At Outside the Beltway James Joyner laments over the lack of alternatives that are both workable and benign in Israel’s war with Hamas, largely following Ezra Klein’s podcast:

I’m not hopeful that any strategy will solve what, for 75 years, has been an intractable problem. But, ultimately, unless Israel is willing to kill every Palestinian man, woman, and child—and they clearly* aren’t—then, ultimately, some political solution is the only conceivable solution.

The problem, of course, is that it’s simply unthinkable that Israel’s government—or any democratically elected government whose population has been attacked in such a brutal and horrifying fashion—would respond in that fashion, at least in the short term. As much as I think Netanyahu is a thug whose policies have set back the cause of peace for decades, there’s simply no way that even the most beneficent Israeli leader could persuade his people right now to respond to mass atrocities by turning the other cheek and seeking to build a bridge to the future with the Palestinian people.

With the exception of the first comment, Michael Reynolds’s, in the ensuing thread most of the comments reflect comforting nostrums. Neither the post nor the comments really come to terms with the underlying problem. There is no resolution that will be effective in securing Israel against terrorist attacks short of exterminating the other party.

Let’s not mince words. A “one-state solution” can only have one outcome: a unified Palestine that is not liberal or democratic and in which Jews are at best a persecuted minority. Why? Because the Palestinians either outnumber the Israeli Jews already or will soon and their population is growing faster. Gaza’s experience has been tersely expressed (in another context) as “one man, one vote, one time”.

A “two-state solution” is unworkable and won’t result in an end to terrorist attacks against Israel. The West Bank settlements aren’t the problem. A Jewish state of Israel is the problem. Take the banner flown by pro-Palestinian demonstrators seriously: “From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free”. There is no room for a Jewish state of Israel in that goal.

The above is why I take the position that I do. We should support Israel. Israel as presently constituted is a liberal, democratic state that is multi-ethnic and multi-confessional. Our efforts WRT to Israel should be dedicated to keeping it that way. However, the objectives of the most radical faction of Israelis, sometimes referred to as “the ultra-conservative”, is not particularly well-aligned with U. S. interests in the Middle East. Therefore, we should support the Israelis with reservations rather than unconditionally.

The Palestinians have a similar problem. The agenda is dictated by the most extreme faction of Palestinians. As a result a Palestinian state while being unworkable would not be stable or a liberal democracy and would likewise not be aligned with U. S. interests in the Middle East. I for one would find U. S. support of a Palestinian state deeply problematic.

The editors of Bloomberg are worried about Social Security:

Washington seems determined to ignore the country’s rapidly worsening fiscal picture, but sooner or later policymakers will be forced to pay attention. When they do, they’ll find that changes to Social Security are unavoidable.

No doubt, any such effort will meet strong political resistance. That’s why nothing has been done for 40 years and counting. The best approach — on the merits and as a matter of political feasibility — would combine entitlement reform with fresh thinking about financial security in retirement.

They propose a combination of raising the Social Security Retirement Age and mandatory savings. I don’t believe they’ve thought the issue through. I have no problem with increasing the SSRA as has been intended all along but I think their proposal does not raise it high enough (I’m far over SSRA myself). But I think they will find that mandatory savings has a disastrous effect on the U. S. economy.

If it were still 1983 (the last time we reformed Social Security) it wouldn’t be so bad. But personal consumption expenditures have increased as a percentage of GDP since then:

They don’t really get to the crux of our problem which is that over the last 40 years the percentage of income subject to Social Security withholding has declined precipitously.

Said another way: The top 1% of income earners hold a far larger proportion of total income than they did forty years ago (even more than 50 years ago) and very little of their wages not to mention earnings are subject to Social Security. There’s more than one way of accomplishing that: either increase FICA max faster or ensure that more people earn more.

In other words I don’t think our problem is that people are retiring too early or that they aren’t saving enough but that there are too many low income earners relative to the total population and not nearly enough people earning near FICA max ($160,200 this year). That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when you maximize the number of minimum wage jobs which has been the objective of policy since the end of World War II. It’s perverse but that’s how politiians keep score.

That’s the question asked by David Sacks’s post at Responsible Statecraft. Here’s a synopsis:

The narrative dam our media has built around the reality in Ukraine is apparently breaking wide open, and the truth is finally spilling out:

• Ukraine’s war aims are unrealistic.
• Staggering casualties have decimated the Ukrainian army.
• Conscription policies are draconian.
• Morale is collapsing.
• Corruption is uncontrollable.

Most of these bullet points are observations I’ve been making right along. I make them because they are true.

I absolutely think that Russia was wrong to invade Ukraine. I would like for Ukrainians to be able to live in freedom in Ukraine. That’s not the direction in which things are moving.

If you’re looking or a metric for how serious President Biden is about supporting Ukraine, don’t look at his appropriations requests—those are funny money. Look at his emphasis on reindustrializing the United States. I wish I had saved it but not long ago I saw a table quantifying Ukraine’s use of various munitions and our present ability to produce them. There was a stark mismatch. We can’t produce enough munitions for Ukraine to prevail on field of battle without a major change in the U. S. economy in the direction of much more fundamental production.

And that’s just Ukraine. Add Israel and the possibility of more hotspots around the world and how poorly we are prepared becomes increasingly obvious.

I found this technology interesting. Reported by Tina Carey at CleanTechnica:

Turbines based on supercritical carbon dioxide came across the CleanTechnica radar back in 2020, when we noticed that the US Department of Energy was eyeballing the technology as an energy efficient replacement for steam-driven turbines.

The familiar steam turbines in wide use at power plants today are based on 19th century technology. They typically range in size from less than 100 kilowatts to more than 250 megawatts, depending on the use case. When used to generate electricity in a central power plant they are massive beasts the size of a bus or larger.

Supercritical carbon dioxide turbines are different. They don’t deploy steam as a working fluid. Instead, they use a concentrated form of carbon dioxide — sCO2 for short — that hovers somewhere between a gas and a liquid.

The Energy Department anticipates that new supercritical carbon dioxide turbines can shave energy consumption at power plants by 10%, but that’s just for starters. They have a much smaller footprint than their steam-driven cousins, resulting in manufacturing efficiencies all along the supply chain.

By way of comparison, the Energy Department calculates that a 20-meter steam turbine would shrink down to one meter if replaced with an sCO2 turbine.

The implications of this are substantial including more efficient carbon capture at fossil-fueled power-plants and lower capital costs. Don’t underestimate the potential impact of that. Smaller turbines with lower capital costs increase the number of potential locations for energy generation and improve the prospects for even more highly networked power generation than at present.

This post has gone through a number of titles which of itself should tell you something about events. The first was, “So, It’s Going To Be This Sort of War”. That was when I had read the description of the Israeli attach on northern Gaza by Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Emily Rose at Reuters. Here’s the lede:

GAZA/JERUSALEM, Oct 31 (Reuters) – Israeli airstrikes hit a densely populated refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, killing at least 50 Palestinians and a Hamas commander, and medics struggled to treat the casualties, even setting up operating rooms in hospital corridors.

Israeli tanks have been acting in Gaza for at least four days following weeks of air bombardments in retaliation for an attack by Palestinian Hamas militants on mostly Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 and the taking of more than 200 hostages.

That changed to “When Is a Refugee Camp Not a Refugee Camp?”. I finally settled on the title above after reading Dov Lieber, Margherita Stancati, and Omar Abdel-Baqui’s reportage at the Wall Street Journal:

Israel said Tuesday it hit a Hamas command and tunnel network in northern Gaza, causing widespread casualties and damage in a crowded Palestinian refugee camp.

Israel said it killed dozens of militants, including a commander who it said led the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Hamas said hundreds were dead or wounded but didn’t say how many were militants, while hospital officials in Gaza reported receiving scores of bodies.

The Israeli strike flattened entire apartment blocks, leaving deep craters. Video footage aired by Palestinian television networks and Al Jazeera showed hundreds of people digging through the rubble with their hands to extract bodies and survivors, many of them children.

Israel’s military said the assault targeted “terrorists and terror infrastructure belonging to the Central Jabaliya Battalion,” saying militants had taken control over civilian buildings in Jabalia refugee camp north of Gaza City. It said the strike had killed large numbers of militants. Israeli ground troops, backed by tanks and jet fighters, are expanding their invasion against Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said the military had struck an underground bunker where a senior Hamas commander who played a pivotal role in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel was hiding. He said dozens of militants had been killed along with the commander. He also said the strike hit between buildings, but that the collapse of tunnels used by Hamas militants in the area led to significant structural damage.

You can barely tell the two articles are about the same events. Which is true? Both? Neither? I cannot tell.

If the entirety of what you read about it is like the Reuters story you might conclude that the Israelis are conducting indiscriminate attacks against civilian targets. If you read the WSJ article you might conclude that Hamas is deeply embedded in the civilian population and legitimate even necessary attacks against Hamas put civilians at risk.

I also don’t know whether this is just the “fog of war” or propaganda. I suspect there’s some of both.

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.