Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Paul Pillar

“The retiring United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process has insightfully identified a major reason the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues to boil and to entail widespread death and destruction. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Norwegian diplomat Tor Wennesland criticized the international community for relying on short-term fixes such as improving quality of life in occupied territory or diversions such as seeking peace deals between Israel and other Arab states. The crescendo of bloodshed during the past year underscores the ineffectiveness of such approaches. Needed but not employed was a concerted and sustained diplomatic effort to end the occupation and create a Palestinian state. ‘What we have seen,’ said Wennesland, ‘is the failure of dealing with the real conflict, the failure of politics and diplomacy.'” (12/12/24)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-palestine/

Source: Quillette
by Joan Smith

“Around 750 people live permanently on Ventotene, catering to the tourists who stay in spa hotels or hire diving equipment to explore the azure waters that surround it. Picturesque houses in pastel colours straggle up the hillside, but it’s an unsettling location for anyone who knows that Ventotene functioned as a prison — and a place of execution—for some of the most famous women in Roman history. In the late first century BC, the Roman emperor Augustus built a palace on the northern tip of the island, which was then called Pandateria, but there’s no evidence that he ever visited it. … Its most famous resident was Augustus’s daughter Julia, who was imprisoned in the palace for five years after she was disgraced and exiled in 2 BC. Julia was eventually moved to the mainland, but three more women from Rome’s Julio-Claudian imperial dynasty would be imprisoned here — and, unlike Julia, they would all die here.” (12/12/24)

https://quillette.com/2024/12/12/shameless-beyond-the-curse-of-shamelessness/

Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob

“Now that UFO sightings are ubiquitous, is it at all amusing that ufologists generally scoff at them, dismissing them as ‘drones?’ Out-of-place lights dot the skies of New Jersey and other east-coast states, and have for several weeks. Yet there is no panic that The Aliens Are Coming! The Aliens Are Coming! Speculation as to what they actually are — and whose — is rampant. And the government hasn’t helped.” (12/12/24)

https://thisiscommonsense.org/2024/12/12/the-ufos-are-here/

Source: EconLog
by Janet Bufton

“Public choice helps explain why, instead of selfless, elevated public servants pursuing only the public good, we see problems like log-rolling, rent seeking, and the concentration of power. But there is another kind of romantic politics — one to which fans of public choice are much more susceptible. It’s the romantic notion that we can, in response to the problems with politics revealed by public choice, do away with politics altogether.” (12/12/24)

https://www.econlib.org/the-other-kind-of-romance-in-politics/

Source: The American Conservative
by Eldar Mamedov

“With the shock overthrow of the Assad dynastic dictatorship that ruled Syria since 1971, new diplomatic opportunities are opening for the incoming administration. If President-elect Donald Trump is serious about his ‘ending forever wars’ rhetoric, Syria offers him a chance to grab a low-hanging fruit. Encouragingly, Trump himself seems to realize that. Commenting on Syria, he suggested that the events unfolding there are ‘not our fight.’ He said that the ‘U.S. should have nothing to do with it (the situation in Syria). Let it play out. Do not get involved.'” (12/12/24)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trumps-syrian-opportunity/

Source: The Dispatch
by Nick Catoggio

“We don’t do hot takes at The Dispatch, but I’ll confess to one that’s lukewarm: I’m coming around on Donald Trump’s scheme to use recess appointments to avoid the Senate confirmation process. I still believe all of his nominees should be confirmed, to be clear. Americans voted for an authoritarian kakistocracy last month and they should have it. We owe it to democracy to run this experiment, for better or worse. And if it goes as badly as I expect, we’ll have the consolation of knowing that we deserve what we’ve gotten. But if you’re still naive enough to care about civic norms, a case can be made that having Congress recess so that Trump can temporarily fill Cabinet positions with whomever he likes would be marginally less demeaning to the Senate than confirming his nominees would be.” (12/11/24)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/making-way-kakistocracy-231102546.html