The observations in Jason L. Riley’s Wall Street Journal column approximate my own views on border security and immigration:

A wall would have some deterrent effect but probably not much, and critics are correct when they argue that there are better ways to spend border-enforcement dollars. Today, the majority of people who settle in the U.S. without authorization arrive legally and then overstay their visas. According to a Center for Migration Studies report last year, these “overstays” have outnumbered illegal entries every year for the past decade—a problem more fencing doesn’t address. Still, Bismarck was right: Politics is “the art of possible, the attainable,” and a wall may be what is necessary to advance immigration reform while Donald Trump is president, or even after he’s left office.

A national Bipartisan Policy Center survey on immigration released in July concluded that the “consensus set of immigration policies that Americans support is more to the right than many realize.” “Most Americans believe that the current system is broken, out of control, and antiquated,” reads the summary. “They don’t feel that anyone is controlling the process or supervising who enters the country legally, and they think that insecure borders make it easier for people to come to the United States illegally.”

Moreover, a larger percentage of survey respondents approved of a wall (48%) than disapproved (41%), which is consistent with other recent polling on the enforcement of immigration laws. A Quinnipiac University poll from April asked, “Do you think that undocumented immigrants illegally crossing the border with Mexico is an important problem, or not?” Seventy-one percent of respondents said yes.

Note that this was before the country witnessed mobs of Central American migrants rushing the border trying to force their way in. The bottom line is that a majority of voters have views on border security that are much closer to Mr. Trump’s than many liberals want to admit. The Democrats ignore these concerns at their own peril. Ask Mrs. Clinton.

It also precedes the recent deaths of children taken into custody by ICE. I don’t know whether opinion has shifted or will shift.

Where I disagree with Mr. Riley is that there is any compromise to be had on immigration and border security. I think that the Democrats, particularly the House Democrats, will reject any plan that doesn’t include something that is effectively amnesty for people already in the country illegally and Republicans will reject any plan that could be characterized as amnesty. It’s an impasse. It has been an impasse for decades. It will remain an impasse.

The immigration reform that was enacted in 1986 amounted to legalization now, enforcement later. Events have demonstrated that we can reasonably conclude that was ineffective. It ran afoul of moral hazard and employers were able to escape punishment for hiring workers without legal status because all that was required of them was plausible deniability.

Our present policy such as it is is gravely immoral. The continuing, reasonably dependable supply of new workers who will work for minimum wage or less keeps wages low for native-born Americans, particularly blacks, and previous cohorts of immigrants. It also enables business models depending on these continuing low wages. It’s one of the reasons for increasing income inequality. Our present inability to arrive at any compromise is a tragedy.

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead muses over the decline of “human rights diplomacy”:

Think back to 2011, when President Obama knew where the arc of history was headed and planned to steer American policy accordingly. As the Arab Spring toppled Hosni Mubarak, Ben Rhodes told reporters the administration believed “there is not going to be a return to the way things were in Egypt.” The people had spoken, tyranny was broken, and Egyptian democracy was here to stay.

Those were heady times. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was creating an “Islamist democracy” in Turkey. Aung San Suu Kyi was being compared to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela for her reformist advocacy in Burma.

Also in 2011, the “international community” proposed a new concept to change the way the world worked: the “responsibility to protect.” The U.S. intervention in Libya, we were told, established a new principle in international law that dictators could no longer massacre their people with impunity.

This sunny worldview couldn’t long withstand the cold realities of geopolitics. After Libya, Mr. Obama’s appetite for human-rights interventions diminished abruptly. Here he was reflecting public sentiment. Americans still believed in human rights and democracy, but they had lost confidence in the ability of policy experts to advance these principles effectively on the world stage.

Let me answer Dr. Mead. The effort was doomed from the start. Here in the United States, increasingly ruled by Hamiltonians, we have Wilsonians who, unlike the progressive interventionists of the first part of the 20th century which rose from the missionary tradition, urge promoting American values at the points of guns wielded by someone else while actually profiting from it, the guns are actually being wielded by Jacksonians who deeply resent the constraints being placed on them by the Wilsonians and Hamiltonians, in a country that would promote its putative values more effectively with a Jeffersonian strategy of practicing them at home while wishing the promoters of liberal democracy outside our borders well without insisting on being their vindicators.

It is much harder to practice one thing while preaching another than it used to be. People in far away countries have videocameras in their mitts, too, and what happens a world away will be shown on the Internet in all its horror before you can mount a propaganda campaign. And we have plenty of enemies who will rejoice in the opportunity of bringing our flaws into the light of day.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Michael Mukasey points out an unexpected intersection between present day feminism and the foundations of 20th century Islamist radicalism:

In the 1940s, an Egyptian writer and Education Ministry employee harshly criticized the government under King Farouk as insufficiently Islamic. That writer, Sayyid Qutb, was rewarded with a traveling fellowship, apparently to get him out of the country.

Qutb arrived at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in 1948. He didn’t much like it. “I stayed there six months and never did I see a person or a family actually enjoying themselves,” he wrote. Even gardening drew his contempt: “There is nothing behind this activity in the way of beauty or artistic taste. It is the machinery of organization and arrangement, devoid of spirituality and aesthetic enjoyment.”

But contempt curdled into revulsion when Qutb dropped in on a church dance that followed a service—a shocking juxtaposition in itself: “The dance hall convulsed to the tunes on the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs. . . . Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion.”

The song that was playing: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” For Qutb, it epitomized the West’s moral degradation. He condemned the “animal-like mixing of the sexes,” concluded that Americans were “numb to faith in art, faith in religion, and faith in spiritual values altogether,” and determined that Islam would have to be perpetually at war with such a society.

He went back to Egypt, quit the civil service, joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and eventually became the organization’s spiritual leader.

I don’t have a lot to add to that. I mostly just wanted to point it out.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” began as a novelty number, written by Frank Loesser,creator of the Broadway Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, as something that he and his wife, Lynn Garland, would perform together at parties. It caught on. It bears a resemblance to earlier vaudeville numbers. My grandfather’s vaudeville act included a similar song which I still have committed to memory. The very slightly naughty quality has been popular during all but the most puritanical periods.

I guess we’re entering one of those now although with all of the sex and nudity in popular entertainment that’s hard to believe.

I’m surprised that Robert Samuelson doesn’t mention two reasons for the Federal Reserve to continue bringing interest rates closer to normal in his column in the Washington Post on how the Fed should react to recent developments:

The current job expansion is an important venture in social policy. People who were tossed out of the labor market are returning, along with many who were never in the market. This may have long-term benefits. If the Fed is too aggressive in fighting weak inflation and mild speculation, it might kill the recovery and sacrifice these gains.

On the other hand, the Fed could become too concerned with a recovery. Throughout history, the Fed has been prone to overstay episodes of easy money and loose credit. By the time this is obvious, the damage has already occurred. Inflation has accelerated, or speculation has become widespread. The economy then enters a long stretch of poor performance.

The first unstated reason is that with the present continuing low interest rates the Fed doesn’t give the Fed much leeway in the case of an economic downturn. This is all the more astounding since econpundits have been harping on it for most of the last decade. Apparently, it’s suddenly become uninteresting.

But second persistent low interest rates have generally injured savers, particularly elder savers who are necessarily risk averse. I would hope that interest rates held under 2% for a decade would disabuse critics of the notion that most people actually able to save for their own retirements. Only those in the two decile of income earners have that luxury and not all of those.

After cataloguing China’s hard and soft power initiatives in his article at The American Interest Larry Diamond remarks:

What we call “the era of engagement”—when we believed that deepening ties would bring a more open, pluralistic, and law-based society in China—is over. What we need now is engagement without illusions: engagement that demands greater transparency, fairness and reciprocity in the relationship; and engagement with a resolve to defend the integrity of our democratic institutions. We call this approach “constructive vigilance.”

This is now a historic juncture not only in the U.S.-China relationship but also in the domestic politics of how to think about the relationship. While there remain many advocates of the old unconditional approach, an emerging bipartisan consensus now sees this stance as dangerously naïve.

I reached that conclusion more than thirty years ago, before most of the harm had already been done. Better late than never, I guess.

I’d like to present a challenge to Nicholas Kristoff, Tom Friedman, and thousands of other journalists and pundits. What is it that you hate about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that isn’t ten times worse in China?

I agree with the editors of the Washington Post that increased and improved aid to Central Americans is an important component of reducing immigration of Guatemalans, Nigaraguans, and so on into the United States:

If Mr. Trump signs on to Mr. López Obrador’s vision for reviving Central America with an ambitious aid plan — one that would also serve U.S. interest as a means to “disincentivize” migration — that could be just the sweetener Mr. López Obrador needs to go along with Mr. Trump’s asylum plan.

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship, or at least a constructive alliance, between a pair of populist presidents who happen to be ideological opposites but whose goals on Central American migration should be aligned. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. López Obrador has his own reasons to discourage migrants who, in the case of the thousands who have reached Tijuana with the caravans, have become an increasingly unpopular local irritant.

and with their skepticism about the effectiveness of a wall:

Hundreds of miles of existing barriers at the border haven’t stopped the flow of migrants, and neither will Mr. Trump’s wall, if it is ever built.

President Trump’s citing of Israel in his argument for the effectiveness of a wall is misplaced. The Israelis are committed in a way and for reasons that we are not. Any wall we build will never be as impenetrable as the Israelis’ wall.

The editors neglect to mention that Mexico’s laws against illegal immigration are harsher than ours if anything and their enforcement of them can be quite ruthless. Both carrots and sticks are necessary to enforce our laws and one element of the “sticks” would be biometric ID and requiring employers to verify the eligibility of workers with stiff penalties for infractions and significantly greater likelihood of detection.

While I agree with Nicholas Kristof’s detestation of the Saudi regime and admire his courage in actually going to Saudi Arabia and attempting to gauge public opinion there, as reflected in his latest New York Times column, that an individual as intelligent and well-informed as he should be could possibly write the following:

The truth is that as Saudi Arabia’s significance as an oil producer diminishes, we need Saudi Arabia less. In 25 years, if we’re freed from the tyranny of imported oil, we may not need it at all.

staggers credulity. Saudi Arabia’s influence over the price of oil would not end if we imported no oil at all. We actually import relatively little oil from KSA but we have notional allies who are largely dependent on Saudi oil and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But the Kingdom’s significance is not limited to imports. They along with the other Gulf states are the low cost producers of high quality oil.

And to understand the full scope of that impact look up how polyester is produced, in particular purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and mono-ethylene glycol (MEG), both byproducts of oil refining. Look up where and how it is used.

Unless you envision an authoritarian United States with a command economy, being “freed” from Saudi and Gulf state tyranny will not be accomplished in our lifetimes. It would take character and determination, both in short supply in American politics. Do not hold out objectives we cannot achieve or, as an ancestor of mine put it, do not set the fence too far. We must choose not to support the truly dreadful Saudi regime and cope with the consequences rather than hoping the consequences will go away enough to make refusing to support them less painful.

I just heard Dick Durbin, the senior senator from ADM Illinois, fully support the position that I have held down for lo! these many months. Congress should just let Robert Mueller conduct his investigation and keep their noses out of it.

My advice: more light, less heat.

goes to John Crudele of the New York Post, who arrives at the surprising conclusion:

Here are the piping-hot details. Those pizzas you take home are 16 inches in diameter. The ones that are sold by the slice are 20 inches. Let’s say a full pizza costs $15, which we think is the typical price these days. And a slice of pizza goes for $2.50, also standard around Manhattan and in the ’burbs.

There are typically eight pieces to a pie. So a pie that is sold by the slice is worth $20 — or eight pieces times $2.50 if you want to see the math.

The 16-inch pie is just under 201 square inches in size. The 20-inch pie is 314 square inches. So one slice of the eight-piece, 16-inch pie is 25.12 square inches. And a piece of the 20-inch pie is 39.25 square inches.

With those numbers, you are paying 7 cents per square inch for the smaller pie and only 6 cents per square inch for the larger one. (Those are rounded just like the pies.)

So, to my surprise and maybe yours, it’s typically a better bargain to go into the pizzeria and order eight single slices of pizza rather than a full pie. To be precise (or as precise as you can get with these “typical” numbers), you’d be getting 56 percent more pizza for only 33 percent more cost.

Hat tip: RealClearInvestigations