Today I’ve read several pieces by individuals with whom I have rarely agreed with full throat but thought were more or less sane in which the term “white supremacist” was applied pretty casually, rather as “racist” has been for a number of years now. I’m old enough to remember when there were actual living, breathing white supremacists around and white supremacy was actually a mainstream position in some states.

I think they should be more sparing in their use of the term, reserving it for, you know, actual white supremacists. When every person of primarily European descent (and a lot of people of Middle Eastern, North African, or even East Asian) descent who do anything other than sit around in glum silence are accused of being white supremacists, the time when the phrase not only has no meaning but no longer has any force is not far away.

At New York Magazine’s The Intelligencer David Wallace-Wells remarks on California’s wildfires:

California is Australia now. Beginning late last year, in what is already known as the country’s Black Summer, bushfires burned through 46 million acres, or 72,000 square miles; killed several billion animals, pushing a number of species to extinction or the brink of it; flooding Sydney with air so thick with smoke ferries couldn’t navigate its harbor and fire alarms in office buildings rang out, registering the smoke as proof the building itself was in flame; and forcing beachfront evacuations in scenes that crossed Dunkirk with Mad Max.

The situation today in California isn’t yet quite as grim, although this week CalFire advised every citizen of the state — all 40 million of them — to be prepared to evacuate. Already, more than 100,000 already have. Over just the last seven days, 700,000 acres have burned in California — a number that would have been, in recent memory, a historically devastating year of fire. In just five days, more land has been burned than in all of 2019, and 500,000 of those acres are in and around the Bay Area. There, the Lightning Complex — in wildfire terminology, “complex” is when multiple blazes join forces — has alone burned 200,000 acres and is, at present, zero percent contained. The Complex could burn as many as a million acres, it’s been suggested—the state’s first “gigafire.” The lightning storms that set it off simultaneously ignited so many other wildfires the state authorities couldn’t keep track of all of them, just the 376 most significant ones. All told, more than ten thousand lightning strikes were recorded in a single day; the week saw 560 wildfires start. Big Basin Redwoods State Park has been burned through, prompting a conservation group to write, “We are devastated to report that Big Basin, as we have known it, loved it, and cherished it for generations, is gone.” These trees are between 800 and 1,500 years old. Some of them, older than Muhammad, had stood for a thousand years by the time Europeans first set foot in North America. The youngest of them are older than the Black Death, and precede the invention of the printing press by centuries. Reports yesterday had them “scorched but still standing.”

Attributing fires caused by a combination of lightning strikes, bad land management, and human crime to climate change is nonsensical. A combination of too many people, its natural environmental circumstances (the same that have attracted people there in the first place), and an influential environmental movement have contributed to decades of bad land management. Rather than conducting controlled burns or clearing scrub, they’re letting nature take its course.

At Bloomberg Hal Brands considers the prospect of the U. S.’s defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion:

There’s no question that the Chinese military threat to Taiwan is greater than it’s been in decades. From probing Taiwanese air and naval defenses, to posturing forces that could be used in an invasion, to dropping the word “peaceful” from its calls for reunification, Xi Jinping’s government is advertising its determination to bring Taiwan back under its control — perhaps not today or tomorrow, but at some point in the coming years. And whereas China long had more ambition than capability, the military balance has now moved sharply in its favor.

The stakes are high:

First, Taiwan is key to the military balance in the entire Western Pacific. Taiwan anchors the first island chain, which runs from Japan down to the Philippines. In friendly hands, it constitutes a natural barrier to the projection of Chinese air and sea power into the open ocean. In Beijing’s hands, Taiwan would be a stepping stone to regional hegemony.

Control of Taiwan would allow Beijing to extend the reach of its anti-ship missiles, air defenses, fighter and bomber aircraft, and other weapons hundreds of additional miles from its shores. It would let Beijing menace Japan’s energy supplies, sea lines of communication, and even its control of the southern Ryukyu Islands. By complicating American operations in support of remaining regional allies — especially Japan and the Philippines — the loss of Taiwan might well make these countries wonder if opposing Chinese hegemony is even possible.

Second, the loss of Taiwan would shatter U.S. credibility. Credibility is a controversial concept, but America’s alliances in the Pacific rest on the belief that Washington is able and willing to protect them from harm. Once it is revealed that America cannot or will not defend Taiwan, it would be foolish for Tokyo, Manila or Seoul not to wonder whether alignment with the U.S. is still worth incurring China’s wrath. As Taiwan goes, so may go the region.

Finally, Taiwan is a small country with outsized ideological significance. The Chinese Communist Party has long argued that democracy and Chinese culture are incompatible. That’s nonsense, of course, as the mere existence of Taiwan demonstrates. In difficult circumstances, Taipei has done almost everything the world could have asked of it: It has built a strong market economy and made the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Taiwan is a living reminder that the Chinese regime has brought its citizens prosperity but not freedom.

and it would be extremely risky:

According to press reports, Pentagon-sponsored war games consistently show that the U.S. military would struggle to act quickly and decisively enough to prevent the People’s Liberation Army from overrunning Taiwan. A former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Morell, and a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Winnefeld, recently argued that a Chinese assault would present Washington with the agonizing choice of either intervening — and suffering catastrophic losses, possibly in a losing cause — or standing aside and seeing the island subdued.

I hold the unthinkable view that the only conflict that the U. S. should be willing to engage with China in involves unleashing a considerable proportion of our nuclear arsenal on China at the outset of hostilities and being prepared to kill hundreds of millions of Chinese as well as possibly putting millions of Americans at risk. The notion that there is such a thing as a proportional response in dealing with China is absurd on its face. Since I don’t believe that any present American political leader would do that, I think that at least privately we should be telling the Taiwanese they need to be prepared to defend themselves or be Hong Kongified.

At The Atlantic Ronald Brownstein presents James Carville’s characterization of the Democratic National Convention:

Ahead of Biden’s speech last night, the longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, the campaign manager for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 race, feared that Democrats might be heading down a similar path again this week. He gave high marks to the convention’s personal introduction of Biden and its outreach to young people, but he worried that the event wasn’t following the formula Democrats used to win the House in 2018: Minimize discussion of Trump and emphasize bread-and-butter economic concerns, such as defending the Affordable Care Act and its protections for Americans with preexisting health conditions.

“The way I would say it is, I wish the convention was a little more 2018—because 2018 actually worked,” he told me. “We ran a play, and the play was: Talk about people’s daily lives, talk less about Trump, make it more about them. We’ve done some of that. I don’t want to say it’s nonexistent. But I would have been happy with 20 percent more 2018.” Carville was reassured by Biden’s speech, though. Shortly after the former vice president finished, Carville texted me: “Thought it was really good. Think he brought some needed 2018 to the convention.”

and contrasts it with the remarks of a Republican political consultant:

Alex Conant, a GOP public-affairs consultant and former communications director for Marco Rubio, says the Democrats’ choice to downplay discussion of their plans through the week reflected their determination to keep the focus on Trump. “For the most part, conventions are never heavy on policy, but this one is striking in its lack of any real policy discussion,” he told me. “At the end of the day, they want this to be a referendum on Trump’s four years in office, not a choice between their vision of the future and Trump’s.”

I think that Mr. Carville’s advice is good but I doubt that Democrats are in a mood to heed it. Presently, Democrats are unified in their attitude towards Trump but divided in much else. Focusing on their plans for the next four years run the risk of emphasizing those differences.

I have a question I’d like to put on the floor. Should political speeches be fact-checked? I don’t think they should or, at least, I think it’s very difficult to do so. How do you separate hyperbole and aspirations from falsehoods? Isn’t that completely subjective?

I’m asking this in reaction to a fact-check of Michelle Obama’s DNC speech. I don’t much care for President Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. Like a Japanese nobleman before the 20th century he seems to live in a reality that exists only in his own mind. He says what he wants to be true rather than what is necessarily objectively true.

And I wish that presidents always told us the unvarnished truth but I don’t know that has ever been true. Still, I think I would hold presidents’ public pronouncements to a higher standard than speeches given in the context of a political convention.

At the Wall Street Journal Sadanand Dhume provides some interesting background on Kamala Harris’s Indian mother:

For many Americans, Shyamala Gopalan’s immigrant story is a heartwarming part of a famous politician’s biography. But Ms. Harris’s mother also figures in another tale told less often: of India’s small and successful Tamil Brahmin diaspora.

Originating in Tamil Nadu, on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, Tamil Brahmins, known colloquially as Tambrams, are thought to number fewer than two million world-wide. Though precise numbers don’t exist, scholars estimate the group’s size in the U.S. at about 50,000, a small fraction of the four million strong Indian-American community. Another 50,000 are scattered in other countries, including the U.K., Canada and Australia.

Like most Indian-Americans, Tambrams are relatively recent immigrants. Most came to the U.S. after Congress eased immigration rules in 1965. But they have produced two Nobel Laureates in the sciences, a clutch of prominent business leaders, including former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and too many prominent doctors, engineers and academics to count.

What explains this? To begin with, historically Tambrams occupied the pinnacle of society in the Tamil-speaking region in southern India. As hereditary Hindu priests, they benefited from centuries of literacy, and many were significant landowners as well. Under British rule, the community quickly took to English education. Over time, many Tambrams rose to occupy trusted positions in the colonial government, where they developed a reputation for probity and for being sticklers for rules. Others took to modern professions such as law, engineering and medicine.

In the 20th century, as political and economic upheaval drove Tamil Brahmins from towns and villages to cities, the community developed a cult of learning. M.R. Rangaswami, a California-based technology investor who founded Indiaspora, an advocacy group that seeks strong U.S.-India relations, recalls growing up in Madras (now called Chennai) in the 1960s and 1970s, in a Tamil Brahmin community that revered the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) rather than the usual movie stars.

Ms. Nooyi credits her success in corporate America to her strict and frugal Tamil Brahmin upbringing in Madras. In a phone interview, she recalls a community for which “education was everything.”

Children weren’t allowed to be even five minutes late for school or to talk back to elders. Grandfathers supplemented homework with extra math problems and spelling tests. “As a conservative Tamil Brahmin, you could forget about fashion or having a social life,” said Ms. Nooyi. “When you weren’t studying, you were focused on classical music and dance, and on reading as much as you possibly could.”

In her book, Ms. Harris airbrushes her mother’s community from her story. The words Tamil and Brahmin don’t appear at all. At one point the senator mentions that Gopalan won an award for her singing in India, but not that it was for Carnatic music, a classical art form closely associated with Tamil Brahmins.

At one level, this omission is understandable. The senator is a U.S. politician appealing to American voters. She has no obligation to know about her mother’s ancestral community, much less to recount its story.

But the Tamil Brahmin story also undercuts many of the pieties of the U.S. left. How do you characterize America as a land of oppression when so many immigrants have clearly experienced it as a land of opportunity?

The Indian policies that spurred Tambram migration also offer a cautionary tale. Socialism, adopted at independence in 1947, created so few jobs that within two decades educated Indians began streaming to the West. Even today, the middle-class dream for many Indians begins with emigrating.

Add to this the pitfalls of identity politics. Beginning in the early 20th century, anti-Brahminism became a hallmark of Tamil politics. Numerically larger castes—Brahmins accounted for only 2.5% of the population—mobilized on the basis of group identity. In the 1960s they introduced sweeping quotas in education and government employment that forced many Tambrams to seek opportunities elsewhere.

The identity entrepreneurs who dominate Tamil Nadu politics justify reverse discrimination—7 in 10 college admissions and government jobs in the state have long been filled using quotas—on grounds of historical grievance. It’s undeniable that Tambrams had advantages, and many of their ancestors held views about social hierarchy that rightly grate on our modern sensibilities. Nonetheless, the community’s marginalization and migration is also a textbook example of the folly of pushing identity politics too far.

As the Democratic convention wraps up, many more Americans will have learned about the remarkable woman who raised Ms. Harris and her younger sister, Maya. They also deserve to learn the lesson of the community into which Shyamala Gopalan was born.

Identity politics presents risks as well as rewards. As we are learning in Chicago, biography does not necessarily provide an adequate guide for policy or governance.

A piece at the Associated Press underscores a point I have been making for some time:

As many as 215,000 more people than usual died in the U.S. during the first seven months of 2020, suggesting that the number of lives lost to the coronavirus is significantly higher than the official toll. And half the dead were people of color — Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and, to a marked degree unrecognized until now, Asian Americans.

The new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlight a stark disparity: Deaths among minorities during the crisis have risen far more than they have among whites.

There is conflicting evidence as to whether the disparity is due to access to health care or some other factor that could broadly be described as racism. A recent JAMA study suggests that’s entirely the explanation; a study from NBER suggests that the disparity is robust even when you control for age, education, income, and occupation.

In the past I have offered one hypothesis: could it be due to Vitamin D deficiency? Here’s another. According to the Census Bureau the prevalence of multi-generational households among Asians, Native Americans, blacks, and Hispanics is nearly twice that among whites:

The percentage of family households that were multigenerational ranged from 3.7 percent for non-Hispanic White alone households to 13.0 percent for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders. Over 10 percent of Hispanic and American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) households were multigenerational, while over 9 percent of Black and Asian households were multigenerational. About 8 percent of households with a multiracial householder were multigenerational.

That could potentially account for the disparity. I would not rejoice if my hypothesis proved true because it’s less susceptible to mitigation than other possibilities (like Vitamin D) might be.

Regardless of the reasons for the discrepancy you deal with a pandemic with the population you have. It may be no coincidence that the prevalence and mortality due to COVID-19 in the U. S. is increasingly coming to resemble that in Brazil or Mexico, countries we are increasingly coming to resemble, than it is that in Germany. As I have noted in the past, outside of New York and New Jersey and a few other Northeastern states, prevalence and mortality among whites in the United States is not unlike that in Germany.

To be very clear I’m trying to make multiple points here. First, the vacuity of present policy and practice. Even the esteemed Dr. Fauci was recently photographed wearing a mask in the outdoors on the pitchers mound but not wearing one in the stands with friends. It should have been the opposite. Other than in a few crowded downtown areas the risk of contracting COVID-19 outdoors is slight; you’re much more likely to catch it at home. Nonetheless decrees are being issued for wearing masks outside while the greater risk is being ignored. And young people demonstrating (or rioting) in the streets create higher risks when they live in multi-generational households. That needs to be called out rather than wrapping ourselves in the flag, boldly proclaiming free speech rights.

The other point is this. We need to devote resources where they’re needed most and it’s increasingly clear that more resources need to be devoted to black, Hispanic, and Native American communities. Why aren’t the states addressing this? That isn’t all or even mostly the responsibility of the federal government.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune remark on the keystone of Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker’s plans for the state, a graduated income tax for Illinois which he calls the “Fair Tax”:

Pritzker has given $56.5 million to an advocacy group promoting passage of the constitutional amendment that would change the way Illinois levies taxes. His tax is opposed by many in the business community, including the Illinois Chamber of Commerce. Ads supporting the constitutional change began airing Thursday. But don’t believe everything you see on TV.

If the amendment passes, Pritzker says Illinois would raise the tax rate on the 3% of highest-income earners, generating about $3 billion more the first full year . The Democratic governor and his allies think it’s such a nifty idea to go after taxpayers to make up for the sins of profligate politicians that we fear the longer-term consequences: If Springfield is freed from the constitutional constraints of a flat tax rate, soon enough middle-class earners also will get hit with a rate increase. That’s because lawmakers find it easier to hike taxes than cut spending, reduce regulatory burdens or take other actions to encourage employers to stay in Illinois, invest and grow the economy.

The study of the proposed graduated tax, conducted by a consulting firm and a Southern Illinois University professor, says the Pritzker tax won’t solve the state’s problems. It will kill jobs and shrink the economy by up to $1.8 billion as more residents flee the heavier tax burden by moving out of state. The study says that as the Illinois Exodus worsens, household spending among high earners will decline by up to 0.8%. Women and minority workers will take the biggest hit because many are employed in industries such as restaurants and hospitals that are most likely to lose revenue as the wealthy depart.

And by the way, the study confirms that our concerns about spiraling tax increases are legit: “States with graduated income tax systems, like California and Connecticut, tend to increase the number of tax brackets and the corresponding tax rates over time. Because the anticipated revenues from the legislation do not come close to offsetting the annual budget deficit and the amount of debt the Illinois government has incurred, it is reasonable to assume that Illinois will similarly increase the income tax rates and brackets in the future. Any tax increase will result in additional job loss and further out-migration.”

I don’t know whether the monicker “Fair Tax” is ironic or deliberately obfuscating. The name has been used for years by an organization backing a replacement of the federal income tax with a prebated sales tax—just about the opposite of Gov. Pritzker’s plans at the state level. If you go to Wikipedia’s article on “FairTax” or fairtax.org, that’s what you get.

I could be persuaded to accept a graduated income tax in Illinois if some changes were made to the proposed amendment: it should be self-repealing after five years if either a) the state’s population decreases over the next five years or b) it does not increase state tax revenue and broadening the basis for the tax should be put beyond the power of the legislature.

VP Biden has made criticism of President Trump’s response to COVID-19 a recurring theme in his campaign. You can see what he plans to do differently here.

It looks pretty likely that COVID-19 will be the elephant in the room for the foreseeable future so it presents a conundrum. He can’t avoid speaking about it at all but IMO emphasizing it too much would be an error for the Biden campaign. Even if the entirety of what he proposes were enacted into law or effected via executive order, I doubt it would change the course of events much.

He has a number of advantages over President Trump in that regard. He won’t have constant media sniping or a resistance within the permanent bureaucracy to contend with. But he can’t order a safe, effective vaccine into existence or mandate the availability of materials or guarantee that the results of the “free” tests (read: paid for by the federal government) that play a prominent role in his plans will be available on a timely basis.

If he’s elected and if a safe, effective vaccine is available by 3Q2021 and if people are vaccinated in sufficient number, he could be a national hero. But that’s a lot of ifs. I think it’s a lot more likely that we will have COVID-19 to contend with for the foreseeable future, governors will continue to be major forces in dealing with emergencies, and his complaints about Trump’s handling of COVID-19 will ring more hollow in 3Q2021 than they do now.