Retired Maj. Gen. Arnold L. Punaro has a rather mournful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. We apparently learned nothing from our experience in Vietnam:

Defense Department leaders have assured Congress and the American people that the military would study the war in Afghanistan to learn lessons from America’s 20-year involvement and painful exit. This will be an important exercise, but not a new one.

Many lessons from Afghanistan mirror ones from Vietnam. This time, we owe it to our fighting sons and daughters not merely to identify the lessons of failure but also to integrate them into our military so they aren’t repeated.

From the start, the U.S. engagements in Vietnam and Afghanistan suffered from a lack of clarity and coherent strategy. Despite the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the U.S. remained in Afghanistan, and leaders continued to misunderstand the differences between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies. We should have known better. In Vietnam we similarly lacked knowledge of the broader social, political and economic dynamics underpinning the situation and broader region.

We also “Americanized” the war in Afghanistan despite the failure of the same strategy in the Vietnam War. We defaulted to teaching our allies to fight like U.S. soldiers, with U.S. weapons and technologies and American-style training. We failed to teach our partners in either case self-sustaining logistics and maintenance skills, thereby setting them up for failure.

In Afghanistan we witnessed a stream of inaccurate accounts and unreliable analyses of the situation on the ground, much as we had in Vietnam. In both cases, the failure to address reality laid the groundwork for failed nations and botched evacuations.

I feel confident in predicting that the Powers That Be will not take Maj. Gen. Punaro’s advice to heart. The only way to win is not to play.

Scott Alexander asks a rather pointed question: when will the FDA approve Paxlovid?

Metaculus predicts January 1 as the median date for the FDA approving Paxlovid. They estimate a 92% chance it will get approved by March.

For context: a recent study by Pfizer, the pharma company backing the drug, found Paxlovid decreased hospitalizations and deaths from COVID by a factor of ten, with no detectable side effects. It was so good that Pfizer, “in consultation with” the FDA, stopped the trial early because it would be unethical to continue denying Paxlovid to the control group. And on November 16, Pfizer officially submitted an approval request to the FDA, which the FDA is still considering.

As many people including Zvi, Alex, and Kelsey have noted, it’s pretty weird that the FDA agrees Paxlovid is so great that it’s unethical to study it further because it would be unconscionable to design a study with a no-Paxlovid control group – but also, the FDA has not approved Paxlovid, it remains illegal, and nobody is allowed to use it.

One would hope this is because the FDA plans to approve Paxlovid immediately. But the prediction market expects it to take six weeks – during which time we expect about 50,000 more Americans to die of COVID.

Perhaps there’s not enough evidence for the FDA to be sure Paxlovid works yet? But then why did they agree to stop the trial that was gathering the evidence? Or perhaps there’s enough evidence, but it takes a long time to process it? But then how come the prediction markets are already 90% sure what decision they’ll make?

I think there’s an obvious answer to the first question: it’s Parkinson’s Law at work. To refresh your memory back in 1955 naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson earned his place in public administration and management history when he published his famous law: in a bureaucracy work expands to fill the time allotted to it. The FDA is a bureaucracy. QED.

Let’s have a little lesson in microeconomics, shall we? The graph above is an illustration of the basic supply and demand curves shown in every Econ 101 text. These graphs illustrate that as the price of something increases people tend to buy less of it, suppliers make more of it, and there’s an “equilibrium price” where the lines cross, i.e. supply and demand are equal. Simple enough.

This graph has a little difference. It adds an additional demand curve to illustrate the effect of an increase in demand on prices, supply, and the equilibrium price. As you probably have already predicted, with a demand shift that increases demand the supply and equilibrium price both increase.

There’s one more little difference. The blue vertical bar indicates a fixed supply. As you could probably guess when supply is fixed and there is a shift that increases demand, it will increase the equilibrium price.

One last little observation. What happens if the increase in the equilibrium price in response to a demand shift and a fixed supply itself results in another demand shift that increases demand? Then you have a positive feedback loop which will continue stopped by some exogenous factor.

Ashley Luthern, Molly Beck, Elliot Hughes, and Daniel Bice report on the Waukesha Christmas parade incident in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The driver who plowed through a Christmas parade in downtown Waukesha, killing five people and injuring nearly 50, did so intentionally and is expected to face first-degree homicide counts and other charges, police said Monday.

The suspect, Darrell Brooks Jr., 39, recently had been released from custody in a strikingly similar case, in which he was accused of driving over a woman during a domestic dispute, sending her to the hospital and leaving tire marks on her pant leg.

The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting that case, said Monday it was launching an internal review of a prosecutor’s “inappropriately low” $1,000 bail recommendation. The bail amount was signed off on by a court commissioner.

and the editors of the Wall Street Journal remark:

Mr. Brooks has a long rap sheet, and the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office said Monday he had been out on a $1,000 bond after he allegedly tried to hit the mother of his child with his vehicle. He was arrested the same day and charged with obstructing an officer, endangering public safety, disorderly conduct, jumping bail and battery. Why was someone with that violent history released on such a minor bond?

The D.A.’s office said it is conducting an internal review of the bail decision, which sounds like ex post self-protection. “The state’s bail recommendation in this case was inappropriately low in light of the nature of the recent charges and pending charges against Mr. Brooks,” said the D.A.’s office in a statement. The Milwaukee County D.A is John Chisholm, a Democrat who readers may recall for his office’s unjustified pursuit of donors to former Gov. Scott Walker’s campaigns.

Bail reform has been a leading cause of the progressive left in recent years, and Democratic prosecutors have often gone along. New York State has passed bail reform that has had the effect of letting many felons back on the street to commit more crimes. The influence of the progressive bail campaign on Mr. Chisholm’s office should be part of the probe.

I find it hard to believe that Mr. Chisholm will not face a recall. He’s run unopposed in the last several general elections.

Sadly, human behavior just does not comport with Mr. Chisholm’s view of bail and criminal sentencing which to all appearances values the rights of the Brookses over those of the overwhelming preponderance of the people who don’t have such histories. I find it inexplicable. Can a history like Mr. Brooks’s, with more than 20 years worth of multiple instances of violent behavior, escalating in their seriousness, be reasonably characterized as anything but feral? And even more sadly as the population increases while the extralegal controls over behavior erode, such feral behavior is not rare and will become increasingly common.

Dealing with such creatures is a major challenge for our system of criminal justice. Such people are simply too dangerous to wander freely among us.

I have a question, impelled by the expansion of Medicare that is part of the “Build Back Better”. What would the economic effects of an expansion of Medicare be?

I suspect that the presumably unintended effect will be to increase the cost of healthcare and not appreciably increase non-healthcare spending. Think about it and you should be able to figure out my reasoning.

I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot more about this as the months wear on. Here’s a post at STAT by Elizabeth Cooney about “long COVID”:

The nightmare that is long Covid unfolds in many stages.

Long Covid collectively means symptoms that persist after Covid-19 infections have cleared, spanning both mental and physical health, the neurologic and psychiatric, cardiovascular and pulmonary, gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal. Within each organ system, severity spans a spectrum. In neurology, for example, that ranges from headache to encephalopathy to muscle weakness to “brain fog” that looks like dementia: memory gaps, trouble finding words, inability to do simple math, such as calculating a tip, or worse.

People can suffer months-long impairment even if their infection was never serious enough to require hospitalization. They’re short of breath, unable to sleep, to return to work, to live what used to be their normal life. We know all this thanks in large part to patient groups raising their voices, on social media and elsewhere, to draw attention to symptoms that would not go away.

More than 50 years ago I made myself unpopular by claiming that World War I’s “shell shock”, World War II’s “combat fatigue”, and what was being diagnosed in returning Vietnam vets and just then being called “post-traumatic stress” were all different words for exactly the same phenomenon. For some reason people were denying vehemently what was obvious and I believe is considered canonical today.

In that vein is “long COVID” the same thing as “post-viral syndrome”? The descriptions sure sound the same to me.

This Chicago Tribune article, republished by MSN, explains why Chicago’s black population is fleeing the city, county, and state. It’s easy to summarize: peace.

A city that once drew tens of thousands of southern Black residents and once held the nation’s second largest Black population seems to have lost its attraction for Black folks, who continue to leave. Chicago’s Black population dropped to 787,551 in 2020, its lowest total since the mid-1950s.

The Parkses and their four daughters had lived in a modest bungalow on South Euclid Avenue, the same block that Michelle Obama’s family once called home, until violence drove the Parkses out three years after they moved in.

Now they appreciate the active parents at the local schools where their 15-year-old twin daughters are thriving and have part-time jobs after school. Their younger daughters can play in the yard without the possibility of gunfire. Best of all, their new community has shopping of all kinds, and their money seems to go further than on the South Side, which lacked many of the basic neighborhood amenities they expected as homeowners.

“I’m glad that we’re out here. I have friends. I have a sense of community,” said Jennifer Parks, a triage nurse at University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, who grew up in Chicago. “We feel safe. We really do. I know violence is everywhere. If someone wants to hurt you, they’ll hurt you. But I have peace.”

It’s easy to point out the fly in that ointment: segregation, even self-segregation. The possibility that the trend of people seeking “people who look like me” will increase faster than flight from such segregated neighborhoods concerns me. It only takes a glance at Chicago’s homicide statistics to observe that those statistics are worst in the neighborhoods with the highest concentration of black population. Note that I am not claiming that all black folks are homicidal gangbangers but that some are is an inescapable truth.

I agree with nearly every word of this piece on reshoring, bringing “tradable” jobs back to the United States, by Joel Kotkin and Michael Lind in American Affairs Journal. Here’s its conclusion:

To make America more productive and Americans more secure, we have to look beyond the memes of a corporate establishment that has, for all intents and purposes, abandoned our national interest in pursuit of short-term profits, foreign favor, and public relations ap­proval. What America needs is not richer tech oligarchs or more virtue-signaling by Wall Street financiers, but policies that focus on boosting dynamic traded sector production and jobs in our communities, restoring Ameri­ca’s lead in the productive economy.

The exceptions to that are

1. I think we need a mixture of reshoring and “nearshoring”—an increase in the use of suppliers in Central America and the Caribbean if we are to reindustrialize in a competitive way. Unfortunately, a major impediment to that objective is that quite a number of thought leaders in the United States genuinely do not want the United States to reindustrialize even if doing that were more environmentally friendly than depending on offshore manufacturing that is discreetly out of side and beyond the reach of inspectors
2. The authors pay no attention to the role of additive manufacturing in American reindustrialization. Too narrow a focus on jobs is an impediment to that paradigm shift.

The authors propose a number of strategies for facilitating that reindustrialization including investments in:

• Ports and inland waterways
• Freight rail
• North-South highways in the middle of the country
• Telecommunications

It doesn’t surprise me at all that getting through Chicago is a major impediment to transporting freight by rail. Even with improved roadbeds and rails procedures are still mired in the early 20^th century. There’s a similar issue for ports. We don’t have a single “lights out”, fully automated port in the United States. Can you guess why? Australia, Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, and China all have ports more efficient than ours.

Can you guess where our least efficient ports are?

Here is the peroration of John Kass’s long, rambling post in reaction to the verdict in Kenosha:

If you were on the street in a riot, would you take a beating, just so a prosecutor wouldn’t get upset? Would you just lie down and let them put the boots to you? I don’t think that would be a good idea. The jury didn’t think it was a good idea, either.

We’re Americans. We don’t kneel and take beatings.

What the American people want is fairness. Yes, we need the law, but we need what’s behind the law, too. In “The Ox-Bow Incident” movie, the cowboy, Gil, played by liberal icon Henry Fonda, reads a letter from one of the innocent men that the self-righteous posse has just lynched.

It is a letter from the dead man to his wife:

“Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It’s everything people ever have found out about justice and what’s right and wrong. It’s the very conscience of humanity. There can’t be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience?”

Is the media stoking rage and racial resentment a civilized act? No. It is an act of force, an exercise in power. There is no restraint in an activated mob. There is no conscience to it. You can’t ride the mob as if it were a horse. Once it’s lathered up, there is no directing it.

If you reject both internalized guilt and externalized shame as regulators of human behavior, you are left with power. Is that the the world they want? It’s not the world I want. Is that the world you want?

I want people to do what’s right because it’s right. I remain unconvinced you can come to a determination of what’s right without being taught right from wrong and in the absence of a belief in God. As Voltaire put it, without God I couldn’t trust my wife, my friend, my barber or my valet.