Monday Miscellany, 10/13/25

Even opponents of President Trump are giving him credit.  That includes the New York Times, which quotes an expert on the subject:

“This cease-fire and hostage release, if it happens, only came to fruition because of Trump’s willingness to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu,” said Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has often been critical of Mr. Trump’s starts and stops in the Mideast. “No president, Republican or Democrat, has ever come down harder on an Israeli prime minister on issues so critically important to his politics or his country’s security interests.”

But arguably even more important was President Trump’s strong-arming of the heads of the Arab states and Turkey to get them to pressure Hamas to accept a deal.

Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank, sums up the diplomacy behind the ceasefire:

It seems clear that President Trump saw an opportunity to move forward after Israel’s failed strike on the Hamas leadership in Qatar’s capital Doha on September 9. The international criticism of the strike—especially among Israel’s Arab partners—and Trump’s professed “unhappiness” about it put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the defensive. Even though the strike failed, it scared the Qataris, who demanded a guarantee from the United States that it would not happen again.

The U.S. president on September 29 issued an executive order that guarantees Qatar’s security, but in exchange he expected the Qataris to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages. (There is also speculation that the president has forced a change in the tone of Qatari-funded Al Jazeera’scoverage of Gaza and that Hamas’s leaders will have to leave Doha.) The president then aligned himself with the 65 percent of Israelis who wanted to prioritize the return of hostages over the defeat of Hamas. This put further pressure on Netanyahu. The White House then elicited the support of major Arab and Muslim states to pressure Hamas to accept the deal.

If that doesn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, what does?  That prize was announced around the same time as the ceasefire and many Americans were indignant that President Trump got snubbed.  But the votes for the Nobel were in far before the peace deal came to fruition.  Though Trump arguably deserved the prize for his other peace-making efforts, next year will be his best shot at the prize.

The New York Times is admitting as much, saying if the peace holds, he will indeed deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

But will the peace hold?  Hamas and Israel agreed to this first phase, but the 20-point peace plan includes many more contentious issues, such as requirements that Hamas disarm and play no part whatsoever in the future governance of Gaza.  There is a long way to go, but already world leaders are meeting to plan the next step of bringing a permanent peace to Gaza.  My sense is that there is now, with both Gazans and Israelis dancing in the streets to celebrate the ceasefire, there is a momentum for peace that militant holdouts on either side may not be able to resist.

Meanwhile, this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was María Corina Machado, who was recognized for her leadership in the resistance to Venezuela’s leftist dictator Nicolás Maduro.  She dedicated her prize to Donald Trump.

Social Media Has Jumped the Shark

Meta and OpenAI have both announced that they are starting new social media platforms so that users can post their AI-generated videos.

John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times of London says that we may look back on the date of these announcements, September 2025, as the point at which social media jumped the shark.

He makes that case in his article Have We Passed Peak Social Media?, with the deck, “As platforms degrade into outrage and slop, users are turning away.”

It turns out, usage of social media is declining worldwide.

In many ways, Meta and OpenAI’s new platforms (AI-generated content is already rife on TikTok and YouTube) are a fitting endpoint for social media’s warped evolution from a place where people swapped updates with friends and family, to one with less and less human-to-human interaction. We have now witnessed the transformation of social media into anti-social media with the progressive disappearance of most people from active participation on the platforms and the steady displacement of real-world interactions by scrolling.

Our Poorest State Is Richer Than Spain, Italy, France, & the UK

We’ve blogged about the “Mississippi Miracle,” the dramatic educational strides made by that state, whose schools used to have some of the lowest test scores in the country but now outperform rich blue states like California by adopting phonics to teach reading.

Here is another tribute to the Magnolia state.  Though Mississippi is still the poorest state in the union, its per capita Gross Domestic Product is higher than that of France, Spain, and Italy.  And it is just $2000 behind that of Germany.

I found that claim here, but I was skeptical.   So I dug into the data.

From EuroNews:

In the third quarter of 2024, Mississippi’s GDP per capita was €49,780, just €1,524 less than Germany’s at €51,304.

Mississippi is followed by West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama and South Carolina — all of which surpass big European economies like Spain, Italy, and France.

On the other end of the spectrum, New York’s GDP per capita reaches €107,485, and the District of Columbia leads with €246,523.

In Europe, GDP per capita ranges from €15,773 in Bulgaria to €125,043 in Luxembourg. The EU average is €40,060, compared to the US average of €80,023.

In dollars, Mississippi’s per capita GDP is $58,454.16.  Germany’s is $60,166  That’s a difference of $1711.84.  That less than $2,000!

Germany leads the European economies.  The next four are the United Kingdom, with a per capita GDP of $56,839; then France at $52,090; then Italy at $43,673; then Spain at $38,819.

So Mississippi also leads the United Kingdom!  The more sensationalized story that first caught my eye, actually understated Mississippi’s standing as compared to Europe.

To be sure, per capita GDP (the gross domestic product divided by the population) is not the only measure of a nation’s wealth, prosperity, and standard of living.  But it is surely significant.

The most telling data point is that the U.S. average ($93,978) is nearly twice as high as the European average ($47,012)!