Musings On September 11

 * I was supposed to be in a trial out of town today for one of my clients. She's been hospitalized since Sunday (it is not life threatening at this time, although it sucks to be in the hospital, of course). So, the trial had to be continued to a future date to be determined. As a result, I have some found time today.

* I was in court 24 years ago, on September 11, 2001, when the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon took place, and Flight 93 crashed after passengers rose up and disrupted the efforts of the men who hijacked the plane. 2,996 people were directly killed in the attacks including 19 terrorists were killed in the attacks, predominantly passengers on the four hijacked flights, people in the World Trade Center, and World Trade Center first responders. 

I still lived in the same house and was married to the same wife. Back then, I was a junior associate attorney with a two year old and an infant. Now, my children have finished college, have apartments of their own, have good jobs, and have significant others with good jobs. My daughter is engaged to be married in less than a year. I'm a few days away from starting a new job as a senior city attorney for the City and County of Denver, after almost twenty years of self-employment as an attorney in the interim.

* In the U.S., the 9-11 attacks, after briefly completely shutting down commercial air travel in the U.S., resulted in the formation of the Transportation Security Administration, the reorganization of the federal government bureaucracy to create a Department of Homeland Security, the establishment of much more strict security checks and protocols for commercial air travel, the creation of memorials and compensation schemes for the victims of the attacks (several thousand people were killed), the rebuilding of the Pentagon, and the erection of a new skyscraper where the World Trade Center once stood. Islamic terrorism in the U.S. after 9-11 proved to be extremely rare and small in scale. Some of the measures imposed in the wake of that attack, like a requirement to remove one's shoes in a security line that was triggered by a single failed shoe bombing attack on December 22, 2001, are finally being rolled back now. The 9-11 attacks also spurred the passage of the controversial PATRIOT Act which strengthened the authority of U.S. intelligence agencies, the substance of which largely remains on the books with several modifications adopted since then.

* A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, dismissing a lawsuit alleging the arbitrary detention without probable cause and mistreatment of American Muslims in the wake of the 9-11 by the federal government adopted a new standard for bringing federal lawsuits, that replaced "notice pleading" that allowed lawsuits to be brought upon information and belief to be substantiated in the discovery process with "plausibility pleading" that requires allegations of facts that were actually known to state a plausible claim for relief to bring a federal lawsuit, and many but not all U.S. states subsequently also adopted this standard. The case was dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have actual knowledge of the insider discussions of top U.S. officials in adopting the policy. The case and a related one called Twombly, which involved an anti-trust lawsuit in which the plaintiffs did not have the "smoking gun" of actual knowledge of the deal reached by allegedly conspiring insiders who had allegedly reached an anti-competitive agreement with each other, made it much harder to bring lawsuits that involve misconduct that only actual insiders have actual knowledge of without court ordered discovery.

* The 9-11 attack was planned and orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization operating in Afghanistan, an organization that the Taliban, which controlled almost all of Afghanistan at the time. al-Qaeda was backed financially and intellectually mostly by factions of the Saudi Arabian royal family and allied wealthy elites were were not part of the ruling faction. The terrorist was Saudi Arabian and Egyptian and Lebanese nationals.

In response to the attacks, Congress promptly and almost unanimously passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against this non-state actor. Starting on October 7, 2001, a small U.S. force using a combination of CIA operatives, U.S. Special Forces, and U.S. air power promptly crushed the Taliban (by December 7 of 2001), which had been on the verged of conquering the entire control over the opposition of a coalition of warlords, called the Northern Alliance, that was resisting them. 

A multinational coalition led by the U.S. then occupied Afghanistan in the resulting power vacuum, shepherded a constitutional assembly based upon local traditions which adopted a Western style government (but with Islamic law as the supreme law of the land) under which a democratically elected civilian government of Afghanistan was formed, with the multinational force supporting the newly formed Afghan government (whose take on Islamic law was far less extreme than that of the Taliban) in counterinsurgency actions against the Taliban. 

The Afghan government fell in 2021, just days after U.S. forces withdrew on August 30, 2021, under an executive agreement that previous U.S. President Trump had negotiated with the Taliban without Afghan government involvement. The Taliban government swiftly seized control of the entire country and has imposes a very strict Islamic law regime in the four years that have followed. 

The AUMF, however, continues to be in force to fight a larger "War on Terrorism" against Islamist terrorist groups and insurgencies related to al-Qaeda, especially the "Islamic State" group that briefly operated an ultra-extreme Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. U.S. military action under the AUMF, predominantly in the Middle East and Africa, has continued into 2025.

About 5.5 million members of the U.S. military served in the post-9-11 era and a large share of the soldiers in the Army and Marine Corps, as well as many members of the U.S. Air Force, and a modest number of U.S. Navy sailors, serve in Afghanistan and/or Iraq (where the Iraq War was conducted from March 10, 2003 to December 15, 2011 with some U.S. forces remaining on a residual basis afterwards). There was a steady, but small stream of casualties from that conflict: 2,420 U.S. soldiers were killed and 20,093 were wounded but not killed in the Afghan War over almost twenty years, usually from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and ambushes from Taliban-linked insurgents. The peak strength of the multi-national force in Afghanistan, in October of 2019, was 17,178 soldiers (about two-thirds of whom were U.S. troops, with British and Canadian troops making up a little more than half of the rest), which was about 5% of the peak number of U.S. troops deployed in Iraq. The U.S. spent $2.3 trillion on the war in Afghanistan (about 90% for the conduct of the war and 10% for related care of Afghan war veterans). At least 243,000 people died as a direct result of this war (mostly Afghani civilians, contractors, and Afghan combatants on both sides). These figures do not include deaths caused by disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure, and/or other indirect consequences of the war. 

* Afghanistan has been immersed in civil wars and insurgencies, with only brief interruptions, since 1979 (just six years after the 18th century monarchy that unified the country was removed in a 1973 coup, with the Western style republic's government removed in a 1978 coup). As a result, on essentially ever element of human development is it the worse in the world outside Sub-Saharan Africa, with only Yemen and the Palestinian territories within Israel (especially post-October 7, 2023 Gaza) coming anywhere close.

Context For The Latest Episode Of The Cambodia-Thailand Conflict

Not so long ago, international wars were viewed as a thing of the past, after a long lull at the end of the 20th century (with the brief, but notable exception of the Gulf War in 1992, which was prompted by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), leaving only insurgencies and cross-border fights with military forces not sponsored by recognized sovereign countries. 

But, the 21st century has proved that this lull was only temporary. We've seen the Russia-Ukraine War (in 2014 and 2022 to the present), there have been military clashes as recently as this year between India and Pakistan, Israel and the U.S. have attacked Iran (which has also struck Israel), the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have recently engage the Houthi regime that is the de facto ruler of Southern Yemen after it attacked merchant ships off its coast, and there have been low intensity naval clashes between China and the Philippines in the past couple of years. A six day war between Cambodia and Thailand this month has added to that roster.

The latest round in a 118 year old border dispute related to a historic Hindu temple built by the Khmer Empire during what were the Middle Ages in Europe, near the current border between Cambodia and Thailand, led to a six day military conflict between the two countries that left at least 38 people dead and displaced at least 310,000 people, until a cease fire took hold yesterday. The two nations have had military clashes for hundreds of years, even before the ambiguous 1907 map that is at the root of this particular border dispute took hold. 

Shots were heard early on Thursday morning near Prasat Ta Muen Thom, an ancient temple on the disputed border between the two countries. Senior commanders from the Thai and Cambodian militaries agreed to de-escalate one of the bloodiest border conflicts between their nations in decades on Tuesday.The deal seemed to end, at least for now, [six] days of fighting that killed at least 38 people. More than 180,000 people in Thailand have evacuated from areas along the border, while in Cambodia, more than 130,000 people have fled their homes.

Each nation accused the other of firing first.

The Thai Army said on July 24 that Cambodia had fired rockets into civilian areas in four Thai provinces, prompting Thailand to send F-16 fighter jets to strike targets in Cambodia.

Cambodian officials said that Thai soldiers had opened fire on Cambodian troops first, at a temple claimed by both nations, called Prasat Ta Moan Thom by the Cambodians and Prasat Ta Muen Thom by the Thais. They said Cambodian forces returned fire some 15 minutes later.

The ownership of Prasat Ta Muen Thom / Prasat Ta Moan Thom is disputed by the two countries. Cambodia’s de facto leader, Hun Sen, claimed in a social media post that a Thai military commander had “started this war” by ordering the closure of the temple on Wednesday, and opening fire on Cambodian troops the next day. Thailand has accused Cambodia of starting the conflict.

The temple is in disputed territory, and people there speak Khmer, the official language of Cambodia, as well as Thai — highlighting the cultural overlap. The area is known for ruins from the Khmer Empire, which lasted from the ninth to the 15th century.

Arguments about where the border should be, and who owns the temples in the region, have led to decades of disputes. In 1962, the International Court of Justice awarded Cambodia sovereignty over the Preah Vihear Temple (known as Phra Viharn in Thailand), another temple about 95 miles away. In 2013, the court, the top judicial body of the United Nations, tried to clarify the 1962 decision. It said that Cambodia had sovereignty over the immediate area around that temple, but it left unresolved who controlled a larger disputed area. The border disputes can be traced to a 1907 map created during French colonial rule in Cambodia. The two countries interpret the map differently. Military fighting has broken out intermittently since 2008, but the last time that a major clash turned deadly was in 2011.

The two countries have had occasional military clashes and nationalist rivalries for hundreds of years.

The quoted material above (and below) is all from today's New York Times, but I have reordered the quoted material to be more readable, in this particularly poorly structured and edited article (which also includes duplicated sentences), and as a result, have not specifically noted where I omitted parts of the story. 

The cease fire was negotiated by Malaysian diplomats, with input from the U.S. and China.

The U.S. does not have particularly strong ties to either party in the conflict and wasn't directly involved in it, even though it claims to have participated in the peace negotiations, so news coverage of the conflict was relatively modest. But, the U.S. has historically favored Thailand, a constitutional monarchy which was one of the few countries never to fall to colonial powers, since it generally speaking sided with the West in the Cold War, over Cambodia, with its history of one of the most violent communist revolutions in history, which China has tended to favor.

An equally interesting aspect of the latest conflict is that Thailand's prime minister was suspended from office by a Thai court for controversial statements made not long before the shooting broke out, which is a political tactic that would be unavailable in most countries (but might be desirable if the grounds for it were suitably defined), in which the status of the prime minister would be primarily an issue for the parliament. Also, relatively few countries recognize the intermediate sanction of suspending a head of government without actually removing the head of government from office.

The border tensions have already contributed to a political crisis in Thailand: On July 1, a Thai court suspended the prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, because of comments she made about the dispute.

In June, Ms. Paetongtarn spoke by phone to Hun Sen, who is . . . Mr. Hun Manet’s father [Hun Manet has been the prime minister of Cambodia since 2023], to discuss the escalating border tensions. Mr. Hun Sen has had close ties to [Ms. Paetongtarn's] father, Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister of Thailand and the leader of a powerful political dynasty, as well as one of the country’s richest men.

Mr. Hun Sen posted a recording of their call, in which Ms. Paetongtarn seemed to disparage Thailand’s powerful military and take a deferential tone. She called Mr. Hun Sen “uncle” and told him that she would “arrange” anything he wanted.

In response, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Bangkok to express their outrage. Although Ms. Paetongtarn apologized, she has faced pressure to resign.

The Geopolitical Impacts And Timing Of The Decline Of Fossil Fuels

Colorado will not use any coal for electricity generation by 2031. It currently has ten coal fired power plants. It will take three of them off line in 2025. The rest are scheduled to be taken off line in the five years that follow.

Colorado will be more aggressive than most states in this time frame, but some states are already coal free, and almost all states are reducing the extent to which coal powers their electrical grids.

Greatly improved solid state electric vehicle batteries will start coming on line in 2025 and vehicles powered by them will make up a large share of new vehicles by 2031, greatly reducing gasoline and diesel consumption.

These developments, taken together, will greatly reduce U.S. fossil fuel consumption over the next seven years, and the reduction will be particularly dramatic for coal consumption. The falling demand for coal will hit Wyoming and West Virginia hard, because they are the two dominant producers of coal right now in the U.S. (the U.S. imports little, if any, coal). This will also heavily impact freight rail and barge transportation demand, because those are the two main ways that coal is delivered to power plants. Coal is the single largest revenue stream for both means of transportation.

The coal fired power plants are being replaced largely by wind, solar, and natural gas over the next seven years. So, the U.S. is going to see continued strong demand for natural gas, which is mostly sourced from North America, but should be seeing a gradual decline in petroleum demand (a fuel that the U.S. is largely self-sufficient in now, although global oil prices still influence domestic oil prices). The energy self-sufficiency of the U.S., however, buffers it from major macroeconomic shocks driven by rising oil prices like those seen in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The increase in the share of vehicles that are electric, spurred by solid state batteries, will be global. Indeed, many places in Europe are already in the lead on this front. And, since gasoline and diesel powered vehicles are the predominant end use of oil, this should drive down the price of oil in the global market. This will make high cost oil producers, like fracking wells and off-shore oil rigs, uneconomic first.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine War has put intense pressure on Europe, which has cut off or reduced access to Russian oil and gas, to be more efficient in order to reduce its fossil fuel consumption, to increase it share of renewable power, to delay shutting down coal fired power plants, and to keep its nuclear power plants on line. This may mean more insulation, more blankets and sweaters, more heat pumps, more electric vehicles, a shift to buses and trains, and fewer natural gas power plants.

China is in the way of these developments strongly addressing global warming, because it seems to be increasing, rather than decreasing, its coal consumption in the short to medium term. 

But China is also a world leader in electric car production and in building a high speed rail network, so China may play an important part in reducing global petroleum consumption. And, China's path in electric vehicle development is likely to heavily influence countries in Southeast Asia that in its sphere of influence, and to a lesser extent, may influence Africa and South America in which China has attempted to expand its economic influence.

China is also a leading producer of high efficiency, low cost solar panels, and eventually this, together with its rapidly declining fertility rates and starting to shrink population, may make its current round of investments in coal fired power plants short lived.

As oil demand and prices fall, this will eventually undermine the often authoritarian leaning countries with heavily oil dependent economies, in the Middle East, but also Brunei, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria. It will also impact Norway, the U.K., Canada, and U.S. states like Alaska, Louisiana, and Texas that are major oil producers. Oil wealth is what has made ultra-conservative Islam feasible in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. It has been central to the economies of Iran and Iraq. It has been an important factor allowing Russia and Venezuela and Iran to continue to be authoritarian.

These countries will see a collapse in their standard of living and they will face intense pressure to convert to a commercial economy. Most of their "guest workers" will be sent home for good.

Hamas, The Houthis, Hezbollah, Iran, And ISIS-K

Hamas and the Houthis have provoked the responses that they predictably received with wide popular support for their actions.

The decision of Hamas to conduct the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel still had strong majority support among Gazans months after the attack when the devastating consequences of that decision were clear. 

Likewise, the Houthi attacks on shipping and U.S. warships in the Red Sea are a boost to Houthi political support and legitimacy in the parts of Southern Yemen which it controls that is home to 70% of the population of Yemen, despite the fact that the insurgency it has waged there has led to a catastrophic humanitarian disaster there.

Every bit of Israeli and Western military response in Gaza and against the Houthis was deliberately provoked and had broad popular support. In both places, large majorities actively wanted to inflict harm on the U.S. and to obliterate Israel entirely. And, Gaza also continues to keep 100 or so Israeli hostages and has done nothing to surrender.

So, in both cases, while there is clearly significant suffering and plenty of people in each place, like children did nothing to deserve it, neither population is very sympathetic. Each of them brought what they are experiencing upon themselves through deliberate provocation and evil conduct. 

Iran's Role

Of course, Iran is to blame too, for giving them firepower and intelligence that they otherwise would have lacked, and for egging them on behind the scenes. Iran has played a similar role in providing capabilities for and egging on Hezbollah which has waged war on Israel for Lebanon for decades, and Shiite Islamic militias in Iraq and Syria.

Iran's role in world affairs is complicated. 

The war in Yemen is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia to a great extent, yet the two countries recently reached a Chinese brokered peace accord. China is also looking to strengthen its ties to the Houthis as a way to exempt its own merchants from Houthi piracy. China has previously joined naval coalitions against Somalian pirates in the same region. On the other hand, China is lukewarm toward Russia since it can't alienate its Western trading partners too badly, and has pulled back a majority of of expatriates and economic investments in Africa in the last five years or so, after having spent years trying to build economic and political influence in Africa and across the second and third worlds.

Iran is a key military supplier and source of military technology for both Russia and North Korea as a result of the military industrial capabilities it was forced to develop for itself after decades of Western sanctions. It probably has a few nuclear weapons, has proven it has long range missile capabilities, and its naval might in the Persian Gulf is rivaled upon plausible U.S. naval adversaries only by Russia, China, and North Korea. Iran has also not refrained from using its military capabilities on occasion and has designs on making Shiite majority Iraq into one of its client states.

Yet, Iran reached a treaty, from which Trump promptly withdrew, with the U.S. during President Obama's administration. Its democracy, while flawed and subject to a theoretic veto, is more of a real democracy than most of the Middle East and West Asia. While Iran presented itself to the world as a Shiite theocracy, it actually have considerable religious diversity and is almost as far along the path towards secularism as places like the U.S. and Ireland in terms of grass roots belief, even though the waning religious conservatives have the upper hand in terms of political power. Iran would be a natural place for an Islamic analog to the modernizing Protestant Reformation in Europe to emerge under the right circumstances. Iran has oil wealth, but unlike many other reasonably developed Islamic countries, also has a substantial commercial and manufacturing sector, leaving it in circumstances that have more in common with Turkey and Egypt, than with Saudi Arabia and UAE and Brunei which are dominated by oil wealth, or Yemen and Afghanistan which have little more than subsistence farming interrupted by long periods of civil war.

Israel's Overkill

Israel's response in Gaza has probably been overkill although it is also completely understandable. Hamas and kindred Islamist movements in Gaza, the West Bank, and across the Middle East have been trying to exterminate Israel and to wipe Jews from the face of the Earth almost since its inception in 1948. When Israel gave Gaza more autonomy and withdrew from direct supervision of the region, the Palestinians put Hamas in charge and Israel got terrorist bombings, endless rocket attacks, and the October 7 massacre in return.

President Biden treads the difficult path of not adding aid and comfort to those who would destroy Israel, while simultaneously trying to mitigate humanitarian suffering in Gaza. And, contrary to the views of many on the left, Israel is not just an American puppet that is compelled to do the bidding of an American President in response to an existential threat to it and its people.

About ISIS-K

As an aside, the terrorist attacked recently carried out at a concert in Moscow that killed about 144 people and seriously injured at least 100 more was the work of four Tajik terrorists affiliated with ISIS-K. ISIS-K is one of the main opponents of the Taliban in Afghanistan, although they obviously have no problem with the idea of an Islamist theocracy. 

ISIS-K stands for Islamic State - Khorasan, a reference to the 7th and 8th century CE kingdom in what is now Islamic Central Asia that included "western Afghanistan, northeastern Iran, the eastern halves of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, western Tajikistan, and portions of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan." The region was first united under the pre-Islamic Sasanian Persian empire, and then became part of the first two Sunni Islamic Caliphates:

First established in the 6th century as one of four administrative (military) divisions by the Sasanian Empire, the scope of the region has varied considerably during its nearly 1,500-year history. Initially, the Khorasan division of the Sasanian Empire covered the northeastern military gains of the empire. . . .With the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate, the designation was inherited and likewise stretched as far as their military gains in the east, starting off with the military installations at Nishapur and Merv, slowly expanding eastwards into Tokharistan and Sogdia. Under the Caliphs, Khorasan was the name of one of the three political zones under their dominion (the other two being Eraq-e Arab "Arabic Iraq" and Eraq-e Ajam "Non-Arabic Iraq or Persian Iraq"). Under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, Khorasan was divided into four major sections or quarters (rub′), each section based on a single major city: Nishapur, Merv, Herat and Balkh.

The Abbasid Caliphate gots its start in Khorasan around 750 CE, was a high water mark of the Islamic empire in a golden age which lasted more than five centuries until 1258 CE, and persisted in some form for more than two and a half centuries after that, until the 1517 CE when the Ottoman Empire replaced them. The Ottomans, in turn, were the most powerful Islamic country in the world and expanded well into the Balkans, for centuries, but then faded in a long, slow decline, until it fell, roughly the end of World War I, when the current politics of the Middle East began when the colonial powers that won in World War I drew the boundaries of the modern Middle Eastern states and picked the rulers for those countries.

The Abbasid Caliphate or Abbasid Empire (/əˈbæsɪd/ or /ˈæbəsɪd/; Arabic: الْخِلَافَة الْعَبَّاسِيَّة, romanized: al-Khilāfa al-ʿAbbāsiyya) was the third caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was founded by a dynasty descended from Muhammad's uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib (566–653 CE), from whom the dynasty takes its name. They ruled as caliphs for most of the caliphate from their capital in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, after having overthrown the Umayyad Caliphate in the Abbasid Revolution of 750 CE (132 AH). The Abbasid Revolution had its origins and first successes in the easterly region of Khorasan, far from the bases of Umayyad power in Syria and Iraq. The Abbasid Caliphate first centered its government in Kufa, modern-day Iraq, but in 762 the caliph Al-Mansur founded the city of Baghdad, near the ancient Babylonian capital city of Babylon and Persian city of Ctesiphon. Baghdad became the center of science, culture, and invention in what became known as the Golden Age of Islam. This, in addition to housing several key academic institutions, including the House of Wisdom, as well as a multiethnic and multi-religious environment, garnered it an international reputation as the "Centre of Learning".

The Abbasid period was marked by dependence on Persian bureaucrats (such as the Barmakid family) for governing the territories as well as an increasing inclusion of non-Arab Muslims in the ummah (Muslim community). Persian customs were broadly adopted by the ruling elite, and they began patronage of artists and scholars. Since much support for the Abbasids came from Persian converts, it was natural for the Abbasids to take over much of the Persian tradition of government. Despite this initial cooperation, the Abbasids of the late 8th century had alienated both non-Arab mawali (clients) and Persian bureaucrats.

The political power of the caliphs was limited with the rise of the Iranian Buyids and the Seljuq Turks, who captured Baghdad in 945 and 1055, respectively. Although Abbasid leadership over the vast Islamic empire was gradually reduced to a ceremonial religious function in much of the caliphate, the dynasty retained control of its Mesopotamian domain during the rule of Caliph al-Muqtafi and extended into Iran during the reign of Caliph al-Nasir. The Abbasids' age of cultural revival and fruition ended in 1258 with the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols under Hulagu Khan and the execution of al-Musta'sim. The Abbasid line of rulers, and Muslim culture in general, re-centred themselves in the Mamluk capital of Cairo in 1261. Though lacking in political power (with the brief exception of Caliph al-Musta'in of Cairo), the dynasty continued to claim religious authority until a few years after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, with the last Abbasid caliph being Al-Mutawakkil III.

And, as an aside, who were the Sasanians? 

The Sasanian Empire or Sassanid Empire, also known as the Second Persian Empire or Neo-Persian Empire, was the last Iranian empire before the early Muslim conquests of the 7th to 8th centuries. Named after the House of Sasan, it endured for over four centuries, from 224 to 651, making it the second longest-lived Persian imperial dynasty after the Arsacids of the Parthian Empire.

War In Israel Again: Six Scenarios (Gaza War Part I)

Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel. More than a thousand people have died in the fighting so far, disproportionately Israelis in the initial attack, with more than 150 hostages taken. It is a battle won for Hamas in the first moments, but almost certainly at a grave cost and a lost war in the long run, unless neighboring countries intervene as they have tentatively shown interest in doing. The U.S. has mobilized its aircraft carriers and jet fighters for possible involvement. Some possible scenarios, in the medium run, in rough order of likelihood are:

1. Israel's massive counterattack crushes the Palestinians. The Arab states don't intervene. Already miserable Palestinian life gets even worse. Netanyahu consolidates power in the face of a corruption scandal. Israeli politics move to the right.

2. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. flexes it muscles without actually getting into shooting itself on any significant scale. The Arab states back down. Inside Israel, the effort to crush Palestinians is slightly emboldened relative to the first scenario. The U.S. starts to recognize that Saudi Arabia is not its friend for a few years before it forgets again. Netanyahu consolidates power in the face of a corruption scandal. Israeli politics move to the right.

3. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. intervenes. The Arab state forces intervening forces are crushed. Hamas is crushed. The U.S.-Israeli bond is strengthened. The U.S. transitions to hostile relations with the Arab world. Oil prices soar. The transition to EVs speeds up. Netanyahu consolidates power in the face of a corruption scandal in the short run, but Israeli politics return to the status quo in a few years.

4. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. doesn't act. Israel survives in a costly war. U.S. guilt and Israeli resentment taint their relationship going forward. The Palestinians are forcibly exiled from Palestine. Israeli politics shift to a far-right majority. The U.S. transitions to hostile relations with the Arab world. Oil prices soar. The transition to EVs speeds up.

5. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. doesn't act. Israel is genocidally crushed, with refugees fleeing to the U.S. and Western Europe. It is a holocaust class event in history with massive U.S. guilt. The Middle East, without Israel, soon dissolves into tribal-like divisions again, replacing Cold War style Arab-Israeli tensions with small wars. The U.S. transitions to hostile relations with the Arab world. The transition to EVs speeds up. Israeli politics cease to exist.

6. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. intervenes. Iran and/or Russia goes nuclear. There are Hiroshima grade losses in Tel Aviv and some other Israeli cities. There is a non-negligible chance that Mecca is nuked by Israel. Arab state intervening forces are crushed. The Palestinians are slaughtered en masse. The U.S. transitions to hostile relations with the Arab world. Oil prices soar. The longer term political implications are unpredictable.

The stated goal of Hamas is to mobilize other Arab states to support it. But, the only scenario where Hamas and the Palestinians come out ahead is the fifth scenario, which is a quite unlikely one. Ordinary Palestinians aren't necessarily happy with the action of the hotheads who launched the attack.

Imagined Threats

[F]earmongers cited a cavalcade of deadly threats against which America, apparently helpless despite possessing the world’s largest military, must further arm itself. 

Washington’s enemies?

Russia, which might launch its army across the Bering Strait once it finishes off Ukraine. 

China, set for a maritime invasion of the West Coast after conquering Taiwan. 

North Korea, ready to launch a nuclear first strike after conquering the South. 

And Iran, poised to confront America once it annihilates Israel, Saudi Arabia, and its other enemies. 

Then there are omnipresent terrorists, ready to infiltrate the U.S. and seize control of cities and states. 

Heck, maybe Americans should double or treble military outlays.

From the 1945 blog. 

Geopolitical Musings

The U.S. urgently needs to restore some of its soft power. It has fallen off the wagon of being a country the rest of the world looks up to, and has instead become a cautionary tale.

One doesn't have to be terribly altruistic or idealistic to think so. The single biggest determinant of who wins wars is the allies that each side has in the fight.

Although, the way that you fight when you are the powerful party and the way you fight in an asymmetric battle as the weaker party is very different.

One of the major lessons of the Ukraine war is that the Russian military's conventional warfare capabilities are far inferior to what had been widely believed. While Russia has some advanced weapons, it has proportionately far fewer, its troops are much less well trained, and its leaders are less competent.

The good news that flows from this fact is that everyone can be much more comfortable that the Western European powers, a coalition that has grown larger in the post-Soviet era, together with the U.S. and Canada, would soundly defeat Russia and its handful of allies in a conventional war.

The bad news that flows from this fact is that Russia will be inclined in future conflicts as it has in this one, to maximize the leverage that it has available to it from its possession of nuclear weapons by threatening to use them and possibly by actually using them.

The temptation for Russia to use them will grow even greater because its global economic and diplomatic clout have been greatly undermined by sanctions and boycotts in response to its invasion of Ukraine, and because the rest of the world has been forcefully encouraged to become energy independent of Russia, since energy is the main thing that the rest of the world relies upon it for.

A major development this week has been an act of sabotage by Belorussian railway workers, shutting down rail based logistics support from Belorussia to Russian forces in Ukraine. As sanctions have impaired the quality of life in Russia, and the intelligentsia, as well as many of the powerful and the rich in Russian who aren't in Putin's inner circle, have found themselves out of the loop, dragged into a war that isn't in their own interests, and at grave peril of persecution both from within Russian for dissent, and outside Russia for loyalty, the stream of Russia's best and brightest out of their country is giving rise to brain drain.

The voluntary exile of dissenters and opponents from Russia, together with crackdowns on those who dissent without leaving, will no doubt help Putin to consolidate power at home, as will the fact that the world seems united against Russia providing a bond to those facing this outside action. But it also means the Russia's economy and society will be much weaker for it, and that untold Russian secrets are escaping to the outside world.

Ten million Ukrainians, roughly a quarter of its population, are now refugees too. It appears that those refugees are disproportionately women and children, with far more than a quarter of them departed. According to a news report from today:

Russian forces appeared unprepared and have often performed badly against Ukrainian resistance. The U.S. estimates Russia has lost a bit more than 10 percent of the overall combat capability it had at the start of the fight, including troops and tanks and other materiel. Western officials say Russian forces are facing serious shortages of food, fuel and cold weather gear, leaving some soldiers suffering from frostbite. . . .

Thousands of civilians are believed to have died. Estimates of Russian military casualties vary widely, but even conservative figures by Western officials are in the low thousands.

On Monday, Russia’s pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, citing the Defense Ministry, reported that almost 10,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. The report was quickly removed, and the newspaper blamed hackers. The Kremlin refused to comment. The Western official said the figure is “a reasonable estimate.”

Russian forces aren't gaining much ground, basically having been stalled out for weeks, but also aren't ceding much ground to Ukraine's offensives. The air space over Ukraine remains contested with daily dog fights between fighter aircraft on both sides and Ukrainian forces harrying Russian aircraft with anti-aircraft missiles.

Russia's poor military performance in Ukraine doesn't just undermine its credibility in future conflicts either. It also depletes Russia's finite resources of military equipment like tanks, warplanes, military helicopters, missiles, and soldiers, especially in the European theater, leaving it less ready for any sequel European conflict to the war in Ukraine. With a weak economy and isolation from international trade, Russia won't be able to easily replace that lost equipment, and it appears to be short of qualified troops to fill the gap as well.

A Russia isolated from the outside world by sanctions and boycotts will still never be as insular as North Korea or Soviet era Albania. But economic isolation and brain drain will dampen its economy and impair its technological capacity. 

True to type, Russia will probably try to shift a larger share of its economy to military spending while dealing with a shrinking economy with reduced consumer spending, as unpleasant as that will be for ordinary Russians. But even so, its resources for military spending will be limited and the military goods it can produce will be degraded.

All of this will leave Russia with few options to exercise power other than its nuclear arsenal, much like North Korea, but far more potent, and apparently with a leader who seems to be going mad and disconnecting  his entire country from reality, as his grand vision for Russia has turned to ash.

It looks as if even Russian-Chinese relations are falling apart. China's society is healthier and the rest of the world's trade means much more to it than Russia's does. Talk of a Chinese pivot towards the West and away from Russia is growing. China is increasingly surpassing Russia as the number one non-Western power in the world.

China's society may be awash in reality challenged propaganda from top to bottom as well. But its leaders, unlike Putin, do not appear to be crazy.

it seems that there is no foreseeable hope of revolution from within to bring about regime change in North Korea. It is less clear if this is a possibility in Russia, despite the current dominance of the United Russia party and Putin. In particular, in areas where Russia thought it had put down insurgencies for good in the past may, in the face of a perception that Russia's military is overtaxed and the regime is weak, some of those insurgencies could reignite, leading Putin to be more embattled and more prone to take ruthless action.

Also, despite the fact that the leadership in Belorussia has kowtowed to Russia to the point of practically rejoining it in a union again, and despite the fact that the Belorussian leadership has been drifting in a totalitarian direction, it seems from some things I've read that its leadership is much less secure, even if it can swiftly be replaced with the normal democratic process. And, Belorussia is facing many of the same economic sanctions and boycotts that Russia is from its collaboration with Russian in its invasion of Ukraine.

Of course, whatever upside Russia had hoped to gain from its invasion of Ukraine seems to have largely evaporated. International recognition of a bit more Ukrainian territory in areas that are heavily ethnically Russian, a withdrawal of its forces from the remainder of Ukraine, and a partial relaxation of sanctions and boycotts, is probably the best outcome it could hope for at this point, and that is far from a sure thing. Russia has already irrevocably lost more than it can reasonably hope to gain.

In an ideal world, all countries of the world would learn from Russia's debacle in Ukraine that unprovoked invasions of other countries don't pay.

And, let's be honest. While not quite as brazen, U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan weren't terribly honorable or well justified either (and who knows what the U.S. was thinking in the Gulf War when it sought to protect a slave holding monarchy in Kuwait from an Iraqi invasion). But, it isn't as if the U.S. benefitted all that much from those wars either.

When the U.S. finally withdrew from Afghanistan last year, the Taliban regime that had been on the verge of ruling the country promptly replaced the regime the U.S. and its allies had put in place in a matter of days and now rules the entire country. I'm hard pressed to explain how the U.S. benefited from the Iraq War, or the Gulf War, either.

Both wars provided a sandbox for the U.S. and its allies to sharpen their military acumen. But these wars were extremely expensive. The Iraq War gave rise to the Islamic State as a major global adversary. Afghanistan and the Iraq War combined have defanged for Iraq, its most threatening neighbors in both directions.

The U.S. has also gains little or nothing from providing military aid to Saudi Arabia, which is not its friend and is using those military resources to fight a proxy war with Iran in Yemen with horrific humanitarian consequences.

The cost of these foreign wars to the U.S. in lives lost has been relatively modest for two decades of war, although it hasn't been nothing. But the money the U.S. has spent to fight these wars and prepare to fight more wars has been immense. One doesn't have to be a pacifist to recognize that we could spend less and yet use U.S. military might in a way that provides us with greater security benefits.

So, returning to the core questions:

1. How can the U.S. restore its soft power and become a global model again?

2. What is the best way to deal with a nuclear armed and unpredictable and aggressive Russia that is starting to collapse and become dangerous out of desperation?

3. How can the U.S. reduce the immense expense it continues to incur for the military and stop fighting wars it does not benefit from, while remaining capable of military operations that make sense for it?

4. Can the U.S. lure China more into the fold of the developed world? How?

The Demographic Transition In The Middle East And North Africa

 

The demographic transition towards having fewer children per woman per lifetime as per capita GDP increases is nearly universal across a great many cultures, including the Islamic cultures of Southwest Asia and North Africa (often described as MENA for Middle East and North Africa).

Razib Khan suggests, not implausibly although it is hard to prove, that the decline in Islamic terrorism activity, that seemed so salient a decade ago, might be driven by this demographic shift that reduces the supply of young "disposable" men.

Two countries neighboring this region, at least, are becoming less religious, it seems. In Turkey:

Polling by the agency Konda in 2019 also found that people aged 15-29 described themselves as less “religiously conservative” than older generations, and less religious than the same age group a decade earlier – respondents said they did not necessarily cover their hair, pray regularly or fast during Ramadan.

The overall drop in people who described themselves as religiously conservative was 7%, down from 32% in 2008, and those who said they fast during Ramadan declined from 77% to 65%.

An anonymous survey in Iran also identifies a trend towards secularism, with a plurality of "nones" who are not overtly atheist identifying but don't identify with an organized religious identity either.

Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularization and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran's 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.

In contrast with state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shi'ite nation, only 32% explicitly identified as such, while 5% said they were Sunni Muslim and 3% Sufi Muslim. Another 9% said they were atheists, along with 7% who prefer the label of spirituality. Among the other selected religions, 8% said they were Zoroastrians—which we interpret as a reflection of Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith—while 1.5% said they were Christian.

Most Iranians, 78%, believe in God, but only 37% believe in life after death and only 30% believe in heaven and hell. In line with other anthropological research, a quarter of our respondents said they believed in jinns or genies. Around 20% said they did not believe in any of the options, including God.

These numbers demonstrate that a general process of secularization, known to encourage religious diversity, is taking place in Iran. An overwhelming majority, 90%, described themselves as hailing from believing or practicing religious families. Yet 47% reported losing their religion in their lifetime, and 6% said they changed from one religious orientation to another. Younger people reported higher levels of irreligiosity and conversion to Christianity than older respondents.

A third said they occasionally drank alcohol in a country that legally enforces temperance. Over 60% said they did not perform the obligatory Muslim daily prayers, synchronous with a 2020 state-backed poll in which 60% reported not observing the fast during Ramadan (the majority due to being "sick"). In comparison, in a comprehensive survey conducted in 1975 before the Islamic Revolution, over 80% said they always prayed and observed the fast.

Change, Some For The Better In Saudi Arabia

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has made some reforms that restrict practices that are widely recognized as putting Saudi Arabia among the "uncivilized" countries of the world (he has also relaxed some restrictions on women's rights and expanded democracy at the local government level while retaining an absolute monarchy nationally). But, he's also taken actions that belong in a modern version of the television series "Game of Thrones."

Even with the reforms, Saudi Arabia will still have one of the highest rates of capital and corporal punishment in the world, still criminalizes conduct that is legal in most of the world, and remains one of the most totalitarian countries in the world. But, steps in the right direction are still welcome ones.

It remains to be seen if his policies, reforms and tactics, will be, on balance, positive or negative ones.

"Saudi Arabia's King Salman has ordered an end to the death penalty for crimes committed by minors, according to a statement Sunday by a top official. The decision comes on the heels of another ordering judges to end the practice of flogging, replacing it with jail time, fines or community service and bringing one of the kingdom’s most controversial forms of public punishment to a close. 

King Salman's son and heir, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is seen as the force behind the kingdom’s loosening of restrictions and its pivot away from ultraconservative interpretations of Islamic law known as Wahhabism, which many in the country still closely adhere to. 

The crown prince has sought to modernize the country, attract foreign investment and revamp Saudi Arabia’s reputation globally. He's also overseen a parallel crackdown on liberals, women's rights activists, writers, moderate clerics and reformers. The 2018 killing of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey by agents who worked for the crown prince drew sharp criticism internationally. 

The latest royal decree by King Salman could spare the death penalty for at least six men from the country’s minority Shiite community who allegedly committed crimes while under the age of 18, including Ali al-Nimr, who had participated in anti-government protests. Such activity carries terrorism-related charges in the kingdom for disturbing order and disobeying the ruler. In a document seen by The Associated Press, the royal decree orders prosecutors to review cases and drop punishments for those who've already served the maximum 10 years. However, the decree states that terrorism-related cases of minors will be tried differently. . . . 

He said “more reforms will be coming,” and that the two decisions “reflect how Saudi Arabia is forging ahead in its realization of critical human rights reforms even amid the hardship imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic." The decree expands on a previous order by King Salman issued in late 2018, which set a maximum 10-year prison term for minors in certain cases, except for crimes punishable by death. Now the 10-year maximum applies to all crimes by minors, with the possible exception of terrorism-related crimes. . . . 

Saudi Arabia's Supreme Court recently issued a directive to end flogging as a form of punishment sometime in April, according to another document seen by The Associated Press. The public spectacle of whipping a handcuffed prisoner for often non-violent crimes had drawn some comparisons to the types of punishment carried out by extremist groups like the Islamic State. . . . The Supreme Court document said the decision was in line with the kingdom's reforms and developments in the realm of human rights as directed by King Salman and overseen by the crown prince. .. . 

While some crimes, such as murder, may carry fixed punishments under Saudi Arabia’s interpretation of Islamic law, or Shariah, many other offenses are considered “tazir," meaning neither the crime nor the punishment is defined in Islam. Discretionary judgments for “tazir” crimes, such as flogging, have led to arbitrary rulings with contentious outcomes. Muslim countries generally do not practice public flogging. “This is a good step but we are still waiting to see if existing lashing sentences will be reversed and expunged,” al-Ahmed said."

From ABC News. 

Yemen's Troubles Aren't All Recent

The war in Yemen, a civil war being played as a proxy fight between Saudi Arabia and Iran that is leading to myriad civilian casualties, in which the U.S. is helping Saudi Arabia from behind the scenes for no good reason, was already in motion eight and a half years ago.

Overrated And Underrated Countries

The ratings here are relative to "conventional wisdom" about how good a place to live or bad a place to live a country actually is.

Places Perceived As Bad That Are Much Worse Than Most People Realize

* North Korea

* Saudi Arabia

* The West Bank and Gaza in Israel (a.k.a. Palestine)

* Pakistan

* Belarus

* Papua New Guinea

* Venezuela

* South Sudan

* Yemen

* Central African Republic

Places That Are Bad But Are Perceived As Worse Than They Actually Are.

* Lebanon

* Iran

* Cuba

* Columbia

* Cambodia

* Vietnam

* Bangladesh

* Ethiopia

* Eritrea

* Uruguay

Places That Are Better In Some Respects But Worse In Others Than They Are Perceived

* Mexico (more educated with better healthcare; but also more corrupt and violent)

* India (more economically developed in some places, but more fanatical, with more profound poverty and with a serious underuse of toilets)

* Portugal (more progressive in some ways, more economically backward and authoritarian in others)

* Egypt (safer but less free)

* Singapore (more developed but less free)

* China (more developed but less free and more corrupt)

Places That Are Perceived To Be Better Than They Actually Are

* Greece

* Italy

* Spain

* Hungary

* Much of the United States of America

Quote of the Day

Unless you are like Saudi Arabia sitting on the bulk of the world reserve of ‘spice’, you cannot really afford being crazy asshole and still remain in long durable alliances.

From a comment posted by Shafiq R at September 5, 2018 at 3:21 am (the literary reference is to Frank Herbert's "Dune" series).

Quick Hits On Economics, Marriage and Education

Economics

Retail and Tourism

* There are lots of businesses that are in trouble: Claire's cheap earring stores are bankrupt, JC Penney is still in trouble, Toy's R Us is shutting down, Barnes and Noble had a weak Christmas season, and in general there has been a retail bloodbath. America's malls are rotting away. Sears and Kmart continue their slow collapse. Sears hasn't recovered from being in deep trouble a year ago. Macy's and Nordstrom are suffering. Now, maybe the right way to think about it is that we previously over-invested in retail and consumerism that adds little value. But, losing tens of thousands of low wage jobs, maybe hundreds of thousands, and creating huge holes on commercial real estate and municipal budgets is no small thing.

* There are winners in the retail sector as well, of course: online merchants, hobby stores, shoe stores, grocery stores and home improvement stores are still growing.

* Trump has been horrible for the U.S. tourism industry, scaring away tourists with his racism.

* I love Spotify but it's losing money hand over fist and facing huge lawsuits over obsolete royalty obligation rules that reflect the world's broken copyright laws.

Housing

* Trying to make housing affordable through deed restrictions that impose price controls is an ill conceived way to achieve this end.

* Relaxing land use regulation near transit served areas is a much better solution. Building codes more friendly to tiny houses would also help. Seattle illustrates how zoning regulation also impacts educational opportunity. A critical look at the pros and cons of building more housing in San Francisco is worth a read. Lax land use regulations help control housing prices in Japan, but do does the fact that demand is pretty stable with lots of housing starts being scrapes to replace old homes with new ones.

* It is undeniable that Denver has some of the fastest surging apartment rents in the nations, however. This is because Denver's population is growing faster than it can build new housing (also here). The population growth, in turn, is a natural consequence of strong job creation in Denver.

* Condo construction is picking up in Denver, but this is largely a function of trends in rental rates and interest rates, rather than concerns about construction defect litigation. Rising interest rates, rising home prices, and student loan debt meanwhile have discouraged the latest generation from becoming first time homeowners.

* Alabama has the worst poverty of the developed world despite its low cost of living. Most Americans have regressed to Third World economic conditions.

Health Care and Reproductive Health

* The medical billing system in the United States is still corrupt, arbitrary and incredibly overpriced with no one controlling excess spending. Emergency rooms are serious offenders in these practices.

* "An increasingly common type of high-deductible insurance plan is touted for its money-saving potential, but a growing body of research indicates the plans don't motivate patients - or doctors - to curb spending on unnecessary medical services."

* But, using algorithms that aren't transparent to allocate health care and make other important decisions is also deeply problematic. Our system of public law to address this kind of problem in the public sector, and our parallel private law systems for addressing this kind of problem in the private sector, however, is not very good at the task of keeping these systems in check and working well.

* Better birth control access would reduce abortions by two-thirds and save $12 billion a year.

* In Japan, very few women use the pill, condoms are the main form of birth control, and abortions are quite common, guilty free and mostly done in the first trimester.

* What health conditions are affected by the business cycle? The 2008 recession increased obesity, diabetes and mental health conditions. It also dampened birth rates.

* Amish fertility rates closely track the rest of the country, despite the fact that the Amish don't use birth control and rarely obtain abortions. There is a parallel here to the decline in infectious disease rates before vaccines and antibiotics were in widespread use, once the germ theory of disease was widely known.

Marriage

* Young, single, childless women actually have higher earnings that comparable men. Getting married and having children is the key factor that results in gender gaps in income.

* Relative income of husbands and wives is a powerful predictor of divorce.

* Lots of Americans in their 20s are having kids before getting married:

[M]ost American women without college degrees have their first child in their 20s. These young women and their partners—who make up about two-thirds of twentysomething adults in the United States—are logging more time at the diaper aisle of the local supermarket than at the local bar.

This would not be such a big deal except for the fact that many of these twentysomethings are drifting into parenthood, becoming moms and dads with partners they don’t think are fit to marry or at least ready to marry. For instance, almost 1 in 2 babies—47 percent, to be precise—born to twentysomething women are now born to unmarried parents. In fact, twentysomething women now have the majority of children outside of marriage, which—given that 30 is the new 20—makes them the new teen moms.

The reality is that children born to unmarried twentysomething parents are three times more likely to grow up with a disorienting carousel of adults coming and going in the home, compared to children born to married parents. This kind of carousel, as sociologist Andrew Cherlin notes in his book The Marriage-Go-Round, is associated with higher rates of teen pregnancy, behavioral problems in school, and substance abuse. By contrast, "stable, low-conflict families with two biological or adoptive parents provide better environments for children, on average, than do other living arrangements."

In my view this is due to two factors: first, working class men have declining economic prospects and have not shared in economic growth since the 1970s (as documented by Piketty among others), while second, economic opportunities have surged for working class women since the 1970s and these women pay a relatively low price in their careers for time spent away from the work force compared to upper middle class women. Automation accounts for a lot of the working class economic slump. Drug tests (sometimes legitimately necessary for the job in question) are a major barrier to workplace re-entry for working class men. Wisconsin has seen the biggest middle class decline of any state. Black unemployment is at record lows but still much higher than unemployment rates for whites, as black poverty is also at record lows (its amazing what good eight years of an Obama economy did).

Whether it is in the African-American ghettos of Northern cities, or the social welfare paradise of Sweden, or in working class white America, women aren't economically dependent upon the fathers of their children and marriages become fragile.

Middle class marriages meanwhile have become more stable, but the rising ranks of single people are changing our society. Upper middle class men have participated in economic growth, making them good providers, and contrary to conventional wisdom rising income inequality is largely driven by increased earning for the working rich rather than rentiers.

* African-American boys are strongly downwardly mobile. Even if their families are in the top income quintile, they have no better prospects than working class boys on average. The story in the link attributes are significant part of this downward mobility to living in single family households. But, not all scholars agree that parental separation has a major impact on the economic prospects of children.

* Someone makes a case that easy divorce favors assortive marriage.

* Late marriage ages contributed to the success of England's industrial revolution.

* Otherwise modern, upper middle class young women in India, who are generally liberal, are still strongly prefer arranged marriages. Caste endogamy, religious endogamy, and a practice of not moving away from home until you are married, even when you are an adult, all play a part. This is a huge difference from U.S. values where one of our most sacred norms is respecting everyones right to love who they want to love, no matter what.

* Survey data says that caste status has a big impact on the lives of South Asian Americans in matters including religion and marriage.

* In Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince has allowed women to drive and is giving them greatly custody rights in divorces. There is a strong correlation between affluence and security on one hand, and liberal-secular values on the other. Is affluence and security in Saudi Arabia changing that society's values from within?

Education

* We enjoy all time high African-American college graduation rates, although on a very gender imbalanced basis. The gender gap in college attendance in favor of women is present in all races to some extent, however.

* Discrimination against Asian-Americans in college admissions is as significant as discrimination against Jews in higher education used to be, because Asian-Americans outperform the applicant pool and colleges don't want that to translate into a larger share of Asian-Americans on campus apparently.

* Most students with student loans from for profit colleges default on their loans.

* High school behavior is a powerful predictor of adult success:  "Being a responsible student, maintaining an interest in school and having good reading and writing skills will not only help a teenager get good grades in high school but could also be predictors of educational and occupational success decades later, regardless of IQ, parental socioeconomic status or other personality factors, according to new research." Critics argue that this is "middle class behavior" not objectively better behavior.

* Study skills and aggression in school students are closely related, fairly stable, and powerful predictors of decisions to drop out of school.

* Closing bad schools is a more effective way to improve the quality of education than trying to improve existing schools. Strategies that improve educational quality are very hard to reproduce. Ending schools that are dragging down students is much easier, and we don't have to know why they are failing to shut them down. I'm well aware that this approach horrifies many of my political and personal peers, but it does work.

Questioned Foundations

They called it the end of history. 

Liberal, democratic capitalism would be universal. So would human rights. Almost all interactions in society were to be based upon strict, mutual consent revocable at any time except in the most extreme circumstances. Religion incompatible with science in daily practice, if not in principle, would fade away. Equality on the basis of race, national origin, ethnicity and gender would prevail by people sharing a common cosmopolitan culture with regional variation.

The zeitgeist, however, is starting to question, often quietly, these foundational ideas.

Democracy is growing less sacred on both the left and the right. The left is concerned about populist demagogues like Donald Trump, the alt-right, and the emerging far right parties of Europe - the UK Independent Party, the Greek National Socialists, Marie LePen's party in France, and so on. The right admires authoritarianism praising regimes like Putin's Russia and China's regime, and tolerates the regime in Saudi Arabia, although still condemning and deriding North Korea's totalitarian de facto absolute monarchy.

While secularism has almost run its course in much of Europe and the number of non-religious is growing rapidly in the United States, especially among the young, Evangelical Christian and conservative Catholicism are thriving on both sides of the Atlantic, and Muslims have become common in most of Europe achieving a foothold through peaceful immigration what the faith had not managed to secure by force. Meanwhile, mainline Christianity continues to be in free fall and some of those who are abandoning it who do not become non-religious have started to adhere to peaceful threads of Eastern religious thought, neo-paganism and re-imagined religious/philosophical movements like Humanism, new Satanist communities, transhumanism, patnheism, and more.

On the right, equality has been openly disavowed by a growing white supremacist movement, and more opaquely challenged by those who have started to frame their thinking into a focus on national, racial and class based intelligence levels. Even strict opponents of identity based discrimination have become comfortable with the notion that in our meritocracy, lower social class equates with less intelligence and also even with lower worth. On the religious side, the prosperity gospel movement is fundamentally one of class superiority with a religious rather than secular dimension. Notions of a gender blind, color blind world are under attack from both the left and right.

Even consent and choice as fundamental principles are doubted - not so much in public debate, but very much in the brewing cauldron of artistic endeavors. BSDM has become a not infrequent element of the pop music, pulp fiction and video streams of ordinary people. Russia just decriminalized wife beating, while Saudi Arabia offers lessons in wife beating on public television. Liberals are trying to come to terms with the fact that this fundamental tenant of their worldview was not widely followed historically, is not widely followed in much of the world, and is absent even in major institutions like the military. If this idea can be absent in so many places, can it really be so fundamental and necessary?

The end of history may still be coming. But, as it arrives the collective discussion and thoughts of the people he think at all are looking backward and exploring, at least intellectually, the alternatives.