Mar
25
2025

Fear and Loathing, I Expect

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Today's Amazon Product du Jour is entry number four in the author's self-published "Conspiracies for Kids" series. (Previous entries: JFK and the Magic Bullet; Neil Armstrong and the Silver Screen; George W and the Inside Job). I can't tell from the book descriptions whether the author ("Ryan Nolan") is an unhinged lunatic or a straight shooter.

For the record: Oswald shot JFK, acting alone; the Apollo moon landings were real; 9/11 was not an "inside job".

But one of these things is not like the others: the COVID-19 pandemic probably was caused by a "lab leak" accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, operating with indirect funding from NIH, approved by Anthony Fauci.

All that gets me to Tyler Cowen's query: What Follows from Lab Leak?. And what follows is disquieting:

First, and most importantly, the higher the probability that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab the higher the probability we should expect another pandemic.* Research at Wuhan was not especially unusual or high-tech. Modifying viruses such as coronaviruses (e.g., inserting spike proteins, adapting receptor-binding domains) is common practice in virology research and gain-of-function experiments with viruses have been widely conducted. Thus, manufacturing a virus capable of killing ~20 million human beings or more is well within the capability of say ~500-1000 labs worldwide. The number of such labs is growing in number and such research is becoming less costly and easier to conduct. Thus, lab-leak means the risks are larger than we thought and increasing.

A higher probability of a pandemic raises the value of many ideas that I and others have discussed such as worldwide wastewater surveillance, developing vaccine libraries and keeping vaccine production lines warm so that we could be ready to go with a new vaccine within 100 days. I want to focus, however, on what new ideas are suggested by lab-leak. Among these are the following.

You can click over for Tyler's ideas. Whether they're good or not, the likelihood they are to be implemented effectively seems iffy, especially given Chinese secrecy and intransigence.

On my "Things That Will Probably Kill Us" list, "Engineered Virus Pandemic" has moved ahead of "AI", "Nuclear War", and "Climate Change".

Also of note:

  • At least one head should roll. Dominic Pino asks the musical question: So, Who’s Getting Fired for This? In case you missed it:

    Agroup of Trump administration officials accidentally texted Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about U.S. military operations in Yemen. Goldberg wrote that he was added to a group chat on the messaging app Signal on March 11 by someone whose profile was named “Michael Waltz,” which is the name of Trump’s national security adviser.

    From there, Goldberg saw messages from accounts sharing names with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff.

    The group chat was called “Houthi PC small group,” with “PC” standing for “principals committee” (though Waltz spelled it “principles” in one of his messages). “Principal” is Washington-speak for “top-level official,” and Goldberg writes that principals committees are informal groups established to discuss specific operations, such as the ongoing campaign against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen.

    On that specific point, Mark Antonio Wright has a recommendation: Trump Should Fire Pete Hegseth.

    Firing a top official doesn’t always fix an organization’s underlying problems, of course. But when a president cashiers one of his own appointees, it’s an unmistakable acknowledgement that someone has failed, and it’s a hard-boiled message that there will be accountability. Because Biden repeatedly declined to send that message, he begat further failures by reinforcing the sense that the embarrassments, incompetence, and outright failures of his administration would be tolerated by the barely-there occupant of the Oval Office.

    And that’s why it’s so important for Donald Trump to publicly defenestrate at least one of his high-profile appointees who are involved in the jaw-dropping scandal of the Houthi bombing-campaign leak, in which a who’s-who of America’s top national-security officials decided to discuss the coordination of a no-kidding shooting war over a Signal chat, despite having inadvertently invited Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg to listen in.

    The whole story is a tale so clownish, so stunning, so outlandish that it would seem to better fit into a gonzo satire of government ineptitude such as Burn After Reading or Veep.

    I guess Trump, who bears responsibility for putting these clowns in their positions, will probably not resign. (I'm not convinced that his replacement, JD, would be an improvement.)

    And of course, the ultimate folks responsible for this dangerous ineptitude are the voters. And you can't fire them, can you? For the nth time: this would not have happened under President Nikki Haley.

  • Speaking of foreign policy amateurishness… Jim Geraghty makes a wish for something unlikely: It Would Help if Our Guy Negotiating with Putin Knew Anything About Ukraine.

    There’s a lot to object to in Trump envoy Steve Witkoff’s interview with Tucker Carlson, but for now I’m going to stick to just a few glaring factual errors on the part of Witkoff.

    About an hour into the interview, Witkoff tells Carlson, “I think the largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbass, Crimea, . . . [long pause] You know, the names, Lugansk, and there’s two others. They’re Russian-speaking, there have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.”

    First, it would be preferable if the American who is handling negotiations with Russia over Ukraine could remember the names of the four oblasts (provinces or states) that were annexed by Russia in this invasion — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia — and that held faked referendums in September 2022. Crimea was occupied in February 2014, and held its own Russian-run, unfair, unfree, and rigged referendum in March 2014.

    Jim points out that the other "referendums" were universally acknowledged to be "absolute shams" as well. And the "Russian-speaking" bit is spectacularly dishonest, since in the bad old days of the USSR, Russian was required, and use of Ukrainian was (to put it mildly) strongly discouraged. As only a totalitarian government can do:

    The Soviet Union even banned the Ukrainian letter “g” because it had no exact corresponding letter in Russian. And everyone in Ukraine from the 1930s to 1991 needed to speak Russian as their primary language, at minimum to interact with the government. Volodymyr Zelensky grew up speaking Russian, not Ukrainian.

    Even more alarming than his ignorance, Jay Nordlinger notes Witkoff's utter obsequiousness for a murderous tyrant: Falling for Putin.

    Describing a recent phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Witkoff said, “It was these two great leaders coming together for the betterment of mankind.”

    But that's not all:

    Here are maybe the mushiest of Witkoff’s remarks:

    President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. . . . It was such a gracious moment.

    Also:

    [Putin] told me a story, Tucker, about how, when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend.

    Jay goes on to compare Witkoff with Joseph Davies, the "incredibly naïve and gullible" Joseph Davies, the US Ambassador to the USSR during Stalin's Great Terror.

  • But closer to home… Kevin D. Williamson Trump's diligent efforts to piss off Canada: Stumped By Stumpage.

    In seeking to justify his imbecilic trade war against Canada, Donald Trump complained on March 7 that “Canada has been ripping us off for years on tariffs for lumber.” You will not be surprised to learn that this claim is, like most of what comes out of the presidential mouth, untrue, and that, until very recently, there were no Canadian tariffs on U.S. lumber at all. The Canadian tariffs on U.S. lumber that have been imposed since they were first considered in 2017 are retaliation for increases in U.S. tariffs on Canadian lumber. As usual, Trump either doesn’t know what he is talking about or doesn’t care. A bit of both, I suspect.

    The U.S.-Canada dispute over trade in softwood lumber is roughly the same age I am, old enough to have been “solved” at least two times in the past, producing the inevitable crop of initialisms: the SLA (Softwood Lumber Agreement), which is to be administered by the LCIA (London Court of International Arbitration), and CUSFTA (Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement) which begat NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) which begat USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement). The first substantial bilateral work on the issue began in the early 1980s.

    Trump has had plenty of time to do his homework on the issue. Of course, he hasn’t. He is lazy and ignorant, he always has been lazy and ignorant, and he prefers to remain lazy and ignorant.

    So (I hear you asking) what about that "stumpage"? Well, you can google. Or (better) click over to KDW's article, subscribing if necessary.

    A buried gem from later in the article, which I liked enough to tweet:

    Nice picture, too.

  • And there are plenty of people who live off the leaks. Chris Edwards chimes in on a recurring theme: Federal Spending Is a Leaky Bucket.

    President Trump’s policy actions are causing concerns that he may push the economy into recession. An Associated Press news piece led with, “With his flurry of tariffs, government layoffs and spending freezes, there are growing worries President Donald Trump may be doing more to harm the U.S. economy than to fix it.”

    Trump’s tariff wars could indeed tank the economy. But cutting the government will support growth by reducing the distortions created by federal programs. Some federal programs aim to solve real market failures, but most simply reallocate taxpayers’ resources based on political whims and lobbying pressures.

    There are two sides to the inefficiency of federal spending. Spending is funded by taxes, which distort the working, investing, and entrepreneurial choices of individuals and businesses. Each additional dollar in income taxes causes about 40 to 50 cents of damage to the private sector beyond the tax amount itself. That damage is called deadweight loss. Republicans seem to understand this side of the fiscal equation, and they push to cut taxes.

    Not to be tiresome, but this is part of (what I call) the "D.C. Shuffle". There are rafts of bureaucrats whose continued employment depend on maintaining and expanding the leaks in the "leaky bucket".