Josh Marshall
One of my subsidiary frustrations in the infrastructure debate and legislative process is how difficult it is even to make sense of what’s going on. I’ve mentioned in a few posts that this is not only a research or reporting problem. It’s hard to have good messaging for what you’re trying to do, build public support or keep supporters engaged, if even those whose job it is to make sense of things, who understand a lot of the jargon and technicalities, struggle to make sense of it. I’ve read a fair amount and discussed it with various people at the highest levels of the process. And I can barely make sense of it.
With that introduction, a few thoughts.
The FBI has released an unclassified intelligence assessment that predicts that some QAnon adherents will soon decide they can no longer “trust the plan” after so many Q predictions have come up short and resort to acts of violence.
You can read the key part of the document here.
Two Thoughts on the Fall of Netanyahu
As you’ve certainly seen, Israel got a new government yesterday and the Prime Minister is not Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time in a dozen years. He went out ugly. No storming the Knesset but a lot of heckling from Bibi’s dead-enders, a hot and wild speech from the man himself denouncing the new government as a danger to Israel, invoking the Holocaust, insisting no one can stand up to Biden like him. And then it was done.
I wanted to note two dimensions of the moment that stuck out to me.
Michigan Republicans’ wild and probably successful plan to get around the governor’s veto of voter suppression laws by getting 340,000 signatures.
I don’t know who’s right or wrong. But I am as sure as I ever have been that this site’s greatest resource is its rich store of incredibly knowledgable readers. From TPM Reader PL …
Now that the lab leak theory has been back in the news, the fact that one of the first identified clusters was at a Wuhan wholesale food market is being discussed again. This happens to be an area where I have some understanding, and I’ve been frustrated with the degree to which everyone is reading things into it without context. Lab leak enthusiasts suggest that because it popped up in the same city as a virus lab it is evidence for the leak, whereas other people just used it to focus on racist “Chinese people eating weird things” stories. But the more likely explanation strikes me as a lot less interesting.
When I was in grad school I spent two years doing field research on design and business strategy in Chinese businesses. As part of this I researched China’s wholesale market system, and, as fate would have it, did ethnographic research on consumer electronics wholesale markets in and around Wuhan as well as other sites across China.
TPM Reader JL flags an interesting article in The Economist about the costs of a global vaccination program. The article is paywalled. But the key passage is tweeted here: “To get 70% of the planet’s population inoculated by April, the IMF calculates, would cost just $50 billion. The cumulative economic benefit by 2025, in terms of increased global output, would be $9 trillion, to say nothing of the many lives that would be saved.”
From TPM Reader JF …
As someone who has lived in Hong Kong for 15 years and what passes here for a passing familiarity with Chinese politics (but would probably be a more than passing familiarity for the average American), I agree with you about COVID and the PRC secrecy culture. It’s especially strong around things that make China look bad, and the instinct to censor and clamp down has only gotten stronger since Xi consolidated power. His shift from a term-limited supremo to a for-life supremo is underappreciated in the US, where I think most people just see a the same generic dictatorship, but it was a major change. The Chinese leaders Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin served two five-year terms, in and out, and then retired after a decade (both are still alive).
The last supremos to wield power until at or near death were Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. By the time of Deng’s departure, China had moved to a system where, power was negotiated among the party elite. There was rotation at the top, governed by the incumbent leader, other politburo members, aspiring leaders, etc, and there were constitutional term limits (of course the PRC constitution can be changed, and was to allow Xi to stay on). All this constrained Hu and Jiang. They made all the real decisions, but their decisions could be overridden by the next guy, who everyone understood would be in power eventually.
I hope you’ve enjoyed or at least feel you’ve learned more about this lab leak controversy from the emails I’ve published over the last couple days. I very much have. I now see a lot more of the complexity of the topic. But at the end of the day I come away with the conclusion that we really don’t know because we don’t have a lot of data.
And that brings us back to a recurrent point: if the Chinese authorities wanted to they could clear a lot of this up by granting access to the records of the Wuhan laboratory, perhaps the medical records of the staff and interviews with the relevant scientists. To China skeptics this is an obvious sign of guilt, a sign of something to hide. Many people from the sciences have a reaction that is a mix of anger and puzzlement. Science is about transparency, so what’s the problem exactly? Many biologists and virologists have years of experience working collaboratively with Chinese scientists or even some of the very scientists in question. So seeing them all go silent just seems odd or inexplicable.
But of course it’s not the scientists. It’s the Chinese government.
From TPM Reader MN …
First of all, for credibility’s sake, I am a computational biology postdoc at [*******]. I’ve done some research on the SARS-CoV-2 genome but it hasn’t been my main focus the way it has for many people. Nonetheless, I’m acquainted with at least the discussion of genomic mutations and evolution, although the nitty gritty web lab virology is not my area.
Remember, our 2nd annual drive for The TPM Journalism Fund starts next week. I’ll get into all the details and the pitch next week. But it’s really important for our operation. So please keep an eye out and if you can give a glance to our posts about it we would really appreciate it.