time circumstances change. The original need may have evaporated but the program will remain forever because someone, somewhere is making a living from it. Frequently programs transmogrify over time from filling actual needs to employing people at wages higher than they could realize otherwise. The strategy may have failed or become inefficient. In the 13 years since Chicago began its recycling program it has changed from a city-run and operated program to one contracted out to one that was not only contracted out at a cost to Chicago but one that failed to realize the initial objectives. That’s not a long time in the scheme of things.

I guess there’s more than one way of looking at that. One, the minarchist view, is that problems that can’t be solved within the private sector should, by and large, not be solved at all. Another view, one typically held by Democratic policymakers is that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Somehow the omelets never seem to materialize or are quite short-lived.

My view is somewhat different. Crafting effective policy is hard and there is no such thing as a masterstroke, a “one and done” by which a program may be put into place and left unchanged and unevaluated to run on its own. Programs should all have mandatory, relatively short expiration dates which require them to be reconsidered and retooled on a regular basis.

That’s hard work and outside the wheelhouse of most elected officials.