In an op-ed in the New York Times molecular biologist Alina Chan explains why at this point the most likely explanation for COVID-19 is that it spread throughout the world due to a lab accident at at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Her argument, basically, is that

• the virus is most closely related to bat viruses from China and Laos
• WIV was experimenting with such viruses
• WIV’s safety protocols were not as strict as they should have been
• no naturally-occurring immediate antecedent has been identified as yet
• in the absence of any other explanation a lab accident becomes most likely

I don’t know what the origins of the virus were but I think it’s important that they be honestly and dispassionately investigated and that is unlikely under present circumstances. That’s why I’ve been arguing for several years that a civil suit should be brought naming China as the cause and that the aministration and U. S. courts should not move to block such a suit. As far as I can tell that’s the only way we could press the Chinese government to be more forthcoming.

This morning the “talking heads” programs did not disappoint which is to say that they were as expected. They attacked Trump relentlessly. Whether it will make any difference in November is anybody’s guess. So far independents seem to be leaning slightly towards disapproving of Trump even more than they did before his convictions.

I think that if the Congress does one thing between now and the end of the present term it should enact a law preventing the strategy used in Trump’s NYC trial explicitly, cross-ruffing between unadjudicated federal crimes and state and local ones to upgrade misdemeanors to felonies. To my eye the risks if they don’t are quite high.

Here’s the summary of Christopher McCallion’s piece on America’s grand strategy at Defense Priorities:

1. Geographic distance and the current state of military technology interact to favor defense while diminishing the threat of conquest. The stopping power of water in particular obstructs the ability of even the most powerful states to project power overseas.
2. Proximate land powers are the most likely to engage in security competition and conflict, while distant or sea powers are relatively isolated from potential adversaries. This strategic insularity is even greater if a state has a large and diversified economy and the resources to be relatively self-sufficient.
3. The United States is separated from other great powers by thousands of miles of ocean to both its east and west, and is the most powerful, prosperous, and secure state in the world.
4. However, many of the same conditions which make the United States secure also make it difficult to project power, carry out wars far abroad, and maintain military primacy on land in Eurasia.
5. The United States should both embrace its abundance of security and accept the limits to its offensive power, using its position as a continent-sized maritime power to act as an offshore balancer rather than a hegemon on the flanks of the Eurasian landmass.

The piece is full of maps. charts, and graphs.

The point-of-view being argued in the piece is diametrically opposed to the strategy of primacy that has been maintained by American diplomats and military figures over the last 50 years which I believe is in contrast to the views held by most Americans. I also believe it is incumbent on those who continue to advocate primacy to explain how they plan to accomplish it.

The one observation in the piece with which I disagree is this:

The United States is abundant in natural resources and is incredibly food-, energy-, and mineral-secure.

We have made ourselves dependent on other countries for food, energy, and minerals. In the case of minerals, for example, although the U. S. used to the the world’s leading producer of rare earth minerals most of what we use today is produced by China. One additional point. The chart of energy production in the piece has a notable omission:

It always feels good to hear someone else saying something I have been saying for decades. I this case the someone is Charles Musick and he says it in a piece at RealClearMarkets:

Based on data from the Federal Reserve, the median price of a home has risen from $30,200 to $429,000 over this period. While this is significant, there are several other considerations. First, overall prices have also increased significantly as shown by the Consumer Price Index. Next, there are ongoing costs for a home for insurance, maintenance and taxes of about 2.4% per year. Finally, median home prices over time do not represent the home purchased in 1973 as the median size of homes has increased. Unless someone makes a significant remodel expense, the square footage of a house purchased in 1973 is still the same in 2023. To correct for this in the data, the home prices were converted to dollars per square foot.

As the graph shows, while home prices have risen by a factor of 14, once you account for ongoing fees, the overall rise in prices, and the change in median square footage, the median value of the home lost about 25% over the past 50 years.

The real value of a home purchased in 1973 was the avoidance of paying rent over the past 50 years. Even after inflation, this value is triple the initial purchase price of the home. Understanding this changes how one views home prices. If we view housing as a cost or cost avoidance instead of an investment, it changes our mindset. Our desire is for lower home prices (lower costs) rather than higher home prices (investment). Higher home prices lead to higher out of pocket expenses – specifically with home insurance and property taxes. Locally, it was time for a property tax reassessment this year. My property tax rose 94% in 2024 (no, I did not leave out a decimal). Likewise, home insurance rates have been rising sharply as the insured value of homes have increased. Higher home prices with their higher costs do not improve the experience of living in the home.

Over the last 30 years I have paid significantly more in property taxes than we paid to buy the house, indeed, in just the last 10 years our taxes have exceeded the original purchase price.

The one thing I think is missing from Mr. Musick’s analysis is that the price per square foot of housing is not the same and has not risen uniformly across the country. For example, in Chicago housing prices peaked about 20 years ago. Needless to say, we were paying a lot less in property tax 20 years ago. In contrast houses in Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco haven’t peaked. They keep rising.

My point is that it is possible that some homes have been investments while others have not. And that doesn’t even start considering the problem of the relation between the price of the median house and median income.

There is an enormous amount of rejoicing, chortling, fingerpointing, anger, sorrow, etc. following President Donald Trump’s conviction in the trial in New York. My reactions are pretty closely aligned with those of James Joyner:

In the grand scheme of things, paying hush money to a porn star to avoid political embarrassment and then committing tax fraud in the service of that tawdry act is as easily dismissed as committing perjury about an illicit affair with a subordinate while testifying in a case about sexually harassing a different subordinate. Both are arguably disqualifying for high office and yet easily dismissed by supporters.

To be clear, while I thought Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were both morally unfit to serve as commander-in-chief before they were ever sworn in and had that reinforced by their behavior in office, the latter’s transgressions are considerably greater. While I thought Clinton rightly impeached for perjuring himself regarding Lewinsky, that was the height of his transgressions as President. Further, while I frequently disagreed with him on policy grounds, I have no reason to doubt that he spent his presidency trying to make the country a better place. Trump, by contrast, used his office as a personal piggybank and had no interest in anything but his own power and enrichment.

I think he’s discounting the Clintons’ desire to enrich themselves via the presidency a bit.

I think there is a slippery slope in nominating and voting for individuals who are “morally unfit to serve as commander-in-chief” and we are seeing that play out. As we have seen there are also slippery slopes in impeaching presidents, castigating reasonably decent individuals running for president as monsters, and challenging the results of presidential elections in the courts.

I guess we’re about to see if there is a slippery slope in prosecuting former presidents, too.

Update

Washington Post

Momentous as the verdict feels, it comes in what was neither the most important nor the most legally compelling of the cases against Mr. Trump. Special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecution regarding Jan. 6, 2021, involving both the scheme to draw up fraudulent slates of electors and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, implicates an alleged assault on democracy. The Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case cuts to Mr. Trump’s unfitness to serve as commander in chief. The obstruction charge, covering Mr. Trump’s alleged efforts to mislead investigators about his retention of papers from the White House, seems clear-cut. Yet these cases remain unresolved, as Mr. Trump successfully persuaded various judges, and the Supreme Court, to consider time-consuming procedural issues. Thursday’s verdict, by contrast, involved a hush money payment scheme to an adult-film actress.

This is not to say Thursday’s result was illegitimate — or, as Mr. Trump declared, the result of a “rigged, disgraceful trial.” The Biden campaign’s decision to hold a news conference outside the courthouse on Tuesday was doubly unfortunate because it belied an important reality: Contrary to accusations from Mr. Trump and his allies that probes into him are “witch hunts” and any outcome that disfavors him “rigged,” the case showed the opposite. An investigation occurred. An indictment was secured. A jury was selected, and in an orderly trial, Mr. Trump got due process of law. Only with six weeks of testimony from 22 witnesses and ample corroborating evidence was a verdict declared.

The jurors appear to have fulfilled their oath to assess the case with care, taking time to have relevant testimony and jury instructions laboriously reread to them. They also accepted a crucial civic duty amid trying circumstances, forbidden from discussing a subject of widespread attention with their friends and family, and risking blowback for their eventual decision, whichever way it went.

Wall Street Journal

Thursday’s guilty verdict wasn’t entirely surprising, given the jury pool in Manhattan. If Mr. Trump had lucked out, he might have drawn one or two stubborn skeptics, like the Henry Fonda character in “12 Angry Men,” resulting in at least a hung jury. Instead the fortunate one was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who filed the weakest of the four indictments of Mr. Trump, but who managed to drag his case first over the finish line.

Normally a felony conviction would be politically fatal for a candidate appearing on the ballot in five months. But normally a prosecutor wouldn’t have brought this case. Mr. Bragg, an elected Democrat, ran for office as the man ready to take on Mr. Trump. When the new DA didn’t indict shortly after winning office, his top Trump prosecutors loudly quit, increasing the pressure on Mr. Bragg to do, well, something. Even after a guilty verdict, the case he ended up filing looks like a legal stretch.

The evidence from the six-week trial fleshed out some of the facts. Stormy Daniels testified that she and Mr. Trump had a sexual rendezvous in 2006, which he keeps denying, if implausibly. In the runup to the 2016 election, Mr. Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. Mr. Trump reimbursed him, and then some, in 2017. According to the DA, the crime was disguising this repayment as legal fees to Mr. Cohen for work under a retainer that didn’t exist.

On the law, though, the case was a bizarre turducken, with alleged crimes stuffed inside other crimes. By the time Mr. Bragg showed up on the scene, the Stormy business was old enough that Mr. Trump couldn’t be hit with misdemeanor falsification of records, because the statute of limitations had expired. To elevate these counts into felonies, the DA said Mr. Trump cooked the books with an intent to commit or cover up a second offense.

What crime was that? At first Mr. Bragg was cagey. He eventually settled on a New York election law, rarely enforced, that prohibits conspiracies to promote political candidates “by unlawful means.” This explains why prosecutors spent so much trial time on David Pecker, the National Enquirer boss. His outfit paid $150,000 in 2016 to silence another woman, Karen McDougal, who also says she had an extracurricular affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg’s argument is that they were all in cahoots, more or less, to steal the election.

Yet what “unlawful means” did this alleged conspiracy use? The DA’s argument was that there were three: First, the hush money was effectively an illegally large donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Second, more business filings were falsified, including bank records for Mr. Cohen’s wire transfer to Ms. Daniels. Third, false statements were made to tax authorities, since Mr. Trump’s repayment of Mr. Cohen was structured as income and “grossed up” to cover the taxes he would need to pay on it.

In some ways this Russian nesting doll structure, to use another analogy, defies logic.

New York Times

In a humble courtroom in Lower Manhattan on Thursday, a former president and current Republican standard-bearer was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The jury’s decision, and the facts presented at the trial, offer yet another reminder — perhaps the starkest to date — of the many reasons Donald Trump is unfit for office.

The guilty verdict in the former president’s hush-money case was reached by a unanimous jury of 12 randomly selected New Yorkers, who found that Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, was guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging.

Americans may wonder about the significance of this moment. The Constitution does not prohibit those with a criminal conviction from being elected or serving as commander in chief, even if they are behind bars. The nation’s founders left that decision in the hands of voters. Many experts have also expressed skepticism about the significance of this case and its legal underpinnings, which employed an unusual legal theory to seek a felony charge for what is more commonly a misdemeanor, and Mr. Trump will undoubtedly seek an appeal.

Yet the greatest good to come out of this sordid case is the proof that the rule of law binds everyone, even former presidents. Under extraordinary circumstances, the trial was conducted much like any other criminal trial in the city. That 12 Americans could sit in judgment of the former and potentially future president is a remarkable display of the democratic principles that Americans prize at work.

Washington Examiner

The term “kangaroo court” has seemed an apt and amusing term to apply to the trial of former President Donald Trump in Manhattan during the past month. But now that, for the first time in history, a former president has been found guilty of felony indictments, it cannot be regarded as anything other than a dark day for the nation. Jurors decided Trump was guilty on all 34 counts, carrying the possibility of more than 100 years of jail time for business record violations that occurred over a decade ago.

It is a dark day, not because of the guilty verdicts but because this trial has been a travesty from start to finish. It is clear, first of all, that no one other than Trump would have been charged in this way. No one other than Trump would have had a prosecutor concoct such an absurd and disgraceful list of charges and twist the law to do so. It is indisputable that no person has ever been prosecuted as a felon for the misdemeanor recordkeeping crimes as Trump was. It’s odd, isn’t it, that the only person ever so charged should be a former president, the much-hated opponent of the current incumbent, who is leading in the polls only five months before Election Day. The only reason Trump was charged and convicted of this crime is because he is Trump. This is what banana republics do.

Nate Silver

My expectation is that Biden will see some improvement in his numbers — perhaps something roughly equivalent to a mini convention bounce — and the question is mostly about how steep it is and how long it persists. In particular, I’ll want to see whether any decline for Trump survives past the first debate on June 27 or instead the debate reverts the race to where it was previously.

If there isn’t some sort of bounce for Biden, however — even a temporary one — then obviously that will count as a highly bearish signal for him. Improved consumer perceptions about the economy haven’t really improved Biden’s numbers much, and nor has a period of comparatively favorable news coverage. (The “vibes” within the pundit class don’t translate in any reliable way to those among swing voters.) The poker term for being in a dicey spot but where your odds have a chance to improve is “having outs”, meaning that you might catch some good cards to redeem your position. The possibility of a criminal conviction was one of the best outs Biden had left — and if it doesn’t move the numbers, I’m not sure what will.

Ilya Shapiro

The Donald Trump verdict is a travesty of justice. I say this not as a Trump-lover—I don’t love any politician, preferring transactional relationships regarding policy—but as a lover of the rule of law. From the moment that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg chose to indict Trump for nearly decade-old offenses that Bragg himself had previously declined to prosecute, the circus came to town. The jury’s findings of guilt on all 34 counts of falsifying business records are almost anticlimactic, putting the cherry on top of multiple scoops of misused legal authority.

You can read elsewhere analyses of the allegations about how the former president funneled business funds through his convicted-felon consigliere Michael Cohen to his mistress Stormy Daniels so that she wouldn’t spill the beans on their affair in the midst of the 2016 campaign. As I understand it, the business-records violations became felonies because they’re in furtherance of a campaign-finance violation—this is what allowed Bragg even to bring charges, given that the statute of limitations would otherwise have run out on the first, underlying actions. But you wouldn’t get this from following the trial, which left most observers scratching their heads at what the crimes were that Trump had supposedly committed.

Mind you, I didn’t follow the trial that closely, either. Because that fact pattern is what lawyers call a stretch, and because it was so blatantly Bragg’s politicized persecution of his party’s bête noire, the legal play-by-play seemed beside the point. Salacious details notwithstanding, I couldn’t get myself worked up about the minutiae of long-ago accounting practices relating to a nondisclosure agreement. But I do have a JD and work in legal policy, which should give me a better understanding of what’s going on. And yet, I still don’t understand these 34 convictions.

As you have undoubtedly heard President Trump was found guilty on all counts in the NYC trial. I believe that is the first time in U. S. history a former president has been found guilty of a felony after serving his term as president.

I suspect we’ll witness a lot more history in coming weeks. It may be memorable but I doubt it will be fun.

What is President Biden’s best move after the jury brings in a verdict in President Trump’s trial in NYC? The editors of the Wall Street Journal advise maintaining a low profile:

Mr. Biden is better advised to say nothing. Even a platitude—a statement in the event of a conviction that the will of the jury should be respected—will sound like an expression of satisfaction by a President whose allies convicted a political opponent. Mr. Biden’s son Hunter is slated to go on trial on felony charges in early June. Will he comment on that proceeding, too?

The issue here is presidential decorum and political judgment. The President has already come close to taunting Mr. Trump for his legal predicament.

Sadly, maintaining a low profile does not play to the president’s strong suit. Any president’s. They continue:

Mr. Biden was elected in 2020 in large part as the anti-Trump who would restore calm and dignity to the Oval Office. But one irony of the Biden Presidency has been its habit of imitating Mr. Trump’s political style of over-the-top rhetoric and disdain for political norms.

That’s never been clearer than in the decision by multiple Democratic prosecutors to indict a presidential opponent for the first time in history. Democrats thought the Manhattan trial would hurt Mr. Trump, but so far he’s gained in the polls. Now they think a guilty verdict will take him down, and they want to gloat about it. But voters may conclude that stretching the law to turn a misdemeanor offense into a felony is more politically significant as an abuse of the justice system.

If Mr. Biden tries to exploit a conviction as a campaign theme, voters will have even more reason to believe Mr. Trump when he says the prosecution was political from the start.

So, what’s the president’s best course of action?

I found this lengthy account of life on the front lines in Ukraine by Mari Saito at Reuters a bit narrative for my taste but it made for vivid reading:

The artillery fire begins just before dawn. A soldier steps into a darkened trench and lights a cigarette, carefully cupping the flame with his free hand. A boom and crackle of outgoing fire sound in the distance.

Viktor, the infantryman, ducks his head under a canopy of camouflage netting and looks up at the brightening sky. The incessant buzz of a drone sounds overhead, moving a dozen meters from one end of the trench to linger just above him.

Viktor swallows. A moment later, the buzzing sound moves on.

“One of ours,” the 37-year-old soldier says, bringing the cigarette back up to his lips.

The one thing the piece does not say is that producing munitions as fast as the Ukrainians need them is beyond NATO’s ability at this point and will be for the foreseeable future. Examples: in aggregate NATO countries produce as many tanks in a year as Russia does in a month. Russia is producing artillery shells at three times the pace that NATO is.

This piece by Shelby Talcott at Semafor and the underlying Blueprint poll should be a wakeup call for everyone:

As part of the online poll of 943 18-30-year-old registered voters, Blueprint asked participants to respond to a series of questions about the American political system: 49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power” — only 7% disagreed.

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

You don’t need to be under 30 to feel that way. The author continues:

Broadly speaking, Blueprint’s polling reveals young voters in America are not doing okay. But the pessimism about the country, its leaders, and more is also a concerning trend for Biden — whether he’s directly responsible for why voters feel the way they do or not, he’s currently in office during a time when many seem to be.

Perhaps unemployment is not the metric that should be considered. Maybe underemployment, working multiple jobs, and discouraged workers should be taken more into consideration. Certainly, dismissing these concerns is not a working strategy.