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.

Here’s a snippet from Matt Taibbi’s lengthy, rambling piece at Rolling Stone on the profits that “Big Pharma” is likely to reap from COVID-19:

Take the example of remdesivir, which he describes as having been “pulled off the scrap heap” to become a major revenue-driver. Having failed to be approved as a treatment for hepatitis and Ebola, it is now one of the most in-demand products in the world, and its price isn’t quite so low as Gilead claims.

For one thing, ICER reported it costs just $10 of raw materials to make each dose of remdesivir. Generic-drug producers in Bangladesh and India were already making a version of it, and their price per course of treatment was $600. Meanwhile, Gilead’s own price for governments around the world — the price it settled on for everyone except American private insurers — was $2,340 per treatment.

Moreover, ICER’s assessment of remdesivir’s price relied significantly on the idea that it would actually help save the lives of Covid-19 sufferers. “If the drug doesn’t impact mortality, and only shortens recovery time,” says Dave Whitrap of ICER, “we figure a course of treatment is worth about $310.”

To recap: Gilead, a company with a market capitalization of more than $90 billion, making it bigger than Goldman Sachs, develops an antiviral drug with the help of $99 million in American government grant money. Though the drug may cost as little as $10 per dose to make, and is being produced generically in Bangladesh at about a fifth of the list price, and costs about a third less in Europe than it does in the U.S., Gilead ended up selling hundreds of thousands of doses at the maximum conceivable level, i.e., the American private-insurance price — which, incidentally, might be about 10 times what it’s worth, given its actual medical impact.

and

The business model for Big Pharma is brilliant. A substantial portion of research and development for new drugs is funded by the state, which then punts its intellectual work to private companies, who are then allowed to extract maximum profits back from the same government, which has over decades formalized an elaborate process of negotiating against itself in these matters.

How big are these giveaways? Since the 1930s, the NIH has spent about $930 billion in research. Between 2010 and 2016, every single drug that won approval from the FDA — 210 different pharmaceuticals — grew at least in part out of research funded by the NIH. A common pattern involves R&D conducted by a small or midsize company, which sells out to a behemoth like Gilead the instant its drug makes it through trials, and obscene prices are set.

There is no scandal in Gilead’s or Pfizer’s making money. They are, after all, for-profit companies. That’s what they’re supposed to do. The scandal is that we’re subsidizing for-profit companies, not just through research dollars and purchases but in thousands of other ways. These are political problems and the failure of either political party to do much more than posture about the matter is a scandal and an outrage.

At City Journal Northwestern law prof John O. McGinnis assesses the situation in Chicago:

The sacking of Chicago’s North Side was more than a tactical failure. For months, key officials—the state’s attorney responsible for prosecution, the mayor, and the governor—have failed to condemn criminals sufficiently or act with necessary force against such violence. They have contributed to a culture of impunity that tolerates mobs and hoodlums.

characterizing our major political players like this:

Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, has already become nationally notorious for refusing to prosecute Jussie Smollett, the actor who lied to the police that he was a victim of racial violence. But her offenses against public order are far worse than her condoning of a provocateur who tried to fracture the city with a falsehood. Foxx has dismissed felony cases brought by the police at a rate 35 percent higher than her predecessor. She raised the threshold for felony shoplifting from $300 to $1,000—and as a result, thieves steal brazenly in broad daylight as well as under cover of darkness. Chicago police chief David Brown suggested that Foxx’s failure to prosecute looters from the previous sacking of the city in June was partly responsible for emboldening the current round of looting.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is also responsible. She has hardly been enforcing a zero-tolerance policy against lawless mobs. When crowds assaulted statues of Christopher Columbus, she did not defend these public monuments, instead removing them under pressure in the dead of night. The message was clear: Chicago would not defend its civic order. Lightfoot did denounce the current round of looting, but she still felt the need to make distinctions between these looters and those who had rioted in the wake of the George Floyd killing, as if there were degrees of culpability in the intentional taking of others’ property. Contrast her uncertain tones in calling vandals to account with her schoolmarmish insistence on closing parks to protect against the coronavirus, when epidemiologists agree that the greatest risk comes from indoor activity.

Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker has been only a bit player in this drama, but even the bits are telling. He has devoted far more energy to denouncing insurance companies for not paying for the value of the stolen goods than denouncing those who stole them. During the first round of rioting, he made an egregious blunder by calling up only enough national guardsman to protect downtown—and only after it was looted. The looters then fanned out to Chicago’s outer neighborhoods and inner suburbs.

I don’t think he’s entirely on base with his subsequent complaints about the “progressive ruling elite”. While they may be on target with respect to Gov. Pritzker and Kim Foxx, Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor as the reform candidate, defeating the Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle who fits the description much better.

Our present situation is that Pritzker and Foxx are third rate talents with first rate political and financial backing while Lightfoot is a third rate talent who is disappointing the voters who put her in office by failing to reform the Chicago Police Department, knuckling under to the CTU, and, apparently, believing that she can run the city based on her identity alone.

Chicago is neither New York nor San Francisco. It’s more pragmatic than that. Lousy candidates are being elected because they’re Democrats, yes, but not because they’re progressives. The voters’ alternatives are really quite limited.