Ninjas and Biden
"There must be some way out of here” said the joker to the thief
You might think somewhere there must be a quiet calm centre like in a James Bond movie where you open the door and there is where the ninjas are who actually know what they are doing. There are no ninjas. There is no door.
When watching the news and observing politics, it’s natural to assume that, despite appearances of chaos, grownups must be in charge somewhere. My prior belief has always been that this is the case, but sometimes lately I’ve been starting to wonder.
At the start of the pandemic, when I first started plotting cases on log scales and estimating their rate of growth, I was baffled that the people in charge weren’t seeing what I was seeing. When on the 16th March 2020, it was reported that:
Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the UK is approaching the "fast growth part of the upward curve" in the coronavirus outbreak.
He says without "drastic action", cases could double every five to six days.
I couldn’t understand it because, as I tweeted immediately, cases were already doubling more like every three days. However I assumed that there must be people with live access to better data than I had, and so I shouldn’t be worrying so much. But on the 20th March, the SAGE consensus statement shifted to talk about 3-5 day growth and lockdown soon followed.
Back in September 2021, when people first started spotting weird patterns in COVID data from the South West, I suggested
If there was a serious problem with a lab or with local testing, it would look a lot like this, I guess? (Not the only explanation, of course)
... only to dismiss it in my mind. It couldn’t be that a lab was systematically producing crazy results, because that would show up in all kinds of quality control measures. There must be another explanation, or the adults in charge would have already spotted it and dealt with it. And yet there was a problem, and the lab wasn’t suspended for several weeks, with serious consequences.
In the same way, I’d heard rumours about Joe Biden’s state of health. On Twitter it was hard to avoid them. To be honest, I was pretty dismissive. There were video clips doing the rounds, but it seemed like a lot of them were edited out of context. People on the Trump end of things weren’t exactly known for their honesty in these matters or others, there was all sorts of motivated reasoning going on.
More to the point, there were grownups in charge. Given the tightness of the race and the serious consequences of a Trump victory, there was no way that the Democrats would let their candidate run for office and do live debates and so on if he wasn’t up to it. These guys were working with Biden every day, they knew what he was like. We’d all seen The West Wing Season 7, there was clearly some pre-debate expectation management going on.
And yet.
When even the Guardian and the New York Times are describing it as a fiasco and calling for Biden to step down, it’s clear that something has gone badly wrong.
I certainly don’t believe that Biden is Like That all the time. But the problem is, he doesn’t need to be. In the job he’s in, we can’t afford to have someone not on top of their game at all times. What if Hezbollah decide to try to overwhelm the Iron Dome with the 120,000-200,000 rockets they are reported to have stockpiled in Lebanon? What if the arrival of F-16s in Ukraine mean that Putin starts losing ground and decides to set off a nuke? What if there’s enough co-ordination between hostile powers that these two things happen on the same day? Are we meant to just hope that it’s on a day when the US President is at his best? Are we sure that these other governments can’t figure out the pattern and work out when these days might be?
Worse, there’s no easy solution at this stage. There’s not an obvious successor for the party to unite around, it’s not necessarily clear that the vice president is any more electable than Biden, and any move to the left or centre risks fragmenting the coalition that Biden had assembled in 2020, and largely held onto when gaining Senate seats in 2022.
I’m not going to run down a list of possible contenders, because it’s well outside my knowledge. If you’re interested in that stuff, you’d be better reading Nate Silver’s Substack piece about how we got here than listen to me bluff about Governors I’ve never heard of.
I want to make a more general point though. Actually the position is much worse than the “no ninjas” COVID scenarios I described above. Those were situations where hard-working people battling under huge pressure missed clues despite their best efforts. But what if instead of there being no ninjas, there is a room full of ninjas but they are not on our side?
As I say, there are lots of people who must have known about Biden’s true state of health. At some level, there must have been some co-ordination to deal with this issue. It’s hard not to start using words like “conspiracy” and “coverup” when you think about it. And of course, the Republicans will exploit this.
Already, failed Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has used this to promote his “deep state” theories:
Ask yourself whether it’s possible that those same outlets which lied to you about the mental fitness of the sitting president might have lied to you about anything else.
I don’t believe for a second there is a conspiracy between scientists and politicians to distort the evidence for climate change for example, as Ramaswamy suggests. But this whole situation certainly doesn’t make it easier to make that case.
And while Democrats may be meeting to discuss how to smoothly switch candidates, they’d do well to remember that they don’t have an automatic right to the electorate’s permission to do that. As a British person, I’d advise them that in a situation when voters are angry at coverups, established political parties don’t have a divine right to change leaders and avoid electoral oblivion. It’s a real mess for them, and I’m not sure they’ve figured out how much trouble they are in yet.
All I can do is shake my head about the situation we’re in. It’s important to remember that sometimes your gut feeling is right and that maybe Cummings was right about the lack of ninjas, or worse. And it feels like there’s real value for an organisation to have people within it who don’t go the easy route and let things slip by, but rather ask the awkward questions internally and have a way for their concerns to be listened to.
Update on a few recent pieces
I’ve been enjoying the football, and I think what I wrote about it is holding up fine. England could still win the tournament, but given some unconvincing performances that’s more to do with a favourable draw than anything else. Overall the Betfair odds have flattened out a bit, with no standout favourites, fitting with my feeling that games are evenly matched. So far my tips of Portugal and Netherlands are still in the tournament, but things will be clearer in a week.
There’s still no reply about clinical trials for triple anticoagulant therapy for Long COVID as far as I can see, but the Guardian at least published a good followup letter from actual experts.
I wrote before about a lack of scrutiny of Labour’s energy policy ahead of their imminent landslide victory. It still feels like that’s the case. I had another crack at some calculations about likely battery storage capacity, and I still can’t understand how Labour think they can decarbonise the power grid by 2030. To be specific, I don’t see how they can crack the intermittency problem of renewables to get gas usage down to 1% or so on that timescale. Maybe they do have a room full of ninjas, as well as their genie. Otherwise again I don’t get it. I guess we’ll see.
Trump bullshits to everyone, but the Democrats have done something worse. They have lied to themselves. Worse their supporters suffer from preference falsification, so that even when they know there is a problem they don't want to be seen supporting a 'right wing' talking point. It is utterly reckless behaviour, particularly if you take the more hyperbolic claim that democracy itself is at stake at face value. If that's true, then you don't head into late 2023 onwards with an unpopular Vice-President, chosen for the wrong reasons, and a candidate who is obviously struggling. You have honest conversations, and fix the problem. A historic failure of succession planning, which aside from the concerns you have mentioned about capability if elected, means that other Western Democracies standing up against authoritarian despots in near conflict, or actual war, may be left unsupported by the US.
I know it's clichéd, but it's a systems and responsibility problem that we see writ large across western institutions. Nobody is ever to blame. We have
feedback loops run by lawyers which essentially create even more layers of responsibility diffusion. More credentialism and agents with less and less personal accountability.