Category: Uncategorized

Aid to Ukraine and Israel (and Taiwan) is being held up because Republicans are demanding that the aid be tied to border security changes. As best I can figure out, these are their demands:

1. Restart construction of the wall.
2. Make asylum harder to get by tightening the standard for "credible fear."
3. Give the president power to shut down the asylum system.
4. Reinstate the "safe third country" policy that bans asylum for anyone who passes through a safe country on their way to the US.
5. Beef up the border patrol and the number of asylum judges.
6. Restrict humanitarian paroles that allow the entry of immigrants from certain countries if they have an American sponsor. Presumably this would also restrict things like President Biden's recent grant of temporary legal status to nearly half a million Venezuelans who are already in the country.

How unreasonable are these things? I'd say #3 is absurd overreach, but I'm not sure Senate Republicans are insisting on it. It would probably get tossed out in court anyway. And #4 is problematic too, especially since Mexico wouldn't think highly of it.

As for the others, the wall is a waste of money but we've wasted plenty of money before with no ill effects. The credible fear standard really does need to be better and more tightly defined, even if we can debate exactly how much. More border agents and more asylum judges are a good idea. And the humanitarian parole program isn't very big to start with, so restricting it wouldn't do a lot of damage.

Republicans also want to end "catch and release," but I'm not quite sure how you do this. If someone makes it into the country but isn't yet deportable, what else are we supposed to do? Put them all in huge detention camps? That might well appeal to Republicans, but it's a nonstarter.

Here's a suggestion that's a little bit out there: I wonder how Republicans feel about DREAMers these days? What would happen if Biden agreed to most of their immigration demands in exchange for legislative approval of the DREAM Act? Would they be open? My sense has always been that although many Republicans oppose DREAM, most of them don't oppose it very much. It's for kids, after all.

Anyway, just a thought. But it strikes me that Biden could agree to 4½ Republican demands without too much trouble, and maybe get DREAM as part of the deal. Unless you just flat out object to any restrictions on illegal immigration, what's the harm?

If it's inflation day, it's also earnings day. And earnings increased nicely in November:

These are both pretty good numbers: high enough to mean real gains for workers—especially after the big August decline—but not so high that it's likely to worry the Fed too much.

Since the start of the pandemic, overall wages are now up 1% compared to the rate of inflation and nonsupervisory (blue collar) wages are up 3%. That's not gangbusters, but it's better than nothing. Inflation may have been high for a while, but wage gains were even higher.

Today is inflation day, and the news was generally good. Both CPI and core CPI were a little higher than last month but still in pretty good shape:

The core rate of CPI has been rising a bit since its low point in June, but even at that it's still only running at 3.5%. That's not too worrisome.

Measured on a year-over-year basis, headline inflation clocked in at 3.1% and core inflation at 4.0%. Both were lower than they were last month.

The latest version of "No, you are" comes from Allysia Finley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who says that Biden is the real dictator. Her evidence is the usual farrago of right-wing nonsense: Biden signed some executive orders she doesn't like; he put in place some protections from oil drilling that she doesn't like; he has border policies she doesn't like; and most laughably, a lunatic federal judge said he was bullying social media platforms, an allegation so ridiculous that even the Fifth Circuit largely overturned it. Oh, and Biden's Justice Department has gone after Donald Trump on "trumped up charges." Uh huh.

This is all nonsense. Some of it is just stuff Finley disagrees with while the rest is a figment of her imagination. Conversely, here's a reminder of why lots of people are afraid of Trump's authoritarian streak:

• He tried to violently overthrow the 2020 election.
• He often speaks admiringly of foreign dictators.
• He has explicitly promised to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies.
• He wants to eliminate big chunks of the civil service so he can appoint his own loyalists instead.
• He writes about "rooting out" all the vermin who don't support him.
• He laughs about being a dictator on "day one" and then stopping.

These aren't merely points of ordinary partisan disagreement. They are the signs of a man who will at least try to bring down the rule of law for his own aggrandizement. He may not succeed, but it won't be for lack of desire.

This is Agathla Peak in Arizona. According to our friends at Wikipedia, it is an "eroded volcanic plug consisting of volcanic breccia cut by dikes of an unusual igneous rock called minette."

It is one of many such volcanic diatremes that are found in Navajo country of northeast Arizona and northwest New Mexico.

The English designation Agathla is derived from the Navajo name aghaałą́ meaning 'much wool', apparently for the fur of antelope and deer accumulating on the rock. The mountain is considered sacred by the Navajo.

The New York Times has an interesting piece today about pedestrian deaths in the US. As I've noted before—along with many others—US pedestrian fatalities decreased for decades but then suddenly turned up in 2010. Since then fatalities have continued to drop in other countries but have increased about 50% in the US. Why?

The Times brings something new to this mystery: According to their analysis, pedestrian deaths have gone up only at night. During the day fatalities stopped declining, but didn't go up.

Possible reasons range from automatic transmissions to increased cell phone use to larger cars and trucks on the road. None of these seem really convincing, though. It turns out the evidence just doesn't support them. But there's also this fascinating tidbit:

This prompts an obvious alternative explanation: The increase in fatalities has something to do with pedestrian behavior. If it were driver behavior, after all, every age group would be increasing.

And guess who uses smartphones the most? Ages 18-64. Children largely don't have phones and old people don't use them much. So maybe the big change is pedestrians staring at their phones and walking unsafely?

Saying this is taboo, because we're not supposed to blame virtuous pedestrians when nasty, reckless, polluting drivers are ready at hand. And yet, if this were a matter of bigger cars or distracted drivers, surely they'd be wreaking havoc on kids and the elderly too? Why wouldn't they?

Granted, this is just a guess on my part. And there's another factor here that the Times doesn't mention: Only fatal crashes have gone up. The total number of pedestrian crashes has been rock steady the entire time.

So: the problem is only fatal crashes at night among ages 18-64 in the US. That is indeed very peculiar. And it's at least worth a look to see if this suggests something going on among pedestrians, not just drivers.

Over at New York, John Herrman tries to figure out what the heck Elon Musk is doing with Twitter. Along the way he notes this: "After bone-deep layoffs, the company is still bleeding talent."

That reminds me: When Musk took over Twitter he immediately fired half the employees, including an astonishing number of engineers. In the ensuing months, every time Twitter suffered an outage or a glitch of some kind it seemed like the whole world pounced. It was always a harbinger of what was to come as Twitter slowly deteriorated into unusability.

But it's now been more than a year and Twitter is.......fine? Sure, it's shedding advertisers like cat hair, but that's because of Musk's contempt for the things advertisers want. Operationally, Twitter seems to be running smoothly with a tiny fraction of the engineering staff it used to have. So what were all those engineers doing back in the pre-Musk era?

For what it's worth, I'll also repeat here something I've said repeatedly on Twitter itself: I don't really notice much difference since Musk took over. Lots of people are abandoning Twitter, but I can't quite figure out why. Maybe the decline of Twitter is more obvious if you follow lots of sketchy accounts? In my case, I follow only about 150 accounts and all of them are normal, sober feeds. I haven't been bombarded with trolls or bots or white nationalists or anything like that. Everything is pretty much the same as always.

I still have a hard time figuring out how Twitter survives if advertisers abandon it en masse because they don't need the grief, but otherwise it seems OK. Am I missing something?

In my post yesterday about the past 20 years of horrific Israeli behavior I noted that "There are reasons things have turned out this way, many of them the responsibility of Arab nations and the Palestinians themselves."

Unsurprisingly, many people asked just exactly what part of the historical record could explain or justify Israeli conduct. It's a fair enough question, because although this history is both contentious and well-known, it's also peculiarly unknown to a lot of people these days.

So here's a nickel summary. First off, this is the original 1947 UN map showing the partition of the old British Mandate in Palestine into two new states, one Jewish and one Arab. There are several things to notice:

• Gaza is much larger than it is today and almost touches the West Bank.
• Jerusalem is solidly within the West Bank and is designated as an international enclave.
• The city of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast is an Arab enclave.
• Arab lands extend north to the border with Lebanon.
• All of these areas were to be connected by extraterritorial roads, guaranteeing free passage within each state and free passage of all to Jerusalem.

So what happened? Zionist leaders weren't thrilled with the partition but reluctantly accepted it. Arab leaders rejected it completely. Partly this was on the grounds that Israel had been given the best land, but mostly it was because they flatly refused to accept the establishment of a Jewish state. They declared war on Israel as soon as the partition was announced, with the stated intent of destroying it.

They lost, and by the time the war ended a lot of territory had changed hands. Israel took Jaffa, the northern Arab region, most of Gaza, and much of the West Bank—and forcibly expelled nearly a million Palestinians from Israeli territory in the process. Jordan seized the rest of the West Bank. Egypt took the remaining piece of Gaza. The extraterritorial roads, needless to say, were consigned to the dustbin of history.

From that point on the Arab states enforced a total air and land blockade against Israel while Egypt blocked its use of the Suez Canal. In 1956, Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba, preventing Israel from developing an alternate route to the Red Sea and Asia. At the same time he nationalized the Suez Canal, prompting an invasion from Britain, France, and Israel. They pulled back due to international pressure and Nasser reopened Aqaba.

During the rest of the 50's Palestinian fedayeen trained in Eqypt mounted repeated attacks across the border into Israel. In 1964 Nasser created the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1967 he blockaded Aqaba again and planned an imminent war against Israel, joined by other Arab states.

They lost. During the war Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights on the border with Syria. Israel then began building settlements on the West Bank in order to protect itself from further attacks.

In 1973 the Arab States attacked again. This was a close run thing, but again, they lost. The 1973 war shook Israel badly, and after it ended they ramped up the settlement program.

In 1988 Palestinians launched the First Intifada, a civil uprising against Israelis. This happened against a background, over the previous two decades, of hijackings, terrorist attacks, missiles launched into Israeli territory, PLO attacks across the Lebanese border, and the establishment of Hezbollah after the Lebanon War.

The Palestinians lost that intifada. Then, at the Camp David Summit in 2000, peace terms between Israel and the Palestinians seemed to be finally in sight, but the PLO pulled out and the talks collapsed. Shortly afterward, the Second Intifada started, marked by gunfights, suicide bombings, stone-throwing, and rocket attacks. The suicide bombings in particular produced an understandable panic among the Israeli population.

Nonetheless the Palestinians lost. In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza but Hamas won elections to run the territory. They declared their unconditional desire to destroy Israel, which was met by an Israeli/Egyptian blockade of Gaza. Since then Hamas has kept up a steady but intermittent barrage of missiles fired into Israel. In 2023 they launched a brutal cross-border attack against Israel.

To summarize:

1948: Arabs launch a war of destruction against Israel.

1956: Egypt blockades the Gulf of Aqaba and nationalizes the Suez Canal, touching off a war.

1967: Arab states plan a war of destruction against Israel but are stopped before it can begin.

1973: Arab states launch yet another war of destruction against Israel.

1982: PLO attacks from Lebanon incite a border war with Israel.

1988: Palestinians launch the First Intifada.

2000: Palestinians launch the Second Intifada.

2007: Hamas takes over Gaza and promises the destruction of Israel.

2023: Hamas launches a brutal attack on Israeli civilians, torturing and killing over a thousand people while taking 200 hostage.

History is contingent. It's not right to say that Palestinians today "deserve" ill treatment because of something that happened in 1948. But at repeated points since then, Arab wars have provoked reactions that eventually metastasized into what we have today. Each of these reactions was a response to an attack in recent memory, and only over time have the beginnings fallen away into mist.

Given this history—even if you take a different view of who started what—it's all but inevitable that Israel would take harsher and harsher measures to protect itself. This doesn't justify the past two decades of Israeli callousness and cruelty, especially against Palestinians in the West Bank, but it does make it understandable.

The Wall Street Journal reprises yet again Jerome Powell's great dilemma:

Inflation has fallen faster this year than many Fed officials anticipated after a hair-raising series of rate increases that none of them envisioned two years ago.

The big questions now are about when the Fed can start cutting rates and by how much. The answers will matter greatly to households, markets and possibly the 2024 presidential election.

One danger is that Powell and his colleagues—blamed for reacting too slowly to address surging inflation two years ago—will wait too long to lower rates as they ensure inflation is fully extinguished. That mistake could curb economic growth too much, causing a recession.

The hubris here is remarkable. Powell and his buddies on the Fed just can't bring themselves to admit that they aren't the ones responsible for inflation coming down. Their model of the economy is implicitly this:

Rate hikes → a miracle occurs → inflation comes down

Rate hikes don't directly affect inflation. How could they? There's an intermediate step, and everyone knows what it is:

Rate hikes → demand slows → inflation comes down

Until we see a slowdown in demand, the Fed's rate hikes haven't yet had an effect. So far, though, we haven't seen even a hint of a demand slowdown:

In addition, GDP was up 5.2% last quarter. Unemployment is running at 3.7%. Nonresidential investment is up. Wages are up.

This isn't a "soft landing." Just look at the numbers. The jet is still in the air cruising at 600 knots. We haven't even started our descent.

So one of two things is true. Either the Fed has reduced inflation through pure magic, or the Fed hasn't had any effect yet and inflation is down because supply chains have returned to normal.

The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the latter.

To a lot of oldsters like me, the depth and extremity of campus support for the Palestinian cause—and its attendant hatred of Israel—can be inexplicable. But it's not that hard to understand. If you were born after 1990 or so, your experience of Israel and the Palestinians is not 75 years old, with everything that implies. Rather, it's been molded exclusively over the past two decades—a period that's seen very little Palestinian aggression. That means young people have experienced what, from their view, looks like a fathomless, unprompted, and wanton persecution of Palestinians by a powerful and ruthless Israeli state that is allowed by the US to treat an oppressed minority however it wants.

Here's what they see:

A West Bank under rigid military rule that administers one justice system for Israelis and a different, far harsher one, for Palestinians. Roadblocks, travel restrictions, segregation, checkpoints, Israeli-only roads, and countless other indignities of daily life. Censorship and long lists of banned books. Restrictions on visitors. Military tribunals that imprison thousands of Palestinians on specious grounds, including hundreds held in "administrative detention" without even the charade of a trial. Construction of a 400-mile prison wall manned by military guards who shoot anyone (on the Palestinian side) who gets too close.

Steady carving up of the West Bank that splinters Palestinian territory into Swiss cheese and makes a mockery of any future Palestinian state. Military raids against Palestinian towns. Extremist outposts that are tacitly supported even though they're illegal even under Israeli law. Settler violence against Palestinians that's rarely punished. Routine land seizures from Palestinian enclaves.

Demolition of homes and eviction of Arabs living in East Jerusalem. A blockade of Gaza that restricts water, fuel, food, and medicine from its residents. Deliberate policies that keep Palestinians in grinding poverty.

And in Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader who treated Barack Obama with open contempt and is actively opposed to any kind of two-state solution. Then, following October 7, prosecution of a ruthless war that has indiscriminately killed at least ten times more Gazans than Israelis. And a barbarous squeezing of the Gaza blockade to make life all but impossible for the survivors.

This is very far from comprehensive, and it's unconscionable even if you have a good understanding of the decades of history that prompted it. If you don't, it's unconscionable and gratuitous, a case of a country tormenting its powerless occupied subjects just because it can. Even the modest amount of Palestinian violence during this era is easy to interpret as nothing more than the righteous flailing of a brutally oppressed people.

This view, in my opinion, is ahistorical. There are reasons things have turned out this way, many of them the responsibility of Arab nations and the Palestinians themselves. But even that doesn't justify Israel's actions over the past two decades—and if you're familiar only with those two decades it merely looks like brutality for its own sake. Is it any wonder that young people feel the way they do about Israel and Palestine?