The myth of nonpartisan justices

Adam Serwer's grim Atlantic piece about SCOTUS is entitled, "The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to Believe".

It opens:

Justice Amy Coney Barrett is offended by those questioning the impartiality of the Supreme Court.

“This Court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she announced at a recent event at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, named for Senator Mitch McConnell. “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.”

For Barrett to insist on her nonpartisanship at a center named for the legislator whose procedural hardball was instrumental in securing her seat suggests that, although Barrett’s peers have praised her legal mind, her sense of irony leaves something to be desired. ...

Serwer provides a handy timeline of how the so-called "conservative" movement worked for a half-century to tilt the Court so far to the right that it's hard to believe it hasn't tipped over. He doesn't fault the movement for doing this, arguing that that's how politics is played. He does, however, tell the too-pious-for-words Justices trying to maintain the fiction of judicial impartiality (including non-conservative Stephen Breyer) to STFU:

The conservative movement seems to have secured the Court for a generation at least, but that is insufficient. The right-wing justices also demand their decisions be seen as the outcome of dispassionate legal reasoning, not partisan warfare. They do not want the legitimacy of their proclamations, or the institution itself, questioned to the point where their liberal counterparts might consider paths as drastic and radical as the ones they took to get here. They wish to be admired and celebrated as the sagacious intellectual giants they believe themselves to be.

Having reached the heights of the legal profession, it must be deflating for the justices to recognize that the public is not obligated to reflect their self-regard. In truth, the public is simply reciprocating the contempt that the justices show for the people every time they insist on lying to their face about how the Court works, or why it looks the way it does today.

Contempt. Yep, that's what I feel for our would-be Solons. Suck it up, right-wing Justices, because you've more than earned it.

The Texas anti-abortion law is incomplete

Thanks to all five uber-right-wing Supreme Court Justices turning a blind eye, Texas' now-infamous anti-abortion law has taken effect. The law criminalizes abortion after six weeks. (Most women don't even know they're pregnant at that point.) There is no exception for rape or incest. To keep from running afoul of prior Supreme Court rulings, the state of Texas doesn't enforce the law. Instead, the law allows a private citizen — any private citizen — to sue anyone who facilitated the abortion. That could include not just the medical personnel who actually carried out the procedure, but anyone who helped; the oft-cited example is the rideshare driver who dropped the woman off at an abortion clinic. Moreover, there's no downside for suing: the plaintiff isn't liable even if s/he pursued the claim frivolously. (That's my understanding from media coverage, anyway.) If the party being sued doesn't respond, a Texas court can enter a default judgment requiring the defendant to pay the plaintiff's legal fees plus a $10,000 fine.

It's a lovely piece of work. Congratulations, Texas Republicans: you crafted a law that is uniquely cruel and corrosive to the rule of law, substituting vigilantism for law enforcement.

However, the law could be made palatable (maybe) with a simple addition to its provisions:

Any party suing, or threatening to sue, under the terms of this law is required to take custody of an unwanted newborn — one for each suit threatened or filed. Otherwise a filed suit is dismissed with prejudice.

You feel strongly that all fertilized eggs should be brought to term? Then take responsibility for the resulting children.

Choice and vaccination

In a piece about tennis players as a population being less likely to be vaccinated than the actual U.S. population as a whole, French tennis player Gilles Simon is quoted as saying, "I’m not very scared of Covid, actually. My basic philosophy is: If you’re afraid of it, you get vaccinated; if not, no. It’s still a choice."

It's still a choice. A lot of people think that, especially in the U.S. Variations on "my body, my choice" are the rallying cry with regard to vaccination (for CoViD-19 and maybe all vaccines) among people who, I would guess, don't believe that when it comes to a woman's right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. But I digress.

Here's the thing, though. If you choose not to wear a seat belt, any bad consequence will be yours alone. Ditto if you choose to eat foods harmful to your health, or to go rock-climbing solo.

However, some choices don't just affect you. Cigarette smoke spreads beyond the smoker. Driving under the influence can injure or kill other motorists or pedestrians. And remaining unvaccinated just because you're "not afraid" of SARS-CoV-2 means you are more likely to catch and to spread it to others, especially those who can't be vaccinated or whose natural immunity is compromised.

And then there's the very high likelihood of getting seriously ill yourself. Think that only affects you? Not if you're in a relationship or need to be hospitalized. A lot of other people might have to endure the consequences of your illness.

In the U.S., for better or worse, getting vaccinated is a choice, yes. The government isn't going to strap you down and inject you.

But like driving drunk, your choice to remain unvaccinated "just because" or "because freedom" (another rationale, if one can use that term) puts others at risk.

As a country we put up with drunk driving for decades, apparently because it was a sacred freedom to be able to get behind the wheel without being able to control it. We finally wised up. Now driving drunk is despicable and you're a grade-Z putz if you do.

We're well on the way to the same consensus on choosing not to be vaccinated against CoViD-19. For the same reason: the risk isn't yours alone. You have no right to risk other lives.

Ed Yong clarifies where the U.S. is in the pandemic

The Atlantic's Ed Yong is credited as "a staff writer" who "covers science". That doesn't do him justice. He's really an acute, clear-eyed observer of not just science but the American political response to the natural world — particularly to CoViD-19.

In a quickie newsletter, he cuts through much of the fog of reporting surrounding the Delta variant. The result is a sober explanation of a few bottom-line facts:

• "Vaccinated people are not fully safe ... but they're much safer than unvaccinated people."
• "Breakthrough infections are relatively rare ... but won't feel rare."
• "Vaccinated people are unlikely to transmit Delta as easily as unvaccinated people ... but they can probably still spread it."
• "We are not back to square one ... but we're not out of the woods."

If you're dissatisfied with the foregoing — if you crave facts that don't leave so much room for interpretation — sorry. That's not how things are.

In a quietly devastating analysis last fall of why the U.S. response to CoViD-19 was so appallingly bad, Yong observed (among many other things) that we have a habit of assuming we can invent our way out of crises. That leads us to seek out, and to expect, magical technological fixes.

My instinct is to call such an expectation simplistic and foolish. However, that's too harsh. Looking for magic bullets bespeaks an optimism that is part of the national character, an optimism that even I must admit is crucial not just for the nation, but for humanity at large.

That said, we often let that optimism blind us to the need to take crucial action before any magic bullets are found. If you don't yet have a cure for zombieism, you'd better do what you can to avoid being turned into one. And you can't rely on just one defense: you have to have multiple layers of defenses, because those zombies will probably overwhelm or circumvent any single obstacle.

Vaccination is not a magic bullet for CoViD-19. It's a key defensive layer, though, just in case you become infected. To minimize the chance of becoming infected, you wear a mask (or masks), stay away from crowds if possible, wash your hands before touching your eyes, etc. — all the things you're tired of hearing about but that remain best practices no matter what you think. Taking all these steps gives defense in depth, which is the best you can hope for in the real world.

So that's where we are. It's neither as great as vaccine proponents hoped nor as dire as some fearmongering pundits think. The world isn't black and white: it's full of grays.

(The 5 August 2021 newsletter is a good summary of where we are, but if you want to know how we botched things as a country so badly, you must read the long piece from last year. He identifies multiple flaws in the national character that will cause us more suffering if we don't recognize and correct them.)

Don't trust Emergent BioSolutions

A few days ago the FDA approved the reopening of the Baltimore facility owned and operated by Emergent BioSolutions that originally was slated to produce large amounts of Johnson & Johnson's CoViD-19 vaccine.

As a reminder of why this matters:

The F.D.A. had halted production at the factory in late March after it was discovered that workers had accidentally contaminated a batch of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine with a key ingredient used in AstraZeneca’s, then made at the same site.

I never got around to posting about Emergent BioSolutions before this but I've followed news of its travails with anger and disgust.

This NYT piece discusses how Emergent came to exploit the federal government's worry over anthrax even as the nation faced shortages of personal protective equipment in the early days of CoViD-19. The company sucked up a lot of money that might have been more productively spent.

Because Emergent was the sole manufacturer of a product deemed critical to national security, the company has played what one former executive described to The Times as “the we’re-going-to-go-bankrupt card.”

Profiteering isn't necessarily a crime but it isn't exactly morally upright, either.

Another NYT piece, "U.S. Bet Big on Covid Vaccine Manufacturer Even as Problems Mounted", revealed yet more damning facts about Emergent.

More than eight years ago, the federal government invested in an insurance policy against vaccine shortages during a pandemic. It paid Emergent BioSolutions, a Maryland biotech firm known for producing anthrax vaccines, to have a factory in Baltimore always at the ready.

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the factory became the main U.S. location for manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines developed by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, churning out about 150 million doses as of last week.

But so far not a single dose has been usable because regulators have not yet certified the factory to allow the vaccines to be distributed to the public. Last week, Emergent said it would destroy up to 15 million doses’ worth of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after contamination with the AstraZeneca vaccine was discovered.

Why and how did the company blunder into this and other disastrous fiascos documented in this article?

... four former company officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements or feared retaliation, described an environment where top Emergent leadership tolerated and even encouraged the flouting of federal standards for manufacturing and marketing products.

One of the former officials said that as the company scrambled to meet the heavy demands of vaccine production, a senior manufacturing supervisor often responded to reports of quality errors by asking: “Do you want me to make drugs or fix issues? I don’t have time to do both.”

This second Times piece is required reading if you want to understand why you shouldn't feel relieved the Baltimore plant is reopening. The story behind its original closure reveals a management team that put profits above quality and responsibility, and a governmental bureaucracy that let the company get away with its recklessness (and make a ton of money in the process) despite being charged with protecting the public.

From the piece about the Baltimore plant's reopening (the first article I referenced):

“The American people should have high expectations of the partners its government chooses to help prepare them for disaster, and we have even higher expectations of ourselves,” Robert Kramer, the chief executive of Emergent, said in a statement on Thursday.

Bullshit. Pardon my French, Kramer, but bullshit.

From that same piece:

Mr. Kramer announced that Sean Kirk, a longtime Emergent executive overseeing manufacturing who went on personal leave earlier this year after regulators found a host of problems at the Baltimore site, would be leaving the company.

Was Kirk solely responsible for the plant's terrible history of mismanagement? The article is silent about that, presumably because Kramer was, too. Emergent hasn't issued a report explaining how its Baltimore plant came to be such a disaster area, and I doubt it ever will of its own accord. In the absence of radical transparency from this outfit, how can we possibly believe, much less trust, that Kirk was the only bad apple?

I sure as hell don't think all the wasted time, money, and other resources were the result of just one executive's misdeeds and inaction. Emergent has a corrupt corporate culture and firing one executive is a laughably inadequate response to this episode.

J & J is assuming oversight of the Baltimore plant but that doesn't mean Emergent BioSolutions shouldn't face a reckoning. The federal government can't let one more penny slip into the company's coffers until there's a public accounting of who did what, and an objective assessment of how the hundreds of millions of dollars Emergent has received was spent. Anybody responsible for squandering that money, including by pocketing it while covering up fraud, has to be held accountable.

Libertarians will be the death of us

A New York Times article describing unvaccinated Americans quotes one fellow who is adamant he will never allow himself to be vaccinated against CoViD-19:

“It has to do with my civil rights,” he said. “The United States government’s main job is to protect me from foreign and domestic enemies. Not my health. I’m in charge of my health.”

First off, I have to note that the article profiles several others before him who are, to varying degrees, more flexible on the subject. In other words, not all unvaccinated people are as adamant as this fellow. Thank goodness for that.

As for this fellow, who, according to the piece, "identifies as more of a libertarian than a Republican", I can only say that he reinforces my exasperation with libertarianism (which I've repeatedly expressed).

Presumably this guy would object to his neighbors contaminating his water by letting their sewage drain into it. Presumably he's grateful for water lines, water treatment plants, and sewers (he lives in Houston so I assume he benefits from them all). These conveniences of modern life don't fall into his tidy little categories of protecting him from "foreign and domestic enemies". Indeed, they are part of protecting his health, something he claims government shouldn't do.

I'm sympathetic to some of the concerns people have over the CoViD-19 vaccines: they were developed in an unprecedentedly short time and we obviously can't yet know if they have any long-term side effects. I think the fact that millions have been vaccinated without widespread bad consequences is good enough real-world evidence that they're safe but your mileage may vary.

But if you're just a stubborn cuss who can't be bothered to think beyond "I ain't letting anybody jab me because freedom", you get no sympathy. You're so obsessed with your favorite buzzword that you have no regard for others. "Freedom" is all about what you want, not about what anyone else might need.

How about thinking about more than yourself for a change?

Start by finding out why it's called public health, not just "health".

"What the Ben & Jerry's Decision Reveals About Israel", Yasmeen Serhan

Yasmeen Serhan's piece in The Atlantic has a thesis I find grim:

While the international community, including the United States, continues to distinguish between Israel and the territories it occupies, the reaction to the Ben & Jerry’s decision has shown that, as far as many Israeli politicians are concerned, that distinction no longer exists.

Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israel-based pollster and political strategist, explained the dynamic to Serhan in greater detail.

Why does Israel care about what an American ice-cream brand thinks of its policies? When I put this question to Scheindlin, she told me that for many Israelis, criticism of Israeli policy is often conflated with an existential threat to Israel itself. To hear many Israeli politicians tell it, “criticism from abroad of our policies is anti-Israel, it’s anti-Zionist, and it’s anti-Jewish, or anti-Semitic,” Scheindlin said. “And that’s really the narrative that we’ve been hearing.”

Serhan notes that while some left-leaning Israeli politicians praised Ben & Jerry's decision, their voices largely have been lost in the tumult raised by centrist and right-wing objections.

I can understand a lot of Israelis not taking kindly to a corporate policy change that explicitly criticizes Israeli policy. However, they should be a lot more careful throwing around that very loaded accusation, "anti-Semitism".

Israel's very existence is a reminder to the world that the ethnic cleansing of Jews during World War II was an abomination that must never happen again. People of good will everywhere can and do support that principle.

However, Israel is also a nation-state, and no nation-state is above criticism. Criticism of the Israeli state is not automatically anti-Semitic. If Israelis can't or won't acknowledge the difference, then Israel risks alienating even its staunchest allies and making "anti-Semitism" meaningless.

Now, it's true that telling someone not to be offended can be presumptuous. I've been on the receiving end of that argument, too, and I'll admit I've called "foul" on more than one occasion when told not to take offense. However, in retrospect, I must admit that I overreacted once or twice.

Take a deep breath, Israelis, especially you politicians lobbing rhetorical artillery fire at Ben & Jerry's. You might not like the company's implied criticism of your national policy but that's all it is: it's not hatred of your identity, it's not anti-Semitism. You conflate policy criticism and anti-Semitism at your own peril.