Passport to My Own Island

As the global pandemic has dragged on, momentum to introduce vaccine passports has picked up. I'm horrified. Proof of vaccination for international travel has been common for many years. But I am particularly distressed by the cavalier manner in which passport schemes have been rolled out in domestic settings. I have yet to see a thoughtful, and convincing case in support domestic passports, particularly as SARS-CoV-2 has evolved to where asymptomatic spread among the vaccinated is now commonly acknowledged and emerging research on "natural immunity" is changing how we think about the dichotomy of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated.

Me in Intellectual and Political
 No-Man's Land

Advocates have yet to think clearly about the implications of these schemes. Instead, they have become wedge issues for politicians, demarcating lines of virtue rather than those between safe and unsafe, infected and uninfected.  Passport schemes are fraught with civil liberties issues and run the risk of repeating past mistakes in which the diseased, the different, or undesirable were cast to the margins of our society. A shockingly large number of people seem perfectly fine with this.

Yet, I don't see a public health case for these things. Until I do, it's hard for me to see them as anything other than the forms of coercion and exclusion I feared back in the spring of 2020. If we are going to enter a period of coercion and health segregation, let's call it that. Let's just stop the charade and make vaccination mandatory. Then we avoid starting down a path toward mobile health monitoring that will inevitably metastasize into additional intrusions that facilitate the expansion of state power more than they address the public health issues ostensibly at their core. 

Been Away for a While

Whoa!!! It's been a long time since I've posted anything here. This past summer, the so-called Brood X cicadas emerged from 17 years underground and menaced the East Coast of North America with the force of their numbers and collective sound. 

Locked Down for More than 18 Months

I haven't been away from this space quite that long, but it sure feels like it. There are lots of reasons for that, most of which I can blame on Twitter. It's not as if I've had nothing to say. It's just that I've always wanted this space to be about things that would stand up well over time. Indeed, part of the reason I started this blog in the first place was to flesh out some think
ing in a space that wasn't limited to a short newspaper op-ed (readership there is declining there anyway), but was less formalized than academic publishing (with a different set of narrow readership problems). 

Fear and Loathing,.. But Mostly Fear

Fear? Who, Me?

I began talking about the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic with my students this past January as news of what was unfolding in Wuhan, China emerged in newspapers. I noted the many table-top exercises I had read about in which very knowledgable people in those simulations made poor decisions or confronted major gaps in preparedness. I also noted the macabre decisions that were made, for example, in aftermath of an attack from a bioweapon, and how ill-prepared our health systems were for the 2003 SARS-CoV-1 event which killed less than a thousand people around the world.

However, I also told students that one of the things I personally worried most about in the context of pandemic or bioweapon responses was them; not their personal health and safety, but their collective responses to what was going on.

I shouldn't be surprised at the level of fear this has all generated, but I am.

The Return of Big Brother

There's An App for That

The past week of coronavirus news has more than once left me staring, mouth-open at the television or re-reading something in news multiple times just to make sure I read it correctly. It's not the mounting casualty numbers. It's not Trump's daily efforts to one-up the previous day's buffoonery.

A Message from The Ministry of Truth:
Stay Home and Get the App

Instead it's the speed with which technology is being heralded as the solution to all of our SARS-CoV-2 problems. It seems there will an app for this too!!! There's just one catch... that app may soon be sharing information directly with authorities.

We've known for a long time that our phones have been "spying" on us. Indeed, our phones are doing things most of us would rather not know about. As we live more and more of our personal and professional lives through our smart phones, we've become complacent about the data we willingly share. Sure, there are these ubiquitous "terms of use" certificates we instinctively click without reading. If we actually read them, the proper reaction ought to be to throw the phone in the river. But, since a lot of the data being mined about our habits is designed to sell us more stuff we don't need, we just roll with it.

David, Goliath and SARS-CoV-2

The fight to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2 around the globe has been an evolving struggle, too frequently pitting governments against each other as they fight to secure resources or impose measures to limit the spread.

Not Quite as it Appears

This is not so say there's no coordination or information sharing going; indeed, the WHO is collecting and disseminating lots of data, central bankers have been communicating with each other about interventions in their respective domestic economies, and ideas for fiscal stimulus are being mimicked by numerous national legislatures. Yet, disappointingly, there have also been too many instances of  "every-man-for-himself" in the response to what is an inherently transnational phenomenon.

More broadly, the instances of "coordination" or "every-man-for-himself" are revealing of aspects of the asymmetrical distribution of power in the international system and, for the purposes of this post, Canada-U.S. relations in particular.

SARS-CoV-2 Isolation Diaries

Like just about everyone else on the planet, I've been at home with my thoughts a lot lately. I've had a lot of them. The problem is that so has everyone else. Indeed, there's been an outbreak of written opinion nearly as large as the outbreak of the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, itself. And, also similar to the SARS-CoV-2, I don't care for a lot of it. 

Dusting Off the Old Plans?

This blog post is going to be mostly a litany of complaints, things that have more than once caused me to get my dander up as I've watched them unfold. I'll refrain from straying into domains properly dominated by my natural science colleagues. However, my most basic observation of what's transpired reaffirms the need for the natural and social sciences to at least get together for coffee now and then.

The litany that follows here eventually leads me to a more serious set of points I think I have something to say about as we contemplate life during and after this pandemic. 

Black Swans and Presidential Campaigns

Whoa! Where do I begin? The coronavirus has upended everything. Just a month ago, I predicted Donald Trump would ride a booming U.S. economy to reelection. I suppose that is something of a caveat that I can now take to argue for exactly the opposite.

Dealing with an Imperial Colossus

I think Donald Trump is going to be re-elected in November. It was a conclusion I reached as I sat on my couch last Monday night, fruitlessly waiting for returns from the Iowa Democratic Caucuses. As I write this more than a week later, we still don't know what the final tally was. The stakes were enormous, and Iowa Democrats managed to screw it up, handing Trump, and all those who suck up to him, a series of talking points to challenge the validity of the entire electoral process-- anyone remember "system is rigged against us"? Expect to hear that a lot this fall.

Iowa was an epic, inexcusable debacle.

The Incumbency Economy

As many others have noted, Iowa was not the only political victory for Donald Trump. The U.S. economy added 225,000 jobs in January. The country's unemployment rate is at a ridiculously low 3.6%. Moreover, Trump's abject ignorance around policy-making, including ill-advised unilateralism on trade, are not having the catastrophic impact on economic growth many predicted. Trump understandably took at victory lap on the economy in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.

Dispute Settlement and the USMCA

Some of you are undoubtedly basking in warm fuzzy feelings from holiday time spent with friends and family. Others of you are probably just glad to be home, happy to have survived a week or two with family, perhaps wishing you'd had better dispute resolution tools at your disposal.

via GIPHY

USMCA: Curb Your Enthusiasm

The drumbeat of bizarre political juxtapositions just keeps rolling over us. Yesterday was no exception. First, the House Democrats released its two Article of Impeachment against President Trump focused on "abuse of power" and "obstruction of Congress." An hour later, many of those same Democrats were before the podium announcing they had worked out a deal with the White House to move forward on one of President Trump's signature trade initiatives, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, or to some, NAFTA2.0).

I suppose the fact that many of us remain flabbergasted (alarmed?) by the daily barrage of these juxtapositions could be read as a source of comfort, cold comfort? Although the impeachment saga routinely sucks most of the oxygen out of the headlines, the USMCA briefly held center-stage. I was struck the generally positive headlines about the bargain struck between House Democrats and the White House were. A rare instance of cooperation between Trump and House Democrats? A sign of some sort of return to a bipartisan consensus on the merits of trade? A template for 21st Century trade agreements?

Hardly. The best I can muster about the USMCA is that it could have been worse.

Authoritarianism

Madison, Hamilton, and Good Sleep

Another semester of teaching around here is winding down and yesterday afternoon was the last seminar. My department happens to have a number of senior seminars that are "variable topics" courses; the precise content may differ semester to semester depending on the instructor.  The course was Political Science 484, Topics in U.S. Politics and Policy. I've taught this particular section in the past, but decided last winter that I would try something different.