Here are a few links to a topic I continue to think more and more about. On the surface it’s Peter Thiel, about whom more in a moment. But beyond Thiel, there’s a broader reality. In the first years of the century we learned to see Tech as a rising business and political powerhouse that was broadly liberal, at least by the standards of Big Business. ‘Liberal’ was probably never quite right – but at least broadly cosmopolitan in its social values and culture. It was young, comparatively diverse, based outside San Francisco. It was in many ways the product of the major cities and universities that are the seedbeds and home of Blue State political culture. That was never wholly true. And it’s become less true, especially as its financial titan corporations have been forced to interact more intensively with Washington DC. But it was at least partly true.

But many of the dominant figures in the world of Big Tech aren’t just conservative. A number are what might be termed neo-reactionary. Thiel of course is the first that comes to mind in this category. But he’s not the only one.

Global geopolitics, especially in its military dimensions, remains mostly outside the purview of this site. But I want to make sure you’re current on some key developments around the world, any number of which could develop into crises fairly quickly.

We’ve discussed the on-going tensions over Taiwan. Last week there was a minor incident in Chinese Coast Guard vessels used water cannons on Philippine resupply ships on their way to the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea. The State Department sent out a message in which it pointedly noted that “an armed attack on Philippine public vessels in the South China Sea would invoke U.S. mutual defense commitments under Article IV of the 1951 U.S. Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty.”

The horrific vehicular homicides at the Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin has even more jaw-dropping details behind it. Earlier today The Washington Post and other publications reported that when suspect Darrell Brook Jr plowed through the parade he was fleeing from the scene of a knife fight after police were called. That made it seem like – at least in a very narrow sense – plowing into the people in the parade wasn’t part of some plan but part of reckless driving trying to avoid arrest.

But a new report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reveals that earlier this month Brooks was arrested for intentionally running over a woman in a gas station parking lot after chasing her to the gas station after a fight. Brooks posted a $1,000 bond for the attack at the gas station and was released from the Milwaukee County Jail on November 16th, last Tuesday.

Behind inflation and supply-chain driven supply shortages one of the biggest topics in 2021 economics discussions is the so-called ‘Great Resignation’. This is a phrase increasingly used to describe the historically high levels of people quitting their jobs. Most often this is treated as one of the many ills facing the COVID and post-COVID economy. It’s also blamed what are frequently described as labor shortages. And it’s even blamed for inflation.

In fact, virtually everything we know about the Great Resignation is a good thing. And we should embrace it. It’s not knowledge workers reevaluating work life balance. It’s low wage workers in grueling and thankless jobs finally telling their bosses to go F themselves, quitting and finding better paying work.

Public life – which is to say, politics – is an interplay between society’s foundational realities and the stories we tell about them – the facts and the messaging. Democrats have been in a collective funk since late summer and a central part of that funkish freakout has centered on their belief that they lost the plot on the messaging front. In fact, we stumbled on our path to national recovery – both on the economic and COVID fronts. And just as that happened Democrats fell into an escalating argument with themselves. There wasn’t really a message or any clear messaging at all. It was an intensifying Groundhog Day-like “keep having the same argument each day but getting nothing done” while the country went off course. That did send a very clear message. And we’ve seen the results in the President’s and his party’s poll numbers for the last five months.

So what happens now?

I’ve mentioned a few times recently both Merck and Pfizer have new COVID-targeted anti-viral medications which dramatically reduce the chances of severe disease and death if taken early in the course of illness. Merck’s pill (molnupiravir) reduced the risk of hospitalization by 50% if taken within 5 days of symptom onset; Pfizer’s pill (paxlovid) reduced the risk of hospitalization by 85% if taken with 5 days onset and 89% if taken within three days.

Both treatments showed 100% efficacy against death.

So much of story of 2021 has been about the polarization over vaccines and the battle to get the country vaccinated against COVID. You know all this story with all its trials and permutations. But for all of this it’s worth stepping back and recognizing this fact: the United States is overwhelmingly vaccinated. At the moment, 80% of people over the age of 12 in the United States have received at least one vaccine dose and 69% are fully vaccinated. Over the age of 18 those stats are 82% and 71%. (The over-12 metric is critical because 5-12 year olds have only become eligible this month; those under the age of five remain ineligible.)

None of this is to underestimate the importance of increased vaccination or the destruction that has been wrought by the willful politicization of the COVID vaccine. But sometimes we have the idea that the country is divided on this issue. And that’s not quite right. Overwhelmingly, adults and those eligible to be vaccinated are vaccinated. A small minority of the adult population remains unvaccinated.

Messaging is generally the most overrated aspect of electoral politics. But it’s not nothing. And Democrats need to do better at it. I just wrote a way too long post on this. But it really comes down to this. President Biden has to learn a lesson from President Trump and brag more about the economy. A lot more. And do it consistently. In every public setting. And about COVID too.

Job reports have been up and down this year. But they’ve actually been consistently revised upward after the fact. That’s happened every month for the last six months for a total of 625,000 additional new jobs. In August the number doubled. But this gets drowned out. Revisions of earlier months don’t make headlines. That’s life. But the power of the presidency is to push these things to the front of the conversation.

Over the last half dozen years the rightist-populist (shorthand: Trumpist) war on expertise has created a highly polarized conversation about the role of expertise in democratic public life. But the debate about booster shots shows how those of us who are on Team Expertise have perhaps slightly overshot in this contentious public conversation. Or perhaps ‘overshot’ isn’t the right word. It shows how once we set aside conversations with idiots and bullshit artists there are real nuances, as there always has been, in the balance between expertise and democratic self-governance.

Let’s start by making a few points clear. Especially in the hard sciences we really should defer to people with professional expertise. Not sign off all decision-making, mind you, but really show great deference to the organized and systematic accumulation of knowledge which is a centerpiece – perhaps the centerpiece – of our civilization. The question is often on what questions specifically is the expertise relevant?

Here’s where you get to the booster question.

There’s little question that a COVID booster shot increases your immunity to COVID infection. Data out of Israel from the late summer and early fall leaves little question about that. The public debate – setting aside questions of global vaccine equity – has been about how long that increased protection lasts and whether it matters. Let’s take the second part first. The most important protection you get from COVID vaccination is protection against severe illness and death. A year’s worth of data shows that protection against bad outcomes remains robust even though protection against infection declines substantially after about 6 months. For healthy people under 65 is it worth another round of vaccination, especially if that top off of increased protection only lasts a few months?