JustOneMinute

There Are No Adults

I'll say this - if Team Trump had handled the submarine deal with Australia so clumsily we'd be hearing talk of Russian collusion and Impeachment III. And politicizing the science by announcing what the FDA would decide before the data was in? OMG and LOL. And let's not even mention Afghanistan.

I did not expect much from Sleepy Joe but I thought he brought with him an experienced team that had been together for years and could deliver a professional sheen to the operation. Ooops.

When You Have To Deny It...

Probably not helpful:

Justice Amy Coney Barrett argues Supreme Court isn't 'a bunch of partisan hacks'.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In the wake of a controversial decision on abortion rights, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a crowd of more than 100 here that she doesn't believe the highest court in the land is politically driven.

“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she told the guests at a Sunday celebration of the 30th anniversary of the opening of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.

Barrett, who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020, spent much of her talk at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel arguing the court is defined by "judicial philosophies" rather than personal political views.

"Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties," she said, noting that she identifies as an "originalist" and citing fellow Justice Stephen Breyer as an example of the other main school of thought, "pragmatism."

Yet fifty years of bi-partisan shouting about Democratic judges and Republican judges and here we are.

No word on whether the justices have stopped beating their significant others.

9/11 Twenty Years On

Open thread to get started.

Biden Backpedaling On ATF Chief

Senate to Biden - Send less crazy crazies.

I like these occasional reminders that Biden campaigned as a moderate. Nice to see his Dem colleagues in the Senate remember too.

Gain Of Function, Loss Of Credibility

The Intercept has used the Freedom of Information Act to pry documents from the NIH. The topic is NIH grants to study bat viruses in a partnership of EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some of the "news" is old since the grants were mentioned in already-published studies. But some details ave been added.

Its a bit of a blow to Dr. Fauci's remaining credibility on the question of whether the US funded 'gain-of-function' research conducted by the Chinese. I'll gloomily guess this won't matter - the battle lines around Fauci have been clear for a while and I doubt there are many willing to shift sides. Just to recap, back in May Sen. Rand accused Dr. Fauci of approving gain of function research and Fauci denied it, vehemently. Over time the gist of his defense seem to be, it couldn't be gain of function research because the NIH review board OK'ed it. The BBC and the WaPo explain (I'll come back to the WaPo below.)

Still, here is Caroline Downey at the National Review:

Newly released documents appear to contradict Dr. Anthony Fauci’s repeated claims that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The internal documents detail the work of EcoHealth Alliance, an American research non-profit which used NIH funding to research novel bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. Among the documents, which were obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request, is a previously unpublished EcoHealth Alliance grant proposal filed with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, which is run by Fauci.

...

Fauci has repeatedly insisted during his Senate testimony that the research being funded by the NIH at the WIV did not qualify as “gain-of-function” under the NIH’s current definition. But critics, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have accused Fauci of playing semantic games by excluding research which makes bat coronaviruses more transmissible — the commonly accepted definition of “gain-of-function” — from his more convenient definition.

Dr. Richard Ebright, biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, has also disputed Fauci’s claims. Primarily, he has rebutted Fauci’s chief declaration that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV]” as “demonstrably false.”

Ebright told National Review that the NIH-financed work at the WIV “epitomizes” the definition of gain-of-function research, which involves working with “enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)” or those pathogens “resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.”

We'll see if these latest revelations move the needle.

BACK TO THE WAPO: They are very intent on defending Fauci and nod along to what I find to be an utterly convincing explanation about gain of function research. The emphasis is on intent rather than results, which seems to me to be beside the point:

Update, May 19: The National Institutes of Health issued a statement to The Fact Checker which in part said: “NIH has never approved any grant to support 'gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans. The research proposed in the EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. grant application sought to understand how bat coronaviruses evolve naturally in the environment to become transmissible to the human population.” When gain-of-function research was paused, “this grant was reviewed again and determined by experts to fall outside the scope of the funding pause.”

The gist of the controversial experiments was to mix and match different segments of different existing bat viruses to see if any of the resulting combinations could be dangerous. Its a fair and relevant questions since bats, and consequently their viruses, tend to co-mingle. But their defense, roughly paraphrased, amounts to 'this is not gain-of-function because we didn't know whether these recombinations would be infectious or not'. C'mon, man. "I wasn't playing with explosives, I was playing with random chemicals and never guessed they'd explode." No Nobel prizes there.

To be fair, the viruses the Chinese have told us about don't look enough like SARS-Cov-2 to be a smoking gun. But have they done undisclosed, unpublished work? Ah, well...

 

Ivermectin Horse Manure

Careful readers often wonder - is it true, or just something I read in the Rolling Stone?

No American Left Behind, Except For A Few

The AP comes for Joe Biden. Gently.

But let's give Tired Old Joe some credit. He can do for Republicans what Trump (and Bush before him) did for the Democrats - let them set aside their differences and unite in their loathing.

Fires Burn Out (Unless They Don't)

The Times ponders a Covid mystery - why have surges faded after about two months?

Has Delta Peaked?

We investigate Covid’s mysterious two-month cycle

By David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu

Has the Delta-fueled Covid-19 surge in the U.S. finally peaked? The number of new daily U.S. cases has risen less over the past week than at any point since June, as you can see in this chart:

 

There is obviously no guarantee that the trend will continue. But there is one big reason to think that it may and that caseloads may even soon decline. Since the pandemic began, Covid has often followed a regular — if mysterious — cycle. In one country after another, the number of new cases has often surged for roughly two months before starting to fall. The Delta variant, despite its intense contagiousness, has followed this pattern.

Sadly, there is no particular explanation. And in any case, there is an obvious issue of aggregation - even if Florida and Texas have peaked that does not assure that New England, relatively calm so far, has also peaked.

They serve up some speculation:

Two possible stories

We have asked experts about these two-month cycles, and they acknowledged that they could not explain it. “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said.

But two broad categories of explanation seem plausible, the experts say.

One involves the virus itself. Rather than spreading until it has reached every last person, perhaps it spreads in waves that happen to follow a similar timeline. How so? Some people may be especially susceptible to a variant like Delta, and once many of them have been exposed to it, the virus starts to recede — until a new variant causes the cycle to begin again (or until a population approaches herd immunity).

The second plausible explanation involves human behavior. People don’t circulate randomly through the world. They live in social clusters, Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, points out. Perhaps the virus needs about two months to circulate through a typically sized cluster, infecting the most susceptible — and a new wave starts when people break out of their clusters, such as during a holiday. Alternately, people may follow cycles of taking more and then fewer Covid precautions, depending on their level of concern.

Mr. Leonhardt had more at the end of July, including a "Stay Humble" message - since we don't know what's going on its hard to be sure how helpful our various interventions (other than vaccines!) have really been:

A more plausible explanation appears to be that Delta spreads very quickly at first and, for some unknown set of reasons, peters out long before a society has reached herd immunity. As Andy Slavitt, a former Covid adviser to President Biden, told me, “It seems to rip through really fast and infect the people it’s going to infect.” The most counterintuitive idea here is that an outbreak can fade even though many people remain vulnerable to Covid.

That’s not guaranteed to happen everywhere, and there probably will be more variants after Delta. Remember: Covid behaves in mysterious ways. But Americans should not assume that Delta is destined to cause months of rising caseloads. Nor should they assume that a sudden decline, if one starts this summer, fits a tidy narrative that attributes the turnaround to rising vaccination and mask wearing.

“These surges have little to do with what humans do,” Osterholm argues. “Only recently, with vaccines, have we begun to have a real impact.”

I don’t want anyone to think that Osterholm is making a nihilist argument. Human responses do make a difference: Masks and social distancing can slow the spread of the virus, and vaccination can end a pandemic.

The most important step has been the vaccination of many older people. As a result, total British deaths have risen only modestly this summer, while deaths and hospitalizations remain rarer in heavily vaccinated parts of the U.S. than in less vaccinated ones.

But Osterholm’s plea for humility does have policy implications. It argues for prioritizing vaccination over every other strategy. It also reminds us to avoid believing that we can always know which behaviors create risks.

Humility is in short supply these days.

Should We Stay Or Should We Go Now?

Peter Baker of the NY Times ponders possible alternatives to the Biden/Trump framing of Afghanistan as a choice between full withdrawal or significant escalation. Sure, to (mis)quote a genius SecState, at this point what difference does it make? But this factoid suggests the unpopular stalemate was achieving some US national security goals with a low level of casualties:

After drawdowns beginning under Mr. Obama, just a fraction of the troops there at the peak were left, yet military strategists said they had an outsize impact in keeping Afghan security forces in the fight without engaging in as much combat themselves.

Fewer than 100 American troops died in combat in Afghanistan over the past five years, roughly the equivalent of the number of Americans currently dying from Covid-19 every two hours. Until the devastating attack this week by ISIS-K at the Kabul airport killed 13 American service members, the military had suffered no combat deaths since the Trump agreement was signed.

Yes, 100 deaths is 100 too many if no purpose is being served. But 5,000 US troops and associated air support were apparently a huge force multiplier propping up an Afghan army with dubious morale.

“The administration is presenting the choices in a way that is, at best, incomplete,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, a deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush who oversaw earlier stages of the Afghan war. “No one I knew was advocating the return of tens of thousands of Americans into ‘open combat’ with the Taliban.”

Instead, some, including the current military leadership of Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asserted that keeping a relatively modest force of as few as 3,000 to 4,500 troops along with the extensive use of drones and close air support could have enabled Afghan security forces to continue holding off the Taliban without putting Americans at much risk.

“There was an alternative that could have prevented further erosion and likely enabled us to roll back some of the Taliban gains in recent years,” said Gen. David H. Petraeus, the retired commander of American forces in Afghanistan and former C.I.A. director who argued the mission was making progress while serving alongside Mr. Biden under President Barack Obama.

If memory serves (and it does), the idea of a light US footprint focused on counter-terrorism rather than counterinsurgency was Biden's plan back in 2009. Met with derision at the time, maybe it doesn't looks so bad now.

Seems like a shame to skip the derision from 2009:

And others, more harshly, argue that Mr. Biden’s judgment on foreign policy has often been off base.

They point out that he voted against the successful Persian Gulf war of 1991, voted for the Iraq invasion of 2003, proposed dividing Iraq into three sections in 2006 and opposed the additional troops credited by many with turning Iraq around in 2007.

“When was the last time Biden was right about anything?” Thomas E. Ricks, a military writer, wrote in a blog on Sept. 24. Mr. Ricks is affiliated with the Center for a New American Security, a research organization founded by Democrats.

Well. By 2021, not even Team Biden liked the old Biden plan (my emphasis):

 

The Biden team considered other options, including keeping a small presence of troops for counterterrorism operations or to support Afghan security forces, but reasoned that was just “magical thinking” and would take more troops than was sustainable. They discussed whether to renegotiate the Trump agreement to extract more concessions but the Taliban made clear it would not return to the bargaining table and considered the Trump deal binding.

 

"Sustainable" seems to mean "politically popular here in the US". The wind has certainly shifted here since 2009, so the national security parallel to "defund the police" carried the day.

 

And why did Biden stick with the withdrawal negotiated by Trump? One 'excuse' which Biden offered and rejected is that Trump forced his hand:

 

Following the deal, Mr. Trump reduced American forces in Afghanistan to 4,500 from 13,000. Eager to be the president to end the war, he signed a memo to the Pentagon instructing it to pull out all remaining forces by Jan. 15 before leaving office, but was talked out of it by advisers. Instead, he ordered the force drawn down to 2,500 troops in his final days, although about 3,500 actually remained.

 

For Mr. Biden, inheriting such a small force in Afghanistan meant that commanders were already left with too few troops to respond to a renewed Taliban offensive against American forces, which he deemed certain to come if he jettisoned Mr. Trump’s agreement, requiring him to send thousands more troops back in, officials said.

 

While he has suggested he had little choice because of the Trump agreement, Mr. Biden in fact was already determined to pull out of Afghanistan regardless and acknowledged in a recent interview with ABC News that “I would have tried to figure out how to withdraw those troops” even if his predecessor had not negotiated a deal with the Taliban.

 

A stranger point - Biden did modify the deal, changing the deadline from May 1 (roughly the kickoff of 'fighting season', after the poppy harvest is in)  to Aug 31, prime fightin' time. Seemingly better months were considered and rejected:

Mr. Biden’s advisers also considered extending the withdrawal deadline until the winter, after the traditional fighting season was over, to make the transition less dangerous for the Afghan government. The Afghanistan Study Group, a bipartisan congressionally chartered panel that was led by Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., a retired Joint Chiefs chairman and that included Ms. O’Sullivan, in February recommended extending the May 1 deadline and seeking better conditions before pulling out.

But Mr. Biden was warned by security specialists that the longer it took to withdraw after a decision was announced, the more dangerous it would become, aides said, so he extended it only until Aug. 31.

Some say none of this would have happened if Biden were still alive.

Strange But True

Politico covers the meltdown of Team Biden's Plan for Afghanistan. They open with a reminder that a mere ten days the White House was celebrating its twin victories in the Senate on the bipartisan infrastructure and the Dems-Only Everything Else bill.

Yeah, that victory celebration went downhill.

And we'd expect Republicans to pounce on Biden's mis-statements, but the NY Times?

That Degenerated Quickly...

Kabul has fallen and the Afghan "government" has fled?!?

Afghanistan Live Updates: Government Collapses as President Flees, and Taliban Enter Kabul

The U.S. military raced to evacuate diplomats and civilians as the insurgents stood poised to retake complete control of the country 20 years after being toppled by American forces.

 

Meanwhile, Back In Afghanistan...

The US failure to create a stable national government in Afghanistan has been a slow train wreck coming. Some conservatives became restive under Early Obama, whose commitment and conviction to victory were, well, suspect.

And what might victory have looked like? I was firmly in the camp that believed the US was unlikely to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan even with resolute US leadership. I wrote this 2010 and reprised it in 2011 while discussing a Reagan-era military expert, Bing West, who detailed the probable failure of the US counter-insurgency effort.

My official editorial position is that if we had Lincoln in the White House, the Afghani equivalent of George Washington in Kabul, and Generals Marshall and Eisenhower peering at maps of Kandahar, we might still lose in Afghanistan.  Gen. Petraeus is a great general and a great American, but he is not partnered with Lincoln and Washington.

Obama didn't have the character to recognize who he was and pull the plug in 2010. Remember, Afghanistan was the "good war" and Iraq was the "bad war". Since Iraq was Bush's mistake, victory there was not important, even if achievable. Fighting the 'good war' made political sense to Obama even though military success was unlikely.

Whatever, dude, and a happy belated birthday from Maureen Dowd. Trump put us firmly on a withdrawal path we should have taken years earlier, and Biden will oversee the final debacle. 

My Pillow Guys Looking For New Experts?

Awkward moment: The cyber-sleuths hired by My Pillow guy Mike Lindell to help Stop The Steal can't back his story.

EXCLUSIVE: Cyber expert says his team can’t prove Mike Lindell’s claims that China hacked election

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The cyber expert on the “red team” hired by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell now says the key data underpinning the theory that China hacked the 2020 election unveiled at the Cyber Symposium is illegitimate.

Mr. Lindell said he had 37 terabytes of “irrefutable” evidence that hackers, who he said were backed by China, broke into election systems and switched votes in favor of President Biden. The proof, he said, is visible in intercepted network data or “packet captures” that were collected by hackers and could be unencrypted to reveal that a cyberattack occurred and that votes were switched.

But cyber expert Josh Merritt, who is on the team hired by Mr. Lindell to interrogate the data for the symposium, told The Washington Times that packet captures are unrecoverable in the data and that the data, as provided, cannot prove a cyber incursion by China.

“So our team said, we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” Mr. Merritt said on Wednesday, the second day of the symposium.

Mr. Merritt’s break from Mr. Lindell accelerated the unraveling of the MyPillow millionaire’s months of spinning of a conspiracy theory that he said would reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and restore former President Donald Trump to the White House.

Well, the expert is not definitively saying that hacking did NOT occur, which will probably help some people Keep Hope Alive.

And speaking of hope, its's great to see it ran out for Cuomo. We've all been spared a few months coverage of his death throes.

Closing Time In Tokyo

That was an odd Olympics, but it had some great moments. The Summer of Italy may be my favorite capped (so far!) by the men's photo finish gold in the 4x100 relay.