Gee, I missed the fourth anniversary of the famed "15 Days to Stop the Spread" event held on March 20, 2020.
Surely, there's more than one lesson to be learned here, but if your brain only has room for one, Steven Greenhut has a suggestion: Don't Give Government More Power.
The great conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1963 wrote that he would rather "live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University." Buckley recognized the great "brainpower" among the university's faculty, but feared the "intellectual arrogance that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise."
I thought of that oft-quoted line four years after the COVID-19 panic. It was a very real public health threat, so much so that it enabled Americans to transfer wide-ranging and largely unchecked powers to the experts. For two years, it was exactly as if Buckley's fears came true and we were ruled by the type of people found in the faculty lounge.
It's no secret that American universities are dominated by progressives, who don't typically accept the "common premise" of limited governance. A core principle of progressivism, dating to its early 20th century roots, is the rule by experts. Disinterested parties would reform, protect, and re-engineer society based on their superior knowledge. Although adherents of this worldview speak in the name of the People, they don't actually trust individuals to manage their own lives.
I decided to look back at my 4-years-ago postings. One of my "favorites" (not the right word, but whatever) was a reaction to this article in The Hill: Fauci: Neither Trump nor CDC to blame for testing delay.
"It was a complicated series of multiple things that conflated that just, you know, went the wrong way. One of them was a technical glitch that slowed things down in the beginning. Nobody’s fault. There wasn’t any bad guys there. It just happened," Fauci said.
A reminder: that testing delay killed people.
My response at the time: "Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of the narrative: (1) the State's job is to protect us all, and (2) it's "nobody's fault" when it fails to do that."
Holds up pretty well, I think.
Also of note:
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He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss). At Commentary, Seth Mandel wonders if President Dotard is channelling Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone: Biden Offers Israel a ‘Deal’ That Sounds Like a Threat.
The White House doesn’t want Israel to go into Hamas’s last redoubt in the numbers with which it would normally try to capture and secure a city full of Hamas terror leaders and militants. One reason is that President Biden and his advisers are nervous about the pro-Hamas elements in his party ramping up their protests and threatening his nominating convention this summer in Chicago. Another reason is that Egypt doesn’t want Israel to do anything that would cause Palestinians to enter Egyptian territory even temporarily and even for humanitarian purposes, nor does Egypt want anyone seeing what’s underneath Rafah—probably because Egyptian-facilitated smuggling tunnels below the southern Gaza city will be revealed.
[…] We will stop Egypt from flooding Gaza with arms and ammunition if you promise to go easy on Hamas is the kind of thing a mafia goon would say if you put him in the foreign service. What the Under Secretary of State for Gabagool is saying here is that if Israel helps the president calm the muppet babies in his party by summer, the Israelis get to choose the cause of the next war: Do they want it to be because Western leaders saved Hamas from oblivion, or would they rather the next war come because Egypt kept up its supply of cannonballs to the Jolly Roger?
(Headline is the title of an old song written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King , Phil Spector produced. For some strange reason it's not heard much any more.)
Also attempting to pressure Israel, as we've noted before, is Senator Chuck from New York.
Joel Zinberg describes The Problem with Schumer's Israel Speech.
Well, actually, two problems: "arrogance and ignorance." Or, in Yiddish:
The first word is chutzpah, which connotes arrogance-laced presumption. That perfectly describes Schumer instructing Israel—the only democracy in the entire Middle East—to jettison its elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold new elections, or else. Schumer threatened: “[i]f Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down . . . then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy.” That is election interference, plain and simple.
[…]
The second word is sechel—common sense or wisdom—something Schumer’s speech clearly lacked. The Senate majority leader claimed that the Israeli people are being “stifled by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” But the only people stuck in the past are those, like Schumer and the foreign policy establishment, who persist in wanting to impose a two-state solution that Palestinians have never favored and that Israelis, brutalized by decades of intifadas and terrorism culminating in October 7, have given up on.
I don't do Yiddish myself, so different words comes to mind when perusing this NH Journal article: Shaheen Joins Progressive Dems Urging Push for Palestinian State. And those words are Et tu, Jeanne?
A group of U.S. Senate Democrats sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to unilaterally announce plans for the U.S. to recognize a Palestinian state and to pressure Israel to do the same.
They include progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Mazie Hirono…and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen.
“In an effort to reignite U.S. leadership on a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we call on you to publicly outline a path for the United States to recognize a nonmilitarized Palestinian state,” the letter reads.
“While we have been particularly disappointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to engage on a path to a Palestinian state, we believe that this provides even more reason for the Biden Administration to lead and push the Israeli government to take [action].”
The letter describes a rosy two-state future which will never happen.
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They go together like greed and corruption. Veronique de Rugy looks at Industrial Policy and Electoral Politics.
The CHIPS Act was enacted in August 2022, with the objective of enhancing semiconductor production in the United States. This recent instance of industrial policy is driven in part by the desire to decrease U.S. dependence on Asian semiconductor manufacturing, and in particular from Taiwan. So here we are with dozens of billions of dollars going to large and wealthy corporations to subsidize what these corporations are already in the business of doing.
According to Bloomberg, Samsung is on track to obtain $6 billion in federal support, and TSMC is expected to receive more than $5 billion. Meanwhile, Intel will get up to $20 billion ($8.5 billion in grants, $11 billion in loans) and “it plans to tap investment tax credits from the Treasury Department that could cover as much as 25% of capital expenditures, according to the Commerce Department.”
Vero links to this Politico story which is pretty clear that it's really all about getting Arizona's 11 electoral votes in November: Biden boosts Intel with massive CHIPS payout in swing state Arizona.
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Good suggestion. And it's from Noah Smith: Go read some Vernor Vinge.
Vernor Vinge, my favorite science fiction author, passed away yesterday, at the age of 79. Hexapodia, my podcast with Brad DeLong, takes it’s [sic] name from a Vinge novel; in fact, it was me seeing Brad make a Vinge reference that led to us becoming friends. David Brin, another of my favorite authors, and a close friend of Vinge’s, has written a moving tribute on his blog; if you want to read tributes to Vinge, I would definitely start there. But as a devoted fan who considers it a point of pride to have exchanged a few emails with Vinge over the years, I thought I should write my own as well.
Vinge is probably best known as the creator of the concept of the technological singularity — which we now simply call The Singularity. Vinge was not the first to imagine that the creation of AI might lead to a rapid intelligence explosion, as thinking machines quickly built better and better versions of themselves; that honor, somewhat predictably, goes to von Neumann. But Vinge coined the term, and it was his own extrapolations of the idea that form the basis of basically all of our thinking on the topic to this day. If you read Vinge’s famous essays on the Singularity — the first in 1983 and the second in 1993, you’ll see basically all of the concepts that AI engineers, effective altruists, “e/acc” folks, rationalists, etc. argue about to this very day.
I've read a lot of Vinge, but only two novels since I started blogging in 2005. Turned out to be his last two: Rainbows End in 2008 and The Children of the Sky in 2012. I noted that the ending of that last one seemed to be a setup for another entry in the series, but looks like we won't get that.
Unless he did something tricky with uploading his consciousness… nah, he probably didn't
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