Gabriel Elefteriu offers his predictions for 2024 at Brussels Signal>:

1. Ukraine: the key to surviving the 2024 campaign is political stability in Kyiv. Overall, the situation at the front will get worse before it gets better.
2. The Middle East powder keg: no complete detonation, but chaos will spread including on our streets.
3. Taiwan: China will continue its preparations for war but will not strike.

concluding that the outlook while bleaik is not preordained:

Western power is at a low ebb in historical terms as regards the military balance. Our adversaries have the initiative – and even the upper hand – in a number of domains, regions or subsets of global affairs. The three global flashpoints in Ukraine, the Middle East and Taiwan act as fractures in the US-backed system of global security, fractures that Russia, Iran and China are trying to widen and deepen.

The fact that the West is proving increasingly more incompetent at strategy and global action hardly bears repeating. It is enough to consider the fact that approaching the third year of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is on the offensive and its economy is growing – whether this is temporary or not, time will tell – while those of leading Western nations are teetering on the brink of recession, with some, like Germany, de-industrialising.

That actually sounds optimistic to me.

I recommend reading David Ignatius’s quiz in his last Washington Post column of 2023. His questions are:

• On Dec. 31, 2024, the status of the war in Ukraine will be
• Russian President Vladimir Putin will close 2024 as
• Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s biggest surprise in 2024 will be
• The Gaza War will end with
• The CIA’s biggest surprise in 2024 will be
• North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will stun the world in 2024 by
• The most significant technology development of 2024 will be
• The biggest economic story of 2024 will be
• The most destabilizing and potentially dangerous military trend of 2024 will be
• The news-business shocker of the year will be

It’s a multiple choice test.. I gather that at least some of his choices are satirical.

In general my answers are all “None of the above”, mostly because I think that several of the choices are likely to occur. For example, here’s his question about North Korea:

AFAICT only the alternative of the hypersonic cruise missile is possible and it’s very unlikely.

And here’s the economic question:

I think the first, second, fifth, and sixth are all possible but that the biggest economic story of 2024 will be something that isn’t even in his list.

At any rate you may find his list amusing or frustrating. Or both.

I agree with Tom Friedman in his latest New York Times column that there are lots of people to blame over the horrid situation in Gaza. First and foremost, Hamas:

Let’s go to the videotape: In September 2005, Ariel Sharon completed a unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza, which Israel occupied in the 1967 war. In short order, Hamas began attacking the crossing points between Gaza and Israel to show that even if Israel was gone, the resistance movement wasn’t over; these crossing points were a lifeline for commerce and jobs, and Israel eventually reduced the number of crossings from six to two.

In January 2006, the Palestinians held elections hoping to give the Palestinian Authority legitimacy to run Gaza and the West Bank. There was a debate among Israeli, Palestinian and Bush administration officials over whether Hamas should be allowed to run in the elections — because it had rejected the Oslo peace accords with Israel.

Yossi Beilin, one of the Israeli architects of Oslo, told me that he and others argued that Hamas should not be allowed to run, as did many members of Fatah, Arafat’s group, who had embraced Oslo and recognized Israel. But the Bush team insisted that Hamas be permitted to run without embracing Oslo, hoping that it would lose and this would be its ultimate refutation. Unfortunately, for complex reasons, Fatah ran unrealistically high numbers of candidates in many districts, dividing the vote, while the more disciplined Hamas ran carefully targeted slates and managed to win the parliamentary majority.

Hamas then faced a critical choice: Now that it controlled the Palestinian parliament, it could work within the Oslo Accords and the Paris protocol that governed economic ties between Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — or not.

Hamas chose not to — making a clash between Hamas and Fatah, which supported Oslo, inevitable. In the end, Hamas violently ousted Fatah from Gaza in 2007, killing some of its officials and making clear that it would not abide by the Oslo Accords or the Paris protocol. That led to the first Israeli economic blockade of Gaza — and what would be 22 years of on-and-off Hamas rocket attacks, Israeli checkpoint openings and closings, wars and cease-fires, all culminating on Oct. 7.

These were fateful choices. Once Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza, Palestinians were left, for the first time ever, with total control over a piece of land. Yes, it was an impoverished slice of sand and coastal seawater, with some agricultural areas. And it was not the ancestral home of most of its residents. But it was theirs to build anything they wanted.

Had Hamas embraced Oslo and chosen to build its own Dubai, not only would the world have lined up to aid and invest in it, it would have been the most powerful springboard conceivable for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, in the heart of the Palestinian ancestral homeland. Palestinians would have proved to themselves, to Israelis and to the world what they could do when they have their own territory.

But Hamas decided instead to make Gaza a springboard for destroying Israel. To put it another way, Hamas had a choice: to replicate Dubai in 2023 or replicate Hanoi in 1968. It chose to replicate Hanoi, whose Củ Chi tunnel network served as the launchpad for the ’68 Tet offensive.

Then Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu:

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister — 16 years — also made choices. And even before this war, he made terrible ones — for Israel and for Jews all over the world.

The list is long: Before this war, Netanyahu actively worked to keep the Palestinians divided and weak by strengthening Hamas in Gaza with billions of dollars from Qatar, while simultaneously working to discredit and delegitimize the more moderate Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, committed to Oslo and nonviolence in the West Bank. That way Netanyahu could tell every U.S. president, in effect: I’d love to make peace with the Palestinians, but they are divided, and moreover, the best of them can’t control the West Bank and the worst of them control Gaza. So what do you want from me?

Netanyahu’s goal has always been to destroy the Oslo option once and for all. In that, Bibi and Hamas have always needed each other: Bibi to tell the U.S. and Israelis that he had no choice, and Hamas to tell Gazans and its new and naïve supporters around the world that the Palestinians’ only choice was armed struggle led by Hamas.

There is also Fatah, Iran, and useful idiots like Mr. Friedman who departs for Cloud Cuckoo Land with this:

The only exit from this mutually assured destruction is to bring in some transformed version of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — or a whole new P.L.O.-appointed government of Palestinian technocrats — in partnership with moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

In what reality is Saudi Arabia moderate or pro-Western? It is a really strained definition of “moderate” that accepts the assassination of journalists, public executions for witchcraft, and the prohibition of practicing any religion other than Islam publicly as moderate. My assessment is that Saudi Arabia is a radical Islamist authoritarian country that is pro-whatever keeps the Saud family in power.

Egypt is essentially a military dictatorship that perennially ranks very low in the rating of its civil rights. Freedom of speech, religion, and the press are all severely curtailed. The largest Arab country, it is only moderate when compared with Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Jordan might reasonably be characterized as moderate, especially in comparison with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but it is also part of the problem. When people speak of a “two-state solution” they actually mean a three-state solution. There is already a Palestinian state and its name is Jordan. One obvious resolution of present conflicts would be for Jordan to assume control of the West Bank but that would create additional problems for Jordan—a majority of the population of the expanded country would be Palestinian. Consequently, it doesn’t want the West Bank.

Mr. Friedman’s fantasy solution to the problems in the Middle East consists of a Palestinian Authority that exists only in his imagination supported by immoderate moderate countries. That does not sound like a winning formula to me. And that doesn’t even consider the changes in Israel that will occur as a consequence of Hamas’s October 7 attack and the ensuing war. The reaction of the Israelis to previous Arab attacks has been to become more radical. Will this time be different?

I encourage you to read Robert Lynch’s article on privilege at Skeptic. Basically, he considers one question: is it better to be born into the richest family in a poor neighborhood or the poorest family in a rich neighborhood? This strikes home for me since I did both. I spent my first ten years in the richest family in a poor neighborhood and next half dozen as the poorest or at least one of the poorest in a rich neighborhood. My younger siblings didn’t share that experience.

Here’s his conclusion:

Decades of social mobility research has come to the same conclusion. The income of your parents is by far the best predictor of your own income as an adult. By using some of the largest datasets ever assembled and isolating the effects of different environments on social mobility, research reveals again and again how race effectively masks parental income, neighborhood, and family structure. These studies describe the material conditions of tens of millions of Americans. We are all accidents of birth and imprisoned by circumstances over which we had no control. We are all born into an economic caste system in which privilege is imposed on us by the class into which we are helplessly born. The message from this research is that race is not a determinant of economic mobility on an individual level.39 Even though a number of factors other than parental income also affect social mobility, they operate on the level of the community.40 And although upward mobility is lower for individuals raised in areas with large Black populations, this affects everyone who grows up in those areas, including Whites and Asians. Growing up in an area with a high proportion of single parents also significantly reduces rates of upward mobility, but once again this effect operates on the level of the community and children with single parents do just as well as long as they live in communities with a high percentage of married couples.

One thing these data do reveal—again, and again, and again—however, is that privilege is real. It’s just based on class, not race.

None of my siblings nor I are poor and I suspect that my wife and I have the highest household income in the family (of our generation) or nearly so. I was fortunate in being born into a frugal, hard-working, closely-knit family. My dad’s family was resolutely upper middle class while my mom’s was lower class or classless. Make of that what you will.

At UnHerd Philip Pilkington warns about the risks posed by inexpensive modern weaponry:

The origins of the story go back weeks, with Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. These attacks culminated in the decision by global shipping companies to avoid transit through the region due to the heightened risk.

As a result, the Houthis have now enacted a de facto naval blockade — without possessing a navy. In response, on 18 December, the Pentagon announced Operation Prosperity Guardian, but many allies — such as Spain, Italy and France — declined US command over their navies in the region.

and

Contemporary drone and missile technology is reshaping the global battlefield in ways that are rendering aspects of modern military technology too expensive. Politico quotes an unnamed official from the Pentagon who highlights that the US Navy is shooting down drones that cost $2,000 with missiles that cost $2 million. “The cost offset is not on our side,” the official said.

How long can this go on for? The Houthis can continue harassing ships for as long as they care to. But the US Navy is burning through expensive weapons trying to stop them (a similar problem to that faced by Israel’s Iron Dome). It is only a matter of time before one of the Houthi weapons slips through naval air defences — if another container ship is hit, can global shipping companies really justify transit through the Red Sea?

which provokes the question why are we shooting down $2,000 drones with $2 million missiles? I suspect it’s a combination of Maslow’s Hammer (“when the only tool you have is a hammer…”) and the Everest explanation (“because it is there”).

That all returns to a point I have been making for nearly twenty years, that the risk of modern technology is personal empowerment. Nowadays a single individual can make attacks that would have required a platoon (or even a brigade) 80 years ago.

If we’re going to address today’s security threats prudently, we must change our mindset. It’s not as though there are no other ways of bringing drones down. There are dozens of ways and I venture to say that most of them don’t cost $2 million a pop.

And, as Mr.. Pilkington’s piece points out, we must be prepared to change our mindset quickly.

Even if you never read the book, I recommend reading David J. Hebert’s review of Universal Basic Income at the Acton Institute. Here’s a snippet:

Despite the quirky format, I’m now far more aware of the nuances to the various UBI policy proposals than I was before picking up the book. For example, the authors begin by noting, “a lot of confusion about the concept of a UBI results from people talking about it as though it was a single, precisely defined policy proposal. We think it’s more helpful to think of the UBI as a family of proposals” (emphasis original). They then list three common elements all UBI proposals share:

1. They involve unrestricted cash transfers.
2. These cash transfers are unconditional.
3. They are universal, in that everyone qualifies.

It’s useful to discuss these in more detail. A UBI as an unrestricted cash transfer means that the government is simply transferring cash into the hands of every citizen—that’s it. If we compare this to the current welfare system, as the authors do, we can already see a stark difference. Consider electronic benefit transfers (EBTs). In the current system, the government decides 1) who is eligible to receive benefits, 2) how many dollars those people receive, and 3) what they’re allowed to purchase with those dollars. There is tremendous potential for cronyism at each of these steps. For example, did you know that you can buy iced coffee with EBTs but not hot coffee or cold chicken, and not hot, ready-to-eat roasted chicken? Where is the line between “cold” and “hot” anyway?

And consider Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) benefits: “For some items—such as yogurt, cereal, and pasta—only specific brands are eligible” (pg. 81).

The list of welfare programs is too long to go through exhaustively, but if you think through those three questions above for each one, you’ll quickly find that cronyism pervades our current welfare system to an alarming degree.

In the end Mr. Hebert isn’t sure whether the book convinces him that a UBI is a good idea or not but he’s certainly tempted.

IMO there’s an important distinction between a hypothetical UBI and a UBI that would actually be enacted in law. That’s illustrated by this quote:

Finally, consider the universality of a UBI. This is the one aspect that even the authors balk at. As they note on page 8: “A UBI that gave money to everybody would either be so expensive as to be unmanageable, or so small as to be practically useless to the people who need it most.” This is probably the weakest part of the book: the authors contend that universality is a central theme of all UBI proposals … but then write that “while most proponents of a UBI say that eligibility for the grant is not dependent on income or wealth, we’ll let you in on a little secret: nobody really means this” (emphasis original).

The hypothetical UBI in which everyone is eligible and everyone receives the same amount would probably be effective in reducing “cronyism” as Mr. Hebert infers. IMO it would also be unconstitutional as well as horrifically expensive or ineffectual, depending on the amount of the stipend. That’s why an actual UBI would be based on need, be arguably constitutional, and not reduce “cronyism”.

Here’s the meat of Ruth Marcus’s most recent column in the Washington Post:

Rules, norms and laws are empty fixtures without decent, patriotic leaders. We cannot survive when one party’s leaders give up on truth, loyalty to country and self-restraint.

Actually, I agree with that statement. However, the context she presents for it is grimly amusing:

Few could argue that Republicans still prize character in their leaders. A 2018 Gallup poll found: “Republicans, by 22 points, were much more likely than Democrats to say it was very important for the president to be a moral leader when [Bill] Clinton was in office.” The pollsters continued, “Now with Trump in office, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to hold this view, by 14 points.”

Here’s her prescription:

The solution to the tyranny of the minority is a wave of pro-democracy reforms, including elimination of gerrymandering and lifetime terms for Supreme Court justices as well as expansion and protection of voting rights. Republicans, once deprived of the crutches that allow minority control, thereafter will need to appeal to the multicultural, multiracial electorate of the 21st century.

My list would be somewhat different. I think that the “expansion and protection of voting rights” does not have the effect she believes and anyway those have gone about as far as they should be taken. Just enforce the laws we have.

Consider the voting in presidential elections

contrasted with that in primaries:

If expansion and protection of voting rights have increased since 1980, what relation between them and participation do those graphs illustrate? I would say none or an inverse relation if any.

I think we need term limits for all elected offices, elimination of pensions for elected offices, and to double or even triple the size of the House of Representatives. The larger the House, the more democratic, no?

The relationship between virtuous leaders and good government is not original to Ruth or me. Plato pointed it out more than two millennia ago. His “philosopher-kings” were a class apart and did not even know who their offspring were if any. Greed and lust were foreign to them. Not to mention nepotism or providing estates for their heirs—they had none.

The Founders, despairing of finding such paragons in a systematic manner, decided that limiting the power of government to “enumerated powers” was the only way to provide for good government systematically. It’s an idea so wild we might consider trying it.

The editors of the Washington Post come out in support of banning ski masks:

Tucked into Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s Addressing Crime Trends Now Act, a bill intended to help police fight crime in D.C., is an under-discussed proposal: a prohibition on ski masks and face coverings.

The mayor’s proposal would revive the anti-mask section of a 1982 law, the Anti-Intimidation and Defacing of Public or Private Property Criminal Act. That statute prohibited those 16 and older from covering their faces while in public, intending to commit a crime, intimidate, threaten, or harass others or in cases in which masking would recklessly “cause another person to fear for his or her personal safety.”

The provision, which carried a one-year maximum sentence, was rarely enforced even when it was on the books. And D.C. repealed it in 2020 to encourage the use of face masks during the covid-19 pandemic.

That reasonable public health policy had an unintended consequence: normalizing masking for all sorts of purposes, legal and otherwise. Now, identity-obscuring ski masks have become a de facto uniform for those who commit retail thefts, carjackings and robberies. The disguises make perpetrators more difficult to identify and their crimes scarier — which of course is the point. One of the more remarkable aspects of last week’s City Center Chanel store break-in was that a video camera recorded a burglar without a face covering.

I have all sorts of questions about this including:

• Why do they think that enacting a law will stop people from doing something?
• Why do they think that police officers who won’t enforce laws against shoplifting will enforce laws against wearing ski masks in public?
• What percentage of those wearing ski masks in public do so with the intention of concealing their identity when they commit a crime?

I wear a ski mask which I call a “balaclava” nearly every day in the winter when I take the dogs out for a walk. Or, at least, I did until my wife insisted I throw the raggedy old balaclava I was wearing away. The entire notion strikes me as backwards from how our laws ought to work.

My general view of law is that anything not expressly banned is allowed (rather than the other way around), we should be prepared to make a good faith attempt at enforcing all laws that are enacted, you can determine whether a good faith attempt at enforcement is being made by the number of violations without enforcement that are being made, and that the primary effect of any law should be to discourage behaviors we must prevent rather than limiting the actions of people who are doing no harm.

Laws don’t reduce crime. Vigorous and routine enforcement of laws reduces crime.

At USA Today Kate S. Petersen does her best to explain why there’s good reason to believe that human action is causing global climate change:

More than a century of experimental and observational research by generations of scientists shows that modern global warming is driven by greenhouse gases emitted by human activity. Scientists know that natural CO2 emissions are not driving modern global warming because they are reabsorbed by natural “carbon sinks.” However, additional emissions by humans have resulted in excess greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere − driving global warming.

Sadly, I doubt she will convince anyone who is not already predisposed to agree with her. Rather than wasting time debating whether, to put it succinctly, “global warming is real”, let’s focus on what the right policies are to deal with it.

My view is that almost all of our present efforts are wasted motion. EVs. Wind and solar power. The whole magilla. Why? There are basically two reasons.

First, China and India are increasing their production of greenhouse gases faster than we can conceivably reduce ours. And, second, while the actions we’re presently taking provide plenty of opportunities for government spending and increasing the income of the wealthiest of our citizens even if successful they will make life harder and more expensive for ordinary people while influencing the actions of those wealthiest citizens hardly at all. That’s perverse because if we are to accomplish anything we must reduce the greenhouse gas productions of the wealthiest—they produce a lot more than ordinary people.

That’s why, for example, a carbon tax is such a lousy idea. It’s regressive—it falls hardest on those least able to pay it while the wealthiest can just shrug it off.

Also, there are lots of problems with wind and solar that can be summarized as that they cause environmental problems of their own while not having an energy density suitable for industry.

Consequently, my policy preferences are:

• More nuclear power
• Carbon capture and sequestration
• Reduce our imports
• Focus efforts on reducing the greenhouse gas production by the rich rather than by the poor. Examples of such measures are the banning of private ownership or lease of jet aircraft or substantial federal taxes on homes of 4,000 square feet or greater

I’m open to other suggestions and I’d like to hear yours.