How did Coronavirus get to Russia?

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Syria today and met with Bashar al-Assad while seated next to the commander of Russian forces in Syria, Lieutenant General Alexander Chayko. Shoigu received a Su-35S fighter escort during his flight. 241/https://t.co/4xUsaEpc9P pic.twitter.com/XazclI3LKm

— Rob Lee (@RALee85) March 23, 2020

Pulitzer / Nobel confusion

Just spoke to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali of Ethiopia. His Country needs Ventilators, and the U.S. is in good position to help him. We will!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 25, 2020

Why did Donald Trump have the Nobel Prize on his mind when his tweet-storm today seems like a reference to the Pulitzer Prize, not the "Noble" Prize?

One possibility -- and at the risk of looking for too empirical an explanation: because yesterday, he phoned the current holder of the Nobel Peace Price, Abiy Ahmed, the PM of Ethiopia. Trump is obsessed with this prize, at least back to Barack Obama getting it. And the wires got crossed between his briefing for his Addis Ababa phone call yesterday and his rage today. 

Imagine a board stamping on a basketball hoop -- forever

A hoop in a public recreation center -- mainly used by children -- in Washington, DC.

Exclusive to all newspapers: those Kim Yo-jong headlines in full

Kim Yo-jong: Gen X Millennials gets their first dictator

Out with Bourgeois Bohemian, In with Preppy Proletarian: The Kim Yo-jong Style Guide

Running the Workers Party by Day, Magic in the Kitchen in the evening: Kim Yo-jong's scallion pancake recipe

Dennis Rodman: that time I was at a reception with Kim Yo-jong

From Swiss Chic to Hanoi Hipster: Our travel reporter follows the footsteps of Kim Yo-jong

Game of Thrones Gangnam Style: How Kim Yo-jong outmaneuvered the generals to secure the legacy of her beloved brother

Outrage as Kim Yo-jong accused of "cultural appropriation" over K-pop themed promotional video

Marie Kondo: what we can learn about home organization from Kim Yo-jong

(continues until next 50,000 notch in Covid-19 fatalities)

Net Material Product

The White House statement on the "meeting on the Elbe" (the handshake of American and Soviet troops at the river in 1945) is fascinating. Given the current state of USA - Russia relations, it will be read for every clue of influence. Particularly interesting is the pivot from the front lines to the workers --

We also recognize the contributions from millions of men and women on the home front, who forged vast quantities of war materials for use around the world. Workers and manufacturers played a crucial role in supplying the allied forces with the tools necessary for victory.

It's the hammer and sickle -- without the sickle. Where are the Great Patriot Farmers?

Quote of the day

Holman Jenkins, Wall Street Journal:

Novel pandemic diseases are not a black swan. Our lockdown response was a black swan. 

The DTs

Goodbye to the Port and Brandy, to the Vodka and the Stag, To the Schmiddick and the Harpic, the bottled draught and keg. As I sat lookin’ up the Guinness ad I could never figure out How your man stayed up on the surfboard after 14 pints of stout. [Christy Moore]

THE PRESIDENT: Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.

Word of the day

Spectocracy.

Defined as rule by a class associated with the Spectator (UK) Magazine.

Usage spotted in Robert Shrimsley's excellent discussion (Financial Times) of how the Covid-19 choices are getting embedded in the UK's version of the culture war:

...  a claque of the government’s media outriders clustered around the Spectator magazine, an outfit whose diaspora also includes Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, and his chief strategist, Dominic Cummings. One lockdown sceptic, Toby Young, a Gove ally and associate editor at the magazine, has set up a website to argue that the lives saved are being overvalued and the costs understated.  Both Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings are less hawkish and worry premature easing may lead to a second peak and more economic damage. But the instincts of the Spectocracy are often aligned and find favour with this government.

Priorities

Iran's Coronavirus crisis is so urgent and requires so much focus and relief from other countries that ... emoji condolence guy, foreign minister Javad Zarif, has time to visit Bashar al-Assad today.

At least there's more social distancing in this photo than during the late-March visit to Bashar of the Russian Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu.

How did the Coronavirus get to Moscow anyway?

Photo via Fars. Note: it's not clear why Fars published some photos featuring no masks and some with masks. 

Crisis playlist

Bored children will suddenly spring into activity singing along with this one.

Learned nothing, forgotten nothing

Buried by the coronavirus, and maybe it would be have been buried anyway, the New York Times detailed some serious errors in the 2016 US government surveillance of people in the orbit of the Trump campaign, and in a parallel, a possibility -- obvious to followers of George Smiley -- that the infamous Steele dossier on Trump was itself a Russian disinformation campaign:

Such ties created a risk that the Russian intelligence services deliberately planted misinformation in Mr. Steele’s network. Complicating matters, however, is that Mr. Steele was trying to understand what Russian intelligence services were doing with regard to the Trump campaign. He would seemingly need his sources to be in contact with people with connections to those services or the Kremlin who were in a position to know what was going on.

In other words, the Steele dossier was raw intelligence. He was talking to people, shady people who knew other shady people, writing down what they said, presenting an assessment of it -- but it was up to others to draw conclusions from the layers of shadiness.

The problem is that his approach presumed patience, and instead it got short-circuited, with upstream intelligence work finding its way directly into the public domain.

This is not a new problem.

In 2002, upstream intelligence on Saddam Hussein's possible WMD program found its way to Dick Cheney.

In 2013-14, upstream intelligence on Libyan Islamist groups found its way to House Republicans looking for dirt on Hillary Clinton.

And now, in 2020, upstream intelligence on Chinese research labs and its late 2019 public health situation is finding its way to the media, and in turn feeding an (understandable!) hope among liberals that it can be used against Trump.

The problem with the last approach should be evident with the previous three instances. Upstream and raw intelligence and surveillance is all about indirect information, informed speculation, and tentative assessments. It's not designed for instant conclusions. If there were instant conclusions, you wouldn't need the analysts in the first place.

Any attempt on a China Knew Therefore Trump Knew "scandal" is not going to end well. It will be a circus of operatives, memos, "leaked" reports, opportunists, grifters, insta-experts, and cranks.

Coronavirus is the Bourgeois Plague (4)

Arlington Virginia, via Arlington Now--

“Obviously a lot more people are home all day,” Arlington Dept. of Environmental Services spokesman Peter Golkin told ARLnow. “They’re cleaning out more than usual, listening to their inner Marie Kondo as they stare at the walls and what’s piled up in front of them. They should indulge themselves with the couch and ARLnow and a few books and put off the big clean-ups for a few months.”

[Previously in this series]

There's always a German word

Der Hamsterkauf prompted by Angstkommunikation.

Royal stare > Mask

King Abdullah of Jordan meets the Minister for Industry and Commerce to discuss food stocks.

Photo via Petra. 

It's not just Trump

The Munich Security Conference took place during 14-16 February 2020. This is one of the biggest ground-truthing, thought-leading, direction-of-travel setting, VIP blabbing events of the year. Even emoji condolence guy, Javad Zarif, was there!

Although everyone's talking points had Cover-der-Arsch references to Coronavirus, the virus was discussed as a mainly China issue that would pose risks if it escalated elsewhere.

In fact, the virus had by then taken root in northern Italy -- with a respectable theory out there that Patient Zero for the Italian outbreak actually occurred in ... Munich in January. Bonus idiocy: Zarif was there yukking it up with the media when the virus was rampant in Iran!

But maybe it's not fair just to focus on the pretty vacant thought leaders at one Munich conference.

Eventually we will get some accountability on the pandemic, at least in terms of who knew what and when. And in that accountability, the decision of European countries to allow the Alpine ski season to continue all through February is going to look like total madness.

It takes a huge level of cognitive dissonance to know that the virus was in northern Italy, and yet not wonder whether it might already be all over the Alpine regions, with hundreds of thousands of ski vacationers, including school children, passing through the regions -- regions that also happen to be Europe's economic heartland. Far more than attendees at one or two sporting events, which get all the media attention because they are easier to focus on, this was a critical phase of the transmission.

With this level of haven't-a-clue leadership in Western Europe, is it any wonder that no one is getting too agitated about Viktor Orban?

Photo: MSC Müller. 

Trump's malaria drug remarks, explained

Trump's Pandemic Strategy, Explained

To rebel is justified

After a tumultuous event in such and such a country, a pundit will usually step forward to say "Where is [this country's] Nelson Mandela?"

So for China, where is China's Deng Xiaoping, the leader who will emerge from a previous Communist Party cohort's wreckage and right the ship?

Quote of the Day

Marshall McLuhan, The Media Approach to Inflation, New York Times, 21 September 1974:

The new economic situation, in which the game is to anticipate events at every turn and at every level, using the interval between the present and the coming events as if this interval were a tangible thing, this new situation in comparison with the older nuts-and-bolts economy presents a contrast somewhat similar to the "old journalism" and the "new journalism." The old journalism had aimed at the objectivity by "giving both sides at once." The new journalism seeks, rather, to immerse the reader in the total situation, using the resources of imaginative fiction to provide a multileveled experience.The new journalism is quite prepared to urge that "news" is necessarily a form of fiction or making. In the same way, the new economy is based on information and gaps and promises, and precisely to the degree that the new economy is based on the simultaneous, it fosters, invites,demands the rule of the anticipatory, the role of the hunter that the blow must strike where the quarry will be.

Competing risks

Important point from FT Health --

High rates of childhood vaccination against preventable diseases will be difficult to sustain with prolonged social distancing.

Coronavirus is the Bourgeois Plague (3)

Golf and Tennis comply with social distancing requirements.

[previously in this series]

Good instincts

Real time news reporting like this one from CNBC in Davos in January deserve a renewed focus given where the world is now.

Drive our cars

One of the cultural changes that has been slow to happen under the Coronavirus is the revitalization of car culture. Sure, you're not supposed to be leaving your house for any reason, but you're not violating the spirit of the restrictions by getting into your own car with your own family members and driving around indefinitely.



In that sense, western countries are headed to where Saudi Arabia has always been -- the car an extension of the zone of freedom that otherwise only existed inside your house. And with the trend in oil prices, it might even be that fuel prices are headed to about the same level as Saudi Arabia.



Above, a video from nearly a decade ago that celebrated / gently mocked this feature of the country.

Crisis playlist

When you need to evoke an alternative mood to cope with the pandemic.

Behind the wheel of a large automobile

De facto ruler of Abu Dhabi, Mohamed bin Zayed, gets the inaugural coronavirus test at a new drive-through testing facility in Abu Dhabi.

Photo via UAE News Agency (WAM).

Quote of the Day

From The Anthropology of Epidemics 1st Edition by Ann H. Kelly, Frédéric Keck, Christos Lynteris, (published just over a year ago!) -- the chapter by Carlo Caduff:

Today’s mass media fascination with the next pandemic is partly due to the fact that it operates as corroboration of the mass media’s own discursive problematic: the necessity of creating and maintaining a constant sense of newness. The function of mass media communication, according to Niklas Luhmann, is to simultaneously ‘generate and process irritation’. Invested in the production, circulation, and consumption of irritation, mass media communication stimulates ‘the constantly renewed willingness to be prepared for surprises’. The trope of the next pandemic, in this sense, is a fertile ground for the mass media and its discursive problematic.

No surprise that a reference to the great Niklas Luhmann kicks off the analysis.

In the long run, we're all recovered

National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper abstract --

Andrew Atkeson. No. 26867 This note is intended to introduce economists to a simple SIR model of the progression of COVID-19 in the United States over the next 12-18 months. An SIR model is a Markov model of the spread of an epidemic in a population in which the total population is divided into categories of being susceptible to the disease (S), actively infected with the disease (I), and recovered (or dead) and no longer contagious (R).

The Gambler at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Donald Trump's ostensible bid to have the country reopen by Easter makes perfect sense. If you're familiar with what bankruptcy does to incentives.

A bankrupt firm has an incentive to take the riskiest gamble possible.

It already owes people more than it can pay. That's what being bankrupt means.

So if the gamble goes badly, it owes even more than it can pay. Nothing changes.

But if it wins, and wins big, it gets to pay all those pesky creditors off -- preferably when they've already agreed to take less -- and the firm is suddenly liquid again and keeps all the excess.

It's why countries generally try not have bankrupt firms hang around too long. The payoffs, as Nassim Taleb might say, are yuuugely convex, and that's often not a good thing.

Especially when we the people are the roulette wheel. 

The Apothecary at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

ROMEO

[]
Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night.
Let's see for means: O mischief, thou art swift
To enter in the thoughts of desperate men!
I do remember an apothecary,--
And hereabouts he dwells,--which late I noted
In tatter'd weeds, with overwhelming brows,
Culling of simples; meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones:
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuff'd, and other skins
Of ill-shaped fishes; and about his shelves
A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread and old cakes of roses,
Were thinly scatter'd, to make up a show.
Noting this penury, to myself I said
'An if a man did need a poison now,
Whose sale is present death in Mantua,
Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him.'
O, this same thought did but forerun my need;
And this same needy man must sell it me.
As I remember, this should be the house.
Being holiday, the beggar's shop is shut.
What, ho! apothecary!
Enter Apothecary

Apothecary

Who calls so loud?

ROMEO

Come hither, man. I see that thou art poor:
Hold, there is forty ducats: let me have
A dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear
As will disperse itself through all the veins
That the life-weary taker may fall dead
And that the trunk may be discharged of breath
As violently as hasty powder fired
Doth hurry from the fatal cannon's womb.

Apothecary

Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua's law
Is death to any he that utters them.

ROMEO

Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness,
And fear'st to die? famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes,
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back;
The world is not thy friend nor the world's law;
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.

Apothecary

My poverty, but not my will, consents.

ROMEO

I pay thy poverty, and not thy will.

Apothecary

Put this in any liquid thing you will,
And drink it off; and, if you had the strength
Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight.

Image: Emmet Walsh in the 1996 Romeo and Juliet. And here's Trump's remarkable medicinal tweet. 

Coronavirus is the Bourgeois Plague (2)

Der Spiegel (along with lots of other publications) -- But it was a visit to the après-ski bar Kitzloch not far from the valley station in Ischgl that proved fateful for many partygoers. A bartender there is thought to have been infected with coronavirus and responsible for passing the disease on to numerous tourists, particularly from Scandinavia and Germany.

[previously in this series]