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Im-Politic: Did “The Science” Give Us the Virus?

19 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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Anthony S. Fauci, bio-weapons, CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Im-Politics, Joe Biden, lockdowns, National Institutes of Health, New York, Nicholson Baker, pandemics, public health, SARS, stay-at-home, terrorism, Trump, virology, Wuhan virus

That’s a pretty stunning header, I know. But it’s anything but crazy, or even click-baity – at least if you take seriously a long, very serious, and very carefully reported article published January 4 about the CCP Virus’ origins in New York magazine, which hasn’t exactly been an enthusiast for President Trump or science- or China-bashing.

For author Nicholson Baker makes clear not only that for years before the Trump era, America’s top public health officials (who epitomize “The Science” that all the adults in the nation’s room from President-elect Joe Biden on down have anointed as the only valid sources of U.S. and global virus policy advice) pushed measures certain to boost the odds that something like Covid 19 would be created, and somehow escape from, a laboratory someplace in the world – including China.

And notably, one of the main pushers was one Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Director of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

It’s important to make clear here what Baker isn’t saying. He isn’t saying that the Chinese manufactured the virus as a bio-weapon. He isn’t saying that Beijing loosed this pandemic on the world on purpose. And he certainly isn’t accusing Fauci and the rest of the public health establishment of acting maliciously.

But what he is saying is awfully damning, and urgently needs to be examined by the incoming Biden administration, the entire U.S. political and policy communities, and of course the public.  For Baker marshalls and summarizes voluminous evidence for the proposition that the most reasonable theory of the virus’ origin is not that in its highly infectious form it developed naturally in some mammal species (like a bat) and then jumped to humans (e.g., at a wet market) – the explanation offered at various times by the Chinese government and by many infectious disease specialists. Instead, the author supports the idea that it was produced by scientists from a naturally occuring mammalian virus, specifically by scientists at one of the three advanced virology facilities in and around the city of Wuhan.

And then, Baker – who is extremely careful to distinguish between facts and suppositions – speculates that “it eventually got out” by hazard. Release via “a lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle,” he emphasizes, “isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory.” But he rightly argues that “It merits attention…alongside other reasoned attempts to explain the source of our current catastrophe.”

But where do the roles of the U.S. and global public health establishments come in? During recent decades, as Baker reports, scientists have been conducting “’gain of function’ experiments — aimed to create new, more virulent, or more infectious strains of diseases in an effort to predict and therefore defend against threats that might conceivably arise in nature.” And many of these experiments were funded by the Fauci’s Institute at the NIH. (Similar work was being funded by the Defense Department, whose interest in bio-weapons and fighting them was reawakened by the increase in global terrorism in the 1990s and the prospect that germs like anthrax would be used to advance extremist goals. This threat, of course, materialized right after September 11 with letters containing the germs sent through the mail – in an immense irony – by a U.S. government bio-weapons researcher.)

As implied immediately above, Fauci and his colleagues had the best of intentions. But as Baker documents exhaustively, they ignored numerous warnings from fellow professionals that, in no less than two related ways, they might be creating a problem far worse than that they were trying to solve. First,in their determination to design in the lab super-dangerous bio threats that terrorists hypothetically might some day create and use, they lost sight of how their own experiments could unleash such actual threats in the here-and-now due to the real possibility of leaks (hardly unknown in the world of biological research).

In Baker’s words, “Why, out of a desire to prove that something extremely infectious could happen, would you make it happen? And why would the U.S. government feel compelled to pay for it to happen?” Echoing these worries were numerous scientists, such as Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer Steven Salzberg, who noted several years ago, “We have enough problems simply keeping up with the current flu outbreaks — and now with Ebola — without scientists creating incredibly deadly new viruses that might accidentally escape their labs.”

Second, no evidence has been found yet that any of the coronaviruses that are naturally occuring and that have infected humans (like the SARS “bird flu” – which actually came from mammals – of 2002-03) are remotely as contagious as their lab versions, or are found in animals that often come into contact with humans outside China and its wet markets. In fact, Baker quotes Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright has describing Chinese virologists’ efforts to scour remote locations for animal sources of natural coronaviruses that can be supercharged in a lab as “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.”

In addition, Fauci arguably magnified these dangers by channeling some of the U.S. government funding for “gain of function” research to the Wuhan virology labs. On the one hand, this decision made sense (as long as gain-of-function was being sought in the first place) because China has been the origin point of so many mammalian coronaviruses, and therefore the home of so many leading virus specialists. On the other hand, safety first hasn’t exactly been a national Chinese watchword.

So the implications for simply “following The Science” seem clear. And they go beyond what should be (but isn’t) the screamingly obvious point that, especially in a field as new and rapidly changing as this branch of virology, there is no “The Science.” Expert opinion almost inevitably will be mixed, and politicians and their journalist mouthpieces flocking to one side while completely ignoring the other is bound to end badly. Matters are bound to end even worse, of course, when the favored faction aggressively tries to stamp out and discredit as “conspiracy thinking” the other’s theories – as Baker shows indisputably was the case with public health authorities and experts (including Fauci) who continue to try absolving the Wuhan labs from any responsibility.

More important, this tale bears out what I and many others have written for months (e.g., here): The pandemic is a crisis with many dimensions – economic and social as well as medical. The public health establishment’s contributions are indispensible. But not only is its expertise limited. Like any other human grouping defined by common characteristics and experiences like fundamental interests and educational backgrounds and occupational environments, this establishment is influenced by its own distinctive unconscious biases and predispositions.

In this case, in Baker’s words, some of the most important are “scientific ambition, and the urge to take exciting risks and make new things.” All of which are perfectly fine and even praiseworthy – in their place.

Further, the medical dimension of the crisis is complex, too, as shown both by all the evidence of major public health costs generated by the lockdown and stay-at-home orders championed so singlemindedly by Fauci and his acolytes, and by the strong disagreements among the virologists and similar researchers laid out in such detail by Baker. So it’s the job of political leaders to take all these considerations into account, not to act as if only one cohort of advisers has a monopoly on wisdom in all relevant areas.

And let’s end on an O’Henry type note. I can’t resist pointing out that President Trump, too, has been one of those U.S. leaders whose administration has robustly funded this gain-of-function research – one of the few instances in which he’s, apparently with no objections, followed The Science.

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Im-Politic: Impeachment and the Mind of a Diplomat I

11 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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Blob, House of Representatives, Im-Politics, impeachment, Trump, Ukraine, Ukraine Scandal, William B. Taylor

When the House of Representatives’ public impeachment hearings open this week, one of the star witnesses for the prosecution – and perhaps the star witness – is expected to be William B. Taylor, former chief U.S. envoy to Ukraine. His appeal to President Trump’s opponents is easy to understand, since he was both deeply involved with Ukraine policy when the alleged actions that ostensibly triggered Mr. Trump’s latest round of troubles took place, and since he’s compiled such an impressive record of service to America, especially as a decorated military veteran.

I haven’t yet made up my mind as to whether Taylor’s remarks at his October 22 closed door appearance before House investigators will seal or significantly strengthen the case for impeachment. (So far I’m leaning “No,” for reasons I’ll detail soon.) What is clear to me is that Taylor’s opening statement, and answers to questions from the Democrats and Republicans involved, put on full display a syndrome long common among America’s diplomatic corps (and broader foreign policy establishment) whose pervasiveness should disturb anyone who believes that the nation’s approach to world affairs should prioritize American interests.

The syndrome is called “Client-itis”. As the name suggests, it’s applied to foreign policy officials who fall in love with the countries they’re focused on, and who act as if their chief responsibility is championing that country’s interests in U.S. corridors of power, not vice versa. And last month, Taylor both came off as a prime example, and strongly suggested that his real beef with the President (and the real beef of the foreign policy Blob in general) concerns Mr. Trump’s doubts about Ukraine as a vital U.S. interest worth antagonizing Russia over, not about any supposed Trump improprieties.

Taylor’s Ukraine-philia emerged right off the bat in his prepared statement before the investigators: “While I have served in many places and in different capacities, I have a particular interest in and respect for the importance of our country’s relationship with Ukraine. Our national security demands that this relationship remain strong.”

But Taylor also eventually made clear that far more than cold strategic calculations underlay this view. As he explained, also at work was an “emotional piece,” that “is based on my time in Ukraine in 2006, 2009, when traveling around the country, I got to know Ukrainians and their frustrations and difficulties and those kind of things. And then coming back and seeing it now where they have the opportunity, they’ve got a young President, a young Prime Minister, a young Parliament, the Prime Minister is 35 years old. This new government has appealed to young people who are so idealistic, pro-West, pro-United States, pro-Europe, that I feel an emotional attachment, bond, connection to this country and these people.”

Is it possible that Taylor nonetheless was able to distinguish American from Ukrainian interests anyway, despite these strong feelings? Sure – but the closing passage of his statement justifies such strong doubts that it’s worth quoting in full:

“There are two Ukraine stories today, Mr. Chairman. The first is the one we are discussing this morning and that you have been hearing for the past 2 weeks. It’s a rancorous story about whistleblowers, Mr. Gjuliani, side channels, quid pro quos, corruption, interference in elections. In this story Ukraine is an object.

“But there’s another Ukraine story, a positive, bipartisan one. In this second story, Ukraine is the subject. This one is about young people in a young nation struggling to break free of its past, hopeful their new government will finally usher in a new Ukraine, proud of its independence from Russia, eager to join Western institutions and enjoy a more secure and prosperous life.

“This story describes a Nation developing an inclusive, democratic nationalism, not unlike what we in America, in our best moments, feel about our diverse country – less concerned about what language we speak; what religion, if any, we practice; where our parents and grandparents came from – more concerned about building a new country.”

Taylor returned to the strategic argument, but not for long, concluding his statement with “This second story, Mr. Chairman, is the one I would like to leave you with today.”

The problem is, however moving this description of the new Ukraine, none of these considerations mitigating for viewing that, or any, country as a “subject” – i.e., worth helping because of its alleged virtues – should be standing at the forefront of U.S. policymakers’ worldview. If such support can contribute to America’s freedom, security, and prosperity at costs and risks deemed acceptable by the American political system (meaning, ultimately, by voters), then their pursuit becomes entirely legitimate. But their intrinsic nature is secondary. That is, an “object” of U.S. interests is precisely what must remain first and foremost for the U.S. government and its officials when dealing with foreign countries and regions.

Taylor is absolutely correct in noting that aiding Ukraine has been a strongly supported bipartisan American policy goal. But as he and his Democratic questioners also made clear, Donald Trump wasn’t sure about Ukraine’s relation to America’s well-being at all. And Mr. Trump is not only the current Constitutionally elected President of the United States. He also ran – and won – on a platform that emphatically opposed a foreign policy made on Taylor-like bases.

That is, an “object” of U.S. interests is precisely how the President views Ukraine. And it’s a decision whose legitimacy Taylor has unquestionably overlooked. Let’s hope that in their impeachment proceedings, the House and Senate don’t.

In my next post:  Taylor’s testimony and the case for clearing Mr. Trump. 

Im-Politic: Claims that Trump Has Betrayed His Voters Economically Look Weaker than Ever

17 Friday May 2019

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Commerce Department, election 2016, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politics, Populism, real personal income, Trump

President Trump has betrayed all the (tens of millions) of working class and/or rural voters who supported him in 2016 – that’s been one of the most popular claims by his opponents politics and journalism alike. (See, e.g., this post.)  Even so, the evidence to the contrary being either ignored or unknown continues to impress.

At the end of last month, I presented some data showing that lower- and middle-income Americans have seen their economic lots improve faster relative to those of upper-income Americans under the first two years of Mr. Trump’s presidency than under the last two years of Barack Obama’s.  The gap hasn’t been enormous, but it sure seems to belie the idea that Trump voters were duped by a phony populist. 

This morning, the Commerce Department supplied some more in the form of its annual report on how inflation-adjusted personal income rose or shrank in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia over the latest data year (in this case, 2016-2017).

A casual reading of the report doesn’t provide much encouragement for Trump supporters. For example, of the ten states that saw real personal income rise the fastest, six gave their electoral votes to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, and only four to Mr. Trump. Moreover, of the ten states that performed the worst when it comes to personal income improvement, seven were in the Trump column and only three in Clinton’s.

Further, on average, the Clinton states enjoyed price-adjusted personal income advances of 2.60 percent in 2017. The comparable Trump state figure was only 2.05 percent.

So why do I argue that the Trump betrayal contentions get the story largely wrong? Because I’ve compared these 2016-2017 results with those of the year before – which was of course the last year of the Obama presidency. And what it shows is what surely matters to voters more the single year results – whether their personal incomes fared better or worse in 2017 than in 2016. And when these numbers are presented, the economic case for Trump votes looks awfully strong.

To be fair, after-inflation personal income nation-wide was much faster in Mr. Trump’s first year in office than in Mr. Obama’s last – and by a whopping 2.6 percent to 1.1 percent! Even so, the Trump states saw the best rates of improvement. Indeed, of the thirty states whose electoral votes were won by the President (and adding in Maine, which split its electoral votes), price-adjusted personal income grew faster in 2017 in fully 25 (or 80.65 percent). Income growth slowed year-on-year in only four 12.90 percent), and the rate stayed the same in two.

For most of the 21 Clinton states (including Maine), real personal incomes grew faster in 2017 than in 2016, too. But the percentage was lower (71.43 percent). In five of those 21 states (23.81 percent), inflation-adjusted personal income increases slowed, and Maine remained flat.

All together, inflation-adjusted personal income growth accelerated from 0.63 percent between 2015-2016 to 2.05 percent in 2016-17 for the Trump states – a much faster rate than the 1.58 percent to 2.60 percent speed-up for the Clinton states.

Especially interesting – between the two time periods, no fewer than seven Trump states saw their personal incomes grow in real terms in 2017 after shrinking in 2016. Only one Trump state (South Dakota) experienced the reverse. By contrast, none of the Clinton states suffered after-inflation personal income drops in 2016 – but none has experienced such dramatic improvement, either.

These state-wide numbers aren’t perfect measures of personal incomes developments, and they’re even more problematic as clues to political behavior. After all, most states are big enough to be highly diverse economically, and wide gaps between rich and poor can be found inside many. It’s also important to note that the Trump states generally keep lagging the Clinton states when real personal income growth is looked at in absolute terms.

But trends almost always deserve to count more than snapshots. And although the new real personal income numbers hardly show that the Trump states have entered economic nirvana, they make the betrayal claims look flimsier than ever.

Im-Politic: So Farmers (Especially Soybeans Growers) Were Going to Punish Trump on Trade?

07 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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2018 elections, agriculture, China, farmers, Im-Politics, midterms 2018, soybeans, tariffs, Trade, trade war, Trump

Since I’ve long followed U.S. trade policy, since it’s long been one of President Trump’s signature issues, and since for months the President’s tariffs had been widely described as a major danger to the coalition that carried him and other Republicans to victory in 2016, I thought one of the most useful post-midterms exercises I could conduct would be to see if these analyses held up. The verdict: Anything but.

At the heart of this narrative were America’s farmers, and especially its soybean growers. In brief, the Trump China tariffs sparked retaliatory Chinese levies on a wide range of U.S. exports, including soybeans. Soybeans had become the nation’s leading agricultural export to China, and China exports represented a large share of total American soybean production. And since those soybean exports to the People’s Republic were endangered (and have in fact plummeted), the soybean farmers (along with the rest of U.S. agriculture, since its exports were threatened by various foreign retaliatory tariffs, too) were likely to take their anger out on Republican candidates for the House and Senate this year, and reward Democrats with significant wins.  (See here, here, and here for some examples.)

Last night’s midterm results, however, make clear that nothing of the kind happened. To see how off-base the “Republican Soy-Mageddon” (“Soy-Pocalypse”?) predictions were, let’s first look at the returns from the Top Twenty districts in the House of Representatives in terms of total agricultural output. Republicans held sixteen and Democrats four when the evening began.

When it ended, the number of those seats flipped by the Democrats (i.e., where one of their candidates beat a Republican incumbent) totaled one: the First District of Iowa. The other three Democratic victories were scored by Democratic incumbents.

Republicans flipped none of these 20 seats. But they held on to 15. Moreover, three of these seats were open seats – that is, a Republican incumbent had retired. So all else equal, the Democratic candidate’s chances of winning were increased.

The race for the twentieth seat on this list – Minnesota’s First District – was too close to call at the time of this writing. It’s an open seat also, but the previous incumbent was a Democrat. So no sign of any blue wave, or any notable Democratic strength in this group of Districts, whatever.

But what about the soybeans-dominated Districts? The results from this Top Twenty show nothing like a Republican Soy-Mageddon, either.

During the previous Congressional session, Republicans held 16 of these seats as well, and the Democrats four. The Democrats flipped two of these Districts – that First in Iowa, along with that state’s Third. The Democrats’ four other victories in this group were by incumbents.

The Republicans, again, didn’t flip any Democratic soybeans seats. But they held onto 15 of their original 16 seats. In addition, three of those seats were open, so again, the GOP candidates’ advantage was smaller than it would have been had the incumbent run. The election in the twentieth District in this soybeans group – Minnesota’s First – is that still-undecided race.

Again no Soy-Mageddon for Republicans.

These developments won’t come as a major surprise to careful news buffs. Several reports (see, e.g., here, here, and here) have been published in recent weeks containing evidence that, however worried they were about their own individual prospects, many American farmers continued to support Mr. Trump – and in principle even his efforts to use pressure to extract more equitable terms of trade from China and other foreign economies. But you had to be quite the careful news buff.

At the same time, last night’s results by no means give Mr. Trump a free pass on trade policy from American agriculture. Before too long, unless his efforts start delivering results for U.S. farmers, or removing the trade threats they still face, or unless other administration policies open up new opportunities (at home or abroad), their patience could well run out. For now, however, ag is hanging tough with an America First trade approach at the grassroots level.  It’s high time that its whiny Inside the Beltway spokespeople start paying attention. 

Im-Politic: The Trump Voters Who Want Work, not Welfare

20 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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coal country, Dante Chinni, Democrats, dignity of work, family leave, Im-Politics, Immigration, Jobs, Mainstream Media, minimum wage, Obama, Obamacare, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, wages, welfare

There’s no doubt that “Aha!” articles need to occupy a prominent place in journalism. This is especially true when they reveal important gaps between the claims of politicians and other major public figures on the one hand, and incontestable reality on the other.

At the same time, “Aha!” journalism can contain fatal flaws even when it’s superficially accurate. As illustrated by a Wall Street Journal article published yesterday, the problems can become serious when the Mainstream Media and others in America’s chattering classes try to figure out what’s going among those American voters who supported President-elect Trump.

Since I’m not a mind-reader, I of course can’t know reporter Dante Chinni’s exact motive in presenting the evidence that Trump voters look to be among the biggest losers if the president-elect keeps his campaign promise to repeal President Obama’s healthcare reforms. But it’s certainly got major – and legitimate – “Aha!” overtones. What could be easier to imagine than Democrats and other assorted liberals and progressives making political hay out of the idea that Mr. Trump will wind up shafting his own backers big-time. Indeed, that’s already begun.

Nonetheless, there’s a big part of this picture that pieces like this miss (regardless of how much or how little of Obamacare the next administration tries to keep). As the Journal article makes clear, Trump voters appear certain to take a painful Obamacare hit because so many live in parts of the country that have been devastated by trends like technological advance, offshoring-friendly trade deals, and the demise of the coal industry. Where lost jobs haven’t resulted, wages have fallen significantly. Of course, these setbacks go far toward explaining why they were Trump voters to begin with!

But there’s a clear implication at work here: that, in fact, those Trump voters should have backed Democratic presidential nominee, and Democratic or otherwise liberal members of Congress, because they’d have surely kept the very important benefit of adequate, free or much lower cost medical coverage.

This conclusion makes perfect sense from the standpoint of typically well heeled, thoroughly urbanized members of the nation’s media, political, and policy establishments. Business leaders who view themselves as progressives surely agree. But it makes no sense from the standpoint of economically pressed Trump voters – who as should now be screamingly obvious, live worlds apart from these elites.

For many of these folks remember the days when they didn’t need Obamacare to prop up their living standards or prevent their descent into near-poverty or outright destitution. They also remember the days when they were able to own a home by financing it responsibly, take a respectable vacation, buy a new car, provide for their children the college education they may have lacked, and retire securely – all without minimum wage hikes, without paid family leave, and without subsidized healthcare during their working lives, and without any of the other actual and prospective palliatives offered by the public sector, whether adequate or not.

In other words, they remember the days when they and/or their spouse held good-paying and reasonably secure jobs, and they reject the idea that any forms of welfare – even all added up together – amount to acceptable compensation. And they resent the dole especially vehemently if they believe, rightly or wrongly, that their livelihoods disappeared or turned into dead-end jobs because of entirely avoidable political decisions – especially on the trade and immigration fronts.

The point here is not that Obamacare and other government supports are bad or unnecessary. The point is that Trump voters (and of course many others) believe in “the dignity of work” – not in the formal Catholic sense, but in the informal, everyday sense. And they want to see more politicians taking this idea seriously, instead of giving it lip service.

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Current Thoughts on Trade

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Chief Economist at Daniel Stewart & Co - Trying to make sense of Global Markets, Macroeconomics & Politics

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Real Estate + Economics + Gold + Silver

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So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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