At his blog Lawrence Siskind presents a point by point rebuttal of the charges made against Israel. Here’s an example:

Israel refuses to let the Palestinians have a state of their own.

The Palestinians were offered a separate state of their own by the British in 1937, by the United Nations in 1947, and by the Israelis in 2000 and 2008. In each instance, they turned down the offer, rather than live as neighbors with a Jewish state. No wonder the late Israeli statesman Abba Eban once said: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

The post is definitely one-sided. If I find a comparable pro-Palestinian post, I’ll link to it similarly.

My sole observation is completely tangential. I often hear it claimed that not all Palestinians support Hamas. I’m sure that’s true. However, what also seems to be true is that as of the most recent polling information from last spring a majority of Palestinians believe a two-state solution is unworkable. That would appear to differ from Hamas’s position only in detail.

In an op-ed in Newsweek Brad Palumbo points out something distressing. According to a recent Harvard-Harris poll although among Americans, generally, there is a consensus of support in favor of the Israelis following Hamas’s attack on Israel, the situation is quite different among Generation Z (Americans aged 18 to 24). 62% think that Hamas’s action was genocidal and 48% support Hamas. He remarks:

This is not normal. Such a moral perversion is not an organic belief that naturally emerges among decent people. On the contrary, it’s in large part the consequence of a corrosive and malevolent “social justice” ideology that’s being spoon-fed to young Americans on college campuses.

In this depraved worldview, which Elon Musk has dubbed the “woke mind virus,” the world is divided into two groups of people: oppressors and oppressed. Black people, for example, are oppressed in America. So, under this lens, Black Americans cannot be racist: They can only be victims of racism.

He attributes it to miseducation. While distressing I don’t think that’s quite right. I agree that it’s egoism if not narcissism but I suspect that much of it is due to an almost complete lack of anything resembling moral education. They only know what they see on TV (or maybe on Instagram) and that is largely amoral or immoral. I think that Mr. Polumbo is assuming that American young people are naturally moral and only through “miseducation” could they possibly hold such a view. I think contrariwise that human beings are naturally self-centered and that inculcating a moral sense in them is hard.

It sounds like a problem to me. Can it be remediated? Will it fix itself over time?

The editors of the Washington Post, donning their rose-colored glasses, urge Democrats to join with Republicans to break the impasse over the appointment of a Speaker of the House:

This is Republicans’ mess. But it hurts the whole country. If Republicans change course — for example, by nominating a better candidate — Democrats should be willing to help them clean it up.

The best — and, given the three weeks of paralysis, perhaps the only — ways to unfreeze the House involve Democrats doing more than watching Republicans fail. This would require at least some tacit understandings between the two parties, which neither side has seemed eager to develop. That has to change.

concluding:

The fact remains that, if just a handful of Democrats had voted “present” on Mr. Gaetz’s motion to dethrone Mr. McCarthy, the House would have been at work for the past three weeks and Mr. McCarthy would have felt freer to govern without constant worry that hard-right obstructionists would take him down for keeping the government open, as they eventually did. Something more like the national interest would have prevailed. At some point, it should.

The question that the editors fail to ask is should the Democrats bail out the Republicans without exacting a pound of flesh for their support and why? They imply that it should be done for the good of the country but, realistically, doing things for the good of the country is in pretty short supply these does. The Republicans should move forward for the same reason but see above.

Also omitted is that

1. It hasn’t always been like this. At first the Speaker of the House was a parliamentarian full stop. The power of the speaker has grown over the years until today we have an imperial speaker. The members of both caucuses seem to like it that way.
2. The present situation is in part an artifact of representatives selecting their constituencies rather than the other way around.
3. Wouldn’t reducing the power of the speaker be more in the national interest than electing yet another imperial speaker?

Imagine for a second that speakers were selected by lot. That wouldn’t violate the Constitution. IMO in that case the power of the speaker would be greatly curtailed. That should provide a hint.

Update

The Congressional Republicans have elected a new Speaker of the House, Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana. The vote among Republicans was unanimous and without any help from Democrats.

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.