There are some signs that the war between Israel and Hamas is expanding into a regional conflict. I’ve already mentioned the increased shelling of northern Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon. U. S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have come under fire lately. In the Wall Street Journal Michael R. Gordon, Nancy Youssef, and Gordon Lubold report:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Tuesday that Washington would react “swiftly and decisively” if Iran or its proxy forces attack U.S. personnel after Tehran raised the risk of a larger Middle East conflict in recent days by unleashing the regional militias it has spent years arming.

For more than six months, these Iranian-backed militia groups refrained from launching drones or rockets against American troops in Iraq and Syria, as part of what appeared to be an undeclared truce between Tehran and Washington.

That came to an abrupt end when U.S. officials said that Iran-backed groups launched 10 drone and rocket attacks against bases that U.S. troops use in Iraq and another three on a U.S. base in southeast Syria.

The attacks were carried out between Oct. 17 and Oct. 24. In one of the attacks at al-Asad air base in Iraq last week, U.S. troops shot a militia group’s drone out of the sky, where it fell atop of an American drone and destroyed it, U.S. military officials said.

In Yemen, the Iranian-backed Houthis also fired five Iranian-provided cruise missiles and launched about 30 drones toward Israel in an attack that was larger than initially described by the Pentagon, U.S. officials said.

Last week, the USS Carney guided missile destroyer, which was operating in the northern Red Sea, shot down four of the cruise missiles while a fifth cruise missile was intercepted by Saudi Arabia as it protected its airspace, according to people familiar with the episode. Those cruise missiles have a range of more than 2,000 kilometers (about 1,240 miles), the Pentagon said Tuesday, which would enable them to reach targets in Israel.

We may have the opportunity to see what the unit of measure of “swiftly and decisively” is soon. Other risks are also emerging. The active arms smuggling network from Iran to the West Bank also appears to have stepped up its activity. Also in the Wall Street Journal Sune Engel Rasmussen and Benoit Faucon report:

Iran is a patron of Hamas, which it over the years has supplied with money, weapons and training. But as Egypt has cracked down on smuggling routes through the Sinai Peninsula, which borders on the Gaza Strip, Hamas has become increasingly self-reliant on indigenously built weapons, especially rockets.

The bulk of Iranian weapons to Palestinians go into the West Bank, particularly to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group allied with Hamas, according to a senior Jordanian security official. The official said networks of smugglers, assisted by the Syrian government and Iranian-backed militias like Hezbollah, were growing.

“The weapons flow has really increased, specifically over the past year. This is because Iran has been much more focused on the West Bank recently, and trying to arm some of the groups there, especially the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is Iran’s more direct partner,” said Michael Horowitz, Israel-based head of intelligence at Le Beck International, a risk consulting firm.

The smuggling routes extend from Iran across Iraq, Jordan, and Syria.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk via RealClearPolitics expresses concern that we’re “sleepwalking into World War III”:

I think we are sleepwalking our way into World War Three, sleepwalking our way into World Wr Three with one foolish decision after another. Really, people should be deeply self-reflective. If they make their predictions have not come true. They should consider whether perhaps their predictions might not come true either.

The “bad decisions” didn’t just start recently. They’ve been made over the last 30 years at least. What I notice is that so many of the arguments being made in favor of the “bad decisions” are completely a priori and discussions devolve into name-calling if you dare contradict them. I have no doubt that the decisions are in sombody’s interest. I don’t see how they’re in the U. S. interest in any but the most indirect of ways.

David Kilcullen has a high level overview of the coming invasion of Gaza by Israel at Foreign Affairs. Here’s a sample:

Hamas is a technologically enabled, socially embedded force fighting on its home terrain. Its fighters operate in small networked teams that are armed with lethal weapon systems of the kind that, in recent memory, were largely only available to the armed forces of nation-states. Hamas’s tactics are likely to involve network defense: holding strongpoints to delay and disrupt IDF advances while keeping mobile forces in reserve, ready to counterattack or re-infiltrate cleared areas. They will make extensive use of military off-the-shelf weapons as well as booby traps and improvised explosive devices. Hamas has also already demonstrated its ability to fight a sophisticated information war to mobilize international support.

What started as a horrific attack on Israeli civilians, exploiting shock and surprise, is now likely to congeal into a grinding, slow, contentious, and costly battle in the air, on land, on the sea, and in cyberspace. In Gaza’s complex, cluttered, heavily populated and densely urbanized environment, it will be extraordinarily difficult to make sense of what is happening, even for those on the ground. The effect of emerging technologies, the enduring features of urban combat as identified by NATO—friction, density, complexity, and all-directional threats—along with the physical, human, informational, and infrastructure constraints that cities impose on military forces will all inform what is about to unfold.

Understanding the tactical difficulty of urban warfare adds context that Israel can use to evaluate the wisdom (or otherwise) of any full-scale ground assault in Gaza. IDF planners are likely concerned that once their forces are decisively committed to ground combat in Gaza, other regional players—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian-backed militias in Syria, or Iranian forces themselves—might attack Israel, creating a multifront war. This possibility might prompt Israel to mount a preemptive strike on regional players before entering Gaza, but such a strike would be a high-stakes gamble.

I don’t really have a lot to add to that article which I recommend. The present conflict began with a multi-pronged surprise attack. I doubt that will be the last surprise in the conflict.

The piece that caught my eye this morning was this one by Annalisa Merelli at STAT:

Fixing the U.S. health care system can seem like a herculean task. But the solution is “actually very simple,” according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Amy Finkelstein.

In their recent book “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care,” Finkelstein and Stanford economist Liran Einav describe how years of research have led them to the conclusion that the best way forward is for the U.S. to offer universal basic health care coverage.

It isn’t until nearly the end of the piece that Ms. Merelli gets to the fine print:

Countries are divided, however, on what constitutes basic services. There are services that are clearly fundamental (say: vaccines, primary care, cancer care, maternity care) and others that are definitely not (for instance, purely cosmetic plastic surgery). But Finkelstein noted that a lot of services fall into a gray area, such as physiotherapy, new drugs that only extend life expectancy for a few months, Viagra, and in vitro fertilization.

Under certain circumstances I could support universal healthcare in the United States. I do have certain questions:

• What would be covered? I don’t believe it could work if elective procedures are covered, for example.
• If universal basic healthcare controls costs why are costs rising so fast in the United Kingdom?
• How will a country of 330 million however wealthy pay for the healthcare of 8 billion people?
• How will we persuade Medicare beneficiaries to accept a lower level of benefits than at present?
• What if they’re wrong?

I suppose we shouldn’t worry about the problems a system of universal basic healthcare might face in the U. S. Such a thing would not be possible politically for some of the reasons suggested above.

I will need to reread this article by Dante Chinni and Stephanie Stamm at the Wall Street Journal a couple of times. I think the interpretation of the data is almost the opposite of what the article claims to show.

As you can see from the graphic above, the American electorate’s voting has become very slightly more Republican (margin of error) over the last 50 year and considerably less Democratic. The article purports to demonstrate that the degree to which Baby Boomers have become more Republican is offset by the degree to which Millennials and Gen Z is Democratic. I think it actually shows that a) the Silent Generation has changed a lot; b) the Baby Boomers have changed a little; and c) Millennials and Gen Zers are quite a bit more Republican than the Baby Boomers were at their age.

More research needed.

One of things that puzzles me is that literally none of the articles, opinion pieces, etc. I have read points out that the Egyptians control the Rafah entry point to Gaza. Take this report at the Associated Press for example. After reading it you’d be left with the impression that the Israelis control entry into Gaza. The Egyptians are mentioned in passing:

Two Egyptian officials and a European diplomat said extensive negotiations with Israel and the U.N. to allow fuel deliveries for hospitals had yielded little progress. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information on the sensitive deliberations.

One Egyptian official said they were discussing the release of dual-national hostages in return for fuel, but that Israel was insisting on the release of all hostages.

That’s just about it. The reality is that all that would be necessary to allow the hundreds of trucks of supplies lined up on the Egyptian side of the border or for foreigners and/or refugees to cross into Egypt is for the Egyptians to allow it.

Egypt’s position is understandable but not particularly praiseworthy. The recognize that if Gazans flee Gaza, the Israelis win. And Hamas is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood which is opposed to the Egyptian government.

And by extension Thomas Sowell as well. Today in a piece at The Free Press Konstantin Kisin declaims:

A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?

The best way to answer that question is with the help of Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today. In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.

Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.

Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one.

While I agree with Dr. Sowell that the dichotomy with respect to the perfectability of human nature is real and one thing that distinguishes progressives from conservatives, I don’t believe it is the only thing. For one thing, there is no universally accepted definition of what human nature is. Indeed, that’s part of the argument.

I would go on to observe that those dichotomous options, “unconstrained” vs. “constrained” are non-verifiable. Consider it this way: can human beings be perfected and how do you know?

Alternatively, I would assert that there are at least three axes in which people diverge: belief, preference, and gain. Mr. Kisin’s piece largely deals with belief. But there are other differences which cannot be explained easily by whether you accept the “unconstrained” or “constrained” vision. Preference is one of them. Some people want to be taken care of; others want to be left alone. Both of those preferences exist on a gradient—most people want to be taken care of in some circumstances but not in others (that preference is called “succorance”). Other are nurturance (whether you want to take care of others), interoception (how important understanding yourself) is, and many others.

The last distinction on my list, I am sorry to say, is gain: whether you benefit personally from what you advocate.

In short I think the distinction between those who adopt the “progressive mindset” and those who adopt the “conservative mindset” is much more complicated than Mr. Kisin supposes. That very complexity explains how one might go to bed believing one is a progressive and wake up believing one is a conservative. Or vice versa.

Could someone explain to me how you reconcile this “scoop” reported by Barak Ravid at Axios:

The Pentagon plans to send Israel tens of thousands of 155mm artillery shells that had been destined for Ukraine from U.S. emergency stocks several months ago, three Israeli officials with knowledge of the situation tell Axios.

Why it matters: The Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Ministry of Defense told their U.S. counterparts they urgently need artillery shells to prepare for a ground invasion in Gaza — and a potential escalation of the war by Hezbollah along the Israel-Lebanon border, Israeli officials say.

with the White House’s assertion that there is no conflict between U. S. support for Israel and U. S. support for Ukraine?

The editors of the Washington Post echo the president’s remarks:

Delivered at what he appropriately called an inflection point in history, the president’s comments reflect the risk that the United States might abandon its friends, as wars rage in Ukraine and Israel. There is broad support for both countries among the U.S. electorate. A generation of Americans who came of age around 9/11 is wary of more “forever wars,” however. Increasingly isolationist Republicans argue that U.S. resources might be better spent on this continent — 117 House Republicans voted against the most recent Ukraine aid package.

And so it behooved the president to make the links between the two conflicts, as he did in Thursday’s somber address to the nation, and to convince Americans that continued support, for both Ukraine and Israel, is not just a principled stand in defense of democracies under attack — but in the United States’ self-interest. At stake is not only the survival of democracies abroad, however imperfect, but the United States’ long-standing interest in preventing two major regions, Europe and the Middle East, from falling under the sway of hostile hegemons (Russia and Iran, respectively), with the inevitable damage to U.S. security and economic prosperity that would imply. If Russia were to succeed in Ukraine, its next target would probably be a NATO ally, which U.S. troops are committed by treaty to defend. The potential stakes extend to Asia, where successful aggression by Russia or Iran could embolden China to seize Taiwan.

Unfortunately, there is a gap between what you might want to do and what you are able to do. Diverting weapons from Ukraine to Israel sounds like an admission of that limitation to me.

Which of the following are we most likely to do:

1. Support Israel and shortchange Ukraine
2. Support Ukraine and shortchange Israel
3. Attempt to support both and end up shortchanging both, possibly alternately
4. Reindustrialize the United States so we can support both

I’m guessing C.

Here’s the follow-up. Which is the greatest U. S. national interest (pick one):

1. Israel
2. Ukraine
3. Taiwan

I say Taiwan.

The first strand I plan to cut starts with David Mamet’s questioning how Jews can be progressives. After explaining to us the circumstances under which Jews came to the United States and how so many came to support Franklin Roosevelt, he declaims:

Why do Jews vote Democratic? Partly from tradition — conservatives have heard a Liberal Jew, when asked to defend or explain various absurd or inconsistent Democratic positions, shrug and joke: “I’m a Congenital Democrat.” I understand, for I was one, too.

But there is no more cosy mystery in the antisemitism of the Democratic Party; Representatives are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists and pro-Palestinians, calling for the end of the state of Israel — that is, for the death of the Jews. And Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary, and will not call out the unutterable atrocities of Hamas. The writing is on the wall. In blood.

Moses was instructed to have the Jews smear blood on their doorposts to identify themselves, and, so, avert the wrath of the Angel of Death. Mythologically, the blood can be said to be their own: the message, that if they chose to stay in Egypt, their blood would not mark the doorpost, but would wash the floor.

Many German Jews served the Kaiser during the First World War, and explained to the Nazi thugs that they were Good Germans. And they were killed. And many defended themselves, in the Thirties, by admitting, among themselves, that the Eastern Jews were uncouth; just as today some Western liberal Jews “agree” with the Squad that the terrorists, though they have “gone too far”, “may have a point”: that Israel’s desire to exist is not consonant with an enlightened humanism. This is, in effect, a plea for exemption, not only from terror, but from conscience, for the liberal Jew means the Israelis “are making it hard on the rest of us”. Which is true; for if Israel’s innocent anguish is acknowledged, he will have to admit he has been living a terrible lie.

Many good German Jews in the Thirties ignored their brothers and sisters to the East, and later died with them. My generation, born right after the Holocaust, wondered: “Good God, didn’t you see what was happening around you? Are you literally willing to die rather than admit you were mistaken?” The answer, today, to many liberal American Jews, is “Yes”.

In response, the world’s Leftist media calls for the chastisement of Israel and support for Palestine, while those who consider themselves mere “liberals” moderate their cowardice by calling for a “ceasefire” — which is to say, a pause while Hamas re-arms. This is where the libel of the hospital bombing is instructive. It is, quite literally, another example of the West’s oldest, most reliable, and most permissible sick entertainment: the call for Jewish extinction. The invitation, here, is no different from that of the carnival barker: thrills, chills, and excitement galore.

The position of the Jews changed in 1948 with the foundation of the Jewish State. But the habits of 2,000 years, now of Liberal Jews (in the diaspora and in Israel) have not changed. These appeal, in the name of humanity, to powers which may believe in humanity, but, unfortunately, do not consider Jews human.

And so, the carnival barker titillates us with the thrills available for a pittance: one dime, one tenth part of the dollar. But the sick thrill of antisemitism also has a price: the surrender of reason, and, with it, of conscience.

I think there’s something that Mr. Mamet has not considered, possibly because he does not share the belief.

In Judaism there is a teaching referred to as tikkun olam, “repair the world” in which there is an obligation to engage in actions intended to repair or improve the world, e.g. “social justice”. In orthodox Christianity the obligation to perform charitable acts is the following of Jesus; the notion of repairing the world would be considered blasphemous.

I suspect that trend in Judaism provides a natural affinity between the religious beliefs of those who embrace it and an expansive social safety net, indeed, an ever-expanding one.

Consequently, I suspect that Mr. Mamet will be frustrated if he expects Jews to flee the Democratic Party however many members of its progressive or “democratic socialist” wing support or, at least, make excuses for Hamas.

“Buridan’s Ass” is a philosophical paradox. It was articulated in its present form by Jean Buridan in the 14th century but it goes back much farther, at least to Aristotle:

Should two courses be judged equal, then the will cannot break the deadlock, all it can do is to suspend judgement until the circumstances change, and the right course of action is clear.

For the last couple of days I’ve been stuck between those two identical bales of hay, unsure of what to post on. Rather than waiting for circumstances to change I’m going to try to hack my way through the paradox.