Here’s what I want for Christmas and the New Year:

• I want Congress to pass the bill funding aid for Ukraine and Israel, increasing staffing at the border, and changing our policy on asylum and for the president to sign it and enforce it.
• I want the U. S. Supreme Court to define clearly and unambiguously what is and is not an insurrection, whether Trump can be disqualified from seeking re-election under the terms of the 14th Amendment, and who has the authority to make the determination.
• I want Russia to stop making war on Ukraine.
• I want Hamas to surrender.
• I want Israel to stop funding settlements on the West Bank.
• I want Congress to raise the debt ceiling and enact a budget.
• I want Hollywood to make a movie I genuinely want to go to the theater to see.
• I want neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump to seek re-election.
• I want the city to correct what their contractors screwed up in our alley.
• I want the bozos at work to start taking my advice, start doing their own jobs, and stop trying to do mine.

Nothing big or ostentatious. I’m under no illusions. I don’t think I’ll get any of those things.

2023 was a bad year for Hollywood. Consider the top grossing pictures (per Box Office Mojo):

Production costs are estimates and from miscellaneous sources.

A number of things are apparent from these results. First, Greta Gerwig, who wrote and directed Barbie, has cemented her position as a powerful force in Hollywood. Congratulations to her. Barbie, despite many predictions of its failure, is one of the highest grossing pictures ever and, well, money talks.

Second, the overall box office grosses for 2023 remain 20% lower than the pre-pandemic grosses in 2019. They may never recover.

Third, we may have seen the end of the blockbuster superhero movie. For GOTG3 to make money it needed to gross $625M by most estimates and it did. But it was the only superhero picture to do so in a year filled with releases of superhero pictures. The rest all lost money.

Third, it was a very, very bad year for Disney. Nearly all of its 2023 releases, particularly its live action releases, lost money. Additionally, its other business units, especially its streaming unit, all lost money. Clearly, they’re doing something wrong. I presume that its CEO Bob Iger will blame it on the other guy but it’s hard to see how he could survive another year like 2023.

Even with its gargantuan budget Avatar 2 made money. Not a lot when you add the promotion budget to the production budget but it made money. Will there be another sequel?

#10 and #11 on the list must send shivers up the spines of Hollywood execs. Neither was a Hollywood movie. Sound of Freedom was crowd-sourced. The Taylor Swift movie was financed, produced, and promoted by her and her people. Add one more picture: Godzilla Minus 1. Released on December 1, the $25 million movie has already grossed three times its production cost. That highlights a critical problem: making Hollywood movies is too damned expensive.

IMO the role of “wokeness” is much exaggerated and only tells part of the story. Corporate Hollywood movies are designed by committees and look it. They’re derivative and repetitive with hardly a creative bone in their collective body and people are bored with them.

We have yet to see what the long-term effects of the writers’ and SAG-AFTRA strikes will be. If they’ve done permanent damage to the studios, that in turn will be devastating to the economy of Los Angeles and that of California more generally.

James Joyner comments on a piece at the BBC:

Honestly, while I concede that Gardner’s focus is on the “international politics stage,” the main setbacks for the West have come from democratic backsliding in so many countries. The Trump phenomenon in the United States is of course the most prominent but we’ve seen growing support for far-right, anti-democratic parties across much of Western Europe. That’s a far greater danger to Western values and influence than any of those listed in the article.

I commend the post to your attention as well as a comment there by Michael Reynolds which might be summarized as “we’re doing just fine”. I think he’s overstating the damages suffered by Russia and understating how disastrous the war has been for Ukraine but otherwise I’m in material agreement with him.

But consider the original piece from the point-of-view of the ethnic nation-states of Europe! The immigration they have received over the last decade from the Middle East and Africa has been nothing short of catastrophic for them. France has based its society on the notion of “Frenchness” for well over a century and that is being challenged. Many of their new immigrants don’t consider themselves to be French and don’t care to be French. In Germany the unemployment rate for immigrants is at least 20% higher than for the native-born while in Sweden it’s twice as high.

Nearly all of those fleeing the unrest in the Sahel are going to Europe and that shows few signs of abating. That will be a challenge for the foreseeable future.

Note, too, that despite the war in Ukraine and whatever threat posed to them by Russia defense spending in most European countries is about what it was as a percentage of GDP in 2000. Either they don’t think that Russia poses a threat to them or they’re clinging to the idea that we’ll defend them. Increasing their military spending threatens the government benefits to which they’ve become accustomed. No wonder uncertainty not to mention instability in the United States is concerning to them.

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”.