I’m glad that hostages are being exchanged in the Israel-Hamas war and that there’s a ceasefire but I want to repeat some themes I’ve touched on before. Let’s start with this report by Alyssa Donovan at WGN:

CHICAGO — Protesters marched down the Magnificent Mile on Friday to draw attention to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters rallied on Michigan Avenue as they looked to catch the attention of Black Friday shoppers. Some of those who participated in the march said it is important to keep the focus on the war in the Middle East as many people’s attention now turns to the holidays.

Israel and Hamas agreed to a four-day-long ceasefire on Wednesday, but protesters on Michigan Avenue said it was not enough and called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the occupation

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Any occupations by Israel of Gaza now are a direct consequence of Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israeli civilians.

Friday’s crowd grew to about 1,000 protesters by noon, and briefly caused a portion of Michigan Avenue to shut down to traffic.

It’s unclear to me how that promotes the Palestinian viewpoint. It is, however, clear to me how that contributes to the decline of Michigan Avenue as a destination.

I’ve checked British, French, and German news sources. I found no reports of demonstrations there. Indeed, there was relatively little about the Israel-Hamas conflict in their news.

Why is the U. S. paying so much attention while our European allies devote so little? Raising the U. S. profile, as President Biden is doing by repeatedly emphasizing how much attention we’re paying and how hard he, personally is working on it, is puzzling to me: the Europeans have a lot more stake in peace in the Middle East than we do but you would never know it based on their news coverage. My conclusion is that they think that maintaining a low profile is in their interests..

Why isn’t similarly maintaining a low profile in U. S. interest? I honestly don’t see any net political advantage for the president in it. It will be interesting to see what the polling information after the weekend tells us. Perhaps President Biden is focusing on it because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. Just to make my views clear, I think it’s very rare for politicians in the upper echelons to do anything for any reason other than domestic political gain.

Meanwhile, at Outside the Beltway James Joyner muses over what will happen in the conflict after the ceasefire:

The destruction is likely to get even worse once the fight moves to the south. And, given a perfectly reasonable and just war aim of destroying Hamas, I believe the killing is proportionate to the military advantage, as required by international humanitarian law.

The problem, though, is tying the military strategy to the political one. Aside from “Hamas won’t be able to kill Israeli citizens any time soon”—a goal I certainly share—it’s not obvious what the ultimate war aim is. What is the better state of peace?

It continues to appear to me that the Netanyahu government has not figured that out. Not so much because they’ve given it no thought but that there are no acceptable answers.

The “two-state solution,” while logically the only end state that can possibly lead to long-term peace, is a fantasy. Israelis have maintained a Zionist state since 1948 and intend to keep it. Even if we could somehow persuade the Palestinians to abandon a goal of a state from the river to the sea,” it’s inconceivable that they’d settle for one that didn’t include Jerusalem. A single state where Arabs and Jews live together in perfect harmony, presumably while having a Coke and a smile, is even more absurd.

Let’s consider some outcomes. First, there’s the “two-state” solution. Any notion of two liberal democratic countries co-existing side by side, one the present Israel and the other composed of the West Bank and Gaza, is a fantasy. What would exist is an Islamist state composed of the West Bank and Gaza, engaging in episodic (at the very least) attacks on Israel from within its borders on the one hand and an imperfectly liberal democratic state in the present Israel, pressed to continue to support and defend Israeli settlers within the Islamic state. In other words the best case scenario is one of mutual tension just short of war, occasionally spilling over into actual conflict. That doesn’t sound like a benign outcome to me. How about you?

A “one-state” solution in which Israel occupies the entirety of the area of traditional Palestine from the west bank of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean would be even worse. Israel could not grant voting rights to the populations of the West Bank and Gaza and continue to exist.

Worst of all would be a one-state solution in which the present state of Israel ceased to exist and the Palestinians held control of the entire area. Whatever else it would be, it would not be either liberal or democratic.

On that basis it’s clear why the Biden Administration support Israel as consistently as it does. Every even remotely benign outcome includes the continued existence of the state of Israel.

I think it would be even better if the U. S. to pressure Israel not to provide financial support or defense to Israeli settlements in the West Bank but that seems to be unworthy of consideration.

The comments at OTB are interesting. The first comment completely takes the Palestinian side. Later on there’s reasonably good comment that completely refutes it. There are several questions that go unanswered:

1. Why are we as involved as we are?
2. Why aren’t Egypt and Jordan taking any flak? Egypt is signatory to the same international conventions on refugees as we are but has not accepted a single Gazan refugee since the conflict began.

This year’s Thanksgiving was intimate—just my wife and myself and a dear old friend. Our regular Thanksgiving custom is for all of those present, starting with the youngest, expressing what they were thankful for in the past year. Our guest, as she led off our expressions of thanks, quipped that she is unaccustomed to being the youngest member of any group these days.

I made our customary Thanksgiving meal. I smoked the turkey, made something resembling my wife’s family’s traditional stuffing (as dressing), my wife’s cranberry chiffon, my spicy cranberry sauce, brussels sprouts braised with chestnuts, and pumpkin chiffon pie. I didn’t make rolls this year—my yeast was dead.

I have now been making Thanksgiving dinners since I was a kid. I took over from my mom the better part of a century ago. I think I have a few more Thanksgiving dinners in me but at the end of the day I can definitely feel it these days and I spend the better part of the next day recovering.

I’ll take this opportunity to give thanks for my regular readers and commenters. I hope in these troubled times you have had a happy and restful Thanksgiving.

I was a bit amused by the editors’ of the Washington Post’s concern over the adverse effect that extreme political polarization has on marriage:

The problem with polarization, though, is that it has effects well beyond the political realm, and these can be difficult to anticipate. One example is the collapse of American marriage. A growing number of young women are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners. As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives. But it’s not just that. There’s a growing ideological divide, too. Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.

This ideology gap is particularly pronounced among Gen Z Whites. According to a major new American Enterprise Institute survey, 46 percent of White Gen Z women are liberal, compared to only 28 percent of White Gen Z men, more of whom (36 percent) now identify as conservative. Norms around sexuality and gender are diverging, too. Where 61 percent of Gen Z women see themselves as feminist, only 43 percent of Gen Z men do.

The first part that struck me was that the risk isn’t to marriage but to the family. That has been a problem for some time.

The second thing that struck me was that when a woman marries she is no longer in the demographic they’re concerned about (“single women 18-30”). How much of the problem is definitional?

The next thing I thought of was that there is plenty of evidence suggesting that women are more hypergamic than men, i.e. more predisposed to “marry up”. That becomes a problem increasingly as women’s incomes are the same as those of men. When you’re a woman in the top 10% of income earners and the only men who are “husband material” are in the top 3% of income earners, guess what? There are more of you than there are of them.

Yet another factor is that ideology is not immutable, indeed, there is substantial evidence suggesting that your views change throughout life based on your experiences. How worried should we actually be about ideological differences that will change with age and experience?

In his Washington Post column David Ignatius reports on the incipient ceasefire and hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas:

A hostage deal between Israel and Hamas will bring joy to the families of the 50 Israeli women and children initially being freed, and a desperately needed four-day pause in fighting for Palestinians civilians trapped in the Gaza war. And it could gradually expand to a broader de-escalation of the nightmare conflict.

The basic idea driving the hostage-release agreement, approved by Israel’s cabinet early Wednesday in Jerusalem, is “more for more,” a formula that’s well known in arms-control negotiations. If Hamas delivers more hostages, Israel would be willing to extend the pause, a senior Israeli official told me. There is no cap on how long Israel might halt its Gaza operations, he said, as Israel seeks eventual release of all captives, including those in the military.

In his New York Times column Bret Stephens is not nearly as optimistic:

But a cease-fire wouldn’t spare just civilians. It would spare, and embolden, the main fighting force of Hamas. It would also embolden terrorist allies like Hezbollah. That’s a virtual guarantee for future mass-casualty attacks against Israel, for ever-larger Israeli retaliation, and for deeper misery for the people of Gaza. No Israeli government of any political stripe is going to allow the territory to rebuild so long as Hamas remains in charge.

That gives a second meaning to “Cease-Fire Now”: Either a demand for Israel’s total capitulation, or a recipe for a perpetual cycle of violence between a terrorist group sworn to Israel’s destruction and a Jewish state that refuses to be destroyed. Whatever else one thinks of Israel, no country can be expected to sign its own death warrant by indulging those who, if given the chance, would annihilate it.

In his Washington Post column yesterday David Ignatius reported that the Israelis planned a large “tent city’ in south Gaza:

The next phase will focus on southern Gaza, where more than 1 million desperate civilians have fled, probably along with one of Hamas’s top political leaders, Yahya Sinwar, whom IDF officials believe is hiding in tunnels under his hometown of Khan Younis. As in the north, the IDF will attempt to separate the battlespace — dividing it into military targets around Khan Younis and civilian safe zones to the west. But this separation might be as difficult as it was in the north — with civilians again caught in the crossfire.

To care for Palestinians who have fled the battle zones, Israel plans to create a vast tent city for refugees at Al-Mawasi, on the coast just north of the Gazan border with Egypt. The location should allow humanitarian supplies to be delivered easily by land and sea. After the intense international criticism for the hospital battles in northern Gaza, Israeli commanders want to quickly create temporary medical facilities for thousands of wounded civilians threatened now with starvation and infectious disease.

That’s similar to what I thought was Israel’s best strategy: clearing a large part of north Gaza and building a tent city there, encouraging civilians to move north into it, carefully searching every entrant to ensure they were civilians. That would have been an admittedly risky strategy and one that the Israelis possibly do not have the ability to implement but I made what I thought was a better assumption—Gaza is now a write-off; it must be completely leveled not just to the ground but below the ground. That’s a consequence of Hamas’s handiwork there.

Here’s my question. Will the ceasefire last four days? Keep in mind that Hamas violated a ceasefire in its October 7 attack.

Update

The editors of the Wall Street Journal follow up on my question:

Expect Hamas to drag out the cease-fire in hopes of making it permanent. Dribbling out 10 hostages a day, Hamas could stall for a few weeks. Or what if it claims after day two that Israel has broken the deal and hostage releases will continue only after Israel holds off for another few days? What if it pulls that trick over and over?

The domestic and international picture will become more complicated for Israel. At home a nation united will be divided over how long to wait. Abroad, the pressure to continue the cease-fire indefinitely will grow, and Israel can expect harsher criticism when it resumes fighting. Israelis know all this, but they are willing to accept the costs to retrieve the captives.

Jack heard about how distressed people were that the pandas were returning to China and decided to fill the gap they left behind. He’s become a panda.

In his Washington Post column Josh Rogin warns that Chinese President Xi appears to be dissatisfied with the status quo:

During the two leaders’ private meeting in the San Francisco Bay Area, Xi struck some ominous notes on Taiwan. Regarding Beijing’s long-standing desire to bring the island under its control, Xi said his “preference was for peaceful reunification,” a senior U.S. official told reporters — but then Xi outlined several scenarios under which he might use force. Biden reiterated to Xi that the United States supports the status quo and is determined to maintain peace.

But Xi’s reaction to Biden’s simple restatement of existing U.S. policy was to tell the U.S. president that China would not be satisfied with the status quo forever.

“Xi responded, ‘Look, peace is all well and good, but at some point we need to move toward resolution more generally,’” according to the official.

concluding:

Leaders in Washington and Taipei can’t allow optimism about the U. S-China relationship to obscure the fact that Xi is rapidly altering the status quo around Taiwan and interfering in Taiwanese politics more than ever before. Xi has revealed his true intentions. Ignoring his ominous words and actions would be the most dangerous policy of all.

My only observations are the following:

1. Taiwan is more important to the United States than either Israel or Ukraine.
2. At this point we are likely to lose a war with China.
3. Some American pundits will not be satisfied until we fight a war with China.

My advice is that we should reduce our dependency on Taiwan as quickly as we can.

Today Catherine Rampelle devotes her Washington Post column to complaining that we’re robbing the young to pay for the old:

This year, as in years past, the report exemplifies the country’s seemingly bottomless commitment to add debt on behalf of retirees. The researchers calculate that a single man who earned the average wage every year of his adult life before retiring in 2020 at age 65, for instance, paid roughly $470,000 in taxes into the Social Security and Medicare systems. But he can expect to receive benefits equal to $640,000 over the course of his retirement.

is the nub of it. And here’s her peroration:

This is a choice. So, too, are the consequences for other, younger constituents. Politicians can’t find “room” in the budget for investments in pre-K, or child care, or paid parental leave, or a more generous child tax credit. But they’re perfectly happy to leave the entitlement system on autopilot, with programs for seniors gobbling up an ever-growing share of our future spending obligations.

American society long ago committed to ensuring minimum living standards for the elderly — whatever the cost. What, I wonder, would it take to secure the same sort of commitment to the young?

I have all sorts of problems with her analysis. She’s looking at the wrong numbers; she’s not taking the right things into account; she’s combining things that should not be combined.

Using the Urban Institute’s own figures, when you compare FICA (Social Security) paid over a working lifetime by someone earning the average income, based on conventional actuarial assumptions about their life expectancy they can expect to collect about 8% more in benefits from Social Security Retirement Income than they paid in FICA. That’s at 0% interest.

If they put 15% of their income annually into an account paying just 1% interest (without fees), by the laws of compound interest at the end of the period they’d have an account worth more than the expected benefits. The problem, obviously, is not that their retirement benefits are too high or they’re not paying enough for them. It’s that the money is being used as though it were part of the general fund.

Furthermore, average is not the right measure to use. Median is. Right now the average individual income is $61,000 but the median individual income is $54,000. Based on that, my conclusion is that there are far too many people earning minimum wage. That’s what happens when you reckon economic welfare based on the unemployment rate: you optimize your economy for minimum wage jobs. But that’s not well-suited to the “safety net” we’ve constructed.

The real problem (most of the difference between the 8% gap I mentioned above and the 36% gap identified by Ms. Rampell is Medicare. As Uwe Reinhardt put it more than 20 years ago, it’s the prices, stupid. We’re paying too much for healthcare and Congress has steadfastly refused to control healthcare spending. That refusal is the reason that, after enacting short term waivers of the increases they knew to be sustainable (the “doc fixes”), they finally three up their hands and stopped trying to control expenses at all.

There is no way to control healthcare expenses without controlling Medicare “reimbursement rates”.

My final point in this post is that last year the federal government paid about $750 billion on Medicare but government at all levels paid $870 billion on public education. Kids aren’t being ignored.

The simplest explanation of Ms. Rampell’s plaint about spending too much on the old while not spending enough on the young is that she wants education to be federalized. We should be doing the opposite. Healthcare for the elderly should be the responsibility of the states, not the federal government. I don’t believe the present Medicare system can be fixed.

At The Strategist Richard N. Haass summarizes the results of the summit meeting between U. S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping:

Over seven decades, the modern US–China relationship has evolved significantly. Early on, there was no relationship to speak of, and the US found itself in an armed confrontation with China during the Korean War. That was followed two decades later by a period of strategic cooperation against the Soviet Union, and then to boost trade and investment as a joint priority once the Cold War ended. But economic ties have become a source of friction in recent years, and as China became increasingly assertive, the two countries found themselves increasingly at odds over just about everything, from regional and global issues to human rights.

The San Francisco summit didn’t alter this reality. US–China relations remain an issue to be managed, not a problem to be solved. Expecting anything else from the summit was to expect too much. The world’s most important bilateral relationship continues to be a highly competitive one, and the challenge remains what it was prior to the summit: to ensure that competition doesn’t preclude selective cooperation or give way to conflict.

Terrible as it is to think about I do believe that war between the U. S. and China is an actual possibility. IMO the best way of reducing its likelihood is a two part strategy:

1. Ensure that the U. S. has the capability of winning a war with China.
2. Stop electing leaders who are willing to go to war if there is a viable alternative.

The notion that China can be deterred from pursuing what it sees as its vital national interest is foolish. I wish that were the case here.

From their most recent editorial I gather than somebody on the Washington Post staff went to the CVS to buy some Advil and were astonished to find the shelves bare. Here’s a snippet:

Shoppers visiting the CVS Pharmacy at 14th and Irving streets NW in Washington recently must think they traveled back in time to the Soviet Union. The store’s shelves are bare. The refrigerator cases are devoid of food or beverages. When we visited, only sunscreen and greeting cards were on display. But the bizarre scene is not a result of a failed planned economy; rampant theft is the cause. Shoplifters ransacked this CVS over two days early last month, and it hasn’t been restocked since. Weeks later, there’s still hardly anything to buy — or steal.

The CVS at 14th and Irving symbolizes extreme retail theft and the harms it can engender. Distressing and inconvenient to ordinary people, threatening to businesses and livelihoods, and repellent to tourists, unchecked shoplifting can corrode a community’s spirit.

It’s happening in the nation’s capital. The D.C. police department does not track shoplifting specifically but reports that theft in general is up 22 percent over last year. It is harder and harder to find a grocery or pharmacy in the District that doesn’t lock up laundry detergent, toilet paper and deodorant. A Giant in Southeast no longer even stocks certain name-brand health and beauty products that thieves target. A liquor store downtown is closing because of constant shoplifting. The H Street Walmart shuttered earlier this year. (The company said the store “hasn’t performed as well as we hoped.”)

I was reminded of John Adams’s remarks:

But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep <, Start deletion,[. . .], End,> simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by <, Start deletion,[. . .], End,> morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition <, Start deletion,and, End,> Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other

There are several known ways of controlling theft. The first and best is for people not to steal because stealing is wrong. The second is to ensure that would-be thieves are deterred by the likelihood of being apprehended and punished. The third is to maintain a police force large and empowered enough to apprehend criminals, DAs to prosecute criminals, and judges to punish them. The last is to authorize and empower shopkeepers to protect their stores against theft.

When none of those are the case, you have more theft.