If you’re not familiar with it, In These Times is a venerable explicitly leftwing publication. I recommend you read Wesley Lowery’s profile of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson there. It has a number of significant insights including some differences between Mr. Johnson and other members of the left. Here’s his conclusion:

“It will be fair to judge my administration around what our investments look like,” the mayor-elect tells me a couple weeks before his May 15 inauguration. ​“It will be fair to assess my administration around how those investments have impacted the neighborhoods more harmed by disinvestment. When my term is over, how did we manage our resources? I’m confident …”

That explains as well as anything why I’m not leftwing. I judge results based on outputs more than I do inputs. Although I’m willing to give him a try, I don’t think the first month of Mayor Johnson’s term has been particularly propitious. My judgment would be predicated on

• Rate of violent crime.
• Number of people and businesses leaving Chicago.

to name just a couple of things. I don’t much care how good his intentions are or how hard he tries.

At Project Syndicate Richard Haass compares and contrasts Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine:

Last time around, the world rallied against aggression. Not now. For one reason or another, many countries are reluctant to oppose Russia. India buys its arms and oil, as do others.

Moreover, America’s ability to rally the world is much diminished, in no small part because respect for the US is much diminished, the result of its internal divisions and widespread global opposition to the US interventions in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011.

President Joe Biden’s administration didn’t help itself by insisting on framing the war as one of democracy versus authoritarianism. Much of the world is hardly democratic and may have responded more favorably had the US emphasized the threat to a country’s freedom from invasion, which most of the world’s governments do support.

What, then, is to be made of these differences? Geopolitics and great-power rivalry, common throughout history, are back, as is armed conflict between countries. The post-Cold War respite, the holiday from history, is over.

I’m really not the right person to remark on that since I opposed all three of those interventions (Kuwait, Iraq, Libya). It’s not that I had any particular fondness for Saddam Hussein—far from it. My preferences in descending order were a) a consortium of Middle Eastern countries should have removed Saddam from Kuwait; b) a UN force headed by France and Britain should have ousted Saddam; c) we should just let Saddam have Kuwait. BTW any claim that Muslim states are reluctant to fight one another is bushwah. Turkey has been at war with practically every Muslim state at one point or another.

And there’s a direct chain of causation between our involvement in the Gulf War and our invasion of Iraq. Don’t ask me to explain our activity in removing Qaddaffi from Libya—I can’t. I guess we did it because we could. But here’s my point: support our involvement in the Gulf War and you support our invasion of Iraq. The two cannot be separated. And for some reason he doesn’t include Afghanistan. Our lengthy sojourn there followed by a hasty withdrawal probably did as much to discredit us as Iraq and Libya.

I think that Mr. Haass’s explanation for the difference between the two cases ignores an important fact. In 1990 the U. S. share of world GDP (PPP) was 26%. Now it’s 16%. We’re just not as important as we used to be. As I’ve said before U. S. standing in the world is downstream from our economy.

William Galston uses his Wall Street Journal column to throw shade on the objectives that Ukrainian President Zelensky has stated as his objectives:

As Ukraine begins its long-awaited counteroffensive, the issue of what comes next has moved to the center of discussions within the coalition. Officially, the allies are committed to aiding Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” The underlying question: As long as it takes to do what? For President Volodymyr Zelensky, the answer is clear: As long as it takes to clear Russian troops from internationally recognized Ukrainian territory. For the alliance, I suspect, the answer is different: As long as it takes for Ukrainian troops to regain as much territory as possible, with the outcome of the current counteroffensive defining a possible perimeter.

Put simply, I believe that 2023 will be the decisive year for the war—and that by the end of the year, support for a cease-fire as a prelude to negotiations will become too strong to resist, even if some Eastern European allies doubt the wisdom of this course. I find it hard to believe that the coalition is prepared to maintain its current level of effort for a trench-warfare conflict lasting as long as World War I.

This hard reality will be a bitter pill for most Ukrainians, who are committed, understandably, to liberating every square mile of their territory. Mr. Zelensky has encouraged his people to believe that this goal isn’t only right but also possible. He can’t persuade them to accept less, unless his country receives binding interim security guarantees along a credible path to accelerated membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

I have no idea how anyone can arrive at a reasonable assessment of what is going on in the war in Ukraine. If you read one set of sources, the Ukrainian counter-offensive now under way is succeeding famously; another set of sources declaims that the counter-offensive is already over, accomplishing little.

The editors of the Washington Post believe that the plea deal signed onto by Hunter Biden was justified:

That Hunter Biden will not spend time behind bars if the deal goes through is by no means exoneration. He’s pleading guilty to misdemeanors instead of facing a smorgasbord of charges that might or might not have stuck in a court of law. His laptop that became public in 2020 showcased questionable behavior, including dealings with a Chinese energy company. What’s more, Mr. Weiss said the investigation “is ongoing,” which indicates that issues beyond the tax and gun crimes are still under scrutiny.

The outcome appears similar to what other defendants might have gotten for similar violations of the law. Prosecutors will recommend two years of probation in exchange for Hunter Biden pleading guilty to two misdemeanors related to failure to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018. He previously paid the IRS about $1.2 million to cover what he owed for unreported payments and gifts, a move to lessen his legal exposure.

Instead of pleading guilty to a gun charge, he will not contest the government’s allegations that he illegally owned a handgun in 2018 because he was simultaneously using illegal drugs. In exchange, he has agreed to enter a pretrial diversion program for substance abuse and remain clean for two years. Such diversion is routinely offered to nonviolent offenders with substance abuse struggles.

while the editors of the Wall Street Journal remain unconvinced:

One question is why Hunter faced only “willful” misdemeanor tax charges rather than felony count of “tax evasion”—given April news reports that Mr. Weiss’s office felt it had enough evidence for the latter. It’s true DOJ has rarely pursued “lie and buy” gun cases—a longtime complaint of progressive gun-control groups. But DOJ has elevated its focus in recent years, and other attorneys have bragged about their aggressive pursuit of such cases.

There’s also the testimony by Internal Revenue Service agent Gary Shapley, a 14-year-veteran who oversees a team specializing in international tax crimes. The whistleblower says his team was assigned to the Hunter case in early 2020, and he “immediately saw deviations from the normal process.”

He says “multiple steps” were “just completely not done” and that “each and every time” decisions “seemed to always benefit the subject.” Mr. Shapley says when he pushed back, his team was excluded—and later removed—

I’m satisfied with the deal on the tax evasion and gun charges. The open question is whether this plea deal closes the matter or not. As the WSJ editors note:

DOJ said in a press release Tuesday that the “investigation is ongoing.” But Hunter’s attorney said “it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.” Which is it? Mr. Weiss ought to clarify matters and cooperate with Congress to put any suspicion of favorable treatment to rest.

The issues which are not included in this plea deal are actually the more serious. They include bribery, money laundering, and being an unregistered foreign agent. If investigations of those additional matters are still ongoing, well and good. If this plea deal concludes the matter, it stinks.

It’s good to be reminded every so often that there are only two known ways of allocating scarce goods:

1. A market system
2. A command system

Any enthusiasm for market systems is not because they’re so great but because command systems are so bad. As my Econ 101 prof said all those years ago, “We don’t know how to promote prosperity but we do know how to create shortages”. Every command system always runs into something called “the knowledge problem”. The central planners simply don’t know enough. Command systems always have deadweight loss, a reduction in total production due to overproduction of some goods and underproduction of others.

John Cochrane has a lengthy diatribe on two articles blaming, of all things, our pandemic response and slowness in adopting new technologies as market failures. Here’s the strongest part of his critique:

More deeply, even I, devoted free-marketer; even at the late night beer sessions at the CATO institute, nobody puts mask distribution in a pandemic as the first job of free markets. There is supposed to be a public health function of government; infectuous diseases are something of an externality; safety protocols in government labs doing government funded research are not a free-market function. As we look at the covid catastrophe, do we not see failures of government all over the place, not failures of some hypothetical free market? California even had mobile hospitals after H1N1. Governor Brown shut them down to save money for his high speed train. We might as well blame free markets for the lines at the DMV.

Our response to the pandemic had high points and low ones. I think the CDC’s bellyflop on a test for COVID-19 early on was a low point; Operation Warp Speed was a high point. I think we could use a high level commission to review the federal government’s response. My understanding is that partisanship has prevented the proposed commission from getting started. That itself speaks volumes.

Here’s an issue I’ve called out several times. At Federal Times Jordan Cohen calls attention to an Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General report that has found, well, that no one is minding the store:

On June 12, 2023, the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General released a report evaluating the quality of the accountability controls for U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine through Poland.

The report’s findings suggest the lack of accountability is even worse than skeptics imagined.

Instead of losing the ability to monitor weapons once they arrive in Ukraine, as many assume, the accountability problems begin before they leave the United States. The lack of accountability can lead not only to weapons dispersion to criminal organizations but also reduces the ability for DoD to track the financial value of weapons sent – all of which potentially risks the security and prosperity of Americans.

The OIG report finds that the lack of accountability occurs for two reasons. First, the agencies responsible for transferring equipment were working at such a high speed they did not provide required information to the recipients in Poland, who are then supposed to send them in transit to Ukraine.

Second, the DoD personnel whose responsibility it was to ensure that transfers meet the accountability thresholds were given no “guidance to training” even when they “lacked logistics subject matter expertise.” As a result, DoD has incomplete documents and an inability to accurately count the number of small arms and light weapons that are being sent to Poland, making accounting for them upon their arrival impossible.

The speed argument is reasonable to some degree. The “nobody showed us how” argument to my eye reflects an astonishing lack of preparedness.

We should able to identify by serial number, type, and description every weapon we’ve sent to Ukraine. Why can’t we?

We have been sending Ukraine weapons since February 2022. That’s nearly a year and a half. By this point we should have some idea of what’s going on.

Failing to keep track comes with risks. They include no ability to determine whether the weapons arrived where they were supposed to, no ability to determine where they did arrive, and even the possibility of those weapons being used against us.

I wanted to pass along this post by George Friedman that deals with some of his fifteen year old predictions. IMO he’s right about them but almost entirely for the wrong reasons. The first prediction he discusses was that there would be no repeat of 9/11. The second is about the Chinese economy. Here’s his discussion:

China had started growing rapidly, and how long it would grow depended on the global economy and internal stability. I couldn’t predict this. However, given the early excitement about China’s growth, I felt it worthwhile to point out that China, as an exporting country, could not grow fast enough or long enough to match the United States.

The method I used to reach this conclusion was to model the emergence and decline of other export-dependent economies under pressure to grow.

The first was the United States, which, after the Civil War, found its economy shattered and domestic demand limited. Existing manufacturers shifted to exporting around 1890. By 1910, the U.S. was producing and exporting about 50 percent of the world’s industrial goods. World War I shattered Europe’s economies, crippled U.S. exports and led to the Great Depression around 1929-30, 40 years after the U.S. had begun to grow.

Something similar happened to Japan. Shattered by the end of World War II, it turned to the export market, particularly the U.S., with great success in the 1950s. By the late 1970s, the U.S. started an economic downturn that eventually slashed Japanese exports and, by the 1980s, created what was called the Lost Decade. By 1990, Japanese banks were reeling and its economic miracle was over. This occurred 40 years after the start of the Japanese exporting miracle.

China was another example of an export-dependent economy, hostage to the ability and willingness of other countries to import. I avoided assuming it would follow the 40-year cycle, as I had only two prior examples, did not understand the time cycle and wrote it off as coincidence. Now with a third example, I still don’t understand it but can’t deny it. China’s economic rise began in the 1980s, and now 40 years later in the 2020s, it is facing a similar economic slowdown to Japan.

After the Great Depression and World War II, the United States went on to great economic success, as did Japan following its economic failure. The failure of the Chinese economic model means a great deal of pain but in no way ends Chinese history. This of course depends on how the Chinese public responds to economic malfunction. That is a forecast to come.

WRT Al Qaeda, it is my opinion that any religion with the following characteristics will have a recurring problem with religiously inspired violence:

• Universal
• Sola scriptura
• Its holy book can be interpreted as sanctioning violence against non-believers
• Lack of a magisterium

I have run that past experts on Islam and its history. They tend to agree with me.

In short we may not be attacked by Al Qaeda again but we will be attacked by violent radical Muslims again.

WRT to the Chinese economy although I find his point about a 40 year cycle interesting I think his interpretation of China’s growth is flawed. He’s greatly overestimating the role of exports in China’s economy. Much of China’s growth is due to urbanization. I suspect that’s run its course. Check the real estate market.

At RealClearDefense Robert Umholtz sees two possible outcomes for the war in Ukraine:

If the war continues, there are two likely outcomes. One is the Russian body count of lost soldiers will continue to climb, the mobilization will resume, and the people will react by forcing an end of the war through protest or regime change as they did during World War I. The other possible outcome, and certainly even worse than the first, is that Ukraine begins to take Crimea back and Putin feels the only way to avoid defeat is a scorched earth policy. In this case, he is likely to use a tactical nuclear weapon, thus preventing Ukrainian victory and destroying Crimea in the process. Diplomacy has not worked yet in this conflict. I hope I am wrong and there is a third option. I recommend we all pray that the third option materializes, but if history is to be a guide the outcome is likely listed above.

That follows a lengthy exposition of the history between the two countries. He draws the correct conclusion from that history: the Russians and the Ukrainians are actually quite similar which does not bode particularly well. As he notes: “nobody out-sucks the Russians”.

However, I do have some quibbles with his exposition. For example, he characterizes Russia’s taking Crimea as “symbolic”:

Russia achieved a symbolic victory when it invaded and captured Crimea with little resistance from the international community, but Ukraine is likely to continue fighting at this point until Crimea is back under Ukrainian control. The history discussed above proves each nation is willing to suffer unimaginable loss before relinquishing the land they believe is rightfully theirs.

He’s wrong about that for several reasons including the peninsula’s substantial Russian population and its strategic importance.

I also think he leaves out an important third option: Ukraine loses enough people that it can’t continue with organized resistance.

I’ve meant to post on this subject for some time. I first saw it in the Times of London. Then in a variety of blog posts from various sources. Now it’s beginmning to leach into major U. S. media outlets. The evidence that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak is actually growing. At the New York Post Marty Makary presents ten reasons to believe that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak.

The one big reason to believe it wasn’t remains that most viruses have been found to have been zoonotic—to have started in another species before spreading to humans.

That isn’t actually what this post is about, however. I have two questions:

1. Is its source important?
2. What should be done if it did turn out to have been the result of a lab leak?

I think it’s important and have already presented my opinion of what should be done.