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“What Putin wants is to transform the world order” that evolved since World War II and the post-Cold War — where “the competition between nations was about who can be richer and who can help their people prosper the most . … Putin hates that world because he loses in that world — his system is a loser in a peaceful, global, wealth-enhancing paradigm. And so what he wants is to move us back to dog-eat-dog, to a 19th-century, great power competition, because he thinks he can, if not win, be more effective there. … Let’s not think that this is a Ukrainian problem; this is a problem for us all.”

These wars very much are our business — and now clearly inescapable, since we’re deeply entwined in both conflicts. What’s crucial to keep in mind about America — as the leader of the Inclusion Network — is that right now we’re fighting the war in Ukraine on our terms, but we’re fighting the war in the Middle East on Iran’s terms.

CNN recently described, per a source familiar with it, a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment provided to Congress saying that Russia had lost 87 percent of its preinvasion active-duty ground troops and two-thirds of its tanks that it had prior to its invasion of Ukraine. Putin can still inflict a lot of damage on Ukraine with missiles, but his dream of occupying the whole country and using it as a launching pad to threaten the Inclusion Network — particularly the NATO-protected European Union — is now out of reach. Thank you, Kyiv.

At a breakfast with NATO leaders devoted to the Ukraine issue at Davos this year, Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, noted that it is we, the West, who should be thanking the Ukrainians, not forcing them to beg us for more weapons.

China under President Xi Jinping straddles the two networks, along with much of what’s come to be called the global south. Their hearts, and often pocketbooks, are with the Resistors but their heads are with the Includers

the Resistance Network “is orchestrated by Iran, Islamists and jihadists” in a process they refer to as the “unity of battlefields.” This network, he noted, “seeks to bridge militias, rejectionists, religious sects and sectarian leaders,” creating an anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western axis that can simultaneously pressure Israel in Gaza, in the West Bank and on the Lebanon border — as well as America in the Red Sea, in Syria and in Iraq and Saudi Arabia from all directions.

In stark contrast, Koteich said, stands the Inclusion Network, one that’s focused on “weaving together” global and regional markets instead of battlefronts, business conferences, news organizations, elites, hedge funds, tech incubators and major trade routes. This inclusion network, he added, “transcends traditional boundaries, creating a web of economic and technological interdependence that has the potential to redefine power structures and create new paradigms of regional stability.”

things are different in the Middle East. There, it is Iran that is sitting back comfortably — indirectly at war with Israel and America, and sometimes Saudi Arabia, by fighting through Tehran’s proxies: Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and Shiite militias in Iraq.

Iran is reaping all the benefits and paying virtually no cost for the work of its proxies, and the U.S., Israel and their tacit Arab allies have not yet manifested the will or the way to pressure Iran back — without getting into a hot war, which they all want to avoid.

The members of the Resistance Network are great at tearing down and breaking stuff, but, unlike the Inclusion Network, they have shown no capacity to build any government or society to which anyone would want to emigrate, let alone emulate

For all of these reasons, this is a moment of great peril as well as great opportunity — especially for Israel. The competition between the Resistance Network and the Inclusion Network means that the region has never been more hostile or more hospitable to accepting a Jewish state.

there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread, and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.

countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.

There are many examples of how economic and political powers manipulated the historical record to their own ends. Stalin purged disloyal comrades from history by executing them — and then altering photographic records to make it appear as if they never existed

Slovenia, upon becoming an independent country in 1992, “erased” over 18,000 people from the registry of residents — mainly members of the Roma minority and other ethnic non-Slovenes. In many cases, the government destroyed their physical records, leading to their loss of homes, pensions, and access to other services, according to a 2003 report by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.

The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903, purported to be meeting minutes from a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. First discredited in August 1921, as a forgery plagiarized from multiple unrelated sources, the Protocols featured prominently in Nazi propaganda, and have long been used to justify antisemitic violence, including a citation in Article 32 of Hamas’s 1988 founding Covenant.

In 1924, the Zinoviev Letter, said to be a secret communiqué from the head of the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain to mobilize support for normalizing relations with the Soviet Union, was published by The Daily Mail four days before a general election. The resulting scandal may have cost Labour the election.

As it becomes easier to generate historical disinformation, and as the sheer volume of digital fakes explodes, the opportunity will become available to reshape history, or at least to call our current understanding of it into question.

Decades later Operation Infektion — a Soviet disinformation campaign — used forged documents to spread the idea that the United States had invented H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, as a biological weapon.

Fortunately, a path forward has been laid by the same companies that created the risk.

In indexing a large share of the world’s digital media to train their models, the A.I. companies have effectively created systems and databases that will soon contain all of humankind’s digitally recorded content, or at least a meaningful approximation of it.

They could start work today to record watermarked versions of these primary documents, which include newspaper archives and a wide range of other sources, so that subsequent forgeries are instantly detectable.

many of the intellectual property concerns around providing a searchable online archive do not apply to creating watermarked and time-stamped versions of documents, because those versions need not be made publicly available to serve their purpose. One can compare a claimed document to the recorded archive by using a mathematical transformation of the document known as a “hash,” the same technique the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, uses to help companies screen for known terrorist content.

creating verified records of historical documents can be valuable for the large A.I. companies. New research suggests that when A.I. models are trained on A.I.-generated data, their performance quickly degrades. Thus separating what is actually part of the historical record from newly created “facts” may be critical.

Preserving the past will also mean preserving the training data, the associated tools that operate on it and even the environment that the tools were run in.

Such a vellum will be a powerful tool. It can help companies to build better models, by enabling them to analyze what data to include to get the best content, and help regulators to audit bias and harmful content in the models

In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard

With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognitio

It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally

He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal

he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist.

From the start, Trump’s brand of illiberal populism had more than a passing resemblance to Rothbard’s paleo strategy—minus, as many classical liberal critics had long predicted, any meaningful moves to actually shrink government

By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government

it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues.

Across the loose constellation of libertarian think tanks, advocacy organizations, and electoral efforts in both the L.P. and the GOP, the embrace or rejection of Rothbard’s “paleo” idea was a source of perennial tension. Rothbard himself was involved for a time in both the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, co-founding the latter before being acrimoniously ejected after a few years.

the other end of the movement came to embrace the view of libertarianism as fundamentally an extension of the larger liberal tradition, continuous with a classical liberal political philosophy rather than a socially conservative one.

Free markets and limited government were still a big part of the picture, but in service to a vision of a dynamic and pluralistic free society.

As much as each held a dim view of the other, both continued to work under the “libertarian” label.

As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.

it still embodied the burn-it-all-down reactionary ethos that saw tearing down established institutions as a necessary first step, even if that required an unrestrained autocrat

After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.

The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies.

It is no longer possible to ignore the conflict of visions about what kind of society freedom was supposed to yield. One in which private bigotry and established hierarchies were allowed free rein? Or an open and all-embracing one where different people and lifestyles disapproved by the traditional order could flourish?

The only way the libertarian movement’s demise could bring down libertarianism as a political-philosophical framework is if one expected the ideas themselves to disappear. Happily, a robust conviction of the centrality of individual liberty—or of the need to fight a tyrannical state—is in no danger of fully fading away.

Everywhere, new investment in green energy generation is being propelled by general concern for the climate, shifting corporate and household demand, the plunging prices for solar and batteries triggered by Chinese policy, and a combination of national and regional interventions

How different would we expect this data to look without the IRA?

The most useful overview of these modeling efforts that I have been able to find is by Bistline et al “Power sector impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” in Environmental Research Letters November 2023. If anyone has a better source, please let me know.

The top panel shows the historical trajectory of US generating capacity from 1980 to 2021. The second half of the graphic shows how 11 different models predict that the US electricity system might be expected to develop up to 2035, with and without IRA.

all the models expect the trends of the 2010s to continue through to the 2030s which means that solar, wind and battery storage dominate America’s energy future. Even without the IRA, the low carbon share of electricity generation will likely rise to 50-55% by 2035. Bidenomics bumps that to 70-80 percent.

The question is: “How does the renewable surge of 2022-2024, compare to the model-based expectations, with and without the IRA?”

The answer is either, “so so”, or, more charitably, it is “too early to tell”. In broad terms the current rate of expansion is slightly above the rate the models predict without the provision of additional Bidenomics incentives. But what is also clear is that the current rate of expansion, is far short of the long-run pace that should be expected from the IRA

At this point, defenders of the IRA interject that the IRA has only just come into effect. Cash from the IRA is only beginning to flow. And in an environment of higher costs for renewable energy equipment and higher interest rates, cash matters.

As Yakov Feygin put it: “Maybe the pithiest way to put it is that there are pre-IRA trends and outside IRA trends, but IRA has served to rapidly compress the timeframes for installation in a lot of technologies. So five years has turned into two, for example.”

So, to judge the impact of the IRA to date, the real question is not what has been built in 2022 and 2023, but what is in the pipeline.

Advised by JP Morgan, sophisticated global players like Ørsted are optimizing their use of both the production and investment tax credits offered by the IRA to launch large new renewable schemes. Of course, correlation is not the same as causation

Where the IRA is perhaps doing its most important work may be in incentivizing the middle bracket of projects where green momentum is less certain.

According to Utility Drive: “The 10 largest U.S. developers plan to build 110,364 MW of new wind and solar projects over the next five years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, but the majority of these projects remain in early stages of development. Just 15% of planned wind and solar projects are under construction, and 13% are considered to be in advanced stages of development, … ”

The states that I have highlighted in red stand out either for their unusually low existing level of renewable power capacity or their lack of current momentum.

Along with Texas, the pipelines for the PJM, MISO and Southeast regions (which includes Florida) look particularly healthy.

The relatively modest California numbers should not be a surprise. As Yakov Feygin and others pointed out, what is needed in California is not more raw generating capacity, but more battery storage. And that is what we are seeing in the data.

The numbers would be even larger if it were not for the truly surreal logjam in California’s system for authorizing interconnections. According to Hamilton/Brookings data the volume of hybrid solar and batter capacity in the queue for approval is 6.5 times the capacity currently operating in the state. In other words there is an entire energy transition waiting to happen when the overloaded managerial processes of the system catch up

Texas’s less bureaucratic system seems to be one of its key advantages in the extremely rapid roll-out of solar.

though it may be true that globally speaking the United States as a whole is a laggard in renewable energy development,

If California (with an economy roughly comparable to that of Germany at current exchange rates) and Texas (with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s) were countries, they would be #3 and #5 in the world in solar capacity per capita.

the obvious question is, which are the laggards in the US energy system.

So there is a lot to get excited about, at, what we are learning to call, the “meso”-level of the economy (more on this in a future post).

What the state-level data reveal is that there are a significant number of large states in the USA where solar and wind energy have barely made any impact. Pennsylvania, for instance

The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. The fact that Arizona is not a solar giant is mind boggling.

Texas is both big and truly remarkable. California already is a world leader in renewable energy. Meanwhile, the majority of the US electricity system presents a very different picture. There is a huge distance to be traveled and the pace of solar build-out is unremarkable.

This is where national level incentives like the IRA must prove themselves

And these local battles in America matter. Given the extremely high per capita energy consumption in the USA, greening state-level energy systems is significant at the global level. It does not compare to the super-sized levels of emissions in China, but it matters.

Indonesia’s total installed electricity generating capacity is rated at 81 GW. As far as immediate impact on the global carbon balance is concerned, cleaning up the power systems of Pennsylvania and Illinois would make an even bigger impact.

A key test of Biden-era climate and industrial policy will be whether it can untie the local political economy of fossil fuels, which, across many regions of the United States still stands in the way of a green energy transition that now has all the force of economics and technological advantage on its side.

One man, speaking about one of his favorite young influencers in a Telegram exchange captured by a child-safety activist, said that her mother knew “damn well” that many of her daughter’s followers were “pervy adult men.”

Meta looms over everything young influencers do on Instagram. It connects their accounts with strangers, and it can upend their star turns when it chooses. The company periodically shuts down accounts if it determines they have violated policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been shut down without such violations. 

Over the course of reporting this story, during which time the Journal inquired about the account the mom managed for her daughter, Meta shut down the account twice. The mom said she believed she hadn’t violated Meta’s policies. 

Meta’s guidance for content creators stresses the importance of engaging with followers to keep them and attract new ones. The hundreds of comments on any given post included some from other young fashion influencers, but also a large number of men leaving comments like “Gorgeous!” The mom generally liked or thanked them all, save for any that were expressly inappropriate. 

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them on Instagram or comment on their accounts. Meta’s guidance for creators also offers tips for building a safe online community, and the company has publicized a range of tools to help teens and parents achieve this.

Like many young girls, the daughter envied fashion influencers who made a living posting glamour content. When the mother agreed to help her daughter build her following and become an influencer, she set some rules. Her daughter wouldn’t be allowed to access the account or interact with anyone who sent messages. And they couldn’t post anything indicating exactly where they live. 

The mom stopped blocking so many users. Within a year of launching, the account had more than 100,000 followers. The daughter’s popularity earned her invitations to modeling events in big coastal cities where she met other young influencers. 

Social-media platforms have helped level the playing field for parents seeking an audience for their children’s talents. Instagram, in particular, is visually driven and easily navigable, which also makes it appealing for child-focused brands.

While Meta bans children under the age of 13 from independently opening social-media accounts, the company allows what it calls adult-run minor accounts, managed by parents. Often those accounts are pursuing influencer status, part of a burgeoning global influencer industry expected to be worth $480 billion by 2027, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report. 

Young influencers, reachable through direct messages, routinely solicit their followers for patronage, posting links to payment accounts and Amazon gift registries in their bios.

The Midwestern mom debated whether to charge for access to extra photos and videos via Instagram’s subscription feature. She said she has always rejected private offers to buy photos of her daughter, but she decided that offering subscriptions was different because it didn’t involve a one-on-one transaction.

The Journal asked Meta why it had at some points removed photos from the account. Weeks later, Meta disabled the account’s subscription feature, and then shut down the account without saying why. 

“There’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just finding a way to monetize from this fame that’s impersonal.”

The mom allowed the men to purchase subscriptions so long as they kept their distance and weren’t overtly inappropriate in messages and comments. “In hindsight, they’re probably the scariest ones of all,” she said. 

Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that the company will no longer allow accounts that primarily post child-focused content to offer subscriptions or receive gifts, and that the company is developing tools to enforce that.

he mom saw her daughter, though young, as capable of choosing to make money as an influencer and deciding when she felt uncomfortable. The mom saw her own role as providing the support needed for her daughter to do that.

The mom also discussed safety concerns with her now ex-husband, who has generally supported the influencer pursuit. In an interview, he characterized the untoward interest in his daughter as “the seedy underbelly” of the industry, and said he felt comfortable with her online presence so long as her mom posted appropriate content and remained vigilant about protecting her physical safety.

an anonymous person professing to be a child-safety activist sent her an email that contained screenshots and videos showing her daughter’s photos being traded on Telegram. Some of the users were painfully explicit about their sexual interest. Many of the photos were bikini or leotard photos from when the account first started.

Still, the mom realized she couldn’t stop men from trading the photos, which will likely continue to circulate even after her daughter becomes an adult. “Every little influencer with a thousand or more followers is on Telegram,” she said. “They just don’t know it.”

Early last year, Meta safety staffers began investigating the risks associated with adult-run accounts for children offering subscriptions, according to internal documents. The staffers reviewed a sample of subscribers to such accounts and determined that nearly all the subscribers demonstrated malicious behavior toward children.

The staffers found that the subscribers mostly liked or saved photos of children, child-sexualizing material and, in some cases, illicit underage-sex content. The users searched the platform using hashtags such as #sexualizegirls and #tweenmodel. 

The staffers found that some accounts with large numbers of followers sold additional content to subscribers who offered extra money on Instagram or other platforms, and that some engaged with subscribers in sexual discussions about their children. In every case, they concluded that the parents running those accounts knew that their subscribers were motivated by sexual gratification.

In the following months, the Journal began its own review of parent-run modeling accounts and found numerous instances where Meta wasn’t enforcing its own child-safety policies and community guidelines. 

The Journal asked Meta about several accounts that appeared to have violated platform rules in how they promoted photos of their children. The company deleted some of those accounts, as well as others, as it worked to address safety issues.

In 2022, Instagram started letting certain content creators offer paid-subscription services. At the time, the company allowed accounts featuring children to offer subscriptions if they were run or co-managed by parents.

The removal of the account made for a despondent week for the mom and daughter. The mother was incensed at Meta’s lack of explanation and the prospect that users had falsely reported inappropriate activity on the account. She was torn about what to do. When it was shut down, the account had roughly 80% male followers.

The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, about 92% of whom were male, according to the dashboard. Within months, Meta shut down that account as well. The company said the account had violated its policies related to child exploitation, but it didn’t specify how. 

Meta’s Stone said it doesn’t allow accounts it has previously shut down to resume the same activity on backup accounts. 

But while those are huge numbers by any measure (world GDP is around $100 trillion), they aren’t big enough to motivate most leaders to justify mitigation, which will also cost a whole lot of money.

To put it in terms the authors use, the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act will cost Americans roughly $80 per ton of carbon emissions avoided, and while each ton not pumped into the atmosphere would save the world $200 as a whole, it would only save Americans about $40 of that $200, making it feel to some altruistic but not self-evident in purely economic terms.

In their new paper, economists Adrien Bilal of Harvard and Diego Känzig of Northwestern take a fresh look at the data

They show that the social cost of carbon is likely far bigger — six times bigger — than previously estimated: losses of more than $1,000 per ton, or around 12 percent of world GDP per degree of warming.

— roughly equivalent to the economic drag on big economies if they were permanently at war.

Suddenly, that $80 Americans are spending on reducing one ton of carbon emissions is netting them $200 or so in U.S. economic activity.

Bilal and Känzig argue that it’s very much worth it for countries of means to spend the money now to avoid much greater costs down the line

the potential losses are so vast it makes sense for these countries to go ahead and act on their own to avoid climate change losses, even if other nations do nothing.

What’s different about your methodology and how did it lead you to the numbers you've come up with?

Adrien Bilal: So virtually all of the previous work that's been done on the subject has relied on comparisons of different countries that heat up or cool down at different points in time. The U.K. gets a little hotter in one year, and then Germany stays cool. And then you look at how GDP in the U.K. evolves following that change in temperature.

that generally gives you numbers in the vicinity of $150 per ton of carbon emitted and a 2 percent decline in GDP per degree Celsius in warming

we think that is quite different from what climate change is actually doing to the world. It's not only that the U.K. is going to heat up a little more than Germany, but the whole world is heating up because of climate change. And, in particular, oceans are also heating up. And when the whole planet warms, that has potentially really different implications for the climate system, increased frequency of extreme weather events that then have big local impacts. 

that's actually what geoscientists have been telling us for a long time, but it simply hadn't percolated into economics. And so we took that perspective very seriously and thought, "Well, what happens when we basically compare years where the world is very hot to years where the world is cooler?" And that gives you a much larger effect of climate change on the economy.

In their place, Trump’s stump speech has become dominated by grievances about the wrongs he believes have been done to him and his promises to get even for them. It doesn’t quite create the festive atmosphere of eight years ago, when many attendees were clearly having a great time. Where the new, more prosaic feeling lacks the uplift of the past, though, it has still managed to generate enough enthusiasm

The lack of catchy slogans might not matter if they were just slogans. But in 2016, they were a symbol of Trump’s willingness to talk about things that other candidates, including other Republicans, shied away from.

Regarding the war in Gaza, he has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the conflict to end quickly—but on Israel’s terms.

He had several such policy positions, including breaking with the bipartisan consensus on free trade, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare, and claiming to have opposed the Iraq War from the start.

The focus on the wall also showed that he was willing to deploy (putatively) “commonsense” ideas that other politicians weren’t. This helped Trump to appeal not just to Republicans but to disaffected voters of all stripes

Where Trump once trumpeted his appointment of justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he is now fumblingly trying to formulate a position on abortion that doesn’t alienate either his base or swing voters, mostly relying on ambiguity

Trump is emphasizing fewer big transformational ideas compared with 2016. His promises are a scattershot collection of ideas targeted at particular segments of the electorate: ending taxes on salary earned from tips, defending TikTok (a platform he once tried to ban), declassifying files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rolling back fossil-fuel regulations. Although he promises to clamp down on the border and deport undocumented immigrants, you won’t catch a “Round ’em up” chant at his rallies. And Project 2025, his allies’ proposal to overhaul the federal government by massively expanding political patronage, doesn’t lend itself to a bumper sticker.

Trump allots a great deal of his stump speech to mocking Biden as incoherent and senile (sometimes awkwardly) while also warning that Biden’s administration has made the United States a failed nation, and that his reelection could be fatal to the country. The disconnect between the images of Biden as doddering fool and as evil schemer is one that Republicans have struggled to reconcile but that Trump has concluded doesn’t need resolving.

Grievance is not a new note at Trump rallies, but four and eight years ago, he used to talk about other people’s grievances and promise to redress them. Now the grievances are largely his own

One big problem for Clinton was the criticism that she had no compelling goal for her candidacy other than that she wanted to be president. Trump’s campaign now is about nothing so much as his desire to be president.

Even Project 2025 is about the accumulation of executive power itself, rather than any particular policy goal

The Israeli military relies on reservist soldiers, some of whom have described growing exhaustion as Israel manages conflicts for months on end on multiple fronts, including the border with Lebanon and in the West Bank. An end to fighting in Gaza would give Israeli forces a respite that analysts say is needed, especially if fighting with Hezbollah escalates further.

Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general and veteran of multiple wars, said tensions between the Israeli military and security establishment and Netanyahu are at a record high.“The IDF feels and the security echelon feels that we exhausted the purpose of the war. We reached the maximum tactical peak that we can achieve,” he said. “As long as Rafah was there, they could say finish the job. OK it’s finished now.”

Netanyahu has rejected a series of proposals for possible alternatives to Hamas, including an American plan to bring in the Palestinian Authority and Arab calls for a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas. Some military analysts and former Israeli officials have questioned whether installing a new government in Gaza was ever possible, given that Hamas has managed to survive the Israeli military assault.

“We need to make a decision,” said Ziv. “Even a bad decision, that’s OK. Let’s say [we] occupy Gaza in the next few years because we need to clear up the last few terrorists. OK, it’s a bad decision, but it’s a decision. The military needs to know.”

The dispute between Netanyahu and the military centers in part on how officials define a defeat of Hamas. An Israeli military official said the army considers a battalion “dismantled” not when all its fighters are killed, but when its command structure and ability to carry out organized attacks are eliminated. 

Military analysts say that Hamas’s militia forces are likely to survive the Israeli military operation even in Rafah, in part because the Israeli army’s approach leaves many lower-ranking Hamas fighters in place. Hamas’s top leadership in the enclave, including its leader, Yahya Sinwar, have also eluded Israeli forces throughout the war.

“Hamas is preserving its forces in Rafah rather than engaging the Israel Defense Forces, likely because Hamas does not believe Israel’s Rafah operation will be decisive,” said an assessment this week from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.

People bemoan a perceived rise in bad dating etiquette such as “ghosting” and the sending of unsolicited sexual messages, and blame the way online romance makes it easier to discard potential partners at a touch of a button. “Hacks,” or tricks designed to game the apps for better dates, abound, demonstrating the shortcomings of their designs. 

the companies’ growing emphasis on pricier premium services is giving users new reasons to scrutinize the algorithmically driven path to romance.

Bumble made its name as a free app that only let women make the first move, for example. But since 2016, it has charged for advantages such as unlimited “swipes” to connect with prospects. The most expensive plan today costs $80 a month

“This is not a new phenomenon, and I think that dating apps have crystallized and brought those concerns to the fore, primarily because the prior institutions that were responsible for connecting individuals—such as family, friends, churches, other homes of worship—were not able to assume blame in the same way,” said Jess Carbino, a sociologist who has worked as a consultant for Bumble and Tinder.

Unlike apps such as Tinder and Bumble, the League requires profile approval to join. On the app, users get three to five prospects a day unless they upgrade to become a paying member, which runs $99 a week or $399 for a three-month subscription. Once a match is made in the app, users have 14 days to initiate a conversation before the matches expire. 

That shame mangrove has been completely uprooted by Trump.

The reason people felt ashamed is that they felt fidelity to certain norms — so their cheeks would turn red when they knew they had fallen short

in the kind of normless world we have entered where societal, institutional and leadership norms are being eroded,” Seidman said to me, “no one has to feel shame anymore because no norm has been violated.”

People in high places doing shameful things is hardly new in American politics and business. What is new, Seidman argued, “is so many people doing it so conspicuously and with such impunity: ‘My words were perfect,’ ‘I’d do it again.’ That is what erodes norms — that and making everyone else feel like suckers for following them.”

Nothing is more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities, added Seidman, than “when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority.

Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will never unite us.”

. Trump wants to destroy our social and legal mangroves and leave us in a broken ethical ecosystem, because he and people like him best thrive in a broken system.

He keeps pushing our system to its breaking point, flooding the zone with lies so that the people trust only him and the truth is only what he says it is. In nature, as in society, when you lose your mangroves, you get flooding with lots of mud.

Responsibility, especially among those who have taken oaths of office — another vital mangrove — has also experienced serious destruction.

It used to be that if you had the incredible privilege of serving as U.S. Supreme Court justice, in your wildest dreams you would never have an American flag hanging upside down

Your sense of responsibility to appear above partisan politics to uphold the integrity of the court’s rulings would not allow it.

Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be a mangrove.

when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage — and immediate demands for firings — “it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding.”

In November 2022, the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit advocacy group, surveyed 1,564 full-time college students ages 18 to 24. The group found that nearly three in five students (59 percent) hesitate to speak about controversial topics like religion, politics, race, sexual orientation and gender for fear of negative backlashes by classmates.

Locally owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our national politics. A healthy local newspaper is less likely to go too far to one extreme or another, because its owners and editors live in the community and they know that for their local ecosystem to thrive, they need to preserve and nurture healthy interdependencies

in 2023, the loss of local newspapers accelerated to an average of 2.5 per week, “leaving more than 200 counties as ‘news deserts’ and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information.”

As in nature, it leaves the local ecosystem with fewer healthy interdependencies, making it more vulnerable to invasive species and disease — or, in society, diseased ideas.

It’s not that the people in these communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are really hard to break through.”

we have gone from you’re not supposed to say “hell” on the radio to a nation that is now being permanently exposed to for-profit systems of political and psychological manipulation (and throw in Russia and China stoking the fires today as well), so people are not just divided, but being divided. Yes, keeping Americans morally outraged is big business at home now and war by other means by our geopolitical rivals.

More than ever, we are living in the “never-ending storm” that Seidman described to me back in 2016, in which moral distinctions, context and perspective — all the things that enable people and politicians to make good judgments — get blown away.

Blown away — that is exactly what happens to the plants, animals and people in an ecosystem that loses its mangroves.

a trend ailing America today: how much we’ve lost our moorings as a society.

Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be mangroves.

civility itself also used to be a mangrove.

“Why the hell not?” Drummond asks.“You’re not supposed to say ‘hell,’ either,” the announcer says.You are not supposed to say “hell,” either. What a quaint thought. That is a polite exclamation point in today’s social media.

Another vital mangrove is religious observance. It has been declining for decades:

So now the most partisan national voices on Fox News, or MSNBC — or any number of polarizing influencers like Tucker Carlson — go straight from their national studios direct to small-town America, unbuffered by a local paper’s or radio station’s impulse to maintain a community where people feel some degree of connection and mutual respect

In a 2021 interview with my colleague Ezra Klein, Barack Obama observed that when he started running for the presidency in 2007, “it was still possible for me to go into a small town, in a disproportionately white conservative town in rural America, and get a fair hearing because people just hadn’t heard of me. … They didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me at face value.”