I’ve been wondering (and worrying) about this; I’m glad to get a plausible explanation for what’s going on.

The central, befuddling economic reality of the United States at the close of 2020 is that everything is terrible in the world, while everything is wonderful in the financial markets.

It’s a macabre spectacle. Asset prices keep reaching new, extraordinary highs, when around 3,000 people a day are dying of coronavirus and 800,000 people a week are filing new unemployment claims. Even an enthusiast of modern capitalism might wonder if something is deeply broken in how the economy works.

To better understand this strange mix of buoyant markets and economic despair, it’s worth turning to the data. As it happens, the numbers offer a coherent narrative about how the United States arrived at this point — one with lessons about how policy, markets and the economy intersect — and reveal the sharp disparity between the pandemic year’s haves and have-nots.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/upshot/why-markets-boomed-2020.html

I hadn’t realized that the Moderna vaccine had been fully developed by January 13th of 2020. This is a pretty interesting look at how we could have a vaccine ready for deployment much sooner next time.

None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html

Avoidance speech is also practiced by speakers of some of the Bantu languages of southern Africa, including Xhosa and Zulu. Married women are forbidden from using their father-in-law’s name, or any word that has the same root or similar sound.

Bantu speakers often get around this restriction by borrowing synonyms from other languages spoken nearby. Some linguists think that is how click consonants found their way into Bantu speech: in words borrowed from Khoisan languages, which use clicks extensively.

In parts of India, a daughter-in-law is not allowed to use words that begin with the same letters as her in-laws’ names, requiring her to use a parallel vocabulary.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/world/what-in-the-world/avoidance-speech-mother-in-law-languages.html

I think Taibbi is exactly right here.

There’s no such thing as a technocratic approach to truth. There are official truths, but those are political rather than scientific determinations, and therefore almost always wrong on some level. The people who created the American free press understood this, even knowing the tendency of newspapers to be idiotic and full of lies. They weighed that against the larger potential evil of a despotic government that relies upon what Thomas Jefferson called a “standing army of newswriters” ready to print whatever ministers want, “without any regard for truth.”

We allow freedom of religion not because we want people believing in silly religions, but because it’s the only defense against someone establishing one officially mandated silly religion. With the press, we put up with gossip and errors and lies not because we think those things are socially beneficial, but because we don’t want an aristocratic political establishment having a monopoly on those abuses. By allowing some conspiracy theories but not others, that’s exactly the system we’re building.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american-wrong

💚💚💚💚💚

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/12/jon-foreman-stone-land-art/

https://theweek.com/articles/951933/how-camp-explains-trump

I think this is exactly right. Be very, very skeptical of anyone who tries to distract you from the man behind the curtain, ie the ways in which the wealthy shape politics to meet their own desires instead of serving the public .

…political movements on both the left and the right were beginning to wake up to the idea that they’d been focusing their anger in the wrong places. Each articulated a theory of political abandonment. The Occupy movement described their battle as being between the 99% and the 1%, while the Tea Partiers, for all their eccentricities — I was pretty harsh about them once upon a time — were at least coming to the realization that the Republican Party leaders had long been lying to them about things like spending. These movements respectively set the stage for Bernie Sanders and Trump, who both described politics as a fight between a broad mean of betrayed constituents and that archipelago of rich villains.

Those movements failed, for different reasons, and we’re now back to corporate-sponsored tales of half against half. What’s always forgotten is who’s paying for these messages. We have two donor-fattened parties that across decades of incompetence have each run out of convincing pitches for how to improve the lives of ordinary people. So they’ve settled into a new propaganda line that blames voters for their problems, with each party directing its base to demonize the other’s followers. Essentially, in the wake of Trump, the political class is accepting the inevitability of culture war, and urging it on, as something preferable to populist revolt.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/for-what-are-americas-wealthy-thankful-fe3

This fascinating article argues that the pandemic illustrates that resilience has become a crucial metric of state power.

Each geopolitical age places a premium on particular forms of national power—seapower and colonial possessions prior to the world wars, nuclear weapons and alliance networks during the Cold War, soft power after the Cold War. And the new era ushered in by COVID-19 has done so as well, revealing the salience of “resilient power”: a country’s capacity to absorb systemic shocks, adapt to these disruptions, and quickly bounce back from them. As the scholar Stephen Flynn once told me, the aim of resilience is to design systems not just so they can endure shocks, but also so they can “fail gracefully and recover nicely.”

The pandemic has taught us that today, a country’s best offense is a good defense. One of its lessons is that national clout and advantage, and thus international power dynamics, will be rooted in resilient power amid the types of mass traumas that look set to dominate this century—not just pandemics, but also climate change, cyberattacks, financial crises, and disinformation campaigns. And right now, it’s a measure of power where the United States is clearly falling short.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, most foreign-policy discussions focused on other challenges: The 9/11 attacks indicated the rise of non-state actors, while the nationalist administrations of Donald Trump in the United States and Xi Jinping in China signaled the dawn of great-power competition. These narratives were accurate, but incomplete. In ways we didn’t fully appreciate at the time, both developments were also early signs that countries needed to get serious about cultivating the capabilities to rapidly recover from the blows that terrorism, on the one hand, and the vulnerabilities inherent in international interdependence, on the other, would deal them. They were about the coming imperative of resilience, and its emergence as a source of state power.

The Pandemic Is Revealing a New Form of National Power – The Atlantic

…even when people seem to care about distant risks, it can feel like a half-hearted effort. During a Berkeley meeting of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller brought up the basic idea behind the hydrogen bomb. You would use a nuclear bomb to ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction in some other substance, which would produce a bigger explosion than the nuke itself. The scientists got to work figuring out what substances could support such reactions, and found that they couldn’t rule out nitrogen-14. The air is 79% nitrogen-14. If a nuclear bomb produced nitrogen-14 fusion, it would ignite the atmosphere and turn the Earth into a miniature sun, killing everyone. They hurriedly convened a task force to work on the problem, and it reported back that neither nitrogen-14 nor a second candidate isotope, lithium-7, could support a self-sustaining fusion reaction.

They seem to have been moderately confident in these calculations. But there was enough uncertainty that, when the Trinity test produced a brighter fireball than expected, Manhattan Project administrator James Conant was “overcome with dread”, believing that atmospheric ignition had happened after all and the Earth had only seconds left. And later, the US detonated a bomb whose fuel was contaminated with lithium-7, the explosion was much bigger than expected, and some bystanders were killed. It turned out atomic bombs could initiate lithium-7 fusion after all! As Ord puts it, “of the two major thermonuclear calculations made that summer at Berkeley, they got one right and one wrong”. This doesn’t really seem like the kind of crazy anecdote you could tell in a civilization that was taking existential risk seriously enough.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/

…when dawn broke on Wednesday morning this week, and thousands of Democratic voices were crying out in anger that President Trump had not been more thoroughly repudiated by voters in the 2020 election, it felt a bit familiar. “This is the country we live in,” was the shocked refrain of the day.

And hey, I get it. It’s easy to look at Trump’s disastrous presidency — his indifference to the coronavirus pandemic, his abject racism, his disrespect for democracy and ostentatious flouting of the law — and see a disaster. It is frustrating that so many millions of Americans don’t see it the same way.

On the other hand, it’s really tiresome to see a lot of smart people appear shocked over and over by the same damn thing. It was one thing to be caught off-guard by Trump’s victory in 2016. It’s another thing entirely to be surprised again if he scores a near-miss four years later. There is a substantial, though not invincible, constituency for conservatism in this country. There was four years ago. There will be four years from now. This really is the country we live in.

[…]

Four years ago, after Trump won, there was a lot of talk in the press about “getting outside of our information bubbles.” Liberals hear one set of media voices, the thinking went, while conservatives hear another entirely. The smart thing to do was to make an effort to listen to voices you didn’t really want to hear.

I’m not sure many liberals actually did that. The New York Times’ occasional “Trump voters in this Ohio diner are still supporting Trump” stories may have become self-parodic through repetition, but they also represented a modest attempt to bring new perspectives to the paper’s readers. Those stories were routinely greeted with widespread derision and threats to cancel subscriptions from readers who, it seemed, believed they already understood the right-wing point-of-view well enough, thank you very much. An attempt by The New Yorker to do a live interview of Steve Bannon — yes, an odious figure — produced a near-revolt.

[…]Progressives who want to make genuine, positive change can probably be most effective by doing the hard and uncomfortable work of truly understanding the perspectives of people with differing views, rather than waving them off with stereotypes. We might even listen once in a while, instead of always trying to win the argument at Thanksgiving.

Otherwise, the shocks will probably keep coming every four years, no matter the election results. “This is the country we live in” shouldn’t be a statement of angry resignation — but the beginning of realistic discussion about how to make America better for everybody.

The liberal bubble never really popped