Six simultaneous crises for the USA, - but the biggest crisis is mass migration into the developed world

'If China won Taiwan, it would threaten South Korea and Japan and wrest control of the Pacific from a humiliated United States.' 

Charles Moore today. Will the USA control the Pacific forever and why should it even want to, 34 years after the Cold War ended?

"Former Defence Secretary Bob Gates tells us America is facing the most crises since World War II ended 78 years ago… Not one of the crises can be solved and checked off: All five could spiral into something much bigger … What scares officials is how all five threats could fuse into one”. (Spreading war in Gaza; the Putin-Xi “anti-American alliance”; North Korea; anti-American disinformation on social media).

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, in Axios

'There will be no one to extract Israel and no one to help Israel pay the cost of caring for more than two million Gazans — not if Israel is run by a government that thinks, and acts, as if it can justifiably exact its revenge on Hamas while unjustifiably building an apartheidlike society run by Jewish supremacists in the West Bank. That is a completely incoherent policy.


'Alas, though, a senior U.S. official told me that the Biden team left Jerusalem feeling that while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel understands that overreach in Gaza could set the whole neighborhood ablaze, his right-wing coalition partners are eager to fan the flames in the West Bank. Settlers there have killed at least seven Palestinian civilians in acts of revenge in just the past week.


'Meanwhile, U.S. officials told me, the representatives of those settlers in the cabinet are withholding tax money owed the Palestinian Authority, making it harder for it to keep the West Bank as under control as it has been since the start of the Hamas war.


'Netanyahu should not allow this, but he has trapped himself. He needs those right-wing extremists in his coalition to keep himself out of jail on corruption charges.


'But he is going to put all of Israel into the jail of Gaza unless he breaks with those Jewish supremacists.'


Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, October 19


'Those who believe the long-term answer is to send Ukraine more advanced weapons and get it into NATO and the European Union as quickly as possible—as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman opined last weekend—have it exactly backwards. Putin went to war primarily to foreclose this possibility, and he’ll continue the war either to prevent it from happening or to ensure that whatever remains of Ukraine is of little value. It makes sense to give Ukraine enough support that Russia cannot dictate a peace, but that support should be tied to a serious effort to bring the war to a close.

'Hardliners have an obvious reply to these arguments, of course. “Ukraine wants to keep fighting,” they insist—correctly, “and we should therefore give them whatever they need.” Ukraine’s resolve has been extraordinary, and its desires should not be dismissed lightly, but this argument is not decisive. If a friend wants to do something you think is ill-advised or dangerous, you are under no moral obligation to aid their efforts no matter how strongly committed they may be. On the contrary, you’d be morally culpable if you helped them act as they wished and the result was disastrous.

'Of course, these moral tradeoffs diminish if you believe Ukraine can win at an acceptable cost and that this outcome will have a profound positive impact around the world. As noted above, this is the war party’s central argument. Given the disappointing (if not disastrous) results of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive, however, that position is getting harder to defend. Hardliners now hope that more advanced weaponry (Army Tactical Missile Systems [ATACMS], F-16 aircraft, M-1 rifles, hordes of drones, etc.) will tip the balance in Ukraine’s favor. Or they speculate that Russia is running out of reserves and will soon be on the ropes. I hope they are right, but it is telling that these hawks are mostly silent on the issue of Ukraine’s own losses. To be specific: How many Ukrainians have been killed or wounded, and how long can Kyiv continue to replace them? This issue is vital to any attempt to assess Ukraine’s prospects, but reliable information on it is almost impossible to obtain.'

Stephen Walt in Foreign Affairs

The Morality of Ukraine’s War Is Very Murky

'Accounts of the Israeli death toll have been filtered and shaped to suggest that a wholesale civilian massacre occurred that day, with babies, children, and women the main targets of a terror attack.

'Now, detailed statistics on the casualties released by the Israeli daily Haaretz paint a starkly different picture. As of 23 October, the news outlet has released information on 683 Israelis killed during the Hamas-led offensive, including their names and locations of their deaths on 7 October.

'Of these, 331 casualties – or 48.4 percent - have been confirmed to be soldiers and police officers, many of them female. Another 13 are described as rescue service members, and the remaining 339 are ostensibly considered to be civilians.

'While this list is not comprehensive and only accounts for roughly half of Israel’s stated death toll, almost half of those killed in the melee are clearly identified as Israeli combatants.

'There are also so far no recorded deaths of children under the age of three, which throws into question the Israeli narrative that babies were targeted by Palestinian resistance fighters. Of the 683 total casualties reported thus far, seven were between the ages of 4 and 7, and nine between the ages of 10 and 17. The remaining 667 casualties appear to be adults.

'The numbers and proportion of Palestinian civilians and children among those killed by Israeli bombardment over the past two weeks – over 5,791 killed, including 2,360 children and 1,292 women, and more than 18,000 injured - are far higher than any of these Israeli figures from the events of 7 October.'

Robert Inlakesh and Sharmine Narwani in The Cradle, What really happened on 7th October?

'CIFS expert Timothy Shoup estimates that 99 percent to 99.9 percent of the internet's content will be AI-generated by 2025 to 2030, especially if models like OpenAI's GPT-3 achieve wider adoption.

'"The internet would be completely unrecognizable," Shoup told colleague Sofie Hvitved....

'It's not inherently a bad thing for AIs to generate web content. In theory, their work could build virtual worlds that are more inclusive around things like gender, race, and culture.'

Article in the Byte is here.

In addition to the five crises mentioned by Bob Gates above we also have the only real defence crisis for the USA, Europe, Canada, and Australia - the refugees and illegal immigrants invading the rich world.

We also have a Pope who favours them, loathes America and colonialism and seems to want to turn Catholicism, as we thought we knew it, upside down. 

This is another crisis for Western civilisation because the Catholic Church, as David Goldman a practising Orthodox Jew has said, is essential for Western civilisation.

How many divisions does the Pope have, as Stalin did not ask. 

As Belloc put it, 'Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in moulding life than nationalism or a common language.' This is true not just of the Middle East.