& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-20 Mo: Failing to ask the Rubin Question: Noah Bierman: "Kamala Harris Says Administration Did Not Anticipate Omicron..." The Rubin question is "what will be wish one, two, five, 10 years from now that we had done here today?” Asked at the end of a meeting, either it leads to great confidence and reassurance that the bases are covered, or it completely up-ends the meeting and sends people frantically scrambling off to think and plan how to handle scenarios. It appalls me that I did not learn to do this until I was 33. It is even more appalling that the Biden administration did not focus in December 2020 on the fact that this thing mutates, and that our failure to vaccinate the world as fast as possible was about to give it much more running room and ample test grounds within which to explore its genetic space. As Jim Stock first said to me back in February 2020: if we do not, after the fact, look back and say “we took vastly excessive steps to deal with the threat of the virus”, we will not have done enough...
Instead of the Rubin question we have the Condoleezza Rice mantra.