Peggy Noonan uses her regular Wall Street Journal column to publish what I presume is an imagined letter from a political ally of Joe Biden’s:

FROM: Charles Smith, an ambassador from the Obama-Biden era

TO: Joe Biden

Boss, happy Labor Day. Hope this finds you well. We’re still in Edgartown and fully recovered from the virus. Betty had it worse than me, but right now I’m hearing the fierce thwack of the ball as she plays doubles and I’m in the pool house banging this out, so I guess we’re OK!

We’ve been watching you closely, cheering you on. You asked me to check in when I have advice. I hesitate because I know you’re inundated. I remember seeing old Bush at dinner in Kennebunkport in ’88, and he was grousing about all his friends telling him “be strong,” “show you’re tough on the trail,” but they never had advice on exactly how to portray “strength.” He sort of comically threw up his hands and said, “What do they want me to do, punch somebody in the face?”

So I know how it is. I’ll keep it short and describe what I’m seeing. We’ve never had a year like this—pandemic, economic contraction, cultural upheaval. Everyone has the jits. Summer’s over, they’re headed home to re-emerge into . . . what? The unknown. Normally people are kind of geared up for the fall, not bracing for it.

You’re good in the polls but I’m worried about the so-called shy Trumpers. The guys who work at the club—they don’t want to say when I ask who they’re for; it’s like they think I’ll get them fired or not give them a tip. And they know me! It’s all gotten so timorous.

I saw your speech in Pittsburgh and I have to be blunt about it, as we always are. You were strong in your condemnation of Trump, that malignancy metastasizing in the Oval, but it’s not as if people don’t know how they feel about him. He’s already vivid, I’m not sure you have to repaint the picture.

More seriously I thought there was a certain off-pointness and disconnect. I thought: This is a man with personal political problems he’s solving with words, as opposed to a leader speaking deep truth about the extraordinary problems that face us.

I think Trump got in your head with “He’s weak.” You felt you had to be what your aides tell you is the opposite of weak, which apparently involves indignation and sarcasm.

You said, in language that was seemingly direct, “Ask yourself: Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?” Joe, no one thinks you’re a radical socialist. No one. They’re afraid you’ll bend to crazy progressives when you’re in the White House because you’re Ol’ Joe and just want everyone to get along.

I think that’s just about right. The question that VP Biden must ask himself is whether frightening moderate Democrats and convinceable independents or even never-Trumpers is a greater risk than alienating the left wing of his own party? So far he does not seem to believe that it is which lends weight to the concerns of those who are “afraid you’ll bend to crazy progressives”. I do not believe he will be able to finesse that question or remain on the fence through election day.

It is not my usual practice to comment on local news other than Chicago or Illinois news. This particular story has a Chicago connection since Mr. Prude’s daughter lives in Chicago and we’re getting a lot on it here. You have presumably heard of the recent death of Daniel Prude at the hands of the Rochester, New York police under circumstances which have eerie reminders of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May. NPR reports:

The mayor of Rochester, N.Y., has ordered the immediate suspension of seven police officers over the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died of asphyxiation after being restrained during his arrest in March.

Police body camera footage of the encounter was released Wednesday, prompting protests and calls for transparency and justice.

In a press conference Thursday afternoon, Mayor Lovely Warren announced she is suspending the officers in question with pay. She said she did so “against the advice of counsel,” noting the police union could respond by suing the city.

Warren said Prude had been failed “by our police department, our mental health care system, our society … and by me.”

She also said institutional and structural racism had led to Prude’s death.

“I believe that if Daniel Prude was white all of those systems would not have failed him,” Warren said. “It is time that we stopped trying to not acknowledge this and call it for was it is. It’s racism.”

Rochester police arrested Prude in the early hours of March 23 after his brother, concerned about his sibling’s safety, had called 911. Prude, 41, had left his brother’s house in below-freezing temperatures wearing long johns and a tank top. He had been released from Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital earlier that night after expressing suicidal thoughts.

When Rochester police officers came upon Prude, he was naked and in distress. Prude had allegedly just gone on a destructive tear, according to police reports, smashing out the windows of storefronts and ranting about having the coronavirus. A passing tow truck driver who called 911 described Prude as being covered in blood.

The police bodycam footage shows officers, with Tasers drawn, confronting Prude and ordering him to lie down on the road, which was slick from a light snowfall. Prude complied, lying facedown on his stomach, and officers cuffed his hands behind his back.

But in time, the 5-foot-10-inch, 230-pound man grew agitated. He began yelling vulgarities, spitting at officers and tried, unsuccessfully, to stand up. Officers ordered him several times to return to the prone position before placing a white hood over Prude’s head, known as a “spit hood” and intended to protect others from possible infection.

Officers restrained Prude by holding him down by his feet and his head, and applying pressure to his back with a knee. Prude eventually fell unconscious and stopped breathing, according to police reports. He died a week later.

What puzzles me about this incident is that the Rochester Police Department has a Crisis Intervention Team. If you saw a naked man walking down the street breaking windows, wouldn’t you consider that an incident for the CIT? I certainly would. All the more so since the 911 call reported Mr. Prude as having a “mental breakdown” and the RPD had made a mental health arrest of Mr. Prude just 15 hours earlier. I find the whole situation baffling and sad.

I want to draw your attention to a piece by Margaret Talev at Axios describing a rather small portion of the hurricane that’s coming our way on election day:

A top Democratic data and analytics firm told “Axios on HBO” it’s highly likely that President Trump will appear to have won — potentially in a landslide — on election night, even if he ultimately loses when all the votes are counted.

She’s considered some of the factors but not all. Let’s dig deeper. Here’s a visual depiction of the scenario described:

Let’s throw out a list of of some of the factors involved:

• Polarization
• Immediate gratification
• COVID-19
• Mail-in voting
• Declining trust in government and politics
• Social media
• The “Dopeler effect”
• The stakes are high

Now I’ll make a few observations, somewhat scattershot. This is not conspiracy-mongering. I’ve already posted about the “wargaming” of the 2020 election which included prominent members of the Democratic National Committee, in which Biden’s failure to concede led to civil war. Hillary Clinton has also openly advocated that Joe Biden not concede under any circumstances.

We are a society accustomed to quick resolutions of problems—immediate gratification. That’s promoted by, among other factors, television. On scripted TV programs an enormous number of problems are solved over the course of an hour. This is reflected in everything from the demonstrations, protests, and riots that have rocked the country for months to plans for a “Green New Deal”. Even the thorniest problems and those least amenable to any actual solution must be solved now.

COVID-19, a reluctance to stand in line at a polling place and crowd into that space with people you don’t know, along with the likely shortage of election workers, has motivated a call for much more mail-in voting. It is likely that mail-in voting will be more widespread in the 2020 election than in any previous presidential election in our history. That will inevitably lead to delays in the final results of the election.

It hasn’t always been that way. Until the invention of the telegraph the final results of presidential elections were generally not known and certified for months after the election. Until the ratification of the 20th amendment in many states voting in presidential elections went on for nearly a month. Delays in announcing results were expected. That has changed.

The “Dopeler effect” is the principle by which nonsense looks sensible to you if it comes to you very fast. And repeatedly. That’s an underlying principle of television advertising not to mention Sesame Street. It is quite well known that social media can maximize impact with updates on an hourly if not minute-to-minute basis.

Need I flesh out how high the stakes are in this election? Ruth Bader Ginsburg can’t hold on forever. She could drop dead at any moment. Should that happen during a second Trump term, the structure of the Supreme Court will change decisively. That’s just one example.

To sum up, unless Joe biden wins a decisive popular and electoral college victory on election night, he is very unlikely to concede. The determination of results and their certification could go on for weeks for the reasons outlined in the linked article. Biden-Harris will undoubtedly insist on counting votes until they are victorious. Trump-Pence will equally undoubtedly seek to shut down the counting.

We’re sitting on a powder keg.

The editors of the Washington Post see the glass of our national response to COVID-19 as half-empty (at least):

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic is veering toward another wildly irresponsible turn. After first saying the virus would go away, then failing to properly boost the supply chains, then bungling the testing scale-up, then walking away and turning the burdens over to governors, then advocating a reopening in May that triggered a new virus firestorm, Mr. Trump has been asking questions about the strategy of relying on natural “herd immunity.” This is another way of taking a hands-off approach, protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the virus to spread until there is enough natural immunity in the population to block transmission.

Mr. Trump should ask very hard questions about this. An analysis by The Post showed that in the United States, with a population of 328 million, reaching a 65 percent threshold for herd immunity could lead to 2.13 million deaths. This was the pandemic approach in Sweden, and it did not turn out well.

but their conclusion looks pretty reasonable to me:

Ultimately, an effective vaccine or therapy can break the pandemic. Until then, what’s needed are concerted measures to slow viral transmission: wearing face masks; avoiding gatherings in enclosed spaces; testing, tracing and isolating the sick; and closures as necessary. The restrictions are hard after months of sacrifice. The economic and psychic toll is undeniable. But until a vaccine or drug arrives, there is no magic wand to make the virus disappear. Everyone must understand the virus is relentless, opportunistic and, for 181,000 Americans, so far, a real killer.

Meanwhile, the editors of the Wall Street Journal see the same glass as half-full:

Most states experienced flare-ups of varying degrees this summer as people gathered and travelled more. But outbreaks were worse in the South and West, for reasons that deserve more study but could include high rates of co-morbidities and more multigenerational households. Some U.S. nationals and migrant workers also brought the virus from Mexico.

But the U.S. seven-day rolling average of new cases has fallen by about 40% from its peak on July 25. Hospitalizations and deaths in hot spots peaked at about the same time in apparent contradiction to epidemiological models that have predicted two- to three-week lags between cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Hospitalizations are down by 62% in Texas, 60% in Florida, 48% in Utah, 45% in California, and 44% in Louisiana from their peaks, which all occurred between July 21 and 24. Arizona’s hospitalizations began increasing in late May, a week or two earlier than in most states, and have fallen 78% since topping out July 12.

Arizona has made so much progress that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo removed it from his quarantine list last week. Notably, hospitalizations have been falling at about the same rate in Texas, Florida and Arizona as in the Northeast this spring. A second shutdown wasn’t needed to crush these outbreaks.

Their conclusion, too, looks pretty reasonable to me:

Covid cases have been rising in some Midwest states, but the flare-ups so far are well below the spring Northeast debacle or the surge in the South and West. Flare-ups are inevitable until a vaccine is widely available, especially in places where there have been few cases. Nobody is suggesting the U.S. has achieved herd immunity and should now declare victory. Americans will have to behave cautiously for many more months, but it’s still worth taking stock of progress.

More and faster testing such as the low-cost rapid antigen test by Abbott Laboratories that the Food and Drug Administration approved last week will allow more schools and workplaces to reopen. The policy goal should be to mitigate the virus’s damage while allowing Americans to return to some semblance of normalcy.

As I have documented in the past, mortality due to COVID-19 in the U. S. among whites is about what it has been in Germany while mortality due to COVID-19 in the U. S. among black and Hispanics more closely resembles that of Brazil which should not be completely surprising if you think about it. We can and should do better but the way we must do it is by concentrating resources where they’re most needed which is in communities with largely black or Hispanic populations. That be done first and foremost at the state and local level but the federal government should play a part as well.

If we can’t make distinctions among different populations, COVID-19 will become yet another problem beyond our ability to manage.

In comments a regular commenter pointed out an interesting article at Medium.com which is worthy of your attention. Apparently, a team of researchers at Oak Ridge put one of their supercomputers to work on the problem, and came up with an interesting hypothesis about how COVID-19 produces the effects that it does:

According to the team’s findings, a Covid-19 infection generally begins when the virus enters the body through ACE2 receptors in the nose, (The receptors, which the virus is known to target, are abundant there.) The virus then proceeds through the body, entering cells in other places where ACE2 is also present: the intestines, kidneys, and heart. This likely accounts for at least some of the disease’s cardiac and GI symptoms.

But once Covid-19 has established itself in the body, things start to get really interesting. According to Jacobson’s group, the data Summit analyzed shows that Covid-19 isn’t content to simply infect cells that already express lots of ACE2 receptors. Instead, it actively hijacks the body’s own systems, tricking it into upregulating ACE2 receptors in places where they’re usually expressed at low or medium levels, including the lungs.
In this sense, Covid-19 is like a burglar who slips in your unlocked second-floor window and starts to ransack your house. Once inside, though, they don’t just take your stuff — they also throw open all your doors and windows so their accomplices can rush in and help pillage more efficiently.
The renin–angiotensin system (RAS) controls many aspects of the circulatory system, including the body’s levels of a chemical called bradykinin, which normally helps to regulate blood pressure. According to the team’s analysis, when the virus tweaks the RAS, it causes the body’s mechanisms for regulating bradykinin to go haywire. Bradykinin receptors are resensitized, and the body also stops effectively breaking down bradykinin. (ACE normally degrades bradykinin, but when the virus downregulates it, it can’t do this as effectively.)
The end result, the researchers say, is to release a bradykinin storm — a massive, runaway buildup of bradykinin in the body. According to the bradykinin hypothesis, it’s this storm that is ultimately responsible for many of Covid-19’s deadly effects. Jacobson’s team says in their paper that “the pathology of Covid-19 is likely the result of Bradykinin Storms rather than cytokine storms,” which had been previously identified in Covid-19 patients, but that “the two may be intricately linked.” Other papers had previously identified bradykinin storms as a possible cause of Covid-19’s pathologies.

If true here are some of the implications:

As Jacobson and team point out, several drugs target aspects of the RAS and are already FDA approved to treat other conditions. They could arguably be applied to treating Covid-19 as well. Several, like danazol, stanozolol, and ecallantide, reduce bradykinin production and could potentially stop a deadly bradykinin storm. Others, like icatibant, reduce bradykinin signaling and could blunt its effects once it’s already in the body.
Interestingly, Jacobson’s team also suggests vitamin D as a potentially useful Covid-19 drug. The vitamin is involved in the RAS system and could prove helpful by reducing levels of another compound, known as REN. Again, this could stop potentially deadly bradykinin storms from forming. The researchers note that vitamin D has already been shown to help those with Covid-19. The vitamin is readily available over the counter, and around 20% of the population is deficient. If indeed the vitamin proves effective at reducing the severity of bradykinin storms, it could be an easy, relatively safe way to reduce the severity of the virus.
Other compounds could treat symptoms associated with bradykinin storms. Hymecromone, for example, could reduce hyaluronic acid levels, potentially stopping deadly hydrogels from forming in the lungs. And timbetasin could mimic the mechanism that the researchers believe protects women from more severe Covid-19 infections. All of these potential treatments are speculative, of course, and would need to be studied in a rigorous, controlled environment before their effectiveness could be determined and they could be used more broadly.

It would also explain why African Americans appear to be more susceptible to the worst effects of the disease—prevalence of Vitamin D deficiency is higher among people of sub-Saharan African descent than among the rest of the population.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the DC City Council’s wish to remove references to Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, Alexander Graham Bell, and James Monroe as “problematic”:

Many backers of the summer’s protest movement say they want to perfect the Founding principles, not demolish them—and that they support the removal of Confederate statues for that reason. That’s the image Democrats presented at their national convention. If it’s true, then Biden Democrats should be the first to blast the district’s efforts to dishonor the people who created the Constitution they are sworn to protect.

I have a couple of modest proposals of my own:

1. Abolish the DC city government. Congress should shoulder its constitutional responsibility of governing the federal district directly itself.
2. Residence within the district should be prohibited. That would solve the DC statehood problem, too. It was never intended to be a highly populous city.

The slug on Jason L. Riley’s latest Wall Street Journal column is “When did Democrats stop trusting people to know what was best for them and their children?” Apparently, he has only now noticed that the Democratic Party has a strong technocratic wing. Odd, since both of the last two Democratic presidents held that view. He remarks:

A troubling trend in recent decades has been the transfer of decision-making authority to expert intellectuals. Environmental regulations and health-care mandates are two obvious examples. But there’s also the more general nanny state mentality emanating from liberals who tell you that politicians, bureaucrats and academics know better than you do how to live your life and raise your children. The result is fewer decisions made through democratic processes, and more choices determined by an intelligentsia that suffers few if any consequences for being wrong.

My problem with the technocratic wing of the party is somewhat different and one I have aired before. Experts are well and good. We should take their advice in the areas of their expertise. But no one is an expert on everything and there is an inescapable tendency, human beings what they are, to try to leverage your expertise in one area into areas in which you have no expertise, cf. Paul Krugman.

Actual technocracy would be one thing. A technocracy in which all decisions about everything are made by lawyers, bankers, or any other specialists is no technocracy at all.

That is not to say that the Republicans don’t have their issues. For example, there is some tendency to “Know Nothing”-ism in the present Republican Party, a populist tendency in which the contributions of experts are ignored because they’re the contributions of experts.

There is a tension here. We must come up with a way to place the opinions of experts in proper perspective. They have a role but they can’t be the last word.

I think there’s a broader issue with which Mr. Riley does not even attempt to come to terms. When specializations are increasingly narrow, how do you make use of experts? It’s a difficult problem. I think the solution is less centralization, more subsidiarity, a lot more humility, and a willingness for policymakers to take stands that aren’t ideological. The first two mitigate the risks of failures in the latter two. I’m not hopeful.

I wanted to share with you an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal from Donald L. Luskin of TrendMacro, assessing his company’s findings on the results of the lockdowns:

TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported cases of Covid-19 in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project. We then compared that with the timing and intensity of the lockdown in each jurisdiction. That is measured not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but rather by observing what people in each jurisdiction actually did, along with their baseline behavior before the lockdowns. This is captured in highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland’s Transportation Institute into a “Social Distancing Index.”

Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.

It could be that strict lockdowns were imposed as a response to already severe outbreaks. But the surprising negative correlation, while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest caseloads. And it makes no difference if the analysis includes other potential explanatory factors such as population density, age, ethnicity, prevalence of nursing homes, general health or temperature. The only factor that seems to make a demonstrable difference is the intensity of mass-transit use.

We ran the experiment a second time to observe the effects on caseloads of the reopening that began in mid-April. We used the same methodology, but started from each state’s peak of lockdown and extended to July 31. Confirming the first experiment, there was a tendency (though fairly weak) for states that opened up the most to have the lightest caseloads. The states that had the big summer flare-ups in the so-called “Sunbelt second wave”—Arizona, California, Florida and Texas—are by no means the most opened up, politicized headlines notwithstanding.

The lesson is not that lockdowns made the spread of Covid-19 worse—although the raw evidence might suggest that—but that lockdowns probably didn’t help, and opening up didn’t hurt. This defies common sense. In theory, the spread of an infectious disease ought to be controllable by quarantine. Evidently not in practice, though we are aware of no researcher who understands why not.

We’re not the only researchers to have discovered this statistical relationship. We first published a version of these findings in April, around the same time similar findings appeared in these pages. In July, a publication of the Lancet published research that found similar results looking across countries rather than U.S. states. “A longer time prior to implementation of any lockdown was associated with a lower number of detected cases,” the study concludes. Those findings have now been enhanced by sophisticated measures of actual social distancing, and data from the reopening phase.

There are experimental controls that all this research lacks. There are no observable instances in which there were either total lockdowns or no lockdowns at all. But there’s no escaping the evidence that, at minimum, heavy lockdowns were no more effective than light ones, and that opening up a lot was no more harmful than opening up a little. So where’s the science that would justify the heavy lockdowns many public-health officials are still demanding?

I think I can explain their results simply. The lockdowns weren’t lockdowns. The notion of a “lockdown” in which 50% of workers aren’t locked down is absurd on its face. That’s not a lockdown; it’s lockdown theater.

What could have been done? The list is enormous. Operations of the package delivery services, e.g. UPS and FedEx, could have been suspended. Government workers not engaged in emergency services could have been furloughed. Grocery stores and pharmacies could have been limited to curbside pickup or delivery only. Transit services could have been shut down. Health care and other essential workers could have been directed not to commute, perhaps making lodgings in or nearby their hospitals, etc. available to them. You can come up with additional steps on your own.

I would submit that such a lockdown would have been intolerable for three weeks let alone for the three months during which they were actually imposed. But that’s what a lockdown entails.

Quarantines can work but not of most of the population and certainly not of half of the population. Voluntary quarantines aren’t quarantines. Neither are quarantines without penalties for violation. They also must be of limited and defined duration. Not “as long as necessary”.

In a report that should surprise precisely no one, NBC News reports that there was likely waste and fraud in the Payroll Protection Program, part of the $2 trillion CARES Act enacted in panicked haste by the Congress earlier this year:

Over $1 billion in emergency coronavirus aid relief went to companies that “double dipped” and received multiple Paycheck Protection Program loans in violation of the program’s rules, according to a preliminary analysis released Tuesday by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

Congressional investigators identified multiple areas of potential waste and fraud in the program, often referred to as PPP, which was part of the $2 trillion CARES Act. The program offered qualifying small businesses up to $10 million in emergency and forgivable loans to shore up their payrolls and meet basic expenses due to business impacts from the coronavirus and lockdown periods. The program gave loans to nearly 4.9 million small businesses for a total of $521 billion. As designed, the program still has $133 million in untapped funds.

The latest analysis “suggests a high risk that PPP loans may have been diverted from small businesses truly in need to ineligible businesses or even to criminals,” according to the report, which was released as part of a subcommittee hearing with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday afternoon.

When the final reckoning is done (if a final reckoning is ever done), I’m sure that the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in the program will be considerably greater than what’s being reported. I would guess in the area of $100 billion or 20% of the total.

Who’s to blame? Predictably, a lot of blame is placed on the Trump Administration:

“Secretary Mnuchin has previously testified that, given the need to get relief money out quickly, it was inevitable that Treasury, and I quote, ‘ran into a lot of issues,'” Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., chairman of the subcommittee, wrote in his opening statement. “That is a false dichotomy: Taxpayers should not have to choose between quickly getting aid to those who need it and wasting federal funds, and there are simple steps that could have been taken to improve oversight and reduce fraud.”

The subcommittee found over 10,000 loans in which the borrowers obtained more than one loan. Under the administration’s rules to audit only loans over $2 million, only 65 of the loans would otherwise have been subject to additional review.

but I suspect that we’ll find that Congress bears some of the responsibility as well. Legislate in haste, repent at leisure. Was money appropriated to bring on additional staff to administer the program? Declaiming that was the responsibility of the administration is no answer. The Trump Administration could have been sued had it diverted funds from the PPP or other programs to staff. It’s the job of the Congress to spell out how money should be used, not allow it up to the discretion of the administration.

And how, exactly, will you bring in additional staff during a lockdown?