You know, the coldest day since April and the first snowfall of the season (several whiteouts) has a way of reducing the number of trick-or-treaters. We had fewer than 20 this year.

Have you heard about the sabotage of multiple subsea cables in the Baltic over the last week or so? Me, neither. At the ASPI’s The Strategist Mercedes Page tells the story:

On the night of 7 October, the 77-kilometre Balticconnector gas pipeline and a separate but close-by subsea telecommunications cable stretching between Finland and Estonia were damaged in the Gulf of Finland. A week later, it emerged that, on the same night, another subsea telecommunications cable—connecting Estonia and Sweden—had also been damaged.

That might not seem particularly newsworthy. After all, subsea cables—despite facilitating around 95% of internet traffic, making them the physical backbone of our digital world—are notoriously vulnerable to damage. These fibre optic cables, often only the diameter of a garden hose, along with gas pipelines, zigzag all across the ocean floor, where they can suffer damage from storms, marine life, waves, earthquakes and accidental maritime vehicle activity. There are hundreds of such incidents each year.

This case, however, appears to have been no accident.

Finland, Estonia and Sweden soon announced that the gas pipeline and cables had likely been deliberately damaged and were being investigated as related incidents.

Read the whole thing. I don’t know what to make of it but it certainly doesn’t sound good.

At The Free Press Olivia Reingold tells a story about a longterm immigrant to the United States who has worked hard and relied on no one. He feels like he’s being taken advantage of by the ongoing deluge of migrants:

“It’s the mindset of the piñata—somebody’s going to hit it, and everybody’s going to pick from it. And before, it was like, work, save, and enjoy your retirement with dignity. Not anymore.”

He takes a deep breath. “It’s not fair.”

The title of the piece is another quote from Mr. Marte, “This is not the America from when I came here”. If he thinks it’s different from thirty years ago he should consider the difference from when I was a kid. Then we had just 4% immigrants.. Now it’s more like 15%. In St. Louis back then you could literally hold all of the Mexican-American immigrants in town in a good-sized ballroom. They all knew each other. There was just one Mexican restaurant in town. And most if not all them wanted to be considered Americans.

By 1986 only a minority of the immigrants eligible sought citizenship. I wonder whether the more recent immigrants think of themselves as Americans.

Can you spot what’s missing from Elham Fakhro’s article at Chatham House supporting an Israeli ceasefire in the conflict in Gaza in response to Hamas’s terrorist attack:

The Middle East is stumbling further into an abyss, from which there will be no clear exit. Although there remains a litany of measures needed to restore long-term stability, including ending Israel’s occupation over the Palestinians, a ceasefire represents the most immediate option to bring the region back from the brink.

President Biden should lend all his efforts towards supporting this measure.

I’ve read it twice now. Perhaps I’ve just missed it. I saw no demand for a ceasefire by Hamas or, indeed, any acknowledgement that Israel has not just a right but a responsibility to protect its civilian population.

I completely agree with her statement of the risks that the conflict is producing. Those include the risks to civilians in Gaza and the risk of a regional conflict. Given the risks wouldn’t you think that a deputation of Gulf countries might consider convincing Hamas to stop attacking Israel if not to surrender outright? The Hezbollah and Hamas rocket attacks on Israel are ongoing.

The observation in the title of this post is pretty obvious but, apparently, not to Tom Friedman at least not as expressed in his most recent New York Times column. He opens by singing the praises of Manmohan Singh’s response to Lashkar-e-Taiba’s terrorist attack in India fifteen years ago. Admirably, his reaction was restrained. He follows with remarks about Israel:

I understand that Israel is not India — a country of 1.4 billion people, covering a massive territory. The loss of more than 160 people in Mumbai, some of them tourists, was not felt in every home and hamlet, as the deaths, maiming and kidnapping of roughly 1,400 Israelis by Hamas were. Pakistan also has nuclear weapons to deter retaliation.

Nevertheless, it is instructive to reflect on the contrast between India’s response to the Mumbai terrorist attack and Israel’s response to the Hamas slaughter.

What he doesn’t seem to appreciate is that there’s a difference in kind between India’s 2008 terror attacks and what Israel has just experienced. A difference in scale really is a difference in kind. Although LeT has a similar objective to Hamas’s, in LeT’s case the conquest of India for Islam, no one seriously thinks that LeT is capable of doing it. Hamas’s threat to Israel’s existence is significantly more proximate, especially considering that the number of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is expected to outstrip the number of Jews in Israel soon. By some accounts that’s already the case.

That places Mr. Friedman clearly in the “Israel has a right to exist but…” camp.

In an address at CIS in Australia John Mearsheimer outlines the fix we are in. The first 21 minutes are devoted to Ukraine; the next 15 minutes to Israel.

The TL;DR version is

• The “unipolar moment” when the U. S. was the sole superpower extended from 1989 to 2017. It’s over now.
• Largely due to our mismanaged foreign policy, we have pushed the Russians towards the Chinese.
• The Ukraine cannot prevail in its war with Russia. The war will never end and we cannot disentangle ourselves from it.
• We are similarly entangled with Israel.
• Those two conflicts are distractions from dealing with the emerging situation in Asia.

What he does not say but I will is that our present predicament has been greatly aggravated by our own actions. Through a combination of hubris, those promoting American hegemony, and getting our foreign policy advice from the wrong people we are now in a very serious situation.

In 1942 Val Lewton was appointed head of RKO’s new horror unit. He was given two directives:

• The maximum budget for a movie was $150,000
• No picture should run more than 75 minutes

Over the next four years Lewton made ten pictures for RKO and they include some of the finest horror movies ever made. $150,000 in 1942 is roughly equivalent to $3 million today. By comparison Killers of the Flower Moon cost $200 million with a running time of three hours and 26 minutes.

Lewton, a Russian emigre (original name: Vladimir Leventon), had been working for David Selznick. He was story editor for Gone With the Wind. If you recall the movie, the elevator scene showing wounded soldiers was written by him (Selznick never realized it had been written as a sort of joke).

Lewton’s picture relied on mood, writing, and acting rather than special effects or gore. They include a very creepy story of Satanic worship (The Seventh Victim in 1943), a werewolf picture with a cat instead of a wolf (Cat People in 1942), a vampire picture without a vampire (Isle of the Dead in 1945), and the best zombie movie made until Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968 (I Walked With a Zombie—1943).

I’m not sure any pictures made today can actually be compared with the Val Lewton horror movies. M. Night Shyamalan’s perhaps?

As we are deluged with slasher pictures over the next week or so, I recommend seeking out Val Lewton’s RKO horror movies. They’ll be 75 minutes well spent.

At The Liberal Patriot Emily L. Blout tries to explain propaganda:

Propaganda isn’t a fake news article or a deliberately poor-quality meme, nor is it disinformation or misinformation—though these are all tactics of information warfare. Propaganda is a communication, often a story, geared to a large audience designed to influence perspectives and inspire actions that support the interests and objectives of its creator. Good propaganda works through framing and narrative; it is attractive and even entertaining. It evokes emotion and, if done well, colors the way one sees the world and evaluates a particular situation.

In the weeks since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, we’ve seen propaganda in action.

She proposes three measures for responding to Hamas propaganda:

• Raise awareness of the problem of state backed media pushing Hamas propaganda.
• When it comes to Hamas, PIJ, and others, both show and tell.
• Pre-bunk Hamas lies.

My advice would be simpler. If it comes from Hamas, assume it’s a lie until categorically proven otherwise. And sites that publish Hamas propaganda are not news sites. They’re propaganda outlets.

As a final bit of advice I think we should recall Jonathan Swift’s counsel: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it”. There is literally nothing than can be done to prevent that other than not publishing propaganda.

I was going through a little mental exercise. Like everybody else I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and sixteen great-great-grandparents. I have photographs, of course, of my parents and all of my grandparents. I have photographs of all but one of my great-grandparents and three of my great-great-grandparents. None of any of my great-great-great-grandparents.

The oldest go back to the 1860s and 1870s.

I’ll start assembling them and post them.

Sadly, I do not much resemble any of my better-looking ancestors.