This remark from Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and quoted by Fox Business struck me as unnecessarily paranoid:

“The situation is very grave in part because … China was lying from the beginning, and they’re still lying today,” Cotton, R-Ark., said. “And also because there are so many unknowns about this virus. For example, how many people one person can infect once they have the virus?”

[…]

He also brought up the “questions” surrounding the biosafety level 4 “super laboratory” in Wuhan, the city where the virus is believed to have originated.

“This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market,” Cotton said. “Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China who published a study … have demonstrated that several of the original cases did not have any contact with that food market. The virus went into that food market before it came out.”

“We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning we need to at least ask the question,” Cotton continued.

The one thing about Wuhan coronavirus about which we should have confidence is that it’s not a bioweapon. The characteristics of a good bioweapon include infectivity, virulence, toxicity, pathogenicity, incubation period, lethality, and stability. Nothing we actually know about it suggests it has any of the characteristics of a useful bioweapon and everything suggests a naturally existing pathogen.

Besides I think the Chinese are more competent than that.

We have enough nutty ideas floating around without spreading more.

There’s yet another take on why the United States should adopt a single-payer system, this time articulated by Igor Derysh at Salon:

The cost of administering health care in the United States costs four times as much as it does in Canada, which has had a single-payer system for nearly 60 years, according to a new study.

The average American pays a whopping $2,497 per year in administrative costs — which fund insurer overhead and salaries of administrative workers as well as executive pay packages and growing profits — compared to $551 per person per year in Canada, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last month. The study estimated that cutting administrative costs to Canadian levels could save more than $600 billion per year.

It’s being treated like a new finding but that health care administrative costs are lower in Canada has been well known for years. I recall reading an article in the New England Journal of Medicine more than 15 years ago that found that health care administrative costs in Canada were about 15% of costs while those in the U. S. about 30% of costs. Those costs aren’t just insurance companies. They also include the cost of administration for hospitals, group practices, and individual physicians’ offices. It pays to hire administrators.

For decades, after I’d spent time working in Germany, I supported a single-payer system for the United States. I no longer do. Bill Clinton’s failed attempt at reforming the health care system convinced me that such efforts were in vain. The problems with our system won’t be fixed by changing who pays.

For one thing everything undertaken by our governments costs more than the same things in other developed countries including road-building, education, and national defense. Health care really doesn’t look so different in that respect.

To convince me that a single-payer system is a good idea for the United States you’ll need to convince me of the following:

• Health care really is different from education.
• The scale of our system has nothing to do with its expense. We are almost three times the size of the next largest developed liberal democracy. Bureaucracies tend to increase in cost with scale.
• Costs in our system can be substantially reduced without cutting the wages of people working in the health care sector OR people working in the health care sector will gladly accept a cut in wages.
• Americans will be willing to accept a system that is acknowledged to be tiered.
• There’s no difference in efficiency or public support between a system administered by the national government and one administered by the states. Canada’s system is administered by its provinces.
• The system you propose isn’t any more lavish than those of other liberal democracies.
• We will be willing to bar immigrants from our health care system OR eliminate illegal immigration.

I think that the high costs of our system are due to a combination of scale, lack of social cohesion, pursuit of profits, and politics.

My wife and I decided to send our DNA samples into AncestryDNA and last week I finally received my results. There were really no surprises on my side. Mostly it confirmed what I already knew—my ancestry is 100% northwest European. My mom was actually mostly Irish with a little French or, perhaps, northwest German in the mix. I didn’t get an answer to one of my enduring questions: were the Schneiders French or German? Yes, I know Schneider is a German name but lots of Alsatian French people have German surnames. I’ll need to keep searching for that answer.

And my dad was entirely northwest European. No real signs of the Swabian ancestry he joked about.

The most important leads I received were in the form of connections with other people with related DNA. One of them is a descendant of my great-grandmother Emma Bader’s sister, Rosa. I have reached out to her and, if luck is with me, she knows more about the Baders than I do. The Baders are another of my lines about which I have questions. If she doesn’t, I’ll gladly share what I know with her.

If you’re wondering about that 2% Norway finding, that’s easy enough to explain. My maternal haplotype is also the most common maternal haplotype in Norway. Those Norsemen got around, leaving evidence of their passing in Ireland.

As Yogi Berra put it (or Niels Bohr, depending), prediction is hard, particularly about the future. I’ve been interested in mathematical models for more than the last half century. Here’s the dirty little secret about them: the results you get out of them can be no better than the data you put into them.

I’ve been reading up on the disease models’ projections of the course of the Wuhan coronovirus outbreak. Not to put too fine a point on it but they don’t make sense. They don’t comport with what seems to be happening at all. Funny thing, though. Several of them would be right on the money if the numbers of infected and killed were much, much higher than are being reported from China.

Even as we speak economists are industriously trying to predict the run-on effects on the economy of the outbreak. BusinessInside reports:

Economists predict China’s economy will slow to to growth levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, a Reuters poll showed on Friday. The 40 economists surveyed said gross domestic product will fall to 4.5% in the first quarter, while full-year 2020 growth could be 5.5%, down from 6.1% last year.

Further, a recent report from Bloomberg found that analysts now see China GDP going as low as 3.8%. That would be an especially problematic growth rate, as it sits below 4.15% — a threshold that, when breached, would send the so-called bad loan ratio at China’s biggest banks up five-fold, Bloomberg finds.

For context, in 2019 the sector saw record loan defaults and the first bank seizure in twenty years in 2019 — and that was when the economy was expanding at a much more robust 6%.

The U. S. economy is anticipated to be affected but not nearly so much. You would expect the stock market to be more affected. Most of the present boom is derived from increases in the values of just five stocks and one of those, Apple, is more dependent on a robust Chinese economy than the others. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you look at it) the stock market is almost entirely divorced from the real economy. So far it doesn’t really seem to be responding to the outbreak. Stock market recoveries from previous serious outbreaks have been quite rapid.

I’m skeptical than we can make any sort of informed predictions about the Chinese or U. S. economies based on the data about COVID-19 that are coming out of China. It makes a difference whether the outbreak started in January or November and whether there have been 68,000 infections or 680,000. Making projections from reliable data is hard enough.

At Gen Democrat Karlyn Borysenko explains her reactions after attending a Trump rally in New Hampshire:

Today, I voted in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary for Pete Buttigieg. I genuinely feel that Pete would be great for this country, and maybe he’ll have his opportunity in the future. But tomorrow, I’ll be changing my voter registration from Democrat to Independent and walking away from the party I’ve spent the past 20 years in to sit in the middle for a while. There are extremes in both parties that I am uncomfortable with, but I also fundamentally believe that most people on both sides are good, decent human beings who want the best for the country and have dramatic disagreements on how to get there. But until we start seeing each other as human beings, there will be no bridging the divide. I refuse to be a part of the divisiveness any longer. I refuse to hate people I don’t know simply because they choose to vote for someone else. If we’re going to heal the country, we have to start taking steps toward one another rather than away.

I think the Democrats have an ass-kicking coming to them in November, and I think most of them will be utterly shocked when it happens, because they’re existing in an echo chamber that is not reflective of the broader reality. I hope it’s a wake-up call that causes them to take a long look in the mirror and really ask themselves how they got here. Maybe then they’ll start listening. I tend to doubt it, but I can hope.

For me the message here is don’t demonize other people. Ever. Simply that they are human entitles them to our consideration and respect. Disagree with their actions if you will but don’t attribute evil motives to them. Motives are tricky things.

When the demons are found to be ordinary, decent people with whom you just disagree, it is perfectly natural to become suspicious of those doing the demonization, believing, as Booth Tarkington might have said, that they deserve their comeuppance.

In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger tries to identify the Democrats’ core problem:

Now that Bernie Sanders—once an obscure socialist senator from Vermont—is officially the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, it is time to confront what that means.

It does not mean the U.S. is flirting with socialism. That’s not going to happen. The meaning of Bernie’s ascent is that the Democratic Party, older even than he is, has simply run out of gas.

The Democrats resemble Europe’s aging political parties—Britain’s Labour, France’s Socialists, Germany’s Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. All have simply deflated with voters.

Signs of public fatigue with the Democrats could be seen in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Besides incompetence, the big story out of Iowa was low turnout. In New Hampshire the story was voter indecision. Once past Bernie’s 25% cement-block base, many voters were flipping a coin in the voting booth to pick from the other candidates.

What does it mean that Elizabeth Warren, by now a household name, got dropped to fourth place? Joe Biden’s humiliating fifth is a personal disaster, but what does that say about the party itself?

Circling overhead is Mike Bloomberg, supposedly the party’s savior. The truth is Barack Obama was the party’s final savior, and a second coming isn’t likely. Recall the talk after the 2016 election about how the Democrats had “no bench.” They just rolled benchless into 2020.

The Democrats’ floundering to find a candidate is deeper than the split between moderates and the left. It looks to me like the accumulated costs of its long history as the self-declared party of government are finally coming due.

The party’s problem is that it doesn’t look competent anymore.

I don’t think that any of those is the Democrats’ core problem. I think their core problem is conflicting objectives. For the Democratic nomenklatura, who depend on influence peddling and public office for their livelihoods and those of their families, the Prime Directive is keeping both of those alive. To do that they are paying lip service to the often conflicting goals of the financial sector, blacks, Hispanics, and young people, maintaining their loyalty without actually fulfilling the at least implied promises they’re making.

I think the solution for that nomenklatura is to be satisfied with a smaller cut of the take and to start fulfilling their promises. They can’t do that without angering some of those constituencies. They must choose among them.

I have only one thing to say about Paul Krugman’s full-throated defense of Bernie Sanders in his New York Times column:

The thing is, Bernie Sanders isn’t actually a socialist in any normal sense of the term. He doesn’t want to nationalize our major industries and replace markets with central planning; he has expressed admiration, not for Venezuela, but for Denmark. He’s basically what Europeans would call a social democrat — and social democracies like Denmark are, in fact, quite nice places to live, with societies that are, if anything, freer than our own.

He’s wrong. Nearly everything he said is wrong.

Nationalization

Back in the 70s Bernie Sanders advocated the nationalization of energy companies, factories, and banks. More recently his Medicare for All proposal effectively nationalizes health care insurance.

He has advocated public ownership of the means of production. Money is the most important means of production and that is already nationalized.

He’s actually a lot like the old Fabian socialists.

Centralized Planning

His identification of democracy with public ownership and his advocacy of worker ownership of companies are at odds. Public ownership means centralized planning. I’m more sympathetic with worker ownership but the reality is that workers don’t really want to own the companies they work for. If they wanted to they could.

Praise for Venezuela and Cuba

In 2011 Bernie Sanders spoke in praise of Venezuela, a position he has tried to walk back. Back in the 80s he praised Castro, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Famously, he honeymooned in the Soviet Union.

Praise for Denmark

His praise for Denmark has been focused on the most socialistic aspects of Danish society not the most capitalistic. I think he’s mistaking “democratic socialism” for Scandinavian ethnic cohesion and Lutheran social doctrine. I agree that the Danes and Swedes are probably freer than we are. The Danes aren’t socialists; they’re Lutherans, at least culturally.

As far as I’m concerned Sen. Sanders is an old-fashioned parlor pink and Dr. Krugman’s column is yet another attempt at sanitizing the senator’s record, something I suspect we will be seeing a lot of from the media in days to come.

I suppose I should comment about the argument by proxy between President Trump and Attorney General William Barr. I’ve said many times in the past that I don’t understand President Trump’s thought processes at all. I don’t think he should be tweeting at all let alone as frequently as he does. I agree with AG Barr that the president shouldn’t be tweeting about cases in progress or exerting what the military calls “unlawful command influence” over cases or sentencing.

I think that presidential appointees shouldn’t be airing their disagreements with their boss in public and that presidents deserve to have subordinates in whom they can be confident. It is fully within President Trump’s authority to fire Bill Barr. I think he’d be a fool to do so.

I also have a little, tiny paranoid streak that makes me wonder if this flap isn’t battlespace preparation.

We are receiving a considerable volume of television spots from the candidates for Cook County States Attorney. The job of the States Attorney is to prosecute crimes and secure convictions but you would not know that from the political advertisements. Were you to base your notions of the job solely on the ads, they would convince you that both candidates were running for Cook County Public Defender.

That’s an appointive office and to the best of my knowledge does not report to the States Attorney but to the County Board and President.