I’ve had the daily challenge of writing hilarious letters to my kids at camp and I’ve done my best to come up with some real doozies. For instance, have you heard about the invasion of zombie-led Mexicans putting Trump back into office so that they can turn him into a zombie and dominate the USA and the world. You should go to summer camp and get my letters to read what you’ve been missing while you’ve been living under a rock in this supposed real world.

Here are some interesting statistics from the Economist about the stupidity of current travel restrictions. Quarantining at home cuts of 75% of contact with the outside world; hotel quarantines raise that to 90%. Is that extra 15% really worth it? In Canada, despite spending millions of dollars on temperature scanners, not a single case of SARS was found using them, which makes you wonder why the world is doing the exact same thing now – and I’ve never heard of a case where these temperature scanners found a single case of covid either. A rapid antigen test on the day of a flight reduces by 76% the number of infected people crossing a border; a PCR test taken 72 hours before reduces the figure by 66%. So why make people go through all the hassle and expense of taking PCR tests? The problem with the PCR tests is that people still have 2 full days to get infected before being tested. Although 6% of American jobs are tied to the travel industry, those accounted for 33% of the losses. The loss of travel cut its share of global GDP in half, amounting to 4.5 trillion dollars of losses. People from Thailand and Colombia can enter the US even without vaccines, but Germans and British with vaccines cannot. Britain has vaccinated people with Astra Zeneca made in India but won’t allow people from India with the same vaccine to enter the UK. Thailand recorded 21,000 cases on August 10, only 19 of them imported despite travel bans and a 2 week quarantine. None of this makes sense, and what you should get out of this is that travel bans and restrictions are mostly theater that don’t stop anything and that are screwing everybody up around the world much  more than they need to be.

I’ve been getting rather upset at the CDC for scaring the country on the basis of flimsy science. I recently read that the big headline story about the Delta variant being as contagious as chicken pox was based on a graphic that appeared in the NY Times that the CDC saw and relied upon. The graphic was wrong. This is according to a leaked document commented on by a federal official to National Public Radio, not exactly Fox News. You really have to wonder what is the basis of CDC regulations. The US is still banning fully vaccinated Europeans and Canadians from coming into the country even though there is nothing at this point to keep out and it is holding up business and families. Newspapers report that the White House says they are relying on “medical experts and the CDC” and meanwhile nobody tells you exactly what these experts and the CDC are basing their opinions on. I think that at this point nobody wants to take responsibility by climbing down from a tree and admitting they were wrong.  So far this Democratic version of the CDC hasn’t been much better than the CDC we had last year and I’m glad Republican governors are ignoring them. There is no reason for people to be running around like idiots due to bullcrap science.

I don’t want to prolong the agony of Covid in this country by coddling a bunch of unvaccinated people and forcing the rest of us to take a bunch of restrictions upon ourselves.  I’ll bet others feel similarly. Mask mandates are not happening or, if they are, will be and already are being widely ignored, especially since the latest CDC scare was induced by flimsy conclusions based on a music festival in Massachusetts involving sex, love and rock and roll, which in no way compares to the bulk of social interactions that do not result in the wide spread of infection. And now the CDC won’t backtrack and admit it unnecessarily scared the country because it would look even dumber, so we all have to live with more mask mandates even though it is not needed. And school kids are going to have another year of masks even though there is not a single study anywhere that shows that these masks help kids avoid infection but rather torture all these kids for no ascertainable gain. It’s just awful how stupid public health policy is and how fed up I am with the Nanny State. You can be sure I’ll be voting for any Republican that looks like less of an idiot than Trump. Just let people live their lives and treat adults like adults. And if you want to get rid of air rage, 75% of which is due to masks on board, stop turning flight attendants into hall monitors treating passengers like idiots.

If a couple hundred thousand Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers and White Supremacists want to commit suicide, why should I mask up to stop them? If Fox News thinks it’s good business to tell these people to kill themselves, why should I have to put on a mask in the gym to keep Tucker Carlson on the air? This whole thing has become really stupid. My kids in camp who are in fully vaccinated bunks have to sleep criss-cross in their bunks for absolutely no good reason other than that they might somehow breathe wrong. My sense is that the reason they are sleeping in Z formation is to send a secret message to prevent the CDC Quarantine Zombies from attacking them during the coming Apocalypse.

In Australia, my wife reports that helicopters buzz over parks and if pilots see two people sitting on a park bench, the police swoop in and hand out $1,000 fines. People in Australia seem to love ratting on each other and getting people into trouble. What lovely people they have there. East Germany should have extended themselves to make a federation with the Ozzies before losing their paradise to the rest of Germany.

You heard all this propaganda out of Israel how great they were at vaccinating people but then you see that everything is going to pot with this Delta. Turns out they didn’t inoculate nearly as many people as they said they did; one-third of all the Arabs in Israel didn’t get the shot, for instance. So where did they come out to report vaccination rates of something approaching 90%? I saw those numbers in the Economist even again as of this writing; where did they come from? All these statistics are crap.

This week in synagogue the rabbi’s sermon dealt with the issue of infrastructure as discussed in Deuteronomy Chapter 21 unexpectedly arising in the discussion of unsolved murders. Interestingly, the issue as to whether infrastructure was strictly stuff like roads and bridges or included what you might call social infrastructure such as social workers goes back over a thousand years and medieval scholars debated this very issue. I did not expect to hear that this issue was alive and well that long ago. The elders of the cities had to inspect the infrastructure outside the borders of the cities and had to declare that they had done all they could to have prevented the murder – the argument being whether the upkeep of the road was to blame or whether having had proper counseling in place would have prevented the murder.

Let me tell you about middle age at the age of 55. This means that 20 years ago I would say Friday night Kiddush at the dinner table all by myself not knowing if I would have a family. Now that my kids are in summer camp and Karen has been away for the month in Australia visiting her mum, I say the Kiddush all by myself but I know that soon everyone will be back at their place around the table. In another 20-30 years, I might be back at the table all by myself but if that happens it will be because everyone else has either died or left home for good. You can feel a lot of context about your life standing around the Friday night table saying the Kiddush prayer for the sabbath.

Another thing about middle age is that 20 years ago hotels wanted to impress people like me because their present clientele were elderly and dying. Now I go to a hotel and I feel old when I see everything so trendy and young around me. Young people have more discretionary income than people did 20 years ago; maybe it’s because they are not having as many kids. Hotels have been faster to cater to this crowd. I did a Staycation at the Equinox hotel in New York City and the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. The Equinox is filled with young trendy bulked-up people standing in the pool holding their drinks and on the weekend it’s a zoo. The hotel advertises a great night’s sleep but I had nightmares because of the thick duvets they put on the bed (and no sheets). The TWA Hotel is a real hoot and lots of fun. They have a rooftop pool, exhibits on life in the 1960’s and the whole terminal building looks like you’ve stepped into a Time Machine with old pay phones, cars, departure boards and even the luggage belts behind the check-in desks. They have a plane from the 1950’s that they use as a cocktail bar on the weekends. You can walk from JetBlue’s Terminal 5 right into this hotel. The last time I was in this building was over 40 years ago as a passenger on TWA. I was in a choir in Miami doing a concert in New York; we took a night flight on a 747 and it was virtually just the 20 of us taking up a whole plane and running around for 3 hours all over the plane! I still remember that terminal; it was a beautiful space and it still is! When I woke up and looked out the window onto the runway, I was amazed to see an Eastern Airlines jet on the tarmac. That airline came back into existence after a 30-year hiatus and now flies to Ecuador.

Has anyone noticed that nobody puts clocks in hotel rooms nowadays? Is it to avoid waking people up at 3am when the hotel maid forgets to rest the alarm clock that nobody else can figure out how to work?

This past weekend I went through my Hall of Treasures, which are my papers and souvenirs from the last 50 years of my life which I know someday will wind up in a Smithsonian Museum dedicated to the posterity of my life. Last time I looked at this I was in a bad mood and couldn’t bear to look at what I had previously written. This time I looked at it again a bit more carefully and actually a lot of what I wrote then was pretty good. Yes, some of it was arrogant and foolish and I wouldn’t write it today. I’m amazed that I got into college and graduate schools with my application essays; they were so awful that at least the universities must have figured that I actually wrote them myself (which probably never happens anymore). I confirmed that high school achievement tests today are much harder than they were when I took them. I would definitely say that in my high school years I took myself much too seriously. But there were some thoughts that remain true today – I didn’t feel that unilateral moves by Israel would bring peace, Arab states wanted to know if the US would be there for them if they all opposed Iran, I felt that more investment was needed in East European and Russian-region economies to ensure that they would survive the transition from communism, and I was trying to figure out how to compile news of the day into a customized abridged version that people could digest to cut through all the clutter, even before people were using the internet and social media.

People asked why I didn’t write about all these voter suppression laws in the US in my last posting. Yes, I’m concerned about them, but if you read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times you get such vastly different descriptions of these laws that, assuming both sides are intelligent, makes me completely confused as to whether or not these laws really would disenfranchise people or if the two political parties are just trying to craft laws to gain advantage for themselves on both sides. I’m pretty cynical about this. I don’t know if the Supreme Court is in lockstep with the Republicans, and I don’t know if the Democrats are just trying to rig things for themselves. I do feel safe though saying that state efforts to put control of elections into the hands of political hacks and legislators instead of independent actors is something that will come back to haunt them later. Today it could be a GOP majority that will certify the election and tomorrow it could be the Democrats. Having non-partisan election officials in place to referee elections is a good thing for all sides to have. The NYC Board of Elections is completely staffed by political party appointees and nobody trusts it. Why go this route in Texas, Arizona and beyond?

A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on climate change had some compelling arguments. It said that although climate change has resulted in death and destruction, it as well as technological and scientific progress has also reduced other types of death and destruction. For instance, while 120,000 people a year will die of heat-related causes, 300,000 people who would have died from the cold will survive. Rivers that used to flood every 50 years in the 1970’s now flood every 150 years. The amount of forests burned by fire is 11% of the area that burned 100 years ago. Climate-related weather disasters kill 90% fewer people than 100 years ago even though the world’s population is up by 400%. You see the same thing with Covid; people have become so used to perfection that when people look at a vaccine with 95% efficacy, they want to know why 5% still get sick. We have become used to being risk averse and expect perfection like tiger moms who want to know why their kid only got 100 on the test and missed the extra credit question.

A good article by Michael Knights, a military analyst who spent 2 decades working with Iraqi militias, opines that Biden’s counter-terrorist strategy in Iraq is failing. He’s hitting back 1x for every 11 strikes against us and trying to be so pin-pricky about what he does that he’s not hitting back at anything that matters. And the US makes a big noise about it. The effect is that the Iranians are laughing at us and continuing to take potshots at us because they know that they can. A better strategy would be to act more unpredictably, hit harder and not admit publicly what we did so that nobody has to publicly oppose it. The Israelis, he says, plays this game much better.

Someone at a dinner party made an interesting point: Have you noticed that liberals are making the arguments that the death penalty should be abolished because they are having such a hard time finding drugs that kill people without causing too much pain. Except that these same people over the past 10 years went and banned all the drugs that killed people without causing too much pain. So now they want to cite a problem as the excuse but it’s the problem they helped create. This person noted that when you go for surgery, you get a shot of anesthesia and you totally black out. If someone wanted to then kill you, you’d never notice. So how hard can it really be to find a drug that they could use for an execution?

The Israelis had been in advanced stages of various kinds of infrastructure projects for Gaza until the rocket attacks by Hamas started in May. Now all those plans are out the window. Egypt is primarily supplying Gaza’s needs, but only ¼ the amount of stuff is coming in from Egypt as previously came in from Israel. Very little of the promised aid from Egypt has actually started to arrive. The Israelis are fine with this even if there will be no negotiations over Israelis held in Gaza. Let Egypt try to run Gaza. The Israelis have almost finished hermetically sealing the Gaza border from the tunnels; they should be finished by next year. The Israelis are pretty much ready to lock the door and throw away the keys, says Alex Fishman, a well known military correspondent for Israeli’s biggest daily newspaper Yediot.

To see China sabotage a Chinese company called Didi which had a big IPO in the US markets and then to have it tank, this was no surprise. But if China is hoping that foreign investment will be there for Chinese companies, it better consider that when you burn the market like this, people remember it and vote nay with their investment dollars as punishment. Basically, China ambiguously warned the company that it had issues but waited until the day after the IPO to suspend their operations. The stock went down 20% the next day and fell below the IPO price. This is the kind of reason that China will not be #1 in the world; unless you think you can do it all on your own, just keep pissing off the rest of the business world and see how far it takes you. No bank or fund is going to want to get burned again in China after this one. The Chinese will say that they are still learning the game as to regulation and public markets, but I think it is somewhat hollow; Mr. Xi has created a cult that puts his persona above all else including business and that’s not good for business.

I met with a Chinese friend who now lives in the US and who at one point was being groomed for future leadership in China. We had a lengthy discussion on the state of affairs. At certain points, it is difficult when two people of very different mindsets are trying to understand this situation, but it precisely because you have two peoples with very different mindsets that the situation is so difficult to diffuse. China sees everything through the lens of 2,000 years of history and is stuck on the needle about the idea that everything the US does is meant to keep China down. Trump’s presidency was great for China because it proved the point. It is the equivalent of the US seeing a communist behind every tree but here Mr. Xi who leads China could point to Trump and the bipartisan support he received regarding China as proving that the US is hellbent on China’s containment. So far Biden hasn’t really changed much when it comes to China, showing that the US national interest is inimical to China’s.

My biggest takeaway is this: All told, China’s Xi will be judged by his deliverables.  (So too will Saudi’s MBS.) Mr. Xi is a tough cookie who grew up under miserable conditions and went through the meat-grinder of its leadership program to get where he is. If he doesn’t deliver the goods, he’ll be out. His mandate is to strengthen China and also to retake Taiwan. That means that you can bet the farm that within another 5 years or so, or as soon as China thinks it can get away with it, they are going to try to occupy Taiwan. They don’t care that Taiwan is not interested in a takeover; they spent decades negotiating with Taiwan until recent governments were more hostile toward mainland China, Taiwanese people want to work in China, and they are banking on the fact that they will get away with it and that the US will be all talk and no walk when it comes to a military confrontation over a matter that is in China’s backyard and upon which its national honor has been placed.

Keep burning people who invest in Chinese companies in the stock market by issuing government fiats out of nowhere that aim to put them out of business, and I can’t see foreign investment continuing into China very long. Even Stalin needed capitalist money to keep his party going. I just don’t see how Xi will get his deliverables this way by ruining Hong Kong and trashing Chinese public companies that make profits. And anyone who would be smart enough to build such a company would want to go outside of China to do it. Decoupling is going to happen faster if China drives investment and technology development to be in line with XI’s philosophy and communist principles (even if you want to believe that the government is not really all that communist).

China has a well-developed system for grooming leadership and it is very tough sledding. You are constantly rotated among various governance jobs, audited and evaluated, and the bottom 10% get thrown out of the program.  America has no such program and it is not surprising that Chinese leaders look with contempt at American leaders like Obama and Biden who never ran anything, Trump who had no government experience and was more of a failure in business than a success, and wonder that if this is the best the nation of America can come up with, then why are we letting them run the world? America is filled with squabbling factions that look for foreign scapegoats and reflect what the Chinese see as a lack of confidence in their own destiny. Its chief of infrastructure for Shanghai visited New York City accompanied by my friend and was astounded at how poor the local infrastructure was.

In Hong Kong, the Chinese believe and claim they have strong evidence that the US was helping to orchestrate protests. As to the Ughur Moslems, the Chinese have been cracking down on these “Gypsies of China” for over 20 years and whatever they are doing to them now is much less harsh than what they used to do, which was to kill them outright. So why is the world getting so excited about this just now? The Chinese don’t want them having lots of kids and being out on the streets peddling and stealing.

From their point of view, China’s economy is already #1 if you factor in various elements that are not usually accounted for when making these determinations, but the Chinese are being cleverly discreet in not flaunting it. China has good shipbuilding capability and can do the work at a much lower cost and faster; Europe will be out of the shipbuilding business if China decides to get into it. Right now they are building aircraft carriers; granted, they are increasingly viewed as sitting ducks, but they are useful toward intimidating second-tier powers in Asia and so China wants them even if not to actually use in warfare.  China hopes it can take Taiwan through intimidation without having to fire a shot, so this strategy has its place.

Finally, an important point that we should all take note of. Mr. Xi and people around him look at what the US did after the USSR crumbled. The US snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by becoming stingy when it was time to invest in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. They left the region to deteriorate and spiral into chaos. Iraq and Libya are other examples of western powers removing the powers that be only to have the area descend into chaos. Mr. Xi does not want to be the guy who made a deal with the West only to find China on the short end of the stick when the West does not live up to its promises and then to see China plunged into chaos. Earlier this year, I reviewed the biography of James Baker whose biggest regret was that the amount needed to invest in post-cold war Europe and Russia was miniscule but the West wouldn’t spend it. Not only did the West squander the dividends it had won with the end of the Cold War, but even today more than 30 years later, it has affected the calculus of leaders around the world such as Putin and Xi in China (and probably Kim in North Korea) who all feel that the US and its partners cannot be trusted and are just as guilty of creating chaos in the world as anything those countries might do. Although China is glad to see the US hightail it out of Afghanistan, they are not thrilled having them leave chaos behind which will complicate Chinese investment in such nearby places as Pakistan. Biden’s team seems surprised by what happened in Afghanistan, and it’s a problem that these veterans of the foreign policy establishment were surprised.

The US and the West today are not in a position to pick up the mantle of world leadership and the US Senate hasn’t ratified a single treaty that its president has made in over a generation. Of course, that doesn’t supply any incentive for any nation to negotiate a treaty with the USA. So China has its own good reasons to both fear and look down on the US and the West and to feel that instead of the US purporting to create a rules-based world order (by which it makes the rules), China has plenty of room to strut its stuff and to try to make its own rules.

My response to my colleague was pretty simple: Assuming arguendo that all of his points were true, the proof that the US will always be #1 is in the pudding: he is here and not there. If China’s elites believe that their lives are better lived in the West and that it is better to build a business in the West without government interference than in China where to get ahead you have to toe the communist party’s line (which I agree isn’t really all that communist) and agree with whatever Xi says, then the momentum will always be here because it is the 1% of the population with 90% of the wealth that determines the future. He didn’t argue me on this check-mate point although he argued every other subject we discussed.

I heard an interesting talk about Saudi Arabia these days and there were some disturbing notes. Young people are doing more drugs and their parents are worried about it. There are a lot of young people caught up in MBS’s reforms and they are working very hard to mimic what they see as a hard-working prince; since they are working at superhuman speed, they need drugs to keep up the pace. If MBS’s work comes to naught, they will be very disillusioned. Also, I’m told that all over the Gulf people dread getting a phone call telling them they’ve been appointed as an ambassador or as a high government official; it means they will be working 18 hour days and have no life. They can’t refuse the offers and they are often not told why they are getting the job; they don’t know if they are being honored, tested or punished. So to avoid this kind of draft, people say little at meetings and try not to be noticed. I’ve always felt Saudi Arabia was a cursed country where it was best not to give a shit; 10 years ago it was because of the oil. Now it’s because you have a ruler who is so feared and capricious that nobody knows what the rules are and nobody wants to get caught up in the game. Interestingly, Chinese executives reaching the pinnacle of their careers have incentive to shut up and not go for the gold because upon retirement they get audited and often found to be faulty if they took risks that didn’t pan out. So instead of going for the gold, they tend to lay low and hope their careers end without incident. It is a waste of good talent and seniority and the Chinese know it but they have fostered a culture of Cover Your Ass and that’s what you get as the result.

My doctor says that telemedicine is a real fraud. He says that doctors were making diagnosis and prescribing medications based on phone calls with people who never took off their clothes to be examined. He says you can’t play doctor without examining patients.

My partners and I are evaluating how things are in the office after the first month of being back. We feel that when people said that productivity working from home was almost as good as being in the office, that some of this was falling victim to lowered expectations of what people thought was good productivity. There is no comparison to being in the office, particularly when it comes to collaboration and people being around people that they like to be with, which is the #1 item that influences people’s willingness to stay in their present job.

Marks and Spencer makes really comfy socks and underwear. Did you know that you can buy it on the internet and have it shipped to the US for a very low cost? You can buy the stuff on a US site, but you can also buy on the UK site and, although shipping is more expensive, the stuff shows up in a few days through DHL and you can get things such as pajamas which are made of super comfy material that they are not allowed to sell in the US (less fire resistant). My kids love the PJ’s from M&S. Also, if you buy from them, you can return stuff to the US via postage paid mail (they pay) and get a refund.

How things change for travel: I used to care about having a shortwave radio and then being able to watch BBC World on television in a hotel. Now that we have our phones, just think of how the packing list has changed: Most of us don’t travel with cameras, we watch internet and get email, texts and phone calls. We care less about a hotel concierge because we can just look things up and follow a map tied to GPS. We get our news from the phone, and we don’t need to send post cards because we can just text photos and comments or post them online to social media. You don’t need a hotel phone to work because you can call and receive calls for free or at low cost on your own phone.

I was watching this infomercial about a collection of Love Songs of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s from Time Life. I was interested until I saw that the price of the collection was something like $150. Also, by the time I’d watched 15 minutes of this program, I’d heard enough songs to last me a year and figured that I’d never actually wind up listening to these songs. So I guess the infomercial was too long for its own good.

It’s too bad New York’s soon-to-be-ex Governor Cuomo couldn’t control himself with women, was terribly arrogant, and had no friends when scandal finally brought him down. There are those who want to rewrite history and say he didn’t do anything as governor. The new airports, train station and subway in New York City that had not been built for 50 years until he got the job done is testament that he was one of the best governors New York has had. It takes an asshole to be a governor in this state and you can’t take that away from him.

I’m ready to judge Biden’s presidency at the 6-month mark where his momentum has stalled, and I’d say that he busted a good opportunity to run up the middle road and get 60 senators to agree to important decisions that would have propelled the US into the next century, something the US hasn’t succeeded in doing since the Reagan-Bush years. Instead, he bought into his progressive wing’s dream of Going Big and is winding up accomplishing next to nothing. Here’s all you need to know – he still has a ton of executive appointments to major offices (such as undersecretaries to the secretary of the treasury) and it’s not the Senate holding them up. The problem is they are so stuck on finding the right token person to fill the roles (ie: we need a black, Hispanic, gay person, female, Native American) that they either can’t agree on the person, find the right person or find a person who accepts the role. It was like early spring when the vaccines became available and Democratic state and national government officials were so consumed deciding who should get the vaccine that few people were actually getting it. Things didn’t pick up until they simplified who should get it and now the problem is convincing people to get it, which was always going to be the problem. So meanwhile, people aren’t getting appointed to senior level positions, the agenda isn’t being pushed forward and time is a-wasting.

The Republicans are going to stick it to the Democrats in 2022 because the majority of Americans voted for Biden to replace Trump, but not to pursue a progressive agenda with critical race theories in schools, higher taxes and social re-engineering. I voted for Biden to get rid of Trump, restore the state and local tax deduction and to seek consensus down a middle road, none of which he is actually doing. Biden is trying to please an activist wing but it’s not what got him into office; it was White suburban often conservative voters, as well as conservative Blacks and Hispanics. Too bad he didn’t figure it out. He is sucking up to teachers unions who don’t want to vaccinate teachers or open schools and pissing off parents of kids who are missing out on school, which puzzles me since there are so many poor kids in public schools who can’t just do what many people with money are doing which is to switch to private schools. I can certainly tell you that the Chinese think of him as a bit of an aged idiot who has spent his life being a senator (and senators don’t do anything except talk), and I’d bet that Putin is not very respectful of him either. Didn’t take 2 weeks after having a summit for Putin to give the green light to a big cyberattack on America. So far Biden is running a more professional show but the amount of initiative being taken is low. Although I’m a hawk on China, I believe that Biden’s strategy is not working even though it is presently frustrating China’s leaders. Biden is doing what I would like to see China not be doing, which is to be simply opposing them for the sake of opposing them everywhere. We need to work with them and find ways to cooperate and I think that Biden and his Team are not sure where they really want to go and are stuck in a loop. The Chinese were hoping for better than Trump but although the tone is a bit different and the US cares more about its allies, substantively it’s still pretty much the same policy out of the US. Same goes with immigration on the border; they haven’t done anything there either. So far it’s been all talk and no walk on the Biden foreign agenda; I mentioned earlier that as far as Iran and Iraq goes, they are treading water and not getting anywhere. Six rounds of talks with Iran has yielded neither an agreement nor a policy. And beyond the large headline companies, many more Chinese  companies under the radar are doing lots of business in the West and doing the same stuff the larger companies are doing. I’ve said for years that the whole concept of trying to contain Iran so that it cannot become a nuclear power is faulty; at this point Team Biden seems to be on the verge of conceding the point and looking for other ways to engage Iran. If George Bush wasn’t going to bomb Iran a decade ago, why would you expect anyone to do it now? Iran is only going to respond to force; not to any type of negotiation especially when the proposed agreements offer them nothing they need that they can’t get anyway.

I said in January that Biden should be doing whatever will get 60 senators to agree. That would work better at getting attention abroad because so far the talking shops in Vienna for Iran are moving toward policies that will not get bipartisan support and it is for this reason that the Iranians are not taking it seriously. Also, Biden would be smart to do something reckless involving US armed forces. Nobody is deterred by these pin-prick moves designed to be so risk averse as to be counterproductive. Trump was viewed as a moron who, if provoked, would do something unpredictable and that at least provided him with a modicum of deterrence. Biden doesn’t even have that.

I think we learned some good lessons this year; government handouts cause labor and supply shortages because people stop working, then inflation which creeps into everything such as taxis, hotels, automobiles, and groceries. State rule is ultimately good because the feds can’t be trusted to make public health policy that works for everyone and some of their policy is just plain stupid. And homelessness causes all sorts of order in the streets to break down, so it must be kept under control. New York City will take a long time to recover from the shit De Blasio put out on the streets.

I’ve also developed a greater appreciation for this filibuster. Progressive Democrats want to spend 3.5 trillion dollars and I don’t agree with it, especially if they try to ram it through the senate with 51 votes. Having Congress seesaw every 2 years when there is an election with barebones majority control is no way to run a country. You need bipartisan support for major spending and policy changes so that they are not constantly reversed every time control of the Congress changes. The supermajority, which the filibuster essentially requires, ensures that Congress will pass laws that have broad support and that will withstand the test of time. It is bad for ideological firebrands but it is good for the country. The infrastructure bill passed and will be enacted because it had broad support, which is as it should be.

When I argued that Team Biden had lots of experienced people especially for foreign policy, people said but they were all with Obama and they suck. I figured that they now had more experience and could learn from earlier mistakes. But criticism is mounting from experienced old-timers that these people are just sitting there and not doing anything, while other countries look at the US and shrug. Under Trump it was a shit show, here it’s just nothing being done and risk aversion run amok. Either way, the rest of the world is not taking the US too seriously. I guess the critics were right – a lot of these veterans from Obama’s administration are still pretty lousy. Trump’s people stood for something; you might not have liked it but you at least knew what guys like Pompeo wanted. With these guys, the rest of the world is still trying to figure out what the US policy is.  I expected better.

A year ago I said that Kamala Harris was a poor vice presidential choice. I still think so. Giving her the Mexico portfolio has helped cement her reputation as a nobody especially since nobody seems to be able to figure out how to solve the problems at the border.

Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist for the New York Times, likes the new mayor of New York. He says he is non-ideological, pragmatic and destined for higher office. That’s good news if it turns out that way. I’m concerned about corruption; I spoke to someone in the police department who wonders why the new mayor retired just a year or so short of his full retirement from the police force. Any idiot knows to just lay low and take the pension. He was reportedly on the take to such a degree that it was worth more to him to take the money than to wait for the pension.

I’ve had a hard time finding a hotel I liked in Miami since JW Marriott turned Turnberry into a zoo. The Four Seasons in Brickell is certainly not bad, especially being connected to a huge Equinox health club, but I was very impressed at the Mandarin Oriental on Brickell Key, which is a small island just off the Brickell/Downtown area. You get great skyline views, the food is good, and it’s more chill being on a little island. I used to work on that island 30 years ago in my first law job; the guy I worked for died and it turns out the firm disbanded soon after I left. I guess it wasn’t going to be a good career move for me to stay there, as it turns out. Don’t use the metrorail from the airport to get here; the connection from the airport to another train is terrible and, even if you come at rush hour, the traffic still will beat the metrorail.

I also visited Fisher Island, where I haven’t been for over a decade. This is a small exclusive island reached only by ferry just a few minutes from South Beach. As long as you don’t want to go anywhere off the island, it’s a great place to veg out with its own beach, spa and eateries, and everything you want is within a 5 minute ride (and you get a golf cart). The hotel consists of 15 cottages built around a Vanderbilt mansion, which really does feel like a Vanderbilt mansion. It’s a great place to enjoy a quiet weekend and in the summer it’s not too pricey. To live on the island, you have to pay an initiation fee of about $350,000 plus an annual fee of about $50,000. But if you make $2 million a year in New York, you’d pay that much in income taxes on the state and local level. So it makes sense to trade that a year of that tax money in for a great lifestyle on an exclusive island with great facilities with another 700 or so families. Even better is just to stay in the hotel 10 days a year and get all this with your room rate. During the summer, many of the residents are up in the Hamptons of New York so you get the island almost to yourself.

An interesting report from the Economist Intelligence Unit forecasts that global supply chains will not move to the North America and will remain in Asia; if not China, then elsewhere such as Vietnam. Because Mexico, the US and Canada are protectionist against each other, Asia still offers the most cost-efficient means of producing and delivering goods to North America. During the pandemic, even though Asia did not vaccinate well, their economies returned to normal faster than those in North America.

When I was in Boston for Memorial Day Weekend, I saw this lady on an elevator holding this huge intimidating book called Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin. She told me it looked tougher than it was and that it was a good read. Yes, it was. At the end of every chapter, I wanted to continue. The book is on the Best Seller’s List now and it’s worthwhile reading because most books about World War II focus on Hitler and his designs. This book says that Hitler was less important than it seems who could have lost the war early on and would have capitulated, and that Stalin really ran the war and played everyone else in this game. He pushed the US and Japan into war and delayed its end, for example. It’s disturbing to see how naïve Churchill and Roosevelt were, how many Russian spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the most senior levels of the US Government and managed to sideline anyone who didn’t agree with them, and that history could have been so different the past 70 years had someone else been running these countries who might have stood up to Stalin earlier when the West had overwhelming leverage to do so. Stalin knew what he wanted and had a very weak hand; Russia was on the verge of total destruction at one point and the US completely rescued it from the dead with a completely one-sided lend-lease deal that gave him everything he wanted for years, even after the war ended, with nothing in return. Stalin made some wise moves and some awful ones but never had to face the consequence of his failures. The fact that China, North Korea, Japanese islands, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, the Baltics, Berlin, and Hungary all fell to the Communists did not have to happen. In fact, from the author’s point of view, the whole World War II was a complete failure that should have been settled at the negotiating table, but Stalin manipulated the other countries into fighting this war, weakening themselves and strengthening him to become the biggest winner of that world war. It’s a disturbing book to read but very necessary toward understanding just how broken Europe and Asia were at the time, with countries going in and out of existence almost annually. You wouldn’t want the world to be this way again. The end result was that millions of people died who probably didn’t have to and tons of money was wasted on war material that could have been spent to much better uses. You get the feeling these days that people are not learning from history and that the US could make the same mistakes all over again.

Look at then and now. Back then, the rest of the world really couldn’t care less as long as their own access to commodities was not hindered, such as the British wanting access to oil in Baku. Countries were just being invaded and plundered at will and you didn’t know from month to month who was going to do what. I don’t think we want to go back to that kind of world. Whether China going into Taiwan would just be the first lick of many or the settling of what they see as their destiny is an open question to me. Whether Russia would build on its annexation of Crimea (something I don’t really understand why it was so compelling for them to do) or stop there is also an open question, but so far Putin hasn’t tried for more. I just don’t think the world today can stand a bunch of invasions and countries going in and out of existence.

Another book I’ve read is Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone, who looks at the last decade of growth at Amazon and tells us about Jeff Bezos. I was curious to read the book because I know so little about this guy who might be the richest person in the world. I remember when I used to joke on these pages that Amazon was giving away dollar bills for 78 cents and making it up in volume. But almost every day I buy stuff on that site and I know that I’m not always paying the lowest price. The book is a good read and it will tell you a good insider’s account as to what goes on at Amazon. I thought the author was balanced and fair, showing the good bad and ugly. My takeaway is that Jeff is not just a lucky guy who made it to the top but a very smart cookie who at key points came up with important breakthrough ideas and who challenged his executives to rethink their methods and which all served to make the company great. He doesn’t sound like a nice guy but more of a human computer; I’d think that he and Putin would get along quite well.

One place you can go and pretend you are in Quebec or Switzerland without leaving the USA is Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, about 2 hours scenic drive from Portland and slightly longer from Boston (although much farther away it is all highway driving). Portland is a small airport that is useful as long as nothing goes wrong; bring food for an evening flight because by 6pm all the food outlets were closed. The Mount Washington Resort is not the most fascinating place on earth but it is a solid resort with all the facilities you want and some new presidential-wing suites that are quite sweet. Pescatarians will get bored of eating salmon and fried cod after 2 days. They have a zip line tour but you got to book it at least a month in advance. It’s a good place to cool off and catch up on a good book and there is a nice spa too.

Soon we are leaving on a Visit USA summer vacation in this second summer of covid. See you in September!

I started writing this in April and waited till early July to post this to see how things sorted themselves out and to be sure this material wouldn’t be obsolete by the time it was published– there’s a lot of stuff here but it’s all good and there was nothing that was outdated or repetitive to take out, so please enjoy this over the holiday weekend. There’s lots of random funny stuff in there to keep you happy.

Sons and daughters – when I put my kids to bed at night, my daughter’s hair smells like peach and my son’s hair smells like pizza.

We were at an astronomical observatory this month in rural Virginia, and we looked at star whose light reaching us now was actually transmitted 25 million years ago. It made me wonder what it would mean if Jeremy was checking online for a result of a basketball game played 25 million years ago. He’s disturbed if the result is even one minute behind the present. But does it really matter? Does it make any difference if the information reaching you is about something that happened 10 minutes ago or 10 million years ago if that’s all you have to go on? What if every sports score that reached you was about a game played 25 million years ago? It makes me think of an American author from the 1800’s who lived on a deserted island and he would get his newspapers by ship so he’d have his butler give him one each day so that he could feel like he was getting his daily news and living a regular life.

Ever go to a planetarium show and, as you journey among the planets, consider the fact that 1,200 degrees separates the hottest and coldest planets in our solar system and that here on earth, humans only feel comfortable walking around outside if it’s between 65 and 85 degrees. Or just two or three degrees on your thermostat is enough to make you hot or cold in bed. One weekend we were in Boston freezing at 50 degrees and the very next weekend it was 90 degrees and miserable in New York. I figure we have about 100 years left on this planet before we humans utterly destroy it. You’d like to think we were smarter than this but we’re not. I went to synagogue last weekend where everyone was wearing a mask and sitting socially distanced even though they’d been vaccinated. One otherwise intelligent guy said to me that he didn’t feel comfortable talking to me since I wasn’t wearing a mask. Then they all went outside and talked to each other right up close and without masks. Including that same guy. If these guys have to save our planet, we’re in real trouble.

If I’ve seen anything most disheartening over the past year of this pandemic, it’s that humans are stupider than I give them credit for. Societies and individuals are poor at measuring risk and calibrating action to strike a middle course between setting boundaries and pursuing their lives. Most countries have stupid rules in place that way overprotect people and yet people consistently act stupidly getting themselves infected. If we could achieve a situation where governments could let people exercise personal responsibility and where people would exercise it, we could all have lived our lives better the past year. Did it really make sense to close all medical offices for 2-3 months last year? Did people have to stay away from swimming laps in pools and the ocean? Did we really need to run around with all that hand sanitizer cleaning everything when not one person was documented actually having caught Covid touching anything? Do people in gyms really need to exercise in masks if they are far away from other people and constantly wiping down everything they touch? Why do vaccinated people still have to behave like lepers in medical offices and in Ubers and on public transportation? If this happens again, will we learn anything or just repeat the same mistakes?

Another sign of returning to normal – there was a street fair outside today and I got a cup of lemonade. It had an ant in it. At least the odds of getting sick from an insect in my lemonade at a street fair now exceeds that of getting covid.

Here’s how I define community leadership these days: It means that when you go to the Botanical Gardens and there are 50 people standing in front of a piece of art in a big line to take Instagram pictures, and you realize that the art is symmetrical so you go to the other side of the art and take your picture, then everybody sees you and half the line starts heading your way. Or you are in an ice cream parlor and everyone else is wearing a mask, and you go inside and ask the person behind the counter if they care (since there’s no sign on the door saying so) and they say they don’t care, and so you leave your mask off and everyone after you comes in without a mask.

We went on our first family trip to Boston over Memorial Day Weekend. It was a dreary cold weekend for the weather record books but we managed to have a good time. We took 3 walking tours: The Freedom Trail, Lexington and Concord, and Harvard and MIT. Our guide for two of these tours was truly excellent; Daniel has a company called Cambridge Historical Tours at 617.520.4030 (cell 413.230.8729). He is a dashing young actor who really puts his all into his tours. The L&C tour was 5 hours and my kids managed to put away the phones and be entertained for a couple of hours. My biggest takeaway about Lexington and Concord is that all that went on there happened in under 24 hours but every moment of it has been memorialized; the start of the American Revolutionary War was bound to occur someplace, it just happened there. But the story of those fateful 24 hours is a good one and you should enjoy the tour! The university tour was fun for hearing all kinds of tales of pranks the students have pulled over the years.

Also on this visit we went to the Tea Party Museum, which was a very good attraction and about 8 minute walk from our hotel. In Concord, we ate at the Main Street café right in the center of town which was rather good. We watched a Red Sox game at Fenway park; there are not many bad seats here. We sat in the HP Pavillion and it offered cover against rain, an indoor place to escape to and decent food. Our hotel, the Boston Harbor Hotel, turned out to be a great choice on the waterfront. This area of Boston has been recently developed and it’s more festive to be out here than in the center of town, so this property actually beat out the Four Seasons for us. Great facilities and food here too, as well as rooms with great harbor views and easy to reach with the water taxi to the airport (although the shuttle to the docks at the airport runs close to half an hour apart so you don’t really save any time using this, but it’s a great way to introduce the city to kids and it’s convenient as the water taxi pulls right up to the hotel).  The hotel is 8 minutes to Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall (the food hall there is really good and we ate there 2 lunches out of 3), and 5 minutes from the Aquarium stop on the blue line of the metro; only 2 stops to the airport. Also easy to get to Fenway park via the metro. The North End is about a 12 minute walk from the hotel; most tourists go to Mike’s Pastry shop; try Modern instead. Best item is the cannolis; you can leave the other items. Bricco’s is a good Italian restaurant for dinner in the North End and don’t discount Legal Sea Foods at the Harborfront right by the Aquarium station – the food is really good there. Uber works better than taxis here. We saw few taxis.

We also went in mid-June to Virginia and DC (it was supposed to be Iceland but that will have to wait another year). Primland is a 5-star resort in southwestern Virginia with beautiful cottages and lots of outdoor activities. We had a great time there for 5 days. It’s about 90 minutes drive from either Roanoke or Greensboro North Carolina airports (or about 2 hours from Charlotte). Among its unique traits is an astronomical observatory. The only real negative is that the property is large enough to be its own county and you can spend 1-2 hours a day just in the hotel’s shuttle getting from place to place.

We visited Washington DC which is in the process of reawakening after Covid. It’s running at about 30-40% when we visited in late June. The Ritz Carlton is in a nice neighborhood near lots of embassies within 5-10 minutes walk of several metro stations, and it has a gigantic Equinox health club attached to it (with a good café for lunch offering pastas, sandwiches and smoothies). Having stayed in lots of DC hotels, this is a good choice. You know you’re in DC when the guy stretching with his trainer next to you is talking about oil and Saudi Arabia. There are new things to see here; last time we visited we saw the Mansion on O Street, which was fun. The Jewish American Veterans Museum is on our list next time around. My kids #1 pick was the new Spy Museum is a good museum but don’t go there thinking you’ll pretend being a spy. The museum in New York City is much better for that. Even with covid, there’s too many people in this DC museum and you can’t get a fair chance to use the kiosks and anyway the challenges are too dumbed down to be interesting. We were disappointed and found it not engaging. There is a new museum called Planet Word which is cleverly designed and teaches you about the history of the English language and about the uses of language for purposes such as advertising and literature. Another new activity is the Museum of the Bible, which is a Disney-like museum about what’s in the Bible and how the Bible became the best selling book of all time. It’s run by a Christian fundamentalist but somehow he managed to pull off this museum without offending anyone I know of. It’s a classy institution and 3 hours is not enough to really see the place but the bare minimum to get through it. My son who hates anything involving religion gave the museum a 9.5 rating out of 10, so you know it’s good. The Jefferson Memorial at dusk is always a nice place to see. After seeing these memorials many times, it was interesting to hire a guide and to do a walking tour of the memorials. There is a lot of walking to do here so clever use of the roundabout bus or a taxi is advised. One interesting memorial we saw was the Einstein memorial at the National Academy of Science just off the Lincoln Memorial. And you can walk next door to the Department of State which has a taxi rank (the only one I saw other than at the airport) which is a good place to finish your tour. Expect for now to use Ubers and to pay for them dearly.

Don’t you think a great new attraction in DC would be the Museum of the American Counter-Revolution where you could go with your group and simulate breaking into the capitol building and re-enact sitting at a replica of Nancy Pelosi’s desk holding your gun and reading a newspaper and pretending to be Donald Trump holding a bible upside down in front of the church just across the street from the White House? I just have this feeling that such an attraction would be a huge success even if the whole idea of it is sick.

I woke up on my 55^th birthday to a screen full of emails. Turned out to be a slew of robo-birthday cards from all my doctors. Some sent two or three of them. Always good to know somebody loves me.

Could someone please tell the guy I saw walking his dog in the street at 11pm this week wearing a mask that the war is over?. … I would like to rename our local Jewish Community Center the NCC, the Neurotic Community Center. Their building is still closed and I stopped my membership, figuring why should I reward them for never reopening? And what about open season on flight attendants – how about ending the mask mandate on airplanes so that people will stop attacking flight attendants and forcing planes to be rerouted daily? Americans just don’t like being told what to do. It ain’t Asia here.

The New York Times seems more and more alien to the city of New York. The day after the mask mandate was cancelled, there was one paragraph about it on page 4, but there were 3 full pages of coverage about Gaza. Recently, the Times had an 8 page spread in the Times of what people want to see in the next mayor and none of them looked like anyone we’d know. Just a lot of ethnic people from other parts of town. Not the people that are paying $1,000 a year to read the paper. And perhaps we’re sick of reading underpaid reporters rant on about why 50-60% income tax should be paid by us, the ones who actually pay for the paper. Or their Men’s Style magazine, where none of the models looked like a male? Speaking of which, I was wondering: If you are transgender, can you also be a feminist or do you have to choose a side?

How come you see Jews eating Chinese food but you never see a Chinese person in a kosher restaurant?

I saw this headline in the Jerusalem Post: Hamas launches suicide drones…..what exactly does one mean by a suicidal drone? Are robots that human now that they are committing suicide? Makes me think of that line by Radar O’Riley in the MASH TV comedy series when he says “Rabbits are people too.”

This time of year the weather changes day to day here in New York. One day is 80 degrees, the next day 50. Have you noticed that this year nobody says they are getting a cold every time the weather changes? I guess since nobody is going to the office, nobody has to have an excuse to stay home.

My wife hurt her arm and it hurt enough that she decided to go on strike in the kitchen. After a few days, my kids turned from complaining about her cooking to complaining that they were going to starve under my cooking. Jeremy joined me in the kitchen one evening where the menu was tilapia filets, broccoli florets and grilled cheese sandwiches. He said he found the stress of preparing all this to come out to the table at the same time was too much for him and then he went on strike.

Speaking of which, I’ve been reading obituaries from the Economist at the dinner table to let the kids hear the beautiful prose that you can’t read anywhere else quite like it, not to mention the intriguing stories of otherwise forgotten people. And when Jeremy complains that our dinner food is beneath him, I feel that reading about some of these amazing people in the world who barely ate food as children but rose to prominence might help put him in his place. I wonder if English teachers around the world have thought of reading these obituaries in the classroom.

I find that after I go for physiotherapy and get the exercises prescribed to me, my pain feels better even if I don’t do the exercises. Just knowing that I’m not doing them and it’s my choice makes me feel that it’s my fault if the pain persists and it would probably be better if I did the exercises.

My son started a YouTube channel with his commentary about football. He’s passed 100 views and he’s all excited. I figured people on Death Row might be bored enough to be watching but he gets all kinds of positive letters from fans who like his programs. After he reached about 4 views, YouTube sent him a note telling him that because he is under age 18, he cannot livestream his programs. We were perturbed; Jewish organizations were complaining to YouTube about all the Holocaust denial programs out there and YouTube was claiming they did not have personnel to police it. So for my kid with his 4 views they are paying attention to him? Anyway, entertainment rules –by the end of the year, there will probably be more people watching my kid talk about football than reading Global Thoughts!

Lo and Behold, People respond to incentives. The whole year Jeremy wouldn’t get out of bed and we’d have to literally hand him his towel, phone, wallet and coat to get him out the door. One morning I threw something like rose pedals at the hallway floor as he walked by in a parody of the prince in the Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America. Then I offered him $10 a day for a week to see if he could get himself out of bed and out the door by himself. The first day he failed, but the second day he got it. The key adjustment was to set the alarm clock for the latest time he could get out of bed instead of early and then figure he’d get up 15 minutes later. That week he got the prize 2 of 4 days.

I did an informal poll at a restaurant, gym and other places where they keep taking people’s temperatures to see if they have a fever. Not one place said they ever detected a high temperature over the past year. Talk about useless information – people who have fever don’t show up in these places, and 50% of those who have covid have no fever.

I found these stretch pants that look like dress pants made by Uniqlo that are fantastic to wear to synagogue or to the office. You can’t tell by looking at them that they are stretch pants. This could be the next fashion craze!

Think about the richest people in the world: They have figured out how to give people something they want without making it too complicated. Finding stuff on the internet (Google); An electric car that looks cool (Tesla); a telephone that looks cool that lets you hook up with people and send them great pictures (Apple); an interface for using almost any computer in the world (Microsoft Windows); an interface for sharing ideas and photos with other people (Facebook); entertainment to watch on your TV, phone or computer (Netflix and YouTube) and the ability to buy one stock that invests in the best of all other stocks (Berkshire Hathaway). I’m trying to think of what’s missing. I’ve got it: Sex is what really sells and sex toys have always sold well. Artificial intelligence can give better massages than real people can, according to a recent Economist article. So if a machine can induce great orgasms using artificial intelligence because it can sense feedback from touching you and adjust to it with more sensitivity than a human can, whoever figures this out will probably become one of the ten richest people in the world. You heard it here first.

I’m utterly shocked at how expensive and how sold out everything is for Christmas and holiday weekends 2021-22. One problem is that the luxury Caribbean market has become a monopoly of Ritz Carlton and the prices are just sky-high everywhere and it’s sold out anyway. We are adjusting to this bubble and not planning to go where other people want to go during school holidays. We’ve decided that we will pull the kids out for long weekends at off-peak times and just stay clear of the warm-weather places at peak times. London for Christmas is almost cheaper than Florida, and it’s a lot more fun. Jetblue will be flying there and London theater has reopened. A trip to the Bahamas for Martin Luther King weekend costs half as much as two weeks earlier. Miami Beach the second weekend in December costs one-third what it costs 2 weeks later. One thing about the pandemic: The Chinese have a lack of vaccine manufacturing capacity in the country. Hopefully this means it will take an extra year to vaccinate their citizens who meanwhile won’t be crowding all the world’s museums, shops and tourist spots, giving the rest of the world’s tourists a break. The last time we were at the British Museum, wherever we went we were behind groups of 50 Chinese tourists taking pictures of everything they could see and pushing past others in line, and we just walked out in disgust. And that’s just one of many places.

I find it sad to see the Bezos and Gates couples break up with divorce. All that money and no true love to survive it. And now the gloves are off in the Gates family and you read all the dirt about Bill Gates which otherwise would have remained private.

Do you feel that when you read oped pieces in the NY Times by conservative columnists, that you have no idea what they are talking about? For over 25 years going back to William Safire, I find that I can never understand what they are writing about when I read their columns. Do you think the Times does this on purpose – publish conservative columnists who are completely ineffectual because they are incomprehensible?

School is both exciting and vexing at the same time. My daughter has ten formulas to memorize for geometry for this week’s test; I remembered none of them. Schools basically teach students how to memorize stuff for exams that they forget a week later. My daughter got nominated by her faculty advisor to be co-captain of the debating team. We are very proud of that because it’s not an achievement you get just for showing up. My son is now writing paragraphs about first amendment issues and she is writing about the French revolution. On the more humorous side, my son’s school is now having sessions about gender identity issues. He says “I know I’m a boy; I have a penis. Why do I need to go to 4 classes about this?” My junior and high school education was so much less of all of this. There was no debating team, our world history class was taught by a distracted principal who used something like Cliff Notes for our textbook as in “Tomorrow read these 3 pages about the Renaissance and we’ll go over it”, and everyone as far as we knew was heterosexual male or female. I’m not knocking all this, but life for these kids is far more complex and I’m really not sure they need to know all this extra math, science and vocabulary that over 90% of them will never see again for the rest of their lives.

Here is a silver lining though about this covid: if you’re a Democrat or a moderate Republican, you probably won’t mind that almost all people going forward in the US who will get sick and die from covid are going to be Trumpists….Entrepreneurship is up after being down for the past decade. People are taking risks and starting companies at a greater rate. Since the US economy is strongly influenced by small companies, this is a good sign. Another silver lining: Since so many elderly people died all over the world, there will be less demand on government services for retirees, which was a great worry around the world as populations age with fewer young people to contribute into the pot. This will be a big windfall to the younger generations across the world. Another unintended consequence: Asia and Australia figured they would bypass this pandemic by containing infections and worrying about vaccinations later. I think it is a mistake; the rest of the world is vaccinated and moving on and these countries will be caged in trying to contain a virus that could at any moment bite them in the ass until they get vaccinated. If I were China, I’d start buying Pfizer and Moderna to use domestically and stop trying to push vaccines that are not proven to work. Every week you read that in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and elsewhere, there are breakouts and lockdowns and the economy is disrupted with uncertainty. The Japanese are still vaccinating people in their 80’s and Australia is living under a rock and, for a country that built an image of toughness on the back of Crocodile Dundee, I have to say that they are acting like a bunch of pussies trying to eliminate any chance of anyone getting sick. Americans are much tougher – they expect people to get sick and die and consider that an acceptable risk in order to live their lives. OK, Republicans more so than Democrats, but I don’t think the US as a whole would ever tolerate the ridiculous way the Australians have shut down their country with no end in sight.

Australia is nuts: they even force vaccinated people to quarantine for 15 days in a hotel room under conditions worse than the Geneva Convention allows for prisoners of war. You can’t choose the hotel, you don’t have access to fresh air, and you are locked in a room under armed guard for the entire time. You can’t have a stove or toaster oven for fear that if a fire breaks out and you go outside, you might contaminate somebody. Singapore has a place for business meetings for those crazy enough to enter the country that involves speaking behind glass windows in room that looks like a jail visitors center for dangerous prisoners. This is what you get when you try to keep the virus out but cut yourself off from the rest of the world; this will probably be the case in Australia for 2 more years at the rate they’re going with vaccinations. Singapore shows that this methodology is not working; they had to go into lockdown for 2 weeks after a few airport workers got infected. I don’t understand why they haven’t gone and vaccinated every person working in an airport by now since this is the #1 place leakages occur. Australia’s current lockdowns stem from the exact same thing, infected workers who came in contact with quarantined people in transit. They’re not learning from each other. Australia’s vaccination rate is about 5% at this point, same as Japan.

The downside of this pandemic is that coming up with a flu virus for next year is going to be tough because there was so little of it this year the virus-makers don’t know what they have to defend against. Funny thing is that people complain that 75% efficacy from Johnson & Johnson or Astra Zeneca is not so good but the average flu virus is only about 50-60% effective.

In the first 2 months of the pandemic, 5% of NYC’s population left the city and about 40% of the wealthiest neighborhoods packed out. Whatever they say, here on the upper west side you can see that the wealthiest people have not come back. Private schools have lost a good number of kids and their largest donors. Synagogues too. Stores for upscale shoppers such as Zabars have seen their quality go down; they’re skimping on scallions in the cream cheese and gefilte fish is being packaged straight from a jar. Flowers at Whole (Paycheck) Foods are often dying on arrival. Stock brokerage offices have closed. The #1 reason? People don’t want to pay more than 50% of their income to taxes. The 2^nd reason is a fear of crime, especially on the subways. People don’t want their kid to be pushed onto the track of an incoming train by some deranged homeless person. The streets of prime commercial areas of Manhattan such as West 34^th Street have become a gauntlet of homeless people and it’s intolerable with people being mugged in broad daylight in front of security guards and with subway stations that reek of urine and human excrement. Really. I don’t remember it being this way since the 1980’s.

I expect to be out of here 5 years from now as soon as my kids graduate high school, so I’m not interesting anymore in buying an apartment here. We have an election coming in June for the next mayor; none of the many candidates look good. They range from self-promoting showboats to corrupt insiders or people from the private sector without government experience and popular support; it’s a pretty sorry lot. We watched the TV debate and there isn’t even one good candidate up there among the 8 that were in the debate. Until recently the leading candidate was a guy who looks like the nerd in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. It’s worse than this – you’d think people are waiting to see who the next mayor will be before they leave. The richest are leaving now and they say that if they like the new mayor, they will come back.

There are now 5 nail salons within a 2 block radius of where I live and no place less than 5 minutes walk away to get a slice of pizza. Landlords want Amazon-proof tenants like nail salons and restaurants are afraid of going into short-term leases but they also want discounts; landlords don’t want to take high-risk tenants for long-term leases and only want to discount short-term leases. Mortgage holders might require extra principal payments by landlords if the rent is not equal to the mortgage payment. It’s a big mismatch and it explains why there are so many vacancies. 13% of shops in the West Village are currently vacant. People are still neurotic and wearing masks everywhere even though this zip code is nearly all vaccinated with very low incidence of infection. I think a better metric to measure places by is not the rate of infection but rather the rate of neuroticism. I have friends who think it will take them several more months just to meet outside. It’s gonna be hard to get the world back in gear this way.

I met recently with Curtis Sliwa. He’s a known personality in New York City for over 30 years; he started the Guardian Angels, a local vigilante anti-crime group. He’s running for New York City mayor on the Republican ticket. He won the Republican primary with over 70% of the vote. No chance in hell of winning in a Democratically-dominated city, but he knows every homeless person in the street in my neighborhood. He can tell you about them, where they go and what they do. He says that harassing homeless people doesn’t help; they just keep coming back. New York City is under a federal mandate to provide all kinds of aid to homeless and destitute people, so it is like a magnet bringing people from other jurisdictions to the City. And if people on the upper west side keep giving money to beggars, then they will brave the elements to come here and beg.  Any mayor other than De Blasio (unless the Democratic party machinery insists on putting someone just as progressive into office) would let the police do their job and help get these people off the streets, but the problem is hard to solve. One problem is that the city keeps moving homeless people to temporary shelters without finding permanent solutions to this problem. I was thinking – what if we just offered $1,000 to each homeless person in NY to go to New Jersey? Or offered each prisoner $10,000 a year to stay out of trouble and therefore out of prison? It’s a fraction of what we spend on the homeless and prisoners now.

Speaking of progressives, AOC as she is known “affectionately” by those on the right who cannot stand her, turns out to have very few friends in Congress. She was recently rated among the very very lowest in terms of effectiveness by a study that rated people in Congress. She may be the lightning rod of conservatives, but she counts for essentially nothing within Congress. It’s funny because she claims that she has been helping progressives win office. If so, she should have chits to cash in, but evidently not. I guess that holding her out there helps raise money to defeat progressives and brings eyeballs to Fox and others, but she is really a waste of attention. The problem is that she is pushing the envelope of what will ultimately become mainstream issues and the threat she represents is not as much what she does now but what will likely happen later. But targeting her is just shooting the messenger.  More about that later.

Last posting I wrote about all this woke stuff going on in schools. Looks like parents are starting to get fed up with it. I’ve been seeing more articles in local newspapers about parents revolting. It’s become like a cult, except that in this spirit of respecting diversity, the people pushing these opinions have become what you would call leftist fascists, beating down anybody who disagrees and insisting that they are culturally superior to everyone else. One article stated that a parent complained to a head of school who responded that the parent should withdraw their student from the school. Other parents are afraid to speak out and be sanctioned because they don’t want to suffer the same fate, but that doesn’t mean that they or their kids agree with any of this. One parent said that they got rid of Columbus Day, all birthdays and holidays and excised all white male historical figures but now they have Ramadan and Chinese New Year on their calendars. Parents just did not sign up for this. I wonder how these school teachers and administrators would like it if someone tried to push some other ideology on THEIR kids. As I wrote last time, my kid says that all her friends think this stuff is stupid and it just goes right past them. An important reason that principals and teachers are getting away with this crap is that private school boards are made up of lay volunteers who are generally too busy to want to deal with firing and hiring a new principal. So they ignore the principal and the principal ignores them. I’ve noticed in New York City that it is very hard for private schools to find principals; it is not an attractive job to have to deal with a bunch of neurotic parents in the City. I see prestigious schools that have taken several years to fill the position and still have not.

With this as background, imagine the entertainment value of a Town Hall when our son’s private Jewish non-sectarian school decided to teach 7^th graders about gender identity issues (basically identifying and defining textbook terms being used these days about genders and pointing out that the world has moved beyond recognizing only 2 genders). This was really nothing special with no ideological axe behind it. But 50% of the school is Orthodox Jewish, and some of them are ultra-orthodox, and this raised a ruckus. Some parents worried that their Joseph’s might, upon hearing of the existence of and definition of transgender people, want to turn themselves into Kathy’s. I’m not sure it made any difference to them that the school’s psychologist said that in 12 years of his experience he had not seen any evidence of children changing sex based on having sex ed at school, (and this assumes these parents are correct in that all these kids have no idea about anything going on in the world except for what they hear from teachers and their parents). All I can say is that I was worried that maybe I should stop ordering General Chao’s chicken for my kid from the school’s delivery lunch menu in case my son decided to become Chinese.

I would be thrilled to vote for a political party that wants to let people live their lives and tries to exercise common sense to regulate what must be regulated and loosen up on the rest. Every time I go to the grocery store and pay 5 cents for a bag that I throw away when I come home, it makes me want to vote for a Republican. The rules are not keeping up with the times and if it were up to a lot of people, we would all be wearing masks forever to try and reach zero risk in every walk of life. I’m sure there are those who would want to bury you wearing a mask.  It’s a good thing that scientists are not in charge, because most humans understand that you have to live with risk in order to live your life. You know you’re in trouble when you read articles with headlines such as “Try Talking to People Again.” By the way, people need to be around germs. Nobody will have any immunity to anything if we try to live in sterilized bubbles forever. So go kiss a stranger. It’s for your own good.

My building says that based on local regulations it still can’t open its basement gym because of the extreme cleaning measures required by local law, both to open the gym and then every time someone uses it. Despite the fact that nobody has used the room for over a year. Despite the fact that the CDC admits that they know not of a single person who got covid after touching something. It’s just nuts.

I don’t know if people have internalized this, but look around you if you are in the USA: Just about everyone who wants a shot has gotten one or can get one on demand. Things are about as good as they are ever going to get, considering that certain people don’t want to get shots. That means that a year from now the reality in which we live is not likely going to be very much different if you live in the US. So people need to accept that and get on with their lives. Otherwise, we are just pandering to the lowest common neurotic denominator because if most people around you have been vaccinated, you can’t make them sick and they can’t make you sick, even if some of them have not been vaccinated. If they want to make each other sick, it is still hard to do that but if it happens, it’s on them to get their shots rather than have the rest of us smoldering each other all day long worrying about these holdouts. Why should a bunch of vaccinated people sit in a 90% empty stadium or theater wearing a mask? Even though mask mandates are now out, I think you will still see lots of this for a long time – the not for profits, such as museums, will be the last to drop the masks.

Consider the following: There are 3 countries in the world in which Jews have prominent roles in government: Israel, the United States and the UK (when it has a conservative-led government). These 3 countries have their shit together when it comes to covid. Say what you will about Trump but Jared Kushner came up with Operation Warp Speed and got those vaccines into the pipeline faster than anyone else would have and the key people in Pfizer and Moderna are Jewish. All the other companies and countries are way behind except for two: Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which have been closely cooperating with Israel throughout this pandemic. I don’t know what you get out of this, but I think I see a pattern here. And the funny thing about the US and Israel is that the key to their success is that they overpaid to get first dibs on the vaccines; people often think that Jews try to underpay but that’s not what happened. It was the Europeans and other rich countries who haggled and missed the train, and it was stupid because the marginal cost of the vaccine (meaning the price they could have paid to save a year waiting in line) was something like $10 per citizen which was miniscule compared to the cost of extending the pandemic. Think of all those subsidies every country gave out. The US wrote out $2,000 checks to families to tide them over. You can imagine what Europe must have given out over the span of over a year.

With an eye toward being smarter in the future should a pandemic happen again, I want to dissect the issues of personal responsibility and citizenship amid the past year of the Covid pandemic. Republicans spoke of people exercising personal responsibility but confused it with personal liberty. I agree that many governments were too aggressive in telling people how to live their lives and that many of the restrictions were way beyond people’s abilities to infect other people or get infected. It was not necessary to close all businesses and tell people to stay at home. There was no reason people couldn’t swim in the ocean or do laps in pools. People should be allowed to assess risk and decide how much of it they want to bear for themselves. But my right to punch ends where your nose begins. If wearing a mask in a store or on public transport or an airplane will protect people in close proximity to you, you should wear a mask even if you don’t want to. I will even buy into wearing a mask in such places for the time being even though I have been vaccinated knowing that I am not infecting other people (they’ve studied this by now) except for the fact that if I don’t wear a mask, others who are not vaccinated will free-ride abusing trust and also not wear masks, thereby putting people in danger. But at a certain point, say mid-May, if people choose not to be vaccinated, it’s not my problem anymore and I don’t and should not have to act to protect them. And in fact, this is pretty much what happened in the US in mid-May.

People who are “citizens” are supposed to look out for each other and act for the common good and this has to be applied consistently. I really do think that if substantial portions of the population do not get vaccinated, variants will continue to form and that eventually you will come up with a disease that resists vaccines and lengthens this pandemic at great cost to everyone. Viruses are like humans, they adapt and get tougher to beat. I think that government should give and allow for incentives for people to get vaccinated and that society and government can include sanctions if they do not. Israeli companies can furlough workers without pay who refuse to get vaccinated, and this has brought quick compliance. At the same time, I wish the authorities would not make people go through the farce of wearing masks in places where they are not infecting other people, especially if the majority of people have been vaccinated, such as in my local gym which is very spacious and not crowded and where the majority of people have been vaccinated. One May weekend, I had to change my seat 4 times in synagogue in a sanctuary where almost everyone in the room had been vaccinated. It was theater of the absurd and it is sad that so many people will have so much trouble moving on from this and expecting everyone else to continue to treat each other as assumed lepers. Just a year ago, you’d be at synagogue and people would be shaking hands with each other spreading the flu all over the place without thinking anything of it and looking at you like a weirdo if you didn’t accept their extended hands. Today synagogue is safer than ever as 50 people socially distance in a space for 500 but everyone is walking around paranoid, elbow-bumping door knobs and spritzing themselves with hand sanitizer and doing secret hand-dances every time they come back from the bathroom. We saw a family out in Central Park with their one year old son who for the past year has only seen his immediate family; he was afraid of every other human being he saw. Time to move on! My office is one of the few places in the world where you wouldn’t know a pandemic was going on and everyone has had their shots; it might help explain why 2 of our companies had their best month ever.

I hope we learned some lessons from the past year that will result in better assessments of risk the next time around.

People are telling me that they are having real problems hiring people because the $500-800 a week unemployment payments are taking people out of the work force. Just one example of many: A restaurant owner who used to pay $15 an hour to a dishwasher tells me he now has to hire one for $65,000 a year. One of our background check companies reports that employers are tired of making offers of employment and having them refused so they are telling us to come back to them in September when the checks run out. Business people are furious and I suppose they will remember this in 2022 when the next elections come around. I’m also being told that employers expect to take revenge against what they see as greedy and opportunistic employees holding these unemployment benefits over their heads in return to bigger paychecks; in September you can expect to see people lose their jobs if they don’t agree to lower their pay when these benefits run out. This will be a good lesson; the US does not respond well to socialist policies. Remember, you can’t beat the boss.

I’ve been thinking about China for a while and here is a bold statement: This Mr. Xi from China is aggressive and arrogant, and is making many Chinese elites uncomfortable, because he would otherwise take China farther with a lower profile. China is its own worst enemy because they are making enemies around the world. He is leading China down a dangerous road and making trouble for everyone. The US doesn’t need to oppose him because he is alienating virtually every continent with his bullying policies. You want anything from China, you better toe their line. You disagree with them about anything, they attack you viciously. They make foreign business-people disappear for no good reason other than to pressure other countries to get what they want, harass businesses with foreigners in their country, and steal all the intellectual property they can get. Businesses are starting to seriously wonder whether or not the Chinese market is more trouble than it’s worth. Hong Kong is being dismantled more quickly than people expected and China couldn’t care less. Now you see that even financial controls are being whittled away as Chinese mainland companies try to import their more corrupt ways of doing business. It’s a sad shit show going on there and it’s not at all clear to me why China’s Xi feels so threatened by a couple of pro-democracy publications and activists in Hong Kong that he needs to go all-out declaring war against an entire territory and enraging the world’s conscience.  China has had Moslems within its borders for centuries; why all of a sudden take hundreds of thousands of them and throw them into concentration camps and try to erase their identity? For what compelling reason other than that a few of them are terrorists? Whether or not the world will try to stop him is not the point; it’s that he is sticking it to the world and making it clear that China is a mean thin-skinned country hell-bent on getting its way in the world and that it will not tolerate any opposition anywhere in the world to what it wants to do. It’s not a recipe for good relations with the rest of the world. India’s army is taking up more offensive postures against the Chinese who have been muscling around on the borders. Every Asian country down to the Philippines is realizing they want American support and resent the Chinese for their heavy footprint around their territories. The US doesn’t go out to try and destroy every company or person that disagrees with it. The Saudi prince MBS tried and saw how far that got him. I think that although Xi projects an image of strength, he is cramming the Communist Party down every Chinese person’s throats at home and abroad more out of perceived weakness than strength. Not that he isn’t accomplishing great things within China and that he is not pragmatic when he needs to be, but he is terrorizing business elites and political functionaries with the idea that the only thing that counts to get ahead is ideology and fealty to him. It’s not going to drive innovation, it puts all China’s eggs in one basket, and sooner or later his propaganda machine will fail when he is the only person who counts and cannot plausibly blame anyone else. Personality cults leave a void at a certain point and China needs to be bigger than Xi.

The best way (which I am not suggesting) to cut him down to size long-term is to humiliate him militarily because that is the one thing he cannot survive, but I don’t see anyone with the appetite to do that and it is probably not necessary. Interestingly, this “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy has failed so much that you now see official statements from China talking about changing its foreign policy to become more “loveable.” I think that Mr. Xi is a failure for China and they ought to replace him. He’s managed to get the world to hate and fear China and even managed to get the US Congress to agree on a bipartisan basis to spend billions of dollars on US research and development to counter China’s rise in the world. Russia is a nuisance that plays a weak hand well, but in the end, it’s just a nuisance. China is increasingly bringing on the next major war and it might happen by accident because China keeps pushing the envelope with Taiwan in the gray zone of warfare such as by sending its fighter planes into Taiwanese airspace, and is more worried about saving face than the disastrous results a war might bring to China and forcing the US to unambiguously extend a nuclear umbrella to that country.

Another sign that China is not succeeding where it counts is that they now allow people to have 3 kids, but it is clear that people don’t want to have kids because the whole country doesn’t work well if you have kids. There is no social safety net, it’s hard to move around the country and live where you want, and schools and universities are a big problem. As I’ve written before, the demographic future of China is terrible. The West doesn’t have to go out of its way to fight with China; the Western system is going to win because China insists on doing everything top-down and it puts the Communist party before its people. The Western system is messier but it works in the long run because it is driven by the people. Just look at China; they have a really low vaccination rate and their vaccines don’t seem to work well at preventing infections. They are just suppressing the virus by keeping everyone in a pen, but it’s not a great solution even if their GDP is doing OK.

I’m not anti-China and I wouldn’t care on its own if China were to become the world’s #1 economy; I’m calling balls and strikes here and I personally would rather see good relations between China and the rest of the world. If you look at China, they are facing the same kinds of internal issues as America and Europe and dealing with some of them similarly, such as with big tech companies that are becoming too big for the common good and banks that are not acting prudently. But this brand of China is turning into something very menacing and it’s up to them to decide if that’s the stance they want to face the world with. Let’s look at the primary military theater and see how things size up. I wonder if the intelligence unit of the Economist reads staging-globalthoughts.kinsta.cloud – last month I wrote about this and just recently the front cover of the Economist called Taiwan the most dangerous place on the planet.

China is trying to intimidate Taiwan and it is pretty clear that the people of Taiwan have no interest in being part of China. It’s an island, they broke away some 70 years ago and they don’t want to be ruled by China. There’s no deals to be had since China broke its word over Hong Kong; that’s the price you pay for breaking your promise of one country, two systems. In response to my Taiwan comments last posting where I wondered if the US should be shouting so loud about Taiwan if it were not prepared to back it up with force and could well lose in a fight, I was told that the US could definitely beat China over Taiwan (more about this coming up). Maybe this is a fight worth having now and it would probably drive Xi out of power or at least put him in his place. My friend also believes that if the West stood up to Putin in Ukraine and he lost over there, it might drive him out as well. The Nassers of the world were driven out by military defeats. Erdogan of Turkey, Maduro in Venezuela, Khameini in Iran and Kim in North Korea all show that economic defeat does not deter dictators. You have to bully them out with military pressure. The one thing dictators cannot endure is losing a fight. Maybe Biden ought to take a round with one of these guys and it will create deterrence across the board. Considering what’s been going on with things like cyberwarfare and precision missile strikes which play to the strengths of smaller countries such as Iran and North Korea, all this emphasis on nuclear weapons is a bit of a sideshow to the more probable threats likely to be employed against superpowers. That last point is a good reason NOT to fight the military fight, by the way, if you figure that the most likely attack the US will have to endure will be via cyber as opposed to nuclear.

So far Biden has been using sanctions a lot but a bit more tailored than Trump’s more indiscriminate use of them. The problem is that as the world moves on, countries are finding ways to evade US financial sanctions. It’s what happens when you keep taking the football away and insisting that everybody play by your rules. Eventually, someone else comes with a football and everyone leaves you all alone. The use of force though is a different matter.

To remind you: Last posting I wrote about Taiwan, saying that I’m not sure the US can beat China back in Taiwan and whether we ought to be making strong statements about us being an ally of Taiwan if we’re not really prepared to stand up for it when the chips are down. A friend of mine who games this stuff for a living has since convinced me that if the US stands up for Taiwan, it can effectively beat back China if it tries to invade. Such intervention would make the difference for Taiwan. In short, he thinks that the US would blockade the Chinese coastline depriving it of raw materials while the Taiwanese would make a good show of fending off invasion by ground soldiers. He thinks the US would keep their aircraft carriers far away enough to withstand Chinese counterattack. The important point is that without the US, the Taiwanese would lose, but with US intervention, they would probably win. The only question remaining is whether the US really cares enough to get involved and to take the risk that China will use whatever leverage it has against US interests worldwide to get the US to stand down. China’s strategy is most probably not to try and win an actual war but to scare the Taiwanese enough and to hope the US stays away so as to get the Taiwanese to buckle without them having to fire a shot, a strategy that has been tried before in the region and which has succeeded.

If Afghanistan resumes being a staging ground for terrorism against the US, Biden will rue the day he decided to pull out the last few token troops the US has over there in order to say “it’s over.”

The Economist has an interesting article about historical patterns following pandemics. People will spend more but not as much as you think. People will take more risks such as starting up businesses. Companies will invest in labor-saving technology but due to shortages of workers, the remaining workers wind up with more pay. Two years after a pandemic, there is a pattern of political shakeups, which brings me to the US in 2022 and 2024.

I think that public opinion is coming around to the idea that Biden is overreaching in governing more like a progressive than a middle of the roader looking for consensus. Biden’s call for “unity” has been mostly lip service and the Republicans are not shouting too much; they are just content to let Biden bury himself in the progressive Democratic swamp. The Wall Street Journal correctly predicted that Biden would go with the progressive wing of the Democratic party in his governance and raise taxes all over the place. I thought they were just saying that to convince people not to vote for him, but it turns out they were right, and so far this year they seem to be on the right side of things. Biden has done less than his progressive wing wanted but more than people expected, which has made him a target anyway. People in the country are not happy with these $300 a week unemployment checks which appear to be the cause of a worker shortage leading to inflation (although there is also evidence to the contrary). The Republicans are going to paint the Democrats as socialists who need to be stopped by voting for Republicans in Congress and on the state level. If they could get off the Trump BS and stop looking like they are stuck contesting the last election, they could look somewhat serious and beat the Democrats.  In a recent Texas election, people overwhelmingly voted against a Democratic proposal for more woke-filled race relations curriculums in a local school district and you can just see across the board that the Democrats are over-reaching on social issues and redistribution of wealth issues where most Americans, even those in the lower economic classes, don’t agree with what they want to do; two-thirds of the so-called infrastructure spending bill have nothing to do with infrastructure and people are not idiots. Over the next few months, public opinion is going to set on this stuff and it’s going to be very hard to overturn it even a year from now. I am supportive of good government and infrastructure development; I’m not in favor of taxing wealthy people to redistribute wealth and create permanent dependencies toward some kind of socialist utopia and to redress historical racial inequities with race-based solutions such as reparations. Neither do most people including the many people who vote for Democrats that are not loony leftists. By the way, notice that Latinos and Blacks have been disappointing the progressive wing of the Democratic party voting for more conservative candidates and also voting for Republicans. The party stalwarts keep wondering what’s wrong with these people and they don’t understand that the native heathens are not waiting to be enlightened by their religion.

Driving the rich out of the country and having millions of people hanging around for handouts is not going to benefit anyone in the long run. A perfect example is Biden coming out in favor of waiving drug patents to help the developing world; the Chinese and the Russians would benefit from this and it would reduce incentive to American and European drug companies to produce vaccines for the next pandemic. It’s just stupid and anyway, it’s never going to happen, so why waste your political capital on grandstanding for international audiences while making yourself look like a socialist at home? The swing voter is the white suburban who switched sides this year and voted for Biden. I don’t think Biden is appealing to this person, but the Republicans who are ranting about a stolen election are not appealing to this person either. Whoever figures this out first will win in 2022 and 2024. I think a lot of people are scared about what they see as crazy leftists in Congress and around Biden and will vote for Republicans just to put a latch on extremism. Having progressively dominated mouthpieces like the New York Times amplifying people like AOC into more than they deserve to try and set the agenda gives the Republicans a ton of ammunition to use against them by scaring everyone else and creating a huge target. I think that so far the Republicans are getting more out of the Times than the Times is getting out the Times.

People are more in favor of reducing poverty than specifically doing things to help Black people. They don’t like the idea that certain races should be favored over others. Certainly poor Hispanic people do not want to be passed over in favor of poor Black people. Also, White people are increasingly feeling that they are being singled out as a race of privilege so they are increasingly seeing themselves as a race under attack. It’s not something white people ever used to think about before. It’s part of the reason you have the biggest internal threat to the US coming from right-wing extremists that are White. The Republicans are fighting the politics of resentment, but the Democrats share blame for creating the tumult and the whole idea that there is something wrong with White people.

I have a great idea: Get a consortium of billionaires together and go to Mexico and ask them for a piece of territory with a 99 year lease which will be paid for with rent. Turn it into a sovereign state like Hong Kong and run a decent show for wealthy people where taxes are low, regulations make sense for the target population and where you have to qualify to move and to remain there, meaning that it is not a full democracy where idiots can put in ridiculous people to rule the roost, and where there are no liberal social justice agendas at work to redistribute wealth. I’d move there in a heartbeat. I’m sick of being in a society filled with people that are either ideologically nuts, that are neurotic beyond belief and that want to harass me daily to save the turtles, feed the homeless and support public radio that hates people like me.

A bit more discussion on the topic of American Infrastructure: Pelosi is, to my mind, responsible for stalling pandemic aid to people for half a year trying to get more than possible at the time. She might do that again with the infrastructure bill, as she threatens not to bring the bill that has bipartisan support for a vote until the other bill is passed which doesn’t have Republican support. She risks getting nothing when this is all over because a year from now she might have a Republican dominated Congress. She basically screws everyone including her own constituents holding things hostage to a progressive agenda. Biden seems more willing to take half a loaf, and she ought to come on board with that.

I watched Biden’s speech before Congress in late April. I’m not sure his messaging is great but I agree with his central premise that America hasn’t really invested in itself for the past 50 years and that if it wants to stay #1 in the world and not be overcome by China, it needs to invest and compete. Coming off this pandemic is a great time to make that move and it shouldn’t be wasted. As a 78 year old guy with tons of experience in politics he can afford to try this because he doesn’t worry about his political future, so I’m interested in having him out there shoot for the moon and administer some tough medicine to a country that needs it. That said, he is being disingenuous in trying to convince people that paid family leave and making adjustments to Medicare are going to accomplish this. On the other hand, things like bringing broadband to 35% of the country that doesn’t yet have it could be compared to projects such as the Hoover Dam which were done by the federal government in the 1930’s when the states couldn’t agree among themselves to fund it and it was done amid serious opposition to its cost, but that dam secured the economy of the Western United States for the rest of the 20^th century. The counterpoint is whether satellite internet can do the job (we’ll know within a year or so) without all this government-funded investment. Americans are in favor of competing to remain #1; they are not in favor of redistributing wealth and that’s where Democrats are vulnerable, even though you’d think that the middle class and racial minorities would support them. It’s why Republicans lurk around the corner to take it all back next year. Even if we are in a situation where 20 million people lost their jobs last year while 650 billionaires made a trillion dollars, the average Joe doesn’t mind as long as he gets his tax cut just like the billionaire did. I’ve said it before – the average guy wants to save a dollar rather than pay a dollar even if he could get an extra $10 for paying that dollar. That’s why 99% of the people don’t have 99% of the money out there. They think small and you’re asking them to think big. Biden has to do better at getting people to think big and I’m not sure his messaging is working toward this end or that it could ever work because it’s not the way most people think and trust, an essential element in investment, is in short supply in today’s America.

Other than the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system created in the 1950’s, I can’t think of a single Republican-led initiative on infrastructure in the last 100 years. Nevertheless, I think Governor DeSantis of Florida would wipe the floor with Kamala Harris in 2024, especially if Democrats pass an infrastructure bill raising tax rates and don’t give back the SALT (state and local tax) deduction that caused massive pain to residents of blue states, many of whom voted Democratic in the hope of putting it back after Trump got rid of it to hurt blue states (and Democrats screamed bloody murder and promised to restore the deduction, something they are now welching on under pressure from the progressive wing which says the deduction helps mainly the rich). It turns out that these days a majority of wealthy people in the US are in Democratic districts that were hit hard when the Republicans cut out the SALT a few years ago. Democrats always accuse Republicans of being the party of the rich but at this point it’s not true. The Democrats are the party of the rich (43 of the top 50 richest districts are Democrat), but the American psyche is that the middle class wants the same tax policy that rich people want and the Democrats are out of sync. If anything, it increasingly looks like many working class people see the Republicans as better for them. If Democrats don’t come through for their voters on this, lots of these people will switch back to Republicans next time around. Most of this infrastructure bill is really social engineering being pushed by progressives, and these voters do not see how they are going to benefit from it. It’s one thing to want to change the world; it’s another thing being asked to pay for it. And now I hear that Biden wants to raise the capital gains tax to 39.6% and cancel out the capital gain benefits of selling your home and business. Great way to lose your donor base, man! Fortunately, this kind of stuff is not going to pass the Senate with people like Senator Manchin to block it. I think that Biden knows his proposals will not make it through Congress but that he is trying to placate his party’s progressives by showing that he is trying. For sure, lobbyists are set to make a killing going to war against all of Biden’s proposals that are sure to absolutely piss off anyone with serious money at stake. I voted for Biden, but I’d vote for DeSantis as a Trumpian with Competence if he ran. I don’t necessarily want Trumpists in office but at least the Republicans don’t want to take more than half of what I earn.

That aside, consider this: Would you rather pay an extra 5% in taxes or make 3x as much revenues? The Democrats tax a bit more but I thnk that a lot of people make a helluva lot more money with Democrats in charge than Republicans. All we’ve had for 30 years under Republicans are economic disasters sooner or later that Democrats have to fix. People forget that things were heading downward even before Covid and the Trump economy was not as good as it seemed. The stock market under Biden so far and Obama outperformed Trump. What I want ideally is a Republican party that governs with competence if such an animal could be found. Could someone bring us another Reagan or at least a conservative Democrat?

In case you needed a reminder why Trump must never regain the presidency, I read The Spy Masters by Chris Whipple. He breaks the news that the CIA had a spy inside the Kremlin who was so close to Putin that he was taking photos of documents on his desk. After Trump started revealing sources and methods to the Russians, they pulled that spy out of Russia. The author writes that most senior intelligence officers believe that Trump has been an asset of Russia that they’ve been cultivating for the past 40 years, even if he is not on their payroll, and that Putin has compromising information about Trump that he uses to keep him in check. There are many ways to compensate someone without paying them directly such as to forbear from the use of compromising information you have about that person or have a bank or friend you control provide loans to or purchase a property or business they own that is not doing well at a preferential rate. For instance, Trump sold a Florida property to a Russian oligarch for more than $50 million more than he paid for it 4 years earlier, a property that the Russian never moved into. The Russian stated that he had no intention to live in the United States. It was at the time $13 million more than the most ever paid for a Palm Beach mansion. Hard to prove but fairly easy to surmise that the buyer might have been a front for the Kremlin. Really – who wastes that kind of money if you were smart enough to make all that money?

The common wisdom is that aftermath of the recent Gaza flareup destroyed the chance for a national unity government of anti-Netanyahu parties. I’m wasn’t so sure; I figured that centrist Lapid and the Arab party’s Abbas might get it together and almost force Bennett to join the coalition lest he be responsible for a 5^th election that nobody wants. I have the feeling (backed up by evidence) that Lapid and Bennett get along as people and politicians and that this has been in the bag for awhile. The new president of Israel was elected in a landslide and is a professional politician with a long track record of being a smooth operator and a political moderate. Both the new prime minister and president speak perfect English and spent years living in the U.S.  They are both prominent businesspeople who favor practical solutions. Avigdor Liberman who is also a pivotal member of this coalition is less right-wing than most people think; the Russians are less interested in holding the West Bank than in getting rid of the rabbis. This bodes well for restoring better relationships with the US on a bipartisan basis. Jew-Arab tensions have been subsiding in the country and it might be argued that Hamas ought not to have a veto over Israeli elections and deciding that Bibi is their choice of a prime minister because he keeps the conflict at a low boil which is exactly where they like it. I don’t know much about Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Israeli-Arab party that joined this coalition united only in their staunch desire to get Netanyahu out of the prime minister’s office and residence, but if it works out, this could herald a sea change in Israeli’s domestic politics. 8 of the 61 members of parliament that are part of this ruling coalition are Arab; that’s a big deal in a country that people who just don’t get it are calling an apartheid state. I’ve felt for a long time that Israeli Arabs would make good coalition partners and that they are certainly better than the Ultra-Orthodox or extreme right-wing nationalists. This guy is not pushing Palestinian nationalism – he is sticking to bread and butter issues and trying to get Arabs as much of the pie as they deserve, and Arabs are supporting him because he is focused on delivering benefits to his constituents. Considering that 30% of Israeli Arabs age 18-24 are neither in school nor at work, there are more immediate problems within that society that require attention.

If Israel could pull this off, maybe moderate Democrats and Republicans in the US could also pull together for the benefit of the country. I will also state later on in this posting that just as this coalition pulled together when nobody thought it would be possible, you could find reasons to be optimistic that a change in direction is also possible in terms of moving the Israeli-Palestinian issue to a better place. Sometimes the best time to make things happen is when nobody thinks anything can happen. The new prime minister made an interesting point this week when he said that “nobody in this coalition has to give up their ideology but everyone has to postpone the realization of part of their dreams.” It’s a sensible call to action that other countries could take note of when looking for a way out of the abyss of domestic deadlock.

Off to Israel and Iran: Israel keeps telling America that it reserves the right to strike Iran by itself in case the JCPOA negotiations don’t end up in a good place. They hope the Americans will use that as leverage in their negotiations with the Iranians and viz a viz the rest of the world such as Russia and China that are happy to help Iran stick it to the US. It is not the agreement itself that the Israelis care about, it is the what happens the day after. They figure that the agreement itself won’t deal with all the regional issues and that the Iranians will cheat or not agree to deal with things that the original JCPOA did not address, which is why they don’t think that the agreement by itself is the real issue and why going back to the JCPOA will not solve anything important. My question is whether the Israelis are bluffing and whether they really could act unilaterally on their own. That to me is the $64,000 million question that I haven’t been able to answer the past 20 years. But the truth is that it doesn’t matter. One thing I can tell you based on briefings I’ve attended by senior officials: The American Government negotiating with Iran now, along with China and Russia, all seem to understand that if whatever deal is made doesn’t make sense on a bipartisan basis back in America, the deal is not worth the paper it’s printed on because the next Republican president will simply undo it. So, despite the public posturing, everybody in Vienna negotiating this understands that simply going back to the JCPOA, which did not work well for Iran either (it didn’t really stop the sanctions that hurt it), is not where things have to go, but that a new deal has to take into account where the JCPOA didn’t work. The shrill hysterics about the JCPOA are missing the point.

Here finally is the answer to the $64,000 question I raised in the last paragraph which I’ve had for over 20 years. It comes from a source in a position to know. The Israelis have the wherewithal to destroy a good portion of the Iran nuclear program with military strikes but not all of it at once. The real question is what happens the day after; does the US follow-on with pressure against Iran or does it allow Iran to build back better. If the Israelis act without US consent, will the US deny the Israelis what they need to be able to replace what they spent and to continue the pressure. The Israelis can only act a few times and they need to know they will not be worse off for taking the initiative. So the answer is the same as the JCPOA question – it is not the act itself that is the question, it is the day after that drives the question. The Israelis could and perhaps would act, but they would have to decide if acting would make them better or worse off for it. The JCPOA could be executed by the parties, but would it actually make a difference on its own or would it be part of a package deal that had bipartisan support in the US? If not, it wouldn’t be worth it.

Here is an important thought about military policy that affects both the US and Israel. One reason Israel winds up in these massive military conflicts with Gaza and Lebanon every few years is that when individual acts happen such as a strike or a shipment of arms toward a buildup, Israel and the US don’t always respond because they fear that the situation will escalate so they tolerate and absorb the strike. But this leads the other side to take that as a point of weakness so they probe deeper and deeper or continue to build up until the point that the actual conflict occurs and the job of putting it down becomes that much more difficult and painful as the greater power tries to restore deterrence. Following the most recent conflagration in Gaza, Israeli military leaders are pushing the country’s leaders to allow it to respond tit for tat as individual acts occur. Already even though the Gaza conflict is just a month since the ceasefire, Hamas has already started to rearm and the Israeli military wants to respond.

Israel and the Palestinians: Every time something happens in Jerusalem, analysts blame it on stupid low-level police errors of decision-making and newly installed police commissioners. This is stupid – if you keep seeing the same movie, maybe you learn not to allow low-level police people to make decisions that you know will blow up in a place like Jerusalem. It is wrong to say that the Israelis were surprised by what’s happening now – they were completely warned about this the last few weeks and there was a stare-down between the two sides before this all blew up. So now I hear the same old stuff: We the Israelis are “mowing the lawn in Gaza” giving Hamas a huge spanking and it will take them at least a year to recover from it. Wow, a whole year. And Hamas succeeded in vetoing a national unity government thereby almost guaranteeing Bibi yet another term in office, something that few Israelis want. Clearly, Iran, which is the force behind Hamas, wanted to get rid of a national unity government in Israel involving an Islamic faction and it wanted to put pressure on the various countries that had entered into the Abraham Accords. The gambit in Gaza pretty much succeeded, and it inured to the benefit of Bibi who exploited it to divide the opposition once again and to justify his policies. This is good for Bibi and Iran, but it’s not good for Israel to be manipulated like this. Is mowing the lawn in Gaza every 5 years a policy? It is if you don’t want to reoccupy the place but for the 1 million people trapped within it, it’s a never-ending cycle of doom from which there is no escape. And that’s an uncomfortable reality that the world has to deal with and from which Israel and Fatah cannot hope to conveniently escape.

On the strategic side, Israelis think they made 2 victories here: Although they probably underestimated the enemy’s willingness to initiate the military action and take losses, they feel that (1) the counterattack was stronger than Hamas expected; and (2) the exposure and loss of the tunnels and complete failure of virtually every other means of attack that Hamas tried probably will chasten Hamas’ calculus in terms of how well it expects to do in future attacks. Hizbullah in Lebanon has 10x the capability and the strong counterattack was meant to make them think twice about the future as well because the Israelis have revealed that their intelligence about the enemy is more precise than the enemy thinks it is. On the other hand, Hamas will probably put more civilians underground in those tunnels so that in the next round when the Israelis hit back they will hit more civilians and add to the propaganda asset for Hamas. In this last round, the Israelis hit a lot fewer civilians as a ratio to total casualties and managed not to kill any civilians in high-rise buildings it targeted and evacuated.

Maybe it’s time to rethink certain assumptions, which have been sorely tested this past round, even after reviewing all the available evidence. My sense of what’s going on is that Israel did not REALLY expect all this stuff to happen from Gaza and yet it did (Hamas actually picked a fight it would lose instead of a bluff plus a phony fight), and it looks like the attacks from there were more accurate than expected and that defenses did not work as well as expected. Even if Iron Dome was 90% accurate defending, the other side sent 10x as many rockets as before and spent a lot less money doing it. Israel was trying to intercept shipments going into Gaza but home-grown manufacture of rockets is stronger than expected and Israeli ordinance that falls in Gaza is recycled by Hamas and turned against Israel. This looks like a turning point in which concepts have to be rethought. Bibi allowed Qatar to give Hamas $30 million a month to keep a lid on poverty in Gaza, but most of the money went to the military and this Pay for Calm strategy has been proven a lemon. I think that Israel not occupying Gaza is not going to work for the long term because this problem will never be solved with Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza but it is clear that Israelis do not want to reoccupy the place. Israeli strategy might have been to divide and conquer and hope to leave things as they are forever, but the more developed states in the region want to move to the future and this is a pit in the stomach; without the same standard applying across all the territories, it just remains for Iran to add fuel to the fire and have these guys disrupt the universe every couple of years resetting everything to zero. And what happens from Gaza will again happen from Lebanon, despite everyone thinking Hizbullah will hold its fire to avoid losses and that the missiles from Lebanon will not really hit anything. Hizbullah has lots more and better missiles in Lebanon than Hamas has in Gaza. Israeli will probably be better off trying to promote moderates within the Palestinian authority rather than cultivating a setting where the various factions are at each other’s throats with Abbas sitting atop all this as a figurehead.

The root of the problem here is that Iran doesn’t care about losing; it just cares about disrupting and rebuilding to do it again. It just seems to me that if you want to solve the Gaza problem, there are two mutually exclusive solutions: Either Israel has to reoccupy Gaza and apply a standard there and make a permanent deal with the Palestinians in order to eventually pull out in a better way than it did the first time. These unilateral pullouts haven’t worked, either in the north or in the south. They just keep kicking the can down the road and are a source of instability – you wake up one morning and all of a sudden the missiles are landing in Tel Aviv and the airports are closed and the country looks like a banana republic that is always 6 inches from the edge.

But, you can take it as a given that Israel has no interest in reoccupying Gaza to solve the Palestinian problem when they feel they can contain it well enough by staying out of it and keeping the Palestinians at each other’s throats, and anyone who suggests doing so is completely out of whack with Israeli sentiment. Also, the Americans are not going to propose any big peace plans for the area; they are interested in managing the conflict but not solving it. By the same token, Gaza will have relief aid, but not reconstruction as long as Hamas just wants to start another war (and they’re already trying to rebuild arms). Comes along Ahmed Faoud Alkhatib, a US citizen living in Gaza who writes an oped with a nutty counter-idea that makes perfect sense: He says flood Gaza with money, build up the place and let people go wherever they want. If you really let the place loose and it succeeds. Nobody will want to destroy it again, not even Hamas. Just ask Nasrallah in Lebanon if he would have started the war with Israel in 2006 if he’d known the amount of destruction in Lebanon it would bring – he said he wouldn’t have. I actually think this is the way to go because as the writer noted, every time we see this movie, the Israelis have tried to link reconstruction with a military embargo and it’s never worked and it’s not going to work now. Cash will still find its way to Gaza, Israeli armaments that land in Gaza will be recycled, and in another 5 years Israel will have laser systems that do what Iron Dome did at a much cheaper rate so the next round of warfare will just see Gaza get trashed with even less effect in Israel. So why go there again?

Funny thing to me is that Biden’s team has some really good people there who have been around the block enough to know what could and would not work so you’d think they could actually propose some creative solutions. And sometimes the best time to do that is when nobody thinks that anything is possible. As an entrepreneur, I like to think of possibilities even if that’s a bit optimistic.

The most important point to consider when thinking about future possibilities is to realize that we discount possibilities because of WHAT IS without fully thinking about WHY IT IS. For instance, we think that a two-state solution is not possible because both sides currently prefer a one-state solution to the negation of the other. But that is because it is in the interests of both sides to tell you that when they do not want you to think otherwise. The Israelis do not have to think about negotiating with the other side that is hellbent on its destruction. The Arabs do not have to negotiate with an adversary that sees no need to negotiate with it. But are the parties really that far apart or are they apart because their leaders stay in power by advancing that argument and allowing no alternatives to exist? I do think, even though others will disagree, that if Palestinians think the time has come to realistically negotiate a peace with Israel, they will elect a leadership that is moderate and that public opinion will come around to a 2-state solution. Recent polls that showed Hamas doing well in elections and support for a 2-state solution dropping significantly reflect the sense that the future is hopeless and that elections are more of a protest vote than an actual referendum on a proposed solution because Abbas has cancelled out anybody who tries to run against him and Hamas is the only alternative. In Israel, Netanyahu has convinced the majority in Israel that the status quo can be maintained forever and that there is nobody on the other side to talk to. You hear all about extremists in Israel causing provocations among Arabs and Arab criminal gangs rioting in mixed-towns within Israel, but hardly anything about the man in the center who still exists. This is not just my gut feeling, but it is backed up by leading researchers of public opinion on the ground in that region with whom I have corresponded on this issue. I don’t care what public opinion is today; I care about what it would be in the future. In the UAE, public opinion swung massively after the government announced it was making peace with Israel and at the beginning of the Oslo accord period Arab opinion also swung in favor of peace initiatives. Palestinian opinion is changing; there are more grassroots movements there that do not identify with either Fatah or Hamas seeing both as failures, and these movements will cause headaches both to Israel and to the various Palestinian leadership as new kinds of opposition emerge to the status quo on all sides, not just nationalist extremists in Israel. It’s important to realize that public opinions in both Israel and Palestine are not set in stone.

I’m listening to briefings from Biden officials and if you compare them to the briefings I got from Trump officials a year ago, the difference is huge. There is just so much more competence going on now. Also, Israelis will tell you that although many of the people in the Biden administration were also in the Obama administration, the relations between the Israeli and American delegations have been friendlier this time around. The Biden people learned from experience and did a much better job this time around trying to prevent and then managing the Gaza blowup.

A final word about the Israel debate within America. Beyond the social media war going on in the broader community, most of which is anti-Israel, less attention is given to vitriol coming from the Right making Biden look worse than Satan. The truth is more complicated and, as I wrote earlier, the Israelis were pretty happy working with Team Biden through this most recent crisis. Team Trump did not have as much effectiveness working all sides and doing it in a way that kept everyone’s trust – and Team Biden did a good job. The result was a crisis that ended in roughly 10 days on the first ceasefire attempt; in 2014, it went over 50 days with 9 ceasefire attempts. Biden was hardly in the Arabs’ pocket as you would think from reading Jewish Right-wing columnists. You didn’t hear a word from Biden criticizing Israel in public and the UN was silenced by the US. You could imagine Egypt’s Sisi picking up the phone from Biden who had been trying since January to avoid him but now had to deal with him as the indispensable party who could mediate with Hamas. (Now Sisi depicts himself as the savior of Gaza despite the fact that he is distributing the UAE’s $500 million there claiming it as his own. The UAE is OK with this as long as it helps sideline Qatar.) Despite their calls for balance and truthfulness, the truth doesn’t matter to these people any more than the leftists they oppose. It’s a real problem because Jews increasingly cannot talk to each other about Israel and the long-term trends are going to be not in Israel’s favor. It’s frustrating because these people are claiming to be defending Israel against the lies and imbalances of those that hate it. The defenders of Israel on the Right need to be a bit less self-righteous and a bit more honest about recognizing if they are truly defending Israel or just promoting their own vision of Israel’s future. I get notes from people and these notes descend into personal attacks when logic fails, and it is a waste of time to reason with them; I always approach people with respect and find it frustrating that this baseless hatred exists. I expect that from anti-semites, I don’t expect that from fellow religious Jews.

Many Jews in America have been wondering why the progressive wing has been less interested in combatting anti-Semitism for what it is rather than condemning it as a poor tactic with which to frame a debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There were a lot of hostile acts against Jews these past few months using the Palestinian situation as an excuse where clearly it had no bearing, and progressives who were supposedly against racism and antisemitism were silent about them which distressed a lot of their colleagues. Banning a food truck from a festival to celebrate diversity just because the guys who had the truck were Israeli? Are all Israelis the same? I think it will make a good number of liberal Jews think about who these people they view as allies really represent. Another warning sign for Israel is that among young evangelical Christians, support for Israel has fallen significantly in the past 2 years. I wrote about this a year ago but the latest polling figures are damning. A study at University of North Carolina at Pembroke found support for Israel among evangelicals age 18-29 dropped from 75% in 2018 to 33% in 2020.  The Israelis cannot count on either a solid Republican or Democratic base of pro-Israel voters in the up and coming generation.  Among young Jews aged under 30 in the latest Pew study, the amount of Jews that feel somewhat or strongly emotionally attached to Israel is 48%, compared with 66% for adults age 65 and older.

Israel is a changing country and some of the supporters of Israel in the US have to come to grips with the fact that over the past 20 years the country has become less democratic and more nationalistic with laws passed that negate the rights of Arab citizens. Provocative acts such as what happened lately in East Jerusalem serve no useful purpose except to incite, and there is no reason why East Jerusalem surrounding the Old City could not be more accommodating to the Arabs who live there. I’ve walked through the various parts of the city over the years, and I get it.

Biden is the last of Democratic presidents who will be as friendly to Israel as opposed to the progressives which have taken over the party and which will be a force to be reckoned with. However, Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, writes in Haaretz that painting this opposition as being all about AOC and the Squad is wrong, and that Israel is losing life-long friends it had in the Democratic congress. Jerry Nadler, the top-ranking Jewish Democrat in Congress, writes in a New York Times guest essay that he abhors Netanyahu’s “vile, hateful rhetoric, and is horrified by his efforts to align himself with Donald Trump and an overtly racist, Kahanist, political party in his own country.” He distinguishes between his criticism of Netanyahu and his warm feelings for the country as a whole and says that most Democrats feel the way he does and that it is wrong to assume that either they all hate Israel or that progressives hate Israel reflexively. He says that friends have to be able to disagree agreeably and not turn everything into a political football, a point which I am also making here.

I would also remind that the Republican party which is presently bending over backward to be pro-Israel is out of sync with its own history and its position is meant more to pander to its evangelicals than to its Jews; the GOP has historically been more hostile than friendly to Israel and a return of its establishment wing does not necessarily augur well for Israel in the long term either when the Republican tendency is to avoid getting involved in foreign conflicts and giving foreign aid. AOC is a toxin who makes a great target, but she represents a real swath of opinion that is in the ascendancy, and I’ve been warning for years that the solution is not better Israeli propaganda but more sensible policies that deal with changes going on around them. Americans do not have to give aid to Israel. Israel does not have to listen to America. Israel offers a lot to America and America is not going to turn its back on Israel unless it wants to bite itself in the ass (although I wouldn’t bet against progressive Democrats being willing to do that, which is why they are so scary). But if Israel wants to be on the right side of America, it will have to be sensitive to what people think of it, and it is not so simple to say that dealing with the Palestinians will bring about its destruction. Israel is not China that can afford to say F-U to the rest of the world.

There is room to pursue a settlement here and to remain strong; the key to my mind is showing leadership and creativity. Everyone understands that the old solutions and mantras do not really apply in 2021 and the Arab world also gets it which is why there is a reason to be optimistic. As long as the present leadership on both sides resists both leadership and creativity, that’s the reason why there is no hope and why it is taken as a given that things are the way they are. A new prime minister and president in Israel who are trying to create national unity and pursue non-ideological solutions as well as a more pragmatic mood in the Arab world are a cause for hope and the belief that new thinking is possible. Soon enough the Palestinians will also have new leadership, especially if they sense the Israelis are in a position to make a deal. If the Israelis can convince themselves and those around them that Netanyahu will not return soon and that they have the stamina to stay the course, people around them will take them seriously.

My conclusion is that the Israel-Palestinian situation is complex but solvable. Extremists must not have a veto. America needs to be willing to act to put Iran in its place and to remove its veto across the board, with military means if necessary; Israel and Palestine need new leaders with the cojones to show leadership and embrace creative solutions that are compromises and then sell it to their people. The Americans are in a good position right now to offer creative solutions because they have time-tested senior advisors who have a lot of experience knowing what does not work and what might. I think the world is different than it was and that China will support solutions that create stability because they want economy. Russia doesn’t want stability but it will go along because the other Arab countries and so much of the rest of the world wants this region to work better, not least because they want to work with Israel, as do Russia and China. I think that Israel, now one of the world’s leading developed countries, has a lot more to gain than to lose if it can make it work, but again, to succeed where all else has failed, it has to be a mutually agreeable arrangement and not the product of a unilateral withdrawal. Both sides have to be invested in the future. It is a different world now, and you’d hope that this part of it could get with the program.

I expect to resume international travel toward the end of the year. We wanted to go to Egypt in November if the Grand Egyptian Museum reopens, but it seems it will not be this year. The Dubai expo is scheduled to run from October 2021 thru next March and I’m ticketed to attend this November. As well, I am planning a side trip to Qatar which I have not yet visited. So plans are afoot to go out and experience the world again if conditions allow.

Today America celebrates the idea that if you don’t like the person in charge of it, every 4 years you get a chance to change the channel. If you live in Saudi Arabia, you figure that you will have MBS as your king for the next 50 years, like it or not. I’ve been watching the Celebration of America entertainment program this evening and notice that TV production has gotten a whole lot better since the pandemic began and we just watched endless pictures of people in their living rooms. In many ways, we have been learning to cope this past year, which helps explain why humans are at the top of the food chain, not because we are the strongest, but because we are the most adaptable.

I’ve been waiting this whole week to see who is the stupidest man on the planet — and the award goes to Alexander Navalny, a Russian opposition leader who was poisoned by Putin and managed to stay alive by having the plane he was on diverted to Germany. Putin said that if he returned to Russia, he would rot in jail. But this guy still insists on going back to Russia, on a budget airline no less. What ego drives people like this to walk straight into life imprisonment? Was it his tweet asking people to meet him at the airport and then seeing 3,000 people respond yes? I’d bet a million dollars that Putin puts him right in the slammer and probably try to kill him again, and this time he’ll make sure it is done right. He is not going to lay off even if the world objects. Have the Chinese shown any mercy to the people in Hong Kong or the Uyghurs? Dude, just stay put in Germany and enjoy the brown bread and beer. Of course, by the time you read this you know that he was nabbed right at passport control and thrown into jail. And Putin diverted the plane so that nobody who came to the airport was there to greet him.

Now that my daughter is teen-age, she is planning Sundays for us to explore the City. We went to Soho and Spring Street. She thinks that Instagram has literally created the world she lives in and was telling us how the area is all new and trendy. I hated to tell her that it was new and trendy 20-30 years ago too. One benefit of this pandemic is that stores that normally have long lines to get into such as a French bakery on the street are now easy to get into. We went to this cool place called Showfields on Bond Street in Soho which bills itself as the world’s most interesting store, and it is. They combined retailing with gallery space and they showcase new products that are not being sold in stores; they redo the store every 3 months. They have a bubbly staff and cheerful and knowledgeable greeters and it was fun. To top it off, they had a dressing room with a hidden door and inside was a slide that took you from the third floor to the second. The whole area was decorated to the hilt. Definitely put this place on your list of off-beat things to do in New York City!

I got a Christmas card from the one person outside my family who appreciates me, my travel agent. The card says “and when this is all over, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!…” For now, we just went to South Florida for the Christmas-New Years break, because that’s about the only warm place you can go without a covid test or a quarantine. We stayed in 3 different areas of South Florida including Fort Lauderdale Beach, the Brickell area of Miami, and then in Miami Beach where my parents live. There has been tremendous regeneration in Brickell and it is a really cool and vibrant scene. Fort Lauderdale has also grown over the years and has some beautiful areas. We took a walking tour around Little Havana, a district in a city I lived for much of my life but never visited. The tour was great and I recommend it! We also saw the alligators and took an airboat around the Everglades as well as the Jungle Queen, this sightseeing boat in the photo, to see mansions along the water in Fort Lauderdale. The Conrad by Hilton in Fort Lauderdale and the Four Seasons in Miami (Brickell area) are good choices, and the food at the Ritz Carlton in Fort Lauderdale is excellent for both breakfast and dinner. Either due to the pandemic or to the way Florida is, you can’t find a newspaper anywhere in print unless you get home delivery. I could hardly find any New York Times or Wall Street Journals to buy during our 10 day visit. Airplanes are no longer blocking middle seats so you have to buy them if you want them for yourself. And in the “Covid-as-an-excuse to cut costs” department, the Grand Beach hotel in Miami Beach wasn’t offering house-keeping so you can imagine how our room smelled by the third day. They didn’t even answer the phone to refresh towels or respond if you went to the lobby to complain. I guess I was lucky; when I was at the front desk complaining, the guy next to me said to the manager that he had gone 8 days without any room service.  People are flocking to Florida to be free from restrictions (that means the holy moly traffic is back) and some hotels are taking advantage by raising rates and going to 100% occupancy except not providing service for anything near 100%; give the Four Seasons credit; they only sold 50-60% of their rooms so that they could do it right for their guests and they are being scrupulous about providing a pleasant but safe environment.

It just seems so obvious to me that if you want to get the vaccines delivered super quickly all around the US, that you get Amazon to do it. Maybe the government is already talking to Amazon and we don’t know about it yet. I predict that once the vaccine is approved, America will exceed expectations in terms of getting it out to people. Convenience is what America does best. So far though, it’s been somewhat stupid with people being on the learning curve of how to handle this. But you could do so much worse — Can you believe that the first week of January France inoculated all of 512 people? I think in Israel they gave shots to over 250,000 people just in that same week. Ain’t much viva la France going on here. One thing I don’t understand — after Israel, the #2 and #3 countries in the world in terms of getting vaccines into arms are the UAE and Bahrain, but they are buying cheap stuff from China which is unproven. They have all the money in the world. A friend there explains that the UAE helped China develop that vaccine. The other vaccines are also available there.

I know this is not politically correct, but if you think about it, it makes sense to get vaccines out to the top 1% of society as a priority. Get those people out traveling and spending again, and it will help lift the economy for everyone else. Meanwhile, all these leaders are sitting on zero credit card balances waiting for the world to come back on and it isn’t doing the other 99% of us any good. I’ll bet the Chinese and the Israelis will do it, and it will be one reason their economies show growth in 2021. One reason the Israelis are leading the world in vaccination is that they paid more than twice as much per dose as did the US or the UK; they figured that it would be a good return on investment if their economy was back in action faster. No question about it; the so-called first world sat on its ass and went the pennywise-dollar foolish route, which is what you do when you really believe that most of your citizens don’t really have value whether or not they are working. Australia seems to believe it can sit around forever paying its citizens not to work and they are not even trying to launch a vaccination program at this time. The US is wasting so much time trying to figure out who should get the vaccine and letting tons of it rot unused. It would be smarter to let the private sector figure this out and just get it out to those who value it with their dollars. That would be the most efficient way to get the country back on track. You cannot overestimate the number of Americans who don’t want to be vaccinated; my doctor said that among health workers in his hospital, the lower the IQ the less one wants to be vaccinated. The result: too many people who want to be vaccinated are waiting for it. Or consider what Indonesia is doing; they are prioritizing vaccines to people age 20-60 because they are the ones spreading the disease the most, and because they want them back at work.

A worrying thing I’m noticing is that the CDC wants people entering the US to be tested before flying, even if they’ve been vaccinated. People are going to be fearful of going abroad if they are not sure they will be allowed back and not get stuck in some quarantine abroad. These rapid tests have high false positivity rates and the PCR tests are expensive; $500 for a family of 4. Experts are not yet sure that being vaccinated means you cannot still infect others. I had hoped that vaccination would be a passport to travel, but it may not be so. If this stays the trend, travel will not rebound anytime soon.

My son Jeremy is becoming a real TV sports nut and we were sitting last month in Fort Lauderdale and he’s gabbing on and on about how “We” this and we that in terms of the team he follows. I scolded him about how “He” is not on the team and that he has nothing to do with whether the team wins or loses. There was a guy sitting near us and I saw him having a good laugh over this.

I feel good when I read a Thomas Friedman column reflecting on an hourlong conversation with Joe Biden about nuclear policy. Beyond the fact that Biden has a good foreign policy team, it is reassuring that a president feels confident enough about a subject to talk for an hour about it on background with a prominent columnist. Imagine Trump doing that. It’s also an important reason why I am not particularly concerned with the “who” on his team although he has put together a really excellent team; Biden knows enough to overrule his team on most subjects that come before him.

Trump has given everyone a break by ensuring that he will never come back into politics. Until now, I figured the Republicans would be leaking dirt on him to clear the way for others in the party but he basically drove himself out. Hopefully his children are also gone for good. Maybe even the Ted Cruz’s of this world, who turned sowing doubt over the election into a fundraising scam unprecedented in how many legitimate people allowed it; Trump raised over $250 million for a fund that he basically gets to control. They basically swindled millions of people into giving money they don’t have in the hope to try and overturn an election. Seeing all these enablers in the White House suddenly resigning is pretty sick; they now want to cover themselves at the 89^th minute of the football match when the consequence of excess became so extreme that there are no more excuses to be found. I think that Ivanka and Jared are not going to be back in respectable social circles soon, although well placed donations can certainly help rehabilitate them as always in a few years. Jared and Ivanka bought a plot of land on Indian Creek Island in Miami Beach, a private island owned mostly by billionaires. Problem is that almost nobody on the island wants them in the island’s country club. Maybe they’ll just flip the plot of land and build their Florida mansion elsewhere. My kids’ school assumed everyone was traumatized by the events in Washington and offered psychological counseling etcetera for everyone. Hey, my kid is a kid. He wasn’t traumatized; he was disappointed. He wanted to see lots of violence with mobs out of control. Yeah, let’s hear it for the Boyz. (Except that as news filtered out we realized that there was more violence than it initially appeared.) I keep noticing that schools think kids are so delicate that they cannot handle just about anything involving controversy. A martial arts teacher I know on the upper east side of Manhattan says that today’s millennials are so soft and easily offended that it is hard to teach them anything because they just fall apart over everything. This ultra-liberal approach to raising kids and young people will have costs in the future as coddled people lose the ability to face adversity or go beyond their comfort zone or “safe space.” People are trying to get adults to change what they consider their “backward thinking” on matters such as racial and sexual harassment but the videos people are forced to watch are so silly that in my opinion they wind up reinforcing people’s existing prejudices and want to defend them against what they consider people forcing silly ideas on them. These are not just my opinion; I’ve been seeing it expressed in the major dailies. We have our nuts on both the Left and Right and the whole discourse is just not good for the public good.

An important intelligence failure the past 4 years that culminated in this past week’s violence at the US capitol is a failure to believe that people will do what they say they will do and to instead assume they don’t mean what they say or that they are just exaggerating. Trump as president did what he campaigned on, despite the fact that many said he did not really mean what he said. Those that stormed the capitol were saying online what they would do, but the police didn’t believe the threats were credible enough to ramp up security on that day. Watching a recap video of Georgia’s secretary of state teary-eyed warning a few weeks ago that people would get shot and killed if the rhetoric did not stop is very disconcerting after the fact. There is history to all this, such as the warnings pre-9/11 that were ignored. A lesson to all this is that we keep forgetting how all this ends while ignoring the warning signs. Democracy has always feared mob rule, and the will of the majority vote is but one piece of the glue that keeps it together and that was becoming unstuck. You also need institutions, and a generation ago when we had 3 TV networks that presented the news each evening, the level of trust in the information presented was much higher than it is now. Even after the events of this month, 75% of Republicans still think that Biden stole the election. Having an unregulated free for all in terms of information has not helped democracy in America nor its reputation abroad, and it is amazing that roughly half of Republicans in Congress still did not want to certify the election after the riots. Clearly, you have a breakdown in the system where the people that are supposed to be the responsible parties are being led by the mob.

I was predicting (and it came true faster than I expected) that Twitter and Facebook would shut down Trump’s megaphones. I figured he and others would just move to other right-wing forums where they would be marginalized but still heard. Then out of nowhere I saw Google and Apple say that they would close off access to their telephones’ app stores if these right-wing sites did not simmer down. If they did that, that would cut off almost 100% of any future downloads to these sites. In many ways, insurance companies in America decide what you can and cannot do in terms of physical risk. We now see that if Apple and Google decide they want to shut down speech anywhere in the world, they can and that it is ultimately in the private sector (more so than in the public sector) that the limits of action are determined, at least in the West. On one hand it is not so great that two private companies basically get to determine what is and is not lawful speech; on the other hand, it is easy to clamp down when the going gets tough. It will be interesting to see if cable TV companies such as Spectrum or Comcast tell Fox News or other networks to shape up or get blacked out. Let’s not make the mistake of thinking they did this for the public good; the Democrats took over the government and these people are scared of what they might do to them now. Companies that backed Trump the past 4 years are now afraid of the instability they wrought so now they are threatening the Republicans with a cutoff of contributions. Turnarounds are never clean with yellow lights flashing; it’s like the water pail in a children’s water park that fills up and all of sudden tips over with a whoosh of water.

People in Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea that are delighting in watching America go through this debasement should not be so happy; someday the pail will turn on them too because what they are doing is also unsustainable at some point. This story is not over; what America does to recover from this is the real story, and if America does it right (and yes, putting Trump on trial and convicting him is part of that), it will be a feather in the cap of democracy around the world, meaning that authoritarians gloating over America’s downfall of democracy should be careful not to focus too much attention on this story because it might ultimately come back to bite them. Another thought: John Hawley is an Ivy-League educated former law professor in his 40’s. A dozen years ago he clerked in the US Supreme Court for Chief Justice Roberts. My Gawd. He knows too much to have participated in this mob scene; it is not that he should have known what he was doing — he knew exactly what he was doing. It was a cynical exercise in self-promotion. Same goes for Ted Cruz; he’s from the Ivy League and is not some redneck who hasn’t been around the block in government. Don’t just look at these protesters as low-class idiots. And by the way, calling them protesters is not really the right label. We ought to call it what it is, terrorism. America has become a hotbed of right-wing terrorism and we cannot explain it away as a cultural phenomenon. Otherwise, what do you say to the Saudis when they use that argument to explain jihadism. Until America calls this for what it is, it is in denial and will not get past this, which is another reason why those that want to sweep this under the rug in the name of “unity and healing” are just kicking the can down the road.

I was waiting for the results in Georgia’s senate runoffs to determine what I thought the future portends for Biden because so much depended on it. I voted for Biden, not for Mitch McConnel. In fact, only people from Kentucky voted for him. So I don’t want to have Biden hamstrung for 4 years by one senator who decides the only thing he wants to do is to stop Biden just like he said was his only goal when it came to Obama. So I’m happy to see a Congress in which the president has a decent but narrow chance to actually put his plans into action. On the other hand, it is narrow enough so that he can tell the progressive wing of his party that he needs moderates on both sides of the aisle to go with him in order to do anything. This actually in my mind is a plus; as I see it, the best possible result came out of this election. If Biden does a good job of working Congress over the next 2 years, he might extend his majority there. He’s more likely to do that than if he were to be hijacked by the Left making his party a bigger target for Republicans and Independents in 2022’s midterm elections.

So far I see legislative priorities being advanced by Nancy Pelosi which to me seem likely to piss off Republicans and squander opportunities to bring people together on things they can agree on. I don’t know if she is the right person for the job at this time; she wants to push statehood for DC, expand voting registration and reform gerrymandering in a clear bid to enhance Democratic power. Biden will need to make sure she is a good partner for him to set a tone and keep on message, otherwise she will be fighting the same old battles in Congress and sabotaging his chances of getting the nation onto a different footing. Biden’s attempts to talk about what he wants to do instead of about Trump’s impeachment has been a good effort to maintain focus on the future. I think that Congress should do whatever it is going to do with Trump quickly and move on. He is not worth the nation’s attention for long. McConnell and establishment Republicans have a shared interest in punishing Trump to purge the GOP of Trumpism. Democrats also want an opposition party that they can do business with because especially we can’t keep having a country like America whipsaw every few years from one policy to another, especially with regard to foreign policy. Biden’s team will work with Republicans to try and come up with policies that will outlast this administration because those are the only ones that will be respected abroad. The Republican party has a better future if it can shake off Trump instead of trying to defend him in the history books. As time goes on, it’s become clearer that among the people who stormed the Capitol were people who wanted to kill, kidnap or otherwise harm. They did not come for tea. Unity and healing will not come by trying to let bygones be bygones with trespass that serious that may have even involved the connivance of incumbent congress-people and law enforcement officers who felt they knew better than their colleagues, but by agreeing that steps need to be taken to make sure it never happens again. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Lots of people need to look in the mirror and ask what they allowed themselves to become over the past number of years. I personally have had trouble seeing how people could justify themselves; maybe they now are taking stock after seeing the results of years of chicanery. Corporate America withholding contributions from Republicans who voted against certifying the elections seems right, but how do you tell over half the Republican congress-people that you are cutting them off? To have gotten to that point says a lot about where this country has fallen into. And yet 75% of Republicans still don’t see that anything is wrong with what they did. All this makes places like Singapore make more sense.

One bright spot out of this pandemic is that economies are adjusting to lockdowns and the shocks are not as severe. All around the world, countries have been forced to modernize and innovate, such as Japan which has had to embrace more digital technologies rather than a legal system that relies on chop stamps and pieces of paper. People have seen the value of R&D in science and technology. The dangers of having a few companies monopolize many industries and reducing innovation and competitiveness has become clearer, and during the pandemic many businesses had to reinvent themselves or die. The electric car industry moved ahead and the oil industry faced a reckoning. There is more optimism now than a year ago that the next decade will see more innovation and development than people had thought possible. And even though covid put a damper on poverty eradication, the levels of severe poverty remained depressed.

Turning to the Middle East, can you believe there was a joint air force drill between Israel and Saudi Arabia in early January? People heard sonic booms going off near Tel Aviv and thought it was the Iron Dome anti-missile system being activated against a Hamas attack, but in fact it was these joint drills going on. It’s a good bet that in 2021 you’ll see more open relations between the Israelis and Saudis. MBS is a tough cookie, but he is likely to be around for a long time and many in the West like what he’s doing overall, so criticism of the Saudis human rights policies is likely to be tempered. Expect more attention to the Sahel region of North Africa. The Moroccan-Israeli deal is significant because it calls attention to this region, and Europe is quite worried about instability stemming from failed states in the area such as Libya. Sudan, which recently normalized with Israel, had less domestic blow-back than expected. I expect Iran to try and test the Americans, but this is really out of weakness and the desire to get themselves on the agenda. The Americans will try to resist those entreaties. An interesting aspect of the normalization of relations with Israel is that Arab states see good relations with Israel as ADDING to their stability; in the past, having relations with Israel was seen as a threat to their stability, so this is an interesting world we are living in, as I further prove by mentioning those Saudi-Israeli air exercises which were not reported in media outside Israel. I think that in 2021, you will see changes in leadership in both the Israeli and Palestinian camps. Gideon Saar has been described to me as the Theresa May of Israel, which is not a compliment. But he has a good chance of unseating Netanyahu in a way that the others coming from the Center-Left have not. Mahmoud Abbas is 85 years old and has to move on. But whoever succeeds him is likely to fail as the past history of these successions involves infighting and attestations of purity to the cause rather than to the desires of the people; Palestinians are very frustrated right now that the Palestinian Authority doesn’t seem to pay much attention to Palestinians. Netanyahu is succeeding with vaccinations and peace initiatives but is seen as spending too much time putting his legal problems in front of the country’s needs and mucking up the response to Covid by pandering to coalition partners such as the ultra-Orthodox. The time is ripe for both incumbents to get the boot because they refuse to step aside and make room for successors.

Here is a good omen; in a secret vote in the UN, the little country of Fiji was elected by a large margin as head of the UN Human Rights Council. China, Russia and Saudi Arabia were trying to get Bahrain to take over that role, figuring that Bahrain would be a much better vote for them than Fiji. (Remember, I mentioned above the Bahrain-China connection on the vaccine and how Bahrain is third in the world in terms of getting their people vaccinated.) But it seems that human rights is still of interest around the world and those that tried to subvert the council lost handily. China has been trying hard to muscle in with appointments to these international institutions such as the UN and World Health Organization to try and get its way in the world; much of the world still doesn’t like China and at least in secret is willing to reject it.

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal discusses artificial intelligence (AI) and says that much of the US policy toward China in terms of hindering their 5G development is based on a misunderstanding of AI technology. It says that policy makers should be more exacting in understanding what it is they want to prevent and what they want to promote. I think that the new Biden team will be able to do this. The article is written by Peter Cowrey and Susan Shirk in the Journal dated 9-10 January. Recounting this is above my paygrade but it’s worthwhile reading if you want a better understanding of the promise and peril of AI.

On the issue of Iran and nuclear technology, Biden seems to be focused like a laser beam on the nuclear dimension. The problem as Israel and its Gulf allies see it, is that Iran is not really interested in using nuclear bombs because that would be suicidal. It wants the nuclear umbrella to strike against its neighbors and beyond using precision conventional missiles. If Biden lets them off the hook with its conventional missile program, as Obama did with the previous JCPOA agreement, there’s going to be a tempest in the region because it will be solving one problem while masking a much bigger problem. Going back to the JCPOA is not in the cards because the agreement is obsolete and because you can’t just turn back the clock. It may be that the US is best off not looking too eager to make a deal with Iran and just go for incremental steps in due time instead of seeking a grand deal.

Here is a profound thought from Nachum Goldman, the founder of the Claims Conference. He said that although he could admire Israelis, he found it quite hard to like them. I often feel that way and I am sure that lots of people feel that way. I’m sure Biden will have his work cut out for him dealing with Israel.

Elliot Abrams has been around in Washington for several decades dealing with US foreign policy issues. Recently I was on a conference call with him and he mentioned that until recently, if there was a debate on foreign policy in Congress it was between two or more points of principle. Nowadays, it’s all about hewing to a party line. He wishes that people did not line up on foreign policy issues through their political party affiliation but based on what they think is the right move for the country.

Lebanon is in a sorry state of affairs with Hizbullah trying to buy its way into the Shia sectors of society to at least have one constituency in its back pocket, but recent polling in the country shows widespread disgust with Hizbullah (even among the Shia) for encouraging the country’s corruption and resistance to reform which is making it impossible for the country to provide essential services to all sectors that Hizbullah is not in a position to offer. For instance, Hizbullah subsidizes groceries and pharmaceuticals but cannot provide hospitals, electricity and internet service. Policymakers in the US and Europe should help the central government compete with Hizbullah in the areas that they are trying to compete and to fill the gaps in the areas where Hizbullah cannot compete. The country is in such bad shape that recent maritime talks with Israel are widely supported. In Iraq, there is the thought that building an oil pipeline to Haifa could be good for the country and would enable it to stimulate its economy.  The poor economy in the area is leading countries to seek out good partners. Consider that Israel just received 4 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine and within a month, one third of the country’s 6.8 million Jewish citizens will be vaccinated. Moderna also has supply commitments to the country and to get herd immunity, you only need roughly two-thirds of the population to get the vaccine. So it is quite possible that within one or two months, Israel will be functioning at a near normal rate and might even be able to take in tourists. One thing about Israel, when they get their s*** together, they get their asses in gear very well. So if you are a neighboring country, why would you want to keep boycotting them just because the Palestinians don’t have a state, which is not exactly Priority One these days and Abbas is not exactly viewed as a great leader. Besides, in a few months Israel has vowed to share excess vaccines with the Palestinians (and has already shared some of what they have) which may be a better result than many Arabs elsewhere will get. Also, Hizbullah polls exceedingly poorly in Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia these days. It’s not exactly rocket science to see why normalization deals spurred by a poor regional economy are taking place. It’s insane – Israeli tourists are just storming the UAE for the Chanukah festive season and the Israelis are welcoming UAE tourists; the foreign ministry had to ask the health ministry to stand down when they tried to declare the UAE a red zone because the UAE was going to do the same to Israel. So you can see that both sides are throwing caution to the wind to open up to each other. Fortunately, when I am writing this on December 10, the infection rate in the UAE is about 1% and in Israel about 2.5%. Both countries appear to be keeping the virus to manageable levels which makes them a good fit for each other – they both run a good show. The UAE has the advantage because they have an absolute ruler who can jail people who don’t comply. Israel is a squabbling democracy which is just a different kind of animal, but push comes to shove, they get it together.

I ran into a person in an elevator wearing a Naval Academy tee shirt and asked him if he went there or just wore the shirt. He said he was a navy fighter pilot. He said that landing planes on aircraft carriers is fun during the day but terrifying at night. I asked him if he thought aircraft carriers were sitting ducks these days. He emphatically said yes and added that he recently wrote a report stating as much and that the US needed to focus more on land-based systems. I mention this because I’ve been warning about this the past several years.

We were in Miami during Christmas week and it is like a different planet there as opposed to New York. People there have lost the paranoia about covid they had last spring. They don’t seem to care as much if they get sick. They just want to live their lives. They say that a good number of people have moved down there because they are sick of all the restrictions in New York. In a gym in Miami, you will not have women come up to you from 50 feet away and remind you to put on a mask like they do in New York. I don’t know if they are genuinely scared from 50 feet away or just feel they are supposed to police the place.  I say women because I’ve never seen a man walk up to someone, but I sure have seen a lot of women do that. Actually, I think that much of humankind has shown themselves to be really dumb in terms of dealing with this covid, from the man on the street who cannot control himself to the people running government who come up with policies that make no sense and that don’t work. It’s amazing that the human race has come as far as it has with the people in charge. At least scientists in their laboratories come up with solutions that corporations know how to carry out. It’s a good argument for free markets and limited government. Although if Biden does a better job of engineering a recovery, I’ll gladly eat my hat but so far I don’t see that Democratic states have done any better than Republican states at getting things under control, and I don’t see countries around the world that have done a better job of letting people live their lives within a pandemic. Australia and New Zealand have kept the virus in check but at a huge cost; people have spent months under lockdown, the government has been printing money nonstop and they are delaying vaccination for various reasons so this is just going to continue for a long time in these countries.

Here’s a random final thought: I called up one of my former employers just to see how he was doing. I remember that when I worked for him, he kept telling me that I was not too smart and he criticized anything that I did. Years later, when I owned a company, I hired him. Then he kept telling me how smart I was, and I kept finding his mistakes. Funny how things are based on who is paying whom.

Time to see what happens now that we are going back to a boring state of affairs in Washington, which is exactly how I like it. Hope we get this covid thing under control. We all know the winter will be tough, but I hope we can start to pull through in the spring. Stay tuned.

Both my kids crossed a Rubicon of maturity and awareness this week. One went to bed early on a Saturday night and got up early Sunday morning to write her essay for school trying to clear her desk before going out to a get together with friends. The other one texted me that he was sad that Alex Trebeck had died, even though he never watches Jeopardy. That was his first texted commentary to me about current events. Moreover, it used to be that our kids would be up in the early hours of the day demanding we play with them; now they could sleep till 10 with no problem and I have to wake them up so that they will go to bed that night at a decent hour.

The day before election day, I promised my kids that if Joe Biden won, we would celebrate with a banana cream pie. The next day I started looking for one and found out that it’s really hard to find such a thing in Manhattan. Finally, I found it but then I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to order one because for a time it looked like Trump might win. Finally, Friday came and I took a risk buying two slices from a patisserie down the street. Saturday night we ate it, and my, it was good.

Yes, my friends, it has all come down to this. To eat a pie, or not to eat.

On Saturday morning about 11:30, we heard cheers and banging pots outside, the likes of which I had not heard since the Yankees won the World Series in 2009. I figured they had declared a winner. We walked around Central Park on Saturday afternoon and Sheep’s Meadow was a giant party on a beautiful late fall sunny unusually warm day. First time in a year I’ve seen people getting together and looking happy, and it certainly gives lie to the idea that New York City is a ghost town.

I felt really happy that voters could make a difference and I thought about people who live around the world in countries where elections are fake and they have no prospect for change. People say that MBS in Saudi Arabia could be the king for the next 50 years; what would it be like to live there and to know that no matter how much people hate him, they can’t vote to get rid of him. In New York City, people were so happy to know that Trump will be gone. I am close to 55 years old and I’ve never seen so many people disgusted with an American leader and so happy to know he will soon be gone. I’ve always liked to feel that when the chips are down, America does the right thing and it usually does. This one was too close for comfort, but in the end, I think the dark side lost. I feel that not only America, but Americans were on trial with this vote – was 2016 a fluke or did we really mean it – and I was really worried how it would actually turn out. Trump did lose by millions of votes but that damn electoral college keeps creeping up on us making the majority of Americans feel we don’t count for much. I will tell you that if Trump won in the face of this, I’d be wondering if I’m living my life in the right country.

I don’t know if China exported this virus on purpose, but if there had been no Covid, you’d probably have 4 more years of Trump. It is clear to me that until this virus is brought under control, there will be an unsteady economy and that Trump was not going to deal with this virus until it either petered out or a vaccine stamped it out, neither of which is likely to happen soon enough. So finally after 4 miserable years, Amateur Hour at the White House is about to end and the haters and wall-builders will be replaced by consensus-builders and deal-makers. Mitch McConnell who leads the Republican Senate gets along very well with Joe Biden and I expect them to work well together. My hope is that stuff will get done by building coalitions of 51-60 senators in the center who can agree rather than trying to get crossovers from the GOP to go along with the Democrats on progressive-based initiatives that will fail. This will leave The Squad squealing in the background but Pelosi does not care for them and she is a vote-counter who has some egg on her face because in my estimation she obstructed a stimulus bill before the election figuring it would help the Democrats as it did in 2008 when congress didn’t pass a bill before the election; this year it backfired and both she and McConnel seem to agree that a stimulus bill is necessary to keep the economy on track for the next several months.

US intelligence services have a strong incentive to make sure ex-president Trump is either jailed or dead; he knows some amount of top secret information that he learned as president and could pass it along to foreign sources. He owes hundreds of millions of dollars to foreign sources, is very angry at the US government and its intelligence agencies, and has a record of compromising intelligence sources as president. Had he not been president, he would have been convicted by now for his actions. The only thing in his favor is that he was so ignorant of reading or listening to his briefings that he doesn’t know nearly as much as he should by now. There is a good article in the Washington Post dated 10 November by Shane Harris about this item.

Government agents will be watching Trump and his family to see if they get foreign bank transfers afterward and I highly suspect Trump will be the first US president jailed for his crimes. It’s pretty clear that Trump continued to coordinate with his various companies and that people wanting favors had it made known to them that country club membership, hotel patronage and the sort were necessary prerequisites. I also want to know what the deal is with a property he owned in Palm Beach that was reportedly bought by some obscure Russian for roughly 10x what it was worth who didn’t even wind up living there. Some say that Putin paid for it. I expect that Trump is going to be Exhibit A of a person who became president of the USA whose darkest secrets came out after he left office. Lots of other people who might have gotten away with a lot in obscurity are being brought down with him. Bush and Clinton might have gotten lots of money from foreign sources after they left office but Trump is not going to get away with it.

I learned something important this year to think twice about. I’ve said for years that the demographic trends in this country show that over time the country is becoming less White and that this bodes well for the Democratic party. The latest election gives that idea pause. The GOP ticket got more support from various minority groups in 2020 than it did in 2016, even after 4 years of Trump. 38% of Latino men and 18% of Black men voted Republican/GOP. I’ve noticed that the Wall Street Journal has been putting out a good many more articles meant to appeal to Black readers and I have been wondering why. Now I think I know; the conservative movement really is targeting Blacks because they think that Blacks are fertile ground for them. Black men are not very liberal; they tend to be conservative and the Democratic party takes them for granted. Latino men also are extremely wary of anything that looks like socialism.

You’d have thought that Biden would have run away with female votes. The spread was only 52-47% of white women in the suburbs, and an 11% spread overall, meaning that Trump kept a good portion of the female vote. I had been thinking that women would have utterly abandoned him this time around and I wonder what I am supposed to understand from that.

A huge question (which I am about to answer) is why were the polls so wrong yet again? Did Trump have a valid point when he pointed to “poll suppression” meaning that the media knowingly promoted polls they knew were wrong showing a large Democratic lead to suppress voter turnout on election day which was expected to trend Republican? (The Wall Street Journal also published polls showing the Democrats ahead by 10 percentage points and they could hardly be accused of this.) A major Wall Street firm’s (I can’t write which one but trust me, they’re in the top 3) in-house estimate in the fall was a 55% probability of a Trump win which was much closer to the result than the Economist’s 95% odds put out the week of the election. You had to wonder if we have 70 million racists in this country who voted for Trump and if the rest of us really want to live in a country like this? Didn’t it matter that he was such a jerk?

After a few days, I came across an interesting study noted in the Economist by the CATO institute in the US which found that only progressive liberals felt comfortable voicing their opinions in public without fear of offending people. People in the center, soft liberals and conservatives felt muzzled. This is hugely important because it means that with the current “cancel culture” spear-headed by academia and the woke-dominated press, it means that people with other viewpoints in this country are simply driven underground and they surprisingly surface at the ballot box. It takes a pollster 100 calls before being able to get a conservative voter to talk on the phone, meaning that as long as these kinds of people are driven underground, you will never be able to gage their opinion about anything in order to predict what the body politic will actually do with their votes.  An article in the Forward repeats this analysis from a conservative commentator saying that conservatives won’t even tell other conservatives about their voting intentions if they have any reason to feel they will be criticized for their stated choice.

The problem is that most of those 70 million people are not racists, but they don’t agree with the progressive program so they are labeled racists by the progressives who hold the mouthpieces. What more swing people in the middle did than was expected was to vote GOP because they were scared of what would happen if the Democrats took control of the government, and they were willing to put up with a president they did not like but preferred to the prospect of what they felt would be socialism in America. It’s these people in the middle who always decide an election. Just enough of them voted for Biden to him to cross the finish line but it is too close for comfort. Consider that the one demographic where Trump did worse in 2020 than 2016 was with white men. The Democratic party is becoming dominated by progressives according to other long-time party activists who are wary of them and were afraid during the fall that the party might lose in the election (something I reported last posting), and the GOP is now dominated by Trumpists and the future of the GOP is very unclear to other centrist Republicans who are active in the party. It just so happened that Biden got through the primaries and the election because Blacks (who as I said are mostly conservative and not progressive) came out and voted for him. I had been saying that a few hundred thousand votes by Blacks in the Midwest would have pushed Hillary over the top and that Biden would need them to get elected, and it was exactly right. Biden does not owe the progressives of his party anything nor will he be reelected by pandering to them. The rest of the candidates who raised their hand for “Medicare for all” during one of the debates earlier in the year all went down to defeat and tarnished the image of the Democratic party. Giving people a public option is one thing but forcing people to take the public option is another and Biden was smart enough to stay on the right side of this issue.

The future is disturbing because the Democrats keep losing for most of the past 40 years except when a centrist candidate gets a crossover vote. Only Clinton and Obama managed to do that between 1980 and 2016. The New York Times is increasingly stuck in an echo-chamber of wokeness as is tax-dollars- funded-NPR, and I don’t know if I can stand 4 more years of reading a daily diet of articles that make it seem that the entire universe is filled with transgender people and racist police officers and that Biden needs to appoint Elizabeth Warren to run our economy. The Democrats are stuck on the Left. The GOP was not punished at the voting booth for having a bunch of Trumpists in charge and the question is whether there is a place for centrist republicans in that party. I don’t know where the money will be placed that pays the bills but figure that ought to help answer the question. It is a good argument for a third party but the structure of the American political system makes it nearly impossible that one could exist.

Those that were expecting a landslide election have to look at historical context – America is a very divided country and most elections here are close. In 1960, they say that it was dead people’s votes in Chicago that pushed JFK over the top. Anything beyond a few percentage votes spread happens only a few times a century and overthrowing an incumbent president after a first term also is rare. That it happened is a big event even if it was by the hair of the chinny-chin-chin.

America is historically divided with dirty tricks and hard feelings. Just look at 1860 election which could easily have gone the other way but for a certain congressman who played fair and allowed Lincoln’s votes to be certified in congress. Our entire history could have gone another way but for that man’s act of courtesy. Basically, America is a divided country except in rare moments.

Here’s another thing we learned from this election: Most Americans don’t really care how much tax cuts you give to the top 1% as long as they get a cut too. They would rather share tax cuts than share tax increases, even if the 1% pay a whole lot more. We are NOT all in this together. We are not Canadians; we are country of selfish people who vote for what they feel is good for them. To understand why so many Latinos voted for Trump, all you had to know was this: I read a quote from a Latino in Texas just before the election who said “Let him build the FU***IN wall. I’m on this side of the Rio Grande now.”

We know that Trump got several million more votes than 2016, so bringing out the Democratic vote also stirred up more Republican votes who felt threatened by court packing, increased taxes, socialism, and Black Lives Matter violence.

Money is over-rated in politics. Didn’t seem to make much of a difference at all in lots of races. Just ask Mike Bloomberg who spent close to a billion dollars only to come in first in American Samoa. People vote for a message and if you don’t have one, money won’t help.

I sent an angry note to Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan who wrote the weekend before the election that she was writing in dead European philosopher Edmund Burke as her presidential candidate. If you have such a prominent column, you have to take a side and explain yourself and not cop-out like this. Jim Clyburn, whose endorsement of Biden before the South Carolina primary turned the tables on Super Tuesday, only did so after an elderly lady told him to get off the fence and tell people who to vote for. Imagine if millions of other people wrote in Edmund Burke. That would leave a bunch of not-so-educated people to pick our president and I’m not so sure as it is that we are better off having so many people involved making poor decisions for the rest of us.  There is something to be said for the fact that in the beginning only 6% of Americans actually had the right to vote.

Let me end on a happy note – all the horrible things that were supposed to happen — social media fake news that would suppress votes and create chaos, voting snafus, the postal service that couldn’t deliver, hacking by domestic and foreign actors – all went pretty well and all the feared scenarios did not happen. Maybe the foreigners stayed away thinking a Biden win was in the bag no matter what, but whatever it was, it did not happen.

The world was watching America and finally, after so many screwups and under the worst conditions, America showed itself to be a country with an electoral system that counted on integrity and worked. In America, we are now allowed to forget Trump and look forward to life without thinking about our Dear Leader. I can’t wait for 2020 to be over and to try and forget all of this ever happened.

Meanwhile…Moving On….(Isn’t that a really great idea, everyone?)

In China we keep hearing how everything is doing just fine.  Factories are still really closed, despite what they say. People can’t get their orders, so I don’t know how well it can be doing.

Time for a funny story. I’m walking down the street and I see this homeless guy with very few teeth sitting up against a milk crate against some scaffolding. About 25 feet away I see this nice comfy leather office chair and I say to the guy, hey there! There’s this nice comfy leather chair right over there, maybe you’d like to take it. He said to me after thinking for a second, Nope. I like it just the way I have it.

A nice thing about NY City these days – people are being very polite to each other, observing their distance and wearing their masks even if they don’t have to. Infection rates are low here, kids are still in school even in mid-November, and people just feel that it’s nice being around when people are trying to be excellent to each other.

I’ve noticed more traffic as I ride cross-town on the buses the past few weeks so I think the city is slowly coming back to life. A secretary in my doctor’s office said this month her travel time to and from work has doubled or tripled since the summer.

The reason the BBC is such a great news service is that after the third Trump-Biden debate, the analysts were discussing Trump’s rant about birds getting killed with windmills as a reason for his opposition to wind farms. The analyst said that X number of birds get killed with windmills, but a much greater number of birds each year get killed by cats. Therefore, what we really ought to do on the basis of this logic is to ban cats. You just don’t get that kind of analysis anywhere else.

During this pandemic, something keeps popping up in my mind. In the Yom Kippur liturgy (the Jewish Day of Atonement), there is a retelling of the ancient service of the High Priest in the Holy Temple of Jerusalem where the priest atones for the sins of the Israelites. At some point, the priest weeps for being suspected of sin, and the priests around him weep for suspecting him. I think of this moment because we are in a situation where everyone acts as if people are suspected of being sick without proof, but I don’t think that anyone feels bad about suspecting each other. When we say that we’re all in this together, I have to be cynical and say that people are not really empathetic about the feelings of others; everyone is in it for themselves afraid that they themselves might get sick from someone else. The guy poking his umbrella at me while walking down the street trying to ensure that he will keep me away from him is not concerned about anyone else but himself. If I fainted because I was breathing in too much carbon dioxide with my mask on while running on a treadmill in a gym where the nearest person is 50 feet away but that person goes nuts when the mask slips off my nose, I just think the person couldn’t care less what happens to me.

Nowadays, people want to ban entry to people who live within certain zip codes, because the rate of infection has been higher from those zip codes. People used to deny giving mortgages to people residing within certain zip codes, and that was called redlining. It probably still happens. We call that discrimination, because you are being judged not by the person you are or how you act, but by being lumped into a category with the people around you that share a characteristic such as skin color or religion. I think that people who live in safe homes and act responsibly should not be penalized and quarantined and barred from entry to schools and other places just because they come from neighborhoods where other people are sick. I don’t understand why people are so willing to do this to other people when they would be highly offended if someone did that to them because they run a good show. I haven’t seen real data that show a correlation between people coming to school infected with the virus and the fact that they live in a certain neighborhood. If I see enough of that, I would change my mind. It’s the same thing with the quarantines by states you visit. Florida is a huge state; it takes almost 12 hours to drive from one end to the other. There are safe spots and there are infectious spots. But people living in infectious spots might live safely inside their homes and have little contact with other people, which is the case in places like Dade County which has poor areas with high infection and rich areas with low infection. That’s why I think it is stupid to say that everyone coming out of Florida has to quarantine for 14 days as if they were sick. New Yorkers were afraid that people returning after summer vacations all over the place would bring infections with them and it did not happen. I also think that 14 days is draconian and invites noncompliance and roughly 50% of people are lying on these health declarations and avoiding contact tracers; other countries are switching to 5-7 days to increase compliance because that is the amount of time that is necessary to catch almost all infections that arise from infectious contact. I would think that by now there would be scientific data on this to guide policy. I think public policy would be better served by being more pin-pricky about restricting the movement of people; it would enable the economy to function better and for people to believe that compliance really makes a difference or that the sacrifice is worth it. There is an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz available in English online dated 15 October by Hilo Glazer where a good many senior doctors say that these lockdowns are stupid. It’s an interesting read. I was sitting in a deserted hotel hallway at 11pm one night reading a newspaper and someone on staff walks up to me and says I am not wearing my mask correctly and that it is necessary to adjust it because I am in a public place. Really…..

Here is why it pays at a hotel to not have everything included in the fee, and for you to have to pay for activities. My father always used to grouse about how hotels are no longer all-inclusive like the ones he grew up with and I used to agree with him. At the Mohonk Lodge one weekend this fall, they had tomahawk throwing. It was a free activity. Over 30 people attended and you stood there for an hour and got to throw a tomahawk 6 times. Last year we went to Colonial Williamsburg and they charged $25 or so for the activity but you were there with just 3 other people and could throw tomahawks for a half an hour with an instructor coaching you.  By the way, there must be some kind of environmental Nazi at Mohonk who is currently trying to eliminate all paper products. The gift shop doesn’t sell newspapers (too much paper in them, I guess) and the menus and daily schedules have all been digitized. Some of the cutbacks in services at hotels are being blamed on the pandemic but I really believe they are just cost-cutting measures using the pandemic as an excuse. People are paying more and getting less when they travel at this point.

I’ve finished reading the newly released biography of James Baker. They don’t make these people like they used to and it’s a shame because we need them. One thing I got out of the book was that the Americans in the 1980’s only put up about half a billion dollars to support all of the Russian Republics and Eastern Europe as they transitioned out of communism. At the end of World War II, the US put up roughly $26 billion for Western Europe. The US was really stingy here and it may have helped lead to the initial failure of Russia to build democratic institutions and to show some success; instead we have Vladiimir Putin and lots of dictators all around. I don’t know that history would have gone any different, but we were not players and a historic opportunity was probably squandered. We just don’t like to invest in anything in America; we would rather pay 50x more when disaster strikes as with this Covid. I’m not even sure after this pandemic whether most countries have really learned anything. Western Europe seems to be heading toward the abyss all over again and much of the US certainly has not really adapted since the first wave last spring.

For a good example of how to handle things during a pandemic, look at Vietnam. They have the 4^th lowest death rate in the world (roughly one in a million) and their economy is booming.

One thing about America is that sometimes we get kicked in the butt and get caught by surprise, such as 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. But we take our licks, learn some lessons and come back better prepared so that it doesn’t happen again. The biggest sin with Trump is that this happened but there is no evidence that he has learned anything over the past 6 months. Cuomo and New York took a licking but then got their act together and now New York runs one of the best shows in the US. That’s probably why Trump hates Cuomo so much. Yes, New York is down right now but it is coming back and sooner or later new businesses will take the places of the old ones and new residents will come in. New York always comes back and it will again. I just wouldn’t go out and invest here until I had a better feeling that if another pandemic or a cyberattack comes this way, that the authorities will have a real plan to deal with it.

Even if sanctions against Iran are lifted under Biden, the Iranians are in for a tough slog. The oil market has collapsed and there will be few buyers for its oil. American and European companies such as Boeing that wanted to sell stuff to them found the deals not to be profitable, and they will not want to invest in future relationships that might go flat the next time a Republican becomes president. I suppose the Iranians will want to make a deal with Biden though especially if Khamenei thinks that he will die in the next few years and wants to put Iran on a better track to survive him.

On recent normalization moves involving Israel: Here are a few statistics about Israel that I just heard at a conference that are pretty interesting and bear repeating because they are quite different than just 10 years ago: Its population is now equal to Sweden (but deaths from the virus are 1/3 of those in Sweden according to the WHO), its GDP equals Japan, 10% of its population is employed in hi-tech, and business failures so far in 2020 are less than there were in 2019. 70% of Americans still look favorably at Israel, and former chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat, no fan of Israel, was being treated for the virus at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem (he could have gone anywhere he wanted). So I guess this means that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, which may help to explain why various countries in the region are normalizing relations with that country.  These statistics come from the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, a prominent think tank in the US.

I’ll end with a thought about the intersection between politics and religion in the current state of things: If you really believe in God (and the majority of Westerners say that they do), then you might agree that the Lord has something to do with this pandemic. Is it to remind us humans that the world we live in is more fragile than we thought and that not everything is within our control at a time when we think we do control everything? Or you might believe that there is no god and or that there might be a god but it does not care about the pandemic. I think about this because the more religious people seem to be, the less they seem to see the hand of God in this pandemic. Religious people seem more interested in expediency than morality these days; how else can you explain the Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews being so supportive of Trump who does not share their values? In the Jewish community, 75% of non-Orthodox Jews can’t stand Trump, but among the Orthodox, 75% love him. Similar numbers show up in the evangelical and non-evangelical communities. Don’t you think that if God exists, he might be using this pandemic to remind religionists that the world doesn’t turn on politics but rather that morality counts for something? Is it all about getting justices appointed to the supreme court to advance a conservative agenda or slapping an embassy sign on a consulate building in Jerusalem? I just feel that if God is trying to teach us something through this pandemic, the religious people of the world are just not getting the message. Aren’t we supposed to learn from this that we are all in this world together, that our world needs to be taken care of if it is to stay healthy for us humans to live in, and that we need to care for each other more, from little things such as wearing masks in a pandemic to big things like providing a floor to accommodate those who get sick and who suffer consequences through no fault of their own. It looks like a global opportunity so far that has been lost. I don’t see anyone talking about it. It’s a shame. For all the expectation that evangelicals or religious Jews might be turned off to Trump, even in the face of a regular churchgoing Catholic like Biden, very few voted against him. I guess the GOP has become a piece of religion quite apart from its leadership and you can expect this trend to continue.

This is a good time to mention Yuval Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century where he muses that Russia and Trump will tweet a story to a million people and it’s called Fake News, but the Bible is read by billions of people and nobody calls its stories Fake News even though Harari is quite sure based on all available evidence that there is no such thing as a Bible authored by God. He surmises that humans demand fictional stories to guide them through their lives; a politician spouting forth facts in a debate is not going to affect public opinion as much as one telling fibs in an uplifting way. This is a very disturbing finding because it shows that demagogues such as Trump, Putin and Brazil’s Bolsonaro are more effective at relating to the human condition and that though we make fun of their propaganda exercises, we are failing to realize that they are simply more effective at understanding what people want to hear and how to influence the majority of people on the planet. It’s also disturbing for considering that anyone who wants the majority of people to vote and to trust them to be guided by something approaching rational logic is going to be disappointed. It’s a fine line between voting suppression, rule by elites and tyranny of the majority. Are we better off having just 6% of elite Americans having the right to vote as it was when the constitution was first ratified? Right now you have the American democratic majority ruing rule by Republican minorities through the filibuster in Congress, the electoral college, and each state having two senators. But then what replaces it? People didn’t want to give the Democrats free reign of a congress to get rid of those minority protections especially since they didn’t like what the Democrats would do with majority power.  But that does that mean that people in the center will join to work together or 4 more years of partisan gridlock in which nothing gets done? We’ve had 40 years of that and I’m sick of watching autocratic countries surpass the US because they can get big things done while we fail at anything beyond what the private sector can do. The US has a huge question mark over its head as it moves toward life beyond this pandemic. There is a huge opportunity for the US to reassess itself and set a course for the future that includes both growth and investment, but somehow I think that just as I saw on TV this past weekend thousands of kids run like crazy unprotected in a pandemic onto a football field after Notre Dame upset Clemson, the US will screw it up all over again, even with a solid guy like Biden as its leader. I’m hoping that we all learn lessons from this – that the US and China, in particular, will need to be transparent with each other to protect each other’s mutual interests, for example. That Planet Earth will need to be cared for if we want to hope that life will not be filled with natural disasters and that it is better to invest in preventive care than to be stuck rebuilding after things go wrong. It’s not a left versus right thing for Fox News commentators to tar and feather people with, it’s common sense, at least to me.

With a hopeful eye, I’ve been booking airline tickets to foreign destinations beginning the second half of June 2021, but for now it makes sense to stay within the US as you need to do these PCR tests within 72 hours of flying out of the country to most destinations. Hopefully the latest vaccine announcement by Pfizer means in another 4-6 months or so people will begin to be able to move around again. I also believe that economic rebounds will be faster than expected, once things begin to pick up. But meanwhile, it could be hell for this winter. Stay healthy!

I believe that I have what I would call Amazonesia – I order stuff on 2 day delivery and by the time it shows up, I don’t remember what I ordered that’s inside when I see the box arrive.

I have a proposal; we should celebrate the Sabbath on Monday, a day in which the kids are in school. On Saturdays, they are home and from the moment my son gets up till the sabbath is over at dusk he keeps badgering me and telling me how bored he is and how he wants to irritate us to get even. Oh, what a restful day it is. Some years ago I mused in this space that prayers in synagogue on Saturday morning at 2.5 to 3 hours was too long and that it needed to be edited down to an hour. I got criticized for it, but today that’s what is happening in Orthodox synagogues during this pandemic. One rabbi said he is not sure people will come back to 3-hour services when this is over. So if you think God had anything to do with this pandemic, I guess maybe the Lord agrees with me.

On the subject of religion, some customs of Orthodox Jews emanate from dubious beginnings (I’ll bet others do too),  like someone did something hundreds of years ago, and people kept on doing it but nobody remembers why and what they do has no relationship to anything that anyone can understand but they do it anyway. Some “Litvakish” Jews don’t like to sing anything in the synagogue and it has been this way for many generations; right now during this pandemic a lot of singing has been removed from the liturgy because people are afraid that people are at greater risk of catching Covid from singing (even if congregants are safely social distanced and the actual singing doesn’t go beyond 30-45 seconds which is the case in most songs you sing in a synagogue). I’ll bet that the original Litvaks probably were going through a pandemic hundreds of years ago and forgot that was the reason they stopped singing. I know that among the non-Orthodox, the virtual synagogue has become quite popular and it will be hard to get their buns back into benches when this is over. My accountant tells me that he enjoys those services because his wife watches while he is able to work in the background. Yeah, right; I don’t think that’s exactly what God has in mind if you think he is actually paying attention to these religious services.

As to Seventh Days, on our seventh day home we ate from Ben’s Deli; our kids missed an old-style Jewish deli in Miami. You would think they would have them down there but not anymore. All the old people who used to eat there have died and the young ones want to eat healthier. Incidentally, Ben’s Deli was where we had our last dinner out in the last hour before they closed indoor dining at restaurants in New York City last March.

I will predict to you that more people will wind up messed up from the effects of all this disinfectant than actually get sick from Covid. I’m pretty sensitive to this stuff and it really gets in my throat.

Last month we took our first vacation since this pandemic started and we visited Colorado Springs and Lake Placid, New York. (Wondering how I could endure? Being in Miami Beach for 5 months felt like a vacation anyway.) You could reach Europe in the time it takes to get to Lake Placid, NY but you will see beautiful views just the same, surprising many who cannot imagine there is more to New York than the City or that parts of it could be that pretty. There is a tradeoff for travel during this pandemic; you get bad vibes from paranoid people around you who are at their worst during this pandemic. On the other hand, many tourist sites are not jam-packed as they would normally be. We felt perfectly safe traveling except on crowded flights where all I can say is that social distancing rules are not being followed when it comes to getting on and off planes and expecting the middle seat to be empty. Going first class is a good investment in your mental health these days. Or just purchase an extra seat in coach and leave it empty if you see the flight is filling up.

New York City actually looks better now than it did when we left in mid-March. The homeless have been somewhat removed from trains, train stations and the streets. The city is eerily quiet; rush hour on a weekday inside the city feels more like Sunday. I walked down 7^th Avenue and 48^th Street at 3pm on a Thursday and there were no cars coming down 7^th Avenue. Less than 10% of people have gone back to their offices in Manhattan. That’s probably the tradeoff for the fact that the rate of infection here has been below 1% for over a month – everybody left! The 6 train that runs up and down Lexington Avenue was very quiet at 5:30pm on a Wednesday. The post office near Lincoln Center was also very quiet on a weekday at noon. Grand Central Terminal is very quiet and most of the commercial tenants and food vendors there have closed. The only place I’ve seen that was really busy was a kosher takeout store at dinner time. Except for the fact that lots of stores have closed, it is a pleasure to get around the city these days.

Some rules of the road in this pandemic are ridiculous. People walk the streets wearing masks and some go nuts if you don’t; I don’t think that a single person on the planet has been infected while walking down the street breathing fresh air. Unless you happen to get close to a sneezing person, you’re not going to get infected this way. Another really stupid thing: in a gym, they close off certain machines saying that the machine is closed to observe social distancing. The machines are not going to infect each other; what the sign really means is that people using the machines should stay 2 machines apart. You would figure that could be the rule and that would be common sense. The problem is that most people are ignorant and not too smart; so the rules of public health have to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. That is not my say-so but a friend who is a public health expert. For instance, taking people’s temperature as they arrive at work really doesn’t do anything. But it will deter people from coming to work if they think they might have a fever and will be checked for it and sent home. That’s why I think they should still take temperatures at airports; they have recently stopped doing it.

Here’s a story: I walk into an office suite made for 50 people. One guy is sitting all alone wearing a mask. I ask why; he answers that someone on the other end of the suite is fixing some carpet so he thought he better put on a mask to protect himself. Now you can understand why it is so hard to get people to go back to the office.

Germany is thinking of limiting the 14-day quarantine to 5 days hoping to increase compliance. In Israel, people are turning off cellphones to avoid contact tracers and 50% say they lie on the health declarations. (Remember, Israel is country where if you get a traffic ticket you put it on someone else’s car.)  In the US, people are not very confident about covid tests if you could die before the results come in and if the results are not consistent. It would probably help to make the rules more sensible to increase compliance. For instance, why make quarantines strictly based on what state you came from recently? While we were in Florida, it was a hotspot but there was hardly any covid going on in Miami Beach where we were staying and the local private hospital was quiet. People there live in multi-million-dollar mansions and hardly go out and very few people get sick driving themselves to a supermarket. The problem is in the poorer neighborhoods. Again, the lowest common denominator drives policy but it is overkill and it also drives down compliance. Sort of like the myth of taxing the rich; at a certain point, compliance with heavy taxation goes down and governments collect even less money. Progressives in the US would do well to look at tax history from France through the US earlier last century.

A disturbing thought about news we are getting about Covid: I saw a doctor who said he has had 95% success treating Covid patients with non-prescription items. He has noted that people with vitamin-C deficiencies have been susceptible to the disease. He told me that the New York Times prepared and killed 5 different articles about this subject, under pressure from pharmaceutical companies who only want people to think about prescription drugs. One article included mention of testimony before Congress, and that was killed by the editors at Yahoo too. Pretty scary that what the press is willing to write about the subject is so much under the thumb of the pharmaceutical industry.

Reading the Economist you can see that instead of every story being about the virus, things have resumed happening in the world. The Middle East has become a heckuva lot more interesting than it was a few years ago, which is a good thing because I find that region interesting and it was getting hard to find things to write about. It would be interesting if Lebanon makes peace with Israel, given their dire economic situation and people’s frustration with everything going on in that country. As far as the Palestinians go, I think that Bibi and his strategy may well be correct, and that Gulf countries are coming around to it: As normalization occurs with the rest of the Arab world, the Palestinians will follow. The conventional wisdom was that the Palestinians would lead, but their leadership is not dynamic and is ossified and split. The world wants to move on and is tired of waiting for Abbas to get off his high horse. When Egypt signed with Israel, the Arab League threw the country out for a decade but back then there was no compelling reason for anything to happen for a generation or two. Now, barely a beep from them. The region has changed; Iran and Turkey are viewed as threats, and regional actors are not sure the US will cover their butts as the US withdraws from the region. They want regional partners, and Israel, which is a substantial armed and economic power in the region with shared interests, cannot be ignored. There are serious joint interests between the UAE and Israel that are not obvious including free trade zones and an oil pipeline that was built with Iran but has not been used. My community rabbi is in Dubai this weekend as a guest speaker of the local community. Things are moving quite quickly. The UAE is a no-nonsense country that many in the region would like to emulate. I can tell you that their ambassador to the US is very impressive and “with-it” which is impressive for a guy who has already been in the job for 12 years and looks pretty young; I can understand why the US has good relations with the UAE, and less so with the Saudis. An hour with each of them will show you that both can BS but the UAE guy pulls it off with much more suavivity. Both the UAE and Saudi have young leaders trying to move their countries into the 21^st century; maybe the Saudi crown prince is constrained by the fact that he is not yet the king and that he has done things to make himself a really bad impression on the world stage. But clearly these countries see each other as kindred spirits and they want to get out from under the baggage they inherited and move forward and not just move forward but make their mark both as rulers and as countries on the planet. I’m happy to see this kind of activity.

The UAE makes peace with Israel and in the region it is pretty la-dee-dah. It used to be that Israel was the country that must not be named, and now it is pretty much accepted. I wonder how things will go once Israeli tourists show up in Dubai and try to steal towels from their hotel rooms. But next Passover you might see Jewish tourists showing up for Passover programs at UAE resorts. The kosher food inspectors are already hard at work.

Recent events in Belarus and Russia prove the long-term point that for dictators such as Putin and Lukashenko (it’s impressive that Microsoft Word is updated enough in the cloud to know how to spell this guy’s name), people get tired of all the BS and at a certain point want their freedoms and revolt against leaders who don’t at least deliver the economic goods in return for their power. China and Iran also beware. You can put out all the propaganda you want but the proof is in the pudding. This past year you see people all over the Middle East rising up against Iran’s desire to essentially try to colonize them. People in China are not thrilled with their government; poor people in China have much less of a social safety net than people elsewhere. This is a big problem because if China wants to stir up its economy from something other than manufacturing, it will need to get its people to spend money, and that means that more people have to have both money and confidence to spend it. Right now, if you get sick in China you are in big trouble with a terrible health system that average people can’t afford. This kind of thing does not create confidence upon which to build an economy of spenders rather than savers. Consider that when you think about public health spending’s overall effect on the economy.

Sorry to say that the EU requires all 27 nations to agree to any sanctions so since Cyprus is holding out for its own reasons which have to do with Turkey, the rest of the EU can’t apply any sanctions to Belarus. That just shows that even on the easy stuff, the EU is a paper tiger. It may have the GDP and the population but it has no way to act as a unitary power.

In the US, we are finally within 30 days of US Elections and it is Biden’s race to lose. I personally hope the result is convincing enough so that the country doesn’t go into spasm trying to determine who won. The markets don’t like uncertainty. I spent an hour on a background conference call with Anthony Blinken, the man likely to be Biden’s national security advisor. The hour gave me good assurance that the nation will be in a much safer pair of hands come January. Blinken appears to me a clone of Dennis Ross in appearance and inflection which means he is professional and competent. Hopefully, he will be more effective. What I wanted to see was a demonstration of what he learned from his years in the Obama administration; he admitted to several failures and said he learned from them. One interesting point was that he did not regret Obama’s failure to back up his own red-line in Syria; he explained in detail that there were no good options at that time.

I’m going to predict at this point that Biden wins in November and that the vote will be more lopsided than you expect. Trump knows it: If he thought he was going to win, would he be so dead-set trying to delegitimize the election in advance? It comes down to this gut level check: First of all, when the chips are down, Americans tend to do the right thing and it’s pretty clear that Trump is a real jerk who does not represent bedrock American values in many ways and needs to be shown the door from a position that we are supposed to look up to. Even his supporters mostly agree that he’s not a good person. But if you want a more analytical view: People really disliked Hillary and wouldn’t vote for her. Some people voted for Trump as a protest not actually thinking he’d win. A good number of them won’t do it again. They don’t hate Biden like they hated Clinton and they will show up to vote this time, more than enough to make up for those who didn’t vote last time. Clinton pissed off her donors and Biden is not doing the same. (For instance, Clinton campaigned at an extremely wealthy synagogue in the Hamptons on Long Island, NY and wouldn’t take questions. People came away from that very unimpressed.) Trump has supporters but he has not expanded his base and he has alienated some of this base, such as the military after calling them suckers and losers. I’m told that the chit chat is that generals are voting for Biden. Trump tried to rally support in 2018 with race-baiting and creating a phony immigration crisis and the Democrats picked up 40 seats. There are racists in America and they may be silent voters who don’t answer to pollsters, but there are not as many of them as you think (which is counter-intuitive because people think there are more of them than they think). In 28 states now, Whites are dying faster than they are being born and younger Whites are becoming more accepting of differences. As I’ve said, America is changing and this year you are going to see some Southern states that have haven’t voted Democratic in 40 years vote for Democrats. Suburbs are much more diverse than they used to be. Watch South Carolina for example. Texas is changing too. Colorado has changed. The GOP will have to change to be relevant; the face of America is changing from white to multi-racial. Also, tons of Americans are below the age of 20 (and half of those that are under age 20 are not white), and they do not carry the same baggage as older people do. They are becoming voting age and, even though they historically don’t vote, they will matter much once they do.

For some perspective, we were ziplining in Colorado and someone said they were from Iran. A millennial who was from the Great State of Texas asked: Where is Iran? So at least Iran has something going for them – a generation of Americans who don’t know anything positive or negative about them. Just as well, since the UN recently found that the Iranians were 10x in excess of their agreed amount of nuclear stuff under the treaty which ain’t much of a treaty anymore. But who remembers?

I think that if Biden’s slogan was “Build Back Better Than Ever” rather than just Build Back Better, it might be more energizing. Steve Jobs was in 1997 just 90 days from insolvency at Apple; he recalled that he would go to the precipice and come back better than ever each time. It is a thought for America at this time in its history.

I’ve been told that Qatar’s economy is really suffering under the boycott of the rest of the GCC. For instance, a major medical center is on hold because they were counting on visitors from neighboring countries.  A ton of money was put into rebuilding the capital city and it’s filled with empty buildings. The problem here is that I’m not sure that Qatar can do much without committing national suicide to get its neighbors to lay off it. They have a gas pipeline with Iran which is their major economic interest; the other countries are oil producers. They have Al-Jazeera which the other countries rulers can’t stand and they support the Moslem Brotherhood; maybe they can act on those two items but their neutrality also gives them the ability to mediate in places that others cannot. I think that this conflict is also personal among leaders who don’t get along, just as much as it is about their policies.

China – From what I have read, I think Biden’s view of China is best. He feels the best way to engage China is to urge the US to work harder, rather than to try to contain China. I think that Trump has encouraged a Crybaby Nation and it is easy to demonize China, raise tariffs and appeal to your base (and silently beg China to buy stuff from your voters’ states). But that doesn’t really do justice to the fact that even if China fights dirty, they are still working very hard to get where they are. They have lots of internal problems but the government is doing what Germany did a generation ago; they are directing industry and working hand in hand with them to push ahead. The US would do best to spend the bulk of its energy competing rather than complaining. The pushback on China, whether it comes from the US or nature, really is the fact that the way they are behaving, they are losing trust all over the world. They will need that trust to be #1 or to maintain the position they have achieved, and sooner or later they will realize it.  You can’t bully your way around the world to be #1; you need alliances. The US has alliances which Trump is squandering, but Biden will repair those. China has none really, and it is doing all it can NOT to make friends and influence people and it’s pretty clear that their strategy is not working. China can try to be self-sufficient to avoid the effect of sanctions, but in the end it is the equivalent of Trump building walls around the US and slapping tariffs and sanctions around to get what it wants – the rest of the world will avoid it. For instance, the Economist reports that British students have stopped taking Mandarin classes because graduates no longer think that a career in China or Hong Kong has value. Why go there if you might be picked up and jailed for no reason other than a diplomatic tit for tat or held to be in violation of some national security law for sending an odd tweet. Or you spend ten years there building things up and then one night in secret they pass a law to change everything in the country and mess up what you built. Right now, expats don’t see a future there when they could go elsewhere. The UAE is a dictatorship but expats think they can live a decent life there. On the other side, China is on its way to becoming the #1 economy in the world and nations want to engage with its economy. In the Middle East in the next decade, the Israel-Palestinian issue for each country will be replaced with how much do we try to have our cake and eat it too in terms of our relationship with the US and with China. This is important when considering the F-35 sale to the UAE; people are focused on whether the UAE will someday fall into hostile hands like Turkey and Iran did. Others are nervous that the Chinese will be in a good position to spy within the UAE and steal the plane’s secrets. The better overall question is what does the US think the UAE will do with these weapons if the US wants to withdraw its troops from the region? The answer is probably not much of anything. Instead of sending toys to allies for cash, the real question is what are these weapons for?

When you consider the Chinese unfair trading practices, you can consider the million people they put into slave labor that are not being paid. It’s making up for the fact that a good amount of what used to be cheap manufacturing has moved to Vietnam and other countries.

I would have two pieces of advice for the next president in dealing with China: 1. We have to push our weight around in order to get them to move. They see the US as unassertive where it counts. Woodward’s book alleges implicitly that national security officials believe that the Chinese did nothing to stop the virus from going to Europe and the Americas even as it was locking down the country because it decided that if it was going to suffer, it did not want to be at a competitive disadvantage to the rest of the world. China clearly stonewalled the rest of the world in giving out information they could have used to mitigate the damage and prepare for the virus. It’s an act of war. The US should state that if it happens again, we’ll put an air and sea embargo against China and shoot down anything coming out of that country. A few planes and ships will go down and they’ll realize the world is serious. It’s worth it to prevent what has happened now to the entire world. Also, America needs to do this in order to get Iran, North Korea and Russia back in line. What stopped Obama with Russian interference with 2016 elections and others, including even Senator Graham when he tried to talk Trump out of killing Iran’s Suleiman, was the thought that confronting aggression would lead to more aggression against the US. Nope – Iran took a turn for the better after the US hit Suleiman. America has to show it is willing to meet fire with fire and this will get the baddies to put themselves in check. 2. Rather than go with progressive or conservative firebrands who want revolution, the president needs to line up a coalition of moderates in both major parties and go for long term plans with Congress that will outlast one person’s presidency. China and Russia do not have to keep changing gears every 4 years and this makes them more stable partners and more dangerous because they can both think and act strategically. The US cannot match that when it has to keep flip-flopping with a president and legislators always focused on getting reelected (and increasingly a judicial system that looks like it consists of ideologues and political hacks that can block legislation or executive orders), and it makes the US weak negotiators abroad because nobody can make a deal with them that will stick. When is the last time any treaty was ratified by the Senate?

Interesting factoid I picked up reading Woodward’s latest book “RAGE”: Most Chinese generals have yet to actually fight in a war. The last time Chinese troops actually fought anyone was 1979 briefly with Vietnam. Think about that when you consider all the stuff about China’s military. They will need to get their hands dirty if they want to get better at putting oomph behind their military and gaining credibility. They have more toys to play with when you look at the figures on the game board, but lack game experience.

Another really interesting insight in Woodward’s book are pages 256-259 where he mentions that Jared Kushner has 4 texts that he feels gives you an insight into what makes Donald Trump tick. I can’t do it justice through a summary, but basically he likes a 2018 column by Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, headlined “Trump…He’s crazy…and it’s kind of working.” He talks about the Cheshire Cat in Alice and Wonderland – “If you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there.” He mentions a book called The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency by Chris Whipple. He says that Trump is an outlier meaning that no chief of staff can get Trump to be anything other than Trump, and a book by Scott Adams called Win Bigly: Persuasion in a world where facts don’t matter. He writes that Trump invents any reality, doesn’t apologize and overall, Trump is crazy, aimless, stubborn and manipulative. What I found missing in this book was a discussion about Mike Pence; he doesn’t seem to be anywhere except in the background telling people working for the prez to “stay the course” when they think that they can’t take any more of Trump. We need to know more about Pence, a guy who someday is likely to run for president. All we seem to know about him is that he is not as dumb as he comes across but that he is basically acting as an altar boy for Donald Trump.

In Israel, you have to look at Naftali Bennett, a guy who seems to be gaining in the polls. Benny Gantz has lost traction in the polls and Yair Lapid also is doing pretty well these days at his expense.

Another new good book I read this summer was The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Created Modern China, by Jonathan Kaufman. Interesting story about the histories of the Sasson and Kadouri families. The Kadouris doubled down on Hong Kong after 1997 with an investment of about a billion dollars in that territory and it will be interesting to see if their bets on the promises of China viz a viz Hong Kong are proven right or wrong in the 2020’s, at least in terms of their financial prosperity.

Two books I am in the middle of: The Life and Times of James Baker and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Harari. James Baker is someone we haven’t had for a time — a middle of the road Washington operator cutting deals and bringing the sides together. He held respect even among those who did not agree with him. Harari’s book has some interesting insights as to the way human society behaves and political scientists must take note of them. He says that people vote on their feelings rather than on the basis of facts, and that people look to others to form opinions and that showing people a bunch of facts is not going to really sway them. Leadership of human groups relies on creating fictional stories, less so than presenting facts. It’s a harsh lesson in a world of misinformation and elites thinking that the truth will set their societies free. Next edition I’ll update you on these items.

Just before we left on our summer vacation, we celebrated the Bar Mitzvah of my son Jeremy. When you have lemons, make lemonade, I like to say, so during this pandemic which found us in Florida instead of Australia for the month of August, I arranged to have the chapel of the Hebrew Academy school opened for us (it had been closed for the past 6 months) and the third generation of a Ciment was Bar Mitzvahed there (as I and my father were).  Here are some nice pictures.

Here are some travel notes from our summer holidays to Colorado Springs and Lake Placid, NY:

We flew to Colorado Springs on American Airlines. Gate agents hate customers and go on power trips with the carry-ons. We were on a half empty plane to Dallas (to change planes) and they were harassing first class passengers who are paying not to be harassed. Anyway, Dallas is a good transfer point with an Air Train between concourses. A few notes about flying under current pandemic conditions with AA: The flight into Colorado was fully booked with middle seats filled; there is no social distancing boarding and deplaning; people asked to wait till the people in front of them have deplaned simply ignored the pilot’s request. Food service is severely curtailed even in first class; bring your own. When flying to Colorado Springs, it pays to change planes and arrive there than to go nonstop to Denver; the airport has only 12 gates and it is easy in and out with the rental car (you really need one here to go anywhere off property), and the airport is close to the city and the Broadmoor resort (15 minutes drive). American does not officially give free internet aboard and uses GoGo for internet service and you might want to buy a monthly pass in advance online if you are going to fly round trip with connecting flights. Turns out I thought I had used their service to go online during the flight but when I returned GoGo did not see that I had used their service so I got a refund. Amex Platinum no longer gives a GoGo benefit. AA has all the panache of military transport. But they are hurting so there is no use complaining. (We flew JetBlue from Florida to New York and that was much better although they also have cut down on the snacks on board.)

The Broadmoor is the place to stay in Colorado Springs and is one of the state’s leading resorts. Rather than take 2 connecting rooms in the main building, we took a cottage which is a 5 minute walk away. The valets will bring the car to that area when you want to leave the property (there is no self-parking). You have your own entry and exit and air conditioning and it is more spacious with a living room. Deer and bears come around (and leave their poop just outside your door). There are two rows; the row along the golf course has the real mountain views. We stayed 5 nights, which for us is unusual because we tend to move from place to place. We could have spent 7 nights there; within 20 minutes of the resort there are lots of things to see and do, and if you drive an hour you get to even more. Because of the pandemic, spa and gym hours are curtailed, so if you want a massage after 4pm on the day of arrival, you need to go offsite. The gym is fine as long as you don’t have some staff person telling you to adjust your mask when the nearest person is more than 50 feet away. We ate at all the hotel’s outlets and we liked them all; we enjoyed some more than others. The lobby café has great gelato (try the dark chocolate sorbetto) and you can reserve and purchase print newspapers there.  Especially now, it is important to reserve mealtimes and activities such as bowling pre-arrival to avoid disappointment and the hotel’s concierge was really good at email correspondence helping us set up a schedule among many choices. During the week the hotel is quiet but weekends even at 60% it is at capacity for things such as breakfast. We found the outdoor pool not heated and pretty cool; the indoor pool was fine.

The hotel offers some really cool adventures such as rock climbing (both beginners and advanced courses), ziplining, rappelling and suspension bridge crossing. We did all of the above and the course is awesome (and a bit scary). The Firns course is better than the combined course for the ziplining tour. In our group was a professional soccer player who wanted to take videos of him toggling a ball with his feet in weird places. Another optional activity in the hotel is Elemental Art where you can make or decorate some crafts such as a pool bag, jewelry pendant and a scarf. As you go off property, there is Manitou Springs about 15 minutes drive away with a Trading Post at the Garden of the Gods (some nice crafts there) and some real good custard at a stand on the main street (906 Avenue Manitou), down the street a bit from there the Vault has nice gifts. At the hotel, Strata also has nice home crafts. We visited the Glen Eyre house; you could really skip it. They have a daily tour but if you can manage to just see the video and walk through the house yourself, you’ll do fine. The actual property has pretty rock views as it is next to the Garden of the Gods. We went to the Garden of the Gods 3 times and there are lots of trails and pretty looking things to see; best time to go is about 2 hours before sunset while the sun is still out and while the shadows are cool. Closer to sunset you get a rush of sunset worshippers and you lose the sunlight and shadows for pictures. Parking can be tough in the main lots. You can drive further than the main lot and see if you can get a spot and walk in through one of the side entrances. Some of the interesting formations beyond the signature ones are Balanced Rock and Siamese Twins. Near Manitou Springs is Cave of the Winds and the 45 minute Discovery Tour is enough; there are various attractions there, mostly for kids. There is one wacky attraction (the Terra Dactyl) that heaves you over the valley but there is often a 2 hour wait for a 20 second thrill, and you might not know of that till after you’ve bought the ticket. Go and look first (you don’t need to pay to look) to avoid disappointment. In the Old Colorado Springs district, we went to a really good Greek restaurant called Jake and Tellys. Definitely in the top 25% with interesting items.  Other nights we ate in the hotel’s outlets and were very happy.

An hour or so away from the city is the Royal Gorge area with several good attractions. We did all 3 in a day. Echo Rafting is a very good outfit with white water rafting along the Arkansas River. You can go on Class I through V rapids, depending on your skill and risk appetite. We went on a private raft with a guide doing the driving although the rest of us had to help paddle. The two hour trip was plenty and it was also fun and generated some good pictures and videos that we purchased. The kids swam in the 65 degree water. I had remembered freezing in the Colorado water as a teenager (and that was just being in the raft), but it didn’t seem that bad now, at least not for our kids. Twenty minutes away is the Royal Gorge Bridge which is fun to walk across. They also have a crazy catapult ride but thankfully we didn’t have to do the 2 hour line for our kids because the ride was closed for maintenance. Another 20 minutes away is the Royal Gorge Railroad. This is a lovely 2 hour tour on beautiful trains (we went in the Observation Dome car and they have nice food for sale). You can also go outside on a platform carried by the train to see things from outside. So you see the gorge from 3 perspectives; on a train down in the gorge itself, along the river rapids and above it from the bridge. Our rafting trip was near the gorge but not along it; those rapids are for the more experienced riders. It was a great day of sightseeing and adventure. It’s best to book your adventures in the morning and early afternoon; thunderstorms tend to pop up after 3 or 4pm.

Everyone enjoyed Colorado; people here are friendly and there is ton of open space. Sometimes you have to walk or drive far to get to something simply because they have more space than they know what to do with so rather than send you in a direct route you go in a big circle. I have a feeling we’ll be back. The rate of viral infection here is lower than the national average; people here take it seriously and take precautions, and there is lots of space here. There was a lot of air pollution from fires but depending on the wind it comes and goes. The tradeoff this year for us was fewer crowds but more restrictions and bad vibes from the pandemic such as having to put on your mask and having tour guides tell you that if you don’t wear your mask correctly such as all the way over your nose (so your glasses fog up and you can’t even see the cave) they’ll throw you off the tour and call the police. It’s a trade. (Now the governor of New York has put Colorado on his shit list so it’s a good thing we managed to get our trip in.)

The Ritz Carlton in Fort Lauderdale on the beach is a good overnight hotel if you have to fly in or out of Fort Lauderdale airport. Right now the rates are quite cheap and you can get some good takeout for the plane ride home. Request that they put VIP settings on your air conditioning to keep the room cool; otherwise it doesn’t matter where you set the thermostat, it goes on energy saver mode.

Next we went across New York State to Lake Placid, home of two winter Olympiads. Best way to get here from New York City (there are no flights to the regional airport except from Boston) is to take Amtrak train to Albany and then drive a bit over 2 hours. The Lake Placid Lodge has lovely cabins right on the lake and they are decorated in true local Adirondack style. On arrival we took a complimentary boat tour of the area around the lake. The resort is about 10 minutes from town which is not much of a town. Emma Ice Cream on Main Street has good soft serve maple flavor and we liked their banana cake flavor. Toursbylocals.com is not an obvious choice but Dmitry offers a really cheap local tour which we enjoyed; it was like a Hollywood backlot tour of the studios except that here we were visiting bobsled and luge areas seeing the tracks and equipment. Everyone in this 3,500 person town seems to know this teddy-bearlike Russian guy. We also visited John Brown house (a not so famous abolitionist) and took a small hike together for some views. He has two tours; take the shorter one. Later, I went with the kids to the Olympic Ski Jump area and you can take an elevator to the top of the 120 meter high ski jump. Since it was summer, the US Olympic skiing hopefuls were skiing down a slide into a 17 foot swimming pool and you could watch them train. There is a gondola ride you also get with your ticket which is not much of a ride, and there is a zip line down which is a baby thing after you’ve been across canyons in Colorado on 1,800 foot lines.  There is another outfit a bit further out of town that claims to do better at ziplines.

We sent the kids with 2 guides from High Peaks Cyclery (the hotel concierge referred us) on a 24- hour overnight adventure with canoeing, cookout, tents, hiking and mountain climbing. The weather interfered with some of it but the kids had a great time and came back exhausted. Karen and I had our first 24-hour break from our kids since the previous summer. Worth every penny, whatever it was. It also made sense; the resort we were staying at did not allow kids in till recently and there is not much for kids to do there. You can go kayaking and boating on the lake but there is a good current there and even on a boat with a small motor you are at the mercy of the current especially if there is wind. In the evenings, they have a fire pit and you can swap travel notes with other adults who feel comfortable in this fairly intimate environment; the resort has about 30 rooms and cabins. The nearby Whiteface Lodge is more full-service (ie: with a spa) but it is not on the lake, and that seems to be the point of it all here. If you don’t stay at the hotel, you’d want to eat a meal there and gaze out along the lake toward the wilderness as far as the eye can see; somebody over 100 years ago wanted privacy and donated the land to the state as long as it would remain wilderness rather than be bought out and have roads built along the lake.

The hotel’s food was not so great and there is no gym on property although they offer a shuttle to a gym just outside the property which I did not use the 3 days I was there because it wasn’t convenient for me to take the extra time to go off property. We ate out at Café Rustica and the Hungry Trout, both excellent. The trout place has great views so go before it gets dark. Café Rustica was 5 minutes drive; Trout was 20 minutes. The Adirondack craft shop on Saranac Road about ¼ mile from the turnoff to the hotel had nice crafts and even I bought something! 3 nights here was plenty; Lake Placid itself is not upmarket but it is a friendly place that attracts active life-stylers and is fun in the winter for things such as riding in a bobsled at 75 MPH, although its skiing is for advanced skiers. The 2-hour drive from Albany was not bad and there are rest hours along the I-87 interstate for the 100 mile stretch closest to Albany. For the ride back to Albany, order some takeout from Simply Gourmet which is easy to reach and has interesting sandwiches. Important note: Call before booking for the 2020-21 ski season; Whiteface Mountain might be closed for renovations before a big competition planned for the following year.

Jeremy won the award at day camp for the person most likely to win the lottery — and lose his ticket.

Over the past 5 months here in Miami, I at least learned how to do decent BBQ. The hardest part to me was getting the fire going in the first place. It would just keep going out before the charcoal burned. They have these bags of charcoal where you just put the whole bag in the BBQ and then just light the bag. It works pretty well. Kingsford produces the product.

So now that you’ve been cooped up inside your country for the past half year or so, where is that special spot you hope to return to somewhere on the planet that makes you feel especially good? That crossroad that brings you memories of all the times you’ve been there before, where you can take stock of how your life has progressed through the years, and that for some reason feels like your home away from home where you check in every once in a while.  For me, that spot is the small park in front of the Globes department store in Zurich just off the Bahnhofstrasse. What’s your special place?

A small victory – Jeremy was intrigued by a cover headline about an Economist editorial supporting the inclusion of Fortnight as an Olympic sport. I suggested he read it. He did and he remembered all the details. So I now have both of my kids seeking out things in the Economist. I was brought up with print newspapers and magazines around me and I think it makes a huge difference when kids see the stuff around them. It’s like vegetables – keep putting them on the table and they start eating it. This month alone Jeremy decided he liked Karen’s salmon burgers and meatballs more than he realized before. We think he’s starting to get a bit taller too. At least that is what others are telling us.

Does it ever happen to you that you want to share a song you like with your kids and they say it’s ancient, although it’s from the 1970’s. But then they come to you with a new song that they recognize from a recent movie or their summer camp and it turns out to be a song from the 1970’s, perhaps even the original recording. Irving Berlin once said that in reality there are only 5 songs. It’s like clothes; eventually everything comes back into fashion. But old movies are different; kids can’t stand watching movies that I thought looked great in the 70’s and 80’s.

To please my father who said I needed to watch a Real News program, I agreed to watch an hour of Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel. (OK, OK. I hear you.) I have to wonder if he really believes what he is saying on the TV or if it is all just a big act on his part. One day we’ll be told that it was all just a great gig on Fox. They are actually winning in prime time ratings with this stuff. You can call Hannity a lot of things but it is clearly an opinion program; It’s not a news program at least as I know it. The show I watched was called “Violence in America’s Democratic Run Cities” and for an hour we were told that America is going to the dogs, and the end is near if Pelosi, Schumer and the “Forgotten One” win in November. You know who, the presidential candidate with dementia. What I found insane was Hannity was trying to paint the Democrats as a white supremacist party including what he called KKK Robert Byrd of West Virginia versus the GOP under Trump which he says has done more for Black people than anyone else.

I’m old enough to remember the now-deceased Robert Byrd who more than 50 years ago was a member of the KKK, but he changed his stripes and became a well-respected leader in Congress. Lots of people in that era changed over the years and went on to illustrious political careers; the Republicans might want to be reminded of Strum Thurmond of South Carolina. It’s just ridiculous to build a case around Robert Byrd as if he were out there right now burning crosses in Alabama. You can’t call that news. It’s opinion and it’s really dishonest opinion at that. That’s what I mean when I say that Fox is really not doing the nation any service; it’s just putting up people who want to blather on and on and sow division and rake in advertising dollars by appealing to elderly and uneducated white men who have enough time on their hands to vote and who are motivated more by being against something than being in favor of anything. What bothers me is that Fox is appealing to those with the least amount of stake in the country’s future. Senior citizens don’t really care about the future of climate change. and uneducated unemployed people are not going to be paying much taxes or creating much growth for the country. But if they all run out and vote, it creates a mess for the rest of us. . Over half the kids under age 16 in the US are not white according to a study from the Brookings Institution cited in the New York Times; as I’ve said, change is coming to the US and old white men are fighting like hell to prevent it but you can’t fight Mother Nature.

So now it’s about the Post Office. If I were Biden, I would announce that if Trump wants to neuter the post office and play hokey with the national census, I will make an executive order prolonging the census into 2021 so that it can be done fairly. Trump and the Republicans would either have to stand down from trying to rig the election in their favor or get with the program.

One thing I am concerned about with Trump is the possibility of a scorched earth policy when he leaves office to ensure that Biden has a horrible time reversing what he did. When Trump entered office, he had an irrational desire to undo anything with Obama’s fingerprints on it and is now attempting to sabotage efforts to do that to him after he leaves office. For instance, the US ambassador to Israel is selling the ambassador’s residential property near Tel Aviv to make it harder to move the embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem. That might be a microcosm of what is to come. That home is expected to sell for $87 million and it is a teardown property at this point; the value is the view from the sea of Herzliya. Russian oligarchs: take a number and get in line. Trump is also taking big steps against China to raise the ante in a cold war he wants to put into a freezer.

So you want to know my take on Kamala Harris as VP? She was not my first choice; Tammy Duckworth was but I understand she wasn’t born in the US and a few appeals to Republican judges might have kept her off the ballot in several states while they duked this out in court. I did not like Harris in the debates but I saw her earlier this summer on the Colbert late night show and found her surprisingly watchable. I have no doubt that she is qualified and will be an asset to Biden. She now seems fine to me and sufficiently vague so as to at least not offend various constituencies within the Democratic tent. Moderates could warm to her as long as they don’t mind that she is black. I really emotionally like the fact that in America you can have immigrant Jamaican and Indian parents and run on a presidential ticket. To me that is the uniqueness of what our country offers the world. It’s always supposed to be the idea that anyone could grow up to be president. Donald Trump did after all. So did Barack Obama. At least Joe Biden offers a sense of return to a quieter more stable normal in the executive branch of government which sorely needs more professionals and apolitical career public servants such as in the State Department

I heard an interesting briefing on the future of warfare and I thought the comments of Michael Eizenstadt of the Washington Institute were of more than casual interest. He said that the US only wants to solve problems around the world; if the problem is not solvable, the US wants to stay away. An example of this was Syria under Obama; he thought he could not win there so he stayed out. The Russians, with very little investment, advanced their position very well in that arena. So too he says the US should change its aims in the world to trying to advance its interests in incremental ways instead of trying to solve big problems. We are in a world where others are filling the voids that are being created because we are allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good.

Another consideration he raises concerns what is known as the Gray Zone of Warfare. Fighting in the gray zone basically means you are fighting covertly and don’t publicly state when you do something. Israel for example fights mainly in the gray zone in Syria.  Eizenstadt recommends that the US do more in the gray zone with regard to Iran. Killing Suleimani and taking credit for it created a lot of problems for the US and it would retain more flexibility if it kept its mouth shut. The Iranians manage to constantly provoke without triggering serious repercussions because they stay in the gray zone. He says the Americans either want a state of war or peace and are not comfortable with the in-between with its military. He says that the Americans need to be more flexible and in return they could act more flexibly on the global chess board. The Russians have certainly done this with their attempts to interfere with American elections. We still don’t really know the full extent of what the Russians did in 2016; it may be another 20 years before we find out what they did. However, indications are that they did more than is publicly known and are capable of doing more than they actually did, something that scared Obama who could see what they were doing in 2016 but was afraid to retaliate for fear of escalation, according to an interesting new book I read called Rigged: America, Russia, and 100 years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer.  He states that Russia is doing basically what they have done for the past half century and what America used to do in terms of interfering in other countries’ elections, but that the Russians have modified their methods for the internet with stunning success while the Americans have mostly stopped trying to influence elections. He generally concludes that a lot of what winds up on Fox News and other sources with extensive influence originates with Russian disinformation programs aimed at sowing division and confusion in the West.

Speaking of fighting in the gray zone, there was an interesting op-ed on Ynet about the fact that since 2015, the Israelis and Hezbullah have played this game of attacking each other but miraculously over 5 years, nobody has ever gotten killed on either side. The author surmises and cites evidence that the two sides are doing a bit of a kabuki dance meant to satisfy their respective populations that a threat exists and that they are fighting each other, but in truth, the two sides are coordinating these rounds of engagement and the goal is for nobody to get hurt. As an example, he cites an incident where a helicopter with supposedly injured Israeli soldiers lands at Haifa Hospital and they all run out perfectly fine.  To some extent, you have the same going on between Iran and the American military just now. The Iranians intentionally miss their target or give several hours warning before firing on a target, and the Americans hit empty buildings in the middle of the night in response.

Here is a rundown of the situation in the Middle East with regard to Israel. As they see it, they and their neighbors are all reeling from economic crisis from the pandemic. Iran has cut aid to Hezbullah and Lebanon is not going to get any US aid or aid from international institutions it controls as long as Hezbullah is pulling strings behind its nominal government. That of course is a serious problem given the latest destruction to hit Beirut.  Russia is hurting financially and Syria is bankrupt so both would like to see reduced expenditures in Syria. Having Iran operate within Syria increases the temperature in the area with Israel striking hard (and with Russia not interfering), so Russia wouldn’t mind seeing the Iranians leave the theater. Given the above and other points, Hezbullah would not like a war with Israel at this time. Other points include heavy losses in Syria and the fact that their newer soldiers are more like mercenaries and less motivated elite fighters they used to have in their militia. I would expect pressure to grow on Hezbullah to get out of Lebanon after the port disaster, given that Hezbullah controlled the port. It’s interesting that people in both Lebanon and Israel are demonstrating against corrupt governments, but that it is really hard to change the status quo in either country.

For all the talk of annexation, few in Israel or in the Likud actually want it at this time given the focus on Covid. Netanyahu wasted a lot of bandwidth on annexation for the months of May and June only to see a resurgence of the pandemic. The Palestinians have made no plans for the day after annexation and their leaders have not been able to get people to go into the streets to demonstrate against it. People are just preoccupied right now. Israel’s current coalition government is bloated with about 35 ministries and complete dysfunction with quarrels about every conceivable thing; the government will not last a year. Benny Gantz has reduced himself to a zero as a result of accepting coalition conditions offered by Netanyahu and by his own indecisiveness in his current role. Ehud Yaari, a top-level strategic commentator in the country, says to look at Gadi Eizenkot, former chief of staff of the country’s military, as a possible contender a year from now. Right now, there is a lot of economic pain in the country and people are tired of Netanyahu but so far there is no good alternative.

As to the Palestinians, I am being told that the Palestinian leadership is in complete disarray and distrustful of each other and that there is no game plan what happens the day after Abbas is gone. Like mafiosos, they make deals in the morning and break them in the evenings, I am told. Either they will appoint the weakest possible person who will leave the rest of them open to game-playing or there will be a triumvirate of people angling to each take the whole pot of power for himself. Whoever inherits Abbas’s position will not be in an enviable job. Meanwhile, polling of Palestinians shows that support for a two-state solution is at an all-time historic low. People figure it will never happen so they figure we might as well hold on to our dream of a one-state solution from Mediterranean Sea to Jordan River. Israelis are also not interested anymore in a two-state solution figuring they can have it all for themselves and keep the Palestinians in a box forever. These views are primarily among the younger people who have only experienced what they have witnessed which is a kabuki dance by both sides and noticing their leaders on both sides are corrupt and rich, feeding them with a lot of cynicism.  Other points I’ve been told about Palestinian public opinion from a top regional pollster: East Jerusalemites have become more radical over the past 5 years; people under 30 are more militant; within the West Bank and Gaza, each province wants the other to fight Israel but they themselves don’t want to fight because they fear the consequences; the man in the street is more moderate than the elites and those in the government; people in the street don’t trust their leadership to lead an uprising; people are generally more militant toward the long term and practical in the short term, meaning they view a Palestinian state in a 2-state situation as an interim step toward a Palestinian from Sea to Sea and that this interim step would not end the conflict, but meanwhile they would like economic cooperation with Israel and jobs in Israel. Surprisingly, a strong majority of Palestinians – two-thirds — think their government should not pay salaries to families of prisoners held by Israel.  Go figure.

Peter Beinart’s recent NY Times op-ed proposing a one-state solution should be taken for what it is; one man’s opinion. I’m sure his recent op-ed piece got a lot of press but it represents a far-out view that has hardly any support among the broader Jewish community anywhere. The wookies at the NY Times agree with him and gave him a soapbox to publicize a Jew stating that he no longer believes in a Jewish state. I know Mr. Beinart and I don’t think he is malicious or idiotic; I just don’t agree with him on this one and he is not the only brilliant person out there with hare-brained ideas.

So into this space comes a deal between the US, Israel and the UAE to trade annexation for diplomatic relations. Everybody wins in this regard, even the Palestinians who otherwise were facing annexation and doing virtually nothing to stop it. When you consider that Israel’s spymaster chief was flying this month on a private plane to Qatar to ask them not to stop funding Hamas in Gaza, you know that nothing is as it seems. In this case, what the UAE is really getting out of this deal is arms they want to buy from the US that they could not get under a law that says that Israel’s qualitative edge must be maintained as to those countries still in a state of war with it. 80% of public opinion in the UAE is against normalization of ties with Israel; the rulers of the UAE don’t care all that much about that but I wouldn’t expect to see high profile things involving Israel inside the UAE anytime soon after the initial euphoria wears off.

A random thought: Progressive Democrats have been doing pretty well running against well established pro-Israel incumbents in their party. Pro-Israel PAC’s threw a lot of money at these races late in the campaigns when it became clear the progressives might win. It didn’t help. The progressives won by large amounts. This year it was 4-0 in races of this category. What you can learn from this is (1) pro-Israel money in politics ain’t what it used to be; and (2) if you want to influence a race these days, throwing a lot of money toward the end of the race is not very helpful. Early money counts for more.

Poor Lebanon; I don’t want anyone to say that I know anything, but if 20 years from now it turned out that Israel blew up the munitions there I wouldn’t be surprised. This recent event is likely to put a great deal of pressure on Hezbullah to get off centerstage in Lebanon. They were running that port. If the Israelis were known to have done this, it would be an act of war. But if it turns out to lead to a better Lebanon it was an ingenious idea wherever it came from. I do believe that evidence shows this was not an accident. Seismologist data shows that there were 6 explosions 11 seconds apart before the huge blast occurred. We’ll never know for sure what happened, but any way you slice it, this may be the kick in the ass Lebanon needs to get going in a different direction. What it’s been doing up till now hasn’t worked.

A lot is being written about how Biden might have an opening to get a lot done. If the Democrats take over a majority of the Senate, they may move to get rid of the filibuster, which seems to be becoming inevitable, in order to make it possible to pass legislation with a simple minority rather than with a 61 vote margin. Both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate for the past generation have become frustrated seeing majorities not being able to get their way because the Senate allows minorities to stop almost anything the majority proposes. The crescendo of tribalism has made it so hard to cooperate across the aisle that instead of trying to work together to solve problems each side is trying to steamroll the other. The nation’s policy changes every time control of the Senate flips. This is not the way to get important things done because America and the world looking to America need consistency and long-term planning.

I’ve never felt this is the best way to get long term things done but maybe this will force the sides to try and cooperate more knowing that a small minority cannot block everything. Or it will make things worse with small majorities winning tactical battles and losing the war as legislative initiatives constantly get reversed. It will be up to the Democrats to push for moderate legislation with a good chance of bipartisan support rather than try to drive up the left lane brining along their progressive base and alienating everyone else. It was the middle of the roadsters that gave the Democrats a good showing in 2018 and aside from some loud voices on the left, it will be the same they need in 2020. I recently read a biography about Pelosi called “Pelosi” and she seems rather good at knowing how to count votes and to go for incremental change items even if her own opinions align more so with the far left. I am optimistic that this virus will force real change into America and give added impetus for the two mainstream parties to work together especially once the Republicans purge their ranks of the Trumpists and reassert its middle. For instance, this year the Democrats have detailed plans as to legislation they want to pass next year on various issues. Last time they took over the reins of the legislative and executive branches, they only had plans for the health insurance act. They have a lot of policy people preparing for action and one thing I think they will get is a public option for health insurance. It won’t be universal insurance or Medicare for All because the private option will still exist, but at least people will have a public option if they want it. It makes sense to me and it will probably happen.

There is a debate within the world of journalism as to the concept of objectivity. It’s been going on for a long time but now it is especially urgent. There is no such thing as objectivity, it is said. So it is OK to have a point of view, especially if it is the “right one.”  Presenting both sides of a story is a waste if the other side is invalid. For instance, do you have to present a Nazi’s view that the Holocaust is a myth when doing a story about the Holocaust? This is an extreme example just to make it obvious, but there is a lot of in-between. But if you try hard enough you can pin “racist” or some other conversation stopper on almost any point of view. I have a big problem with this because we live in a society where having a point of view increasingly means negating the other’s point of view. Even some liberals are finding that this new wave of “cancelling” speech is suffocating. I agree that there is no such thing as true objectivity – we all bring biases to the table, and many of them are those we don’t realize we have. Others based on their experiences looking in from the outside can notice them and bring them to our attention. For instance, many things that can be perceived as bias or racially tinged are part of everyday speech that hardly anyone realizes stems from bigotry such as the term “peanut gallery” as in “Are there any questions from the peanut gallery?” The problem here is that you can turn almost anything into something that is censorable if you try hard enough as I said before. People have to find a golden mean and distinguish between trying to counter people intending to be hateful as opposed to living with speech that is inconvenient to their taste. For instance, when is a demonstration a riot? Some refuse to call anything a riot. Others feel there is a fine line between the two. Put another way, you can always find some cleric to find a source that he will interpret to prohibit something that otherwise might be left to be permissible. The ideologue might call you a racist for disagreeing with his right to cancel something as racist, but he would be dead set against a rabbi using the same type of logic to prohibit a certain activity.

I think that the journalist’s creed is to be fair in reporting what happens and to try to tell the truth as best he or she perceives You can leave it to the reader to decide if he or she trusts the writer and editor. I know, for example, that the New York Times has a huge fact-checking operation to be sure that things they write are based on credible sources so I tend to trust the facts of their reporting but I might argue with the context or conclusion they reach, certainly on the editorial page where they don’t have to use all the facts to prove a point (and often ignore facts they don’t like). But to be a discerning reader is hard work and not everyone has the means to sift through this stuff and figure things out.

A big problem today in the world is that most people do not trust what they read or see in the news and therefore they believe nothing. It’s an easy way out of this conundrum. The problem with that is that if everything is “truthiness” but there is no truth, then nobody knows what to believe. A democratic society cannot participate if they can’t form an opinion from the same set of facts. Nobody agrees on what the facts are, so nobody can agree on what to do because nobody can agree on what the situation is all about. This is a recipe for paralysis, a barrier to progress and development – and there are many who are happy to see it that way and who therefore invest in sowing division and distrust to keep countries such as America distracted. America did better when its two parties at least agreed about the facts and differed as to how to solve problems. Now it can’t even agree as to the facts. And you see that nothing gets done. With this pandemic, you see debate as to how the disease spreads so even when it becomes quite clear that wearing a mask helps stop infection it becomes a political football to the point that wearing a mask means you are a liberal Democrat. Meanwhile, America leads the world in infection. This is great if you want to keep America down. We would never have won two world wars this way.

Here is a thought about the current state of the debate about mask wearing: Assume that The US was fighting a war in Korea and they told you that 150,000 soldiers would die within half a year, but that if all of us on the home front wore masks, only 50,000 soldiers would die. Don’t you think just about everyone would wear a mask to help our troops? So basically, people would wear a mask to save the life of someone they don’t know on the other side of the world fighting some senseless war involving our country (which is usually the case), but more than 50% of us wouldn’t wear a mask to save themselves or their neighbor and would instead come up with some reason to avoid it. Go figure. I think this is where a country’s leadership counts – Trump is not the guy to inspire citizens to be empathetic.

Back to the issue of trust in print media: I subscribe to the NY Times print edition home delivery 7 days a week and although I read it daily, I find that some of the paper has been taken over by woke loonies (should we call them Wookies?)  and that I am being fed a diet rich in stories about transgenders, race as it regards to White Privilege, and rantings that Trump is the greatest threat to the World. It is pretty much the daily dose of fiber to the daily diet of news. I find it more than bordering on preachy and wish they’d tone it down a bit. I read it for the news and analysis but can’t avoid this other stuff. Same thing listening to NPR (National Public Radio); it’s just the same stuff day after day and it’s not fair; Blacks are 14% of the population, the LGBTQ community and transgenders are less than that, though the subjects of race and gender is taking up a majority of the airtime on a taxpayer funded network. No wonder Republicans want to cut their budget to zero. There’s a time and place for everything; just that it be in proportion.

Summer Reading: During this pandemic I’ve been reading more books than usual. Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers is interesting because it tells you that people who see people to look into their eyes and get a sense of the person usually misjudge the person more than a computer algorithm or a person who did not meet the person will. This includes such characters as bail judges, police officers, heads of state and spies. Another book, The Room Where it Happened by John Bolton, is a distressing chronicle of a shallow and loony president and fair warning not to reelect him. The book basically says that Trump is a capricious person who sees the world through the lens of what’s good for him (as opposed to his country) whose stand depends on which side of bed he got out of that morning, all of which has led to the weakening of US resolve around the world under Trump’s presidency because foreign leaders take advantage of the fact that Trump cares more about the photo-op, having summits and reaching any kind of agreement than the substance of the policy.  Another interesting book is The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson about Winston Churchill during the years of the Blitz; it tries to give you insights as to Churchill’s thinking during the time of the Blitz. It’s a good read. Another book is Pelosi, a biography of her from birth through a few years ago. It’s an interesting insight as to the person that she is and how she got where she is.  Love her or hate her, you’ve got to respect her. Another interesting book is 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century by Yuval Harari. I’m still reading it but an interesting thing he observes is that elections register voters feelings rather than their thinking. This is hugely important because if people voted their thoughts the results might well be different. I’ve always felt that people voted for people they like or at least vote against people they don’t like. In the last election people voted against Hillary who few people liked. A good number of people did not like Trump on an intellectual level but they felt something about him that made them want to vote for him, such as his giving voice to their frustrations.  A good number of people did not vote because they were exposed to enough negativity to be turned off to the election itself. The reason you should care is that people’s feelings are being manipulated all the time and to the extent that the Russians, political operatives, leaders of Facebook or anyone else figures out how to successfully the feelings of enough Americans to vote a certain way or not to vote, they can swing an election.  Another interesting idea he has is that terrorism involves theater and that responses to terrorism should involve theater more so than military. If a terrorist uses terrorism out of weakness due to the lack of a military, why does it make sense to send in the military after the terrorist? So I was thinking, instead of dropping bombs in Gaza after a suicide bomber blows himself up in Tel Aviv, wouldn’t it make more sense for the Israelis to drop tons of shit all over Gaza? Everyone knows that Israel doesn’t want to reoccupy the place. It would be a theatrical response that would also be so gross that it would make locals think twice about supporting acts of terrorism.

It’s interesting how Republicans who are so insane about protecting our borders and sovereignty don’t seem to care that Russians, Iranians and Chinese state actors are trying to mess with our elections. Elections is a matter of sovereignty because it is how we choose our leaders. If they can manipulate ballots and minds, they are in effect helping to choose our leaders. Again I would refer you to the book I mentioned earlier in this posting called Rigged by David Shiper which was quite informative about Russian efforts in 2016 and what might happen in 2020. The book says that Obama’s people feel they made a mistake in 2016 by not more actively calling out Russia leaving them the opening to escalate efforts in 2020. Another point he makes is that if you want to control someone that you are supporting covertly, the key is to let that person know in advance you are trying to help him win. If you don’t and he finds later that you helped him, he doesn’t know if you caused him to win. But if he knows in advance that you want him to win and then he wins, he feels that he owes you. Russia is clearly doing this now in 2020 with regard to Trump and it is no secret that they own him and he knows it. I just recall that video from a few years ago at a summit in Helsinki where Trump comes out of the room where he met 1:1 with Putin with nobody else present and looked and spoke like a drugged POW giving a forced confession. No doubt the Democrats will remind us of it in the fall but it speaks volumes.

Here’s a preview of coming attractions: In 2021, you can expect Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt to have a harder time in the US House of Representatives as more progressive people coming into congress question US support for these countries. When MBS from Saudi Arabia appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee of the House looking into arms sales and questioning his use of arms in Yemen, he made no friends retorting to a question that the Kingdom is his inheritance to do with as he pleases, according to a former senior staff member. At this point, there is a bipartisan feeling that Saudi Arabia is not a good ally for the US. However, in the Senate the powers that be will ensure at least that Israel continues to get full support. Those people have a long track record of good relations with that country and see it as an important ally; the idea of conditioning military aid to certain policies such as annexation of territories is not seen as a good way to go about taking care of business and it is also unworkable in a practical sense. Saudi Arabia has a problem though; it is getting harder to get senators to come out on the floor of the Senate and vouch for that country when a vote comes up. Up till now, new legislators were told that the US has to support its allies because that’s they way it’s always been and it is a bedrock of US policy and the national interest. That argument is not working anymore as new legislators increasingly question the assumptions underlying US policy.

The Washington Institute of Near East Affairs is a think tank in DC and they have some very interesting experts on China and Russia as to the Middle East. Although they are not global experts, you can get a good sense of the overall global situation as to China and Russia through the microcosm of the Middle East. Looking at their discussions of these areas gives good guidance that you can extrapolate globally. The Institute has a plethora of scholars with significant real-life experience and is producing some very intricate work in the fields of military analysis and intelligence. For instance, they recently posted a catalogue of virtually everything they could find that Hezbullah has done over the past quarter century. No doubt the guys running Hezbullah would probably enjoy a good coffee with their Institute counterparts to critique their work.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Professional courtesy.

If you ask me how to deal with Putin, I would say that overall Russia is playing a bad hand for all its worth but that Russia deals from a weak position. It has few friends or allies and nobody looks up to Russia as anything it wants to be. Putin tries to look tough but his bullying stems from an inferiority complex, as to Russia’s declining empire. I would counter this by letting Russia look as big as it wants on the world stage and letting it share the spotlight so that it can say that it is a player in the world. I would look for spots that are critical to Russia such as Belarus and Ukraine and agree to spheres of interest. There is no way that trying to counter them in these countries will lead to a result other than that when you stick someone else up against the wall, just like we don’t like Russia meddling in Cuba or Venezuela. At the same time, I would fight in the gray zone in areas where we really do have an interest and fight like hell in our sphere of interest such as Venezuela if they won’t back off. My motto would be to seek stability for both sides and not to pull surprises on each other. Russia does have legitimate gripes as to things that have happened over the past 25 years since the end of the cold war and we would be wise to recognize them and see if we can give each other some slack if they will act on a mutual basis. Russia thrives on being in opposition to something; Putin wants to be able to have gripes so that he can oppose the US. However, both the US and Russia really need to get together about China, which threatens them both. So I think there is room for each side to back off a bit and create greater stability and to partner up against other mutual threats. Russia is not as complex as it seems; Putin’s theory of foreign relations is to create sources of leverage for Russia and countries he creates dalliances with such as Iran and Turkey know he may throw them under the bus at any time. Sanctions are not really effective against Russia and the US has been a one-trick pony using sanctions as a stick to try and get its way. The point of my argument as to strategy is to remove the sources of leverage to undercut Putin’s methodology and to cudgel him to deal with the US and the world in a more useful way.

With regard to China, I would say that though it is clear that China is actively opposing the US throughout the world and is in a race to become the #1 economy in the world, I would try and give the country fewer reasons to believe that we are disrespecting them and trying to hold them down. To me it is not really all that important who is the #1 and #2 economies. The problem with China is that as it becomes more powerful it behaves much more arrogantly than the US has, throwing its weight around and forcing other countries to bend to its will tying its aid to expressions of support and the suppression of criticism and attempts to create debt traps toward taking over strategic assets and financing corruption to ensure pliable governments. But in the end, China has no friends or allies. Only countries that it pays off and forces its way with. Nobody wants to be like China. So the US should work on restoring its alliances and soft power interests and showing the world that the US is the better friend and only true ally. Over time that way will win. Trump has certainly squandered a half century of work as he questions our network of alliances and does the work of Russia, but the US can regain its position and Biden will certainly try to do that. As to China, I would show it the greatest of respect just like I would Russia and not give it excuses to say the US is trying to keep China down. At the same time, I would play in the Gray Zone and make sure that military moves in the Asia theater by China to change the status quo are countered so that it is clear that it is China and not the US that is a source of instability in the region. I think there is room for cooperation with China in areas such as climate change. (The Russians seem to benefit from climate change and probably don’t want to work with the world to prevent it.) If China wants to steal IP and make it difficult for foreign businesses to operate there, we should just encourage businesses to go elsewhere. If they want to kidnap tourists and businesspeople to use as pawns, we could be more forceful and apply Gray Zone pressure to them as well. But kidnapping people is not going to get companies to want to do business with them or tourists to feel safe so there is only so far China can go with this. The truth is that China could have put up with Hong Kong as it is for another 20 years but they did not and they broke their promises; they have been acting very arrogantly around the world and are making no friends anywhere. They might have even set out this virus for their own reasons. I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Their intentions are not good and nobody trusts them. This business of running concentration camps within their country with minorities within is disgusting. But be it as it may, they are an important country and it is best to try to work with them as much as possible while protecting our own interests. I don’t think that Trump’s tariffs program was the way to go; it was a stupid strategy that has always failed in history and his strategy was more about featherbedding his re-election in midwestern states than it was to help the US. We need a more sophisticated strategy and I think that part of it is making it very clear as far as Taiwan goes that the US will stand solidly by it given that China reneged with Hong Kong.  I think the US can both stand its ground and work well with China. The Chinese are intelligent people capable of thinking long term strategically, and they do not seem to be like Russia, just causing instability for its own sake. They want stability and they want to do business. I think it is a matter of trying to create a more friendly type of rivalry where it is clear that the rules of the road are that make sense to both sides, and that each side sticks to the rules and sees a benefit in doing so. There are obviously areas where the sides cannot agree and the goal is to figure out how to either give and take or to be able to move forward while agreeing to disagree in places. The US and China need each other; it will be a stupid waste of resources on either side to try to build a Chinese wall between them.

I know that the above as to China and Russia are somewhat oversimplified and I could say a lot more here but won’t; I’m not writing treatises here but rather trying to distill each of these cases into something readable for a Global Thoughts posting.

Consider this though: Belarus shows you that even though Russia wants to control its next door neighbor, it has to tread carefully because the people hate their leader and will hate Russia if they intervene. Iran also is truly hated throughout the region, including its client state Lebanon. China is not well liked either hardly anywhere. So countries can invest billions into influencing public opinion, manipulating information, corrupting government and trying to get its way, but be it ever so humble, people want democracy and they would like to be friendly with the United States. Donald Trump has done a lot to ruin the USA brand abroad but Biden values alliances (he says that Trump thinks NATO is a US-run protection racket) and the US brand stands to gain with him. The Russians, Chinese and Iranians want to discredit the west and its values, but ultimately human beings continue to value liberty and democracy.

Guess what? It’s finally time to be moving on. Gyms, museums and bowling alleys are reopening in New York City on 24 August and school is a-starting in September, and my kids are expecting to be in real classrooms most of the time. Our neighborhood on the upper west side is supposedly going to the dogs but at least we are not being locked in our apartments with nowhere to go. We’ve gone off for some change in scenery in Colorado and will then pick up in New York City. Boy were my kids excited to see suitcases come out after 5 months. I will be reporting on how much deterioration is real and how much is exaggerated. We have a year to go before mayoral elections; the current mayor is totally aloof because he is barred from seeking reelection due to term limits. The governor could remove him but doesn’t. My kids just want a big fresh deli sandwich and there don’t seem to be any kosher delis here in South Florida. So although we enjoyed 5 months of tropical paradise with 9 weeks of day camp that managed not to get interrupted even though Florida because a pandemic hotspot (but not our immediate area), and we managed not to get struck by a hurricane (the most recent close call went instead to NYC, wouldn’t you have guessed), we’re ready to move on. As soon as travel becomes more possible, I look forward to more interesting pictures on this website.

My daughter asked me last night while I was tucking her in to put her iPad on Night setting because she did not want to be disturbed during the night.  I said why not just turn it off. She answered that she did not want to have to wait 30 seconds in the morning for it to turn back on. Isn’t it amazing how people will think ahead to avoid just that little inconvenience?

My son got his bar mitzvah present from me this week – an xBox. He’s wanted one for years but we were afraid he would be addicted to it and not do anything else. Now it’s summer and no homework to do so I told him that he could enjoy it during the summer but would have to be responsible to keep it in the fall. The graphics on these games such as Madden are amazing; the whole game is controlled by you and the broadcasters’ commentary and video react to your real time actions and the whole setting looks very realistic. We went to the Pro Bowl in Orlando this past year and the stadium on the TV looks exactly like it did in person. I remember when I was his age with a black and white Zenith TV and I got my first video game, Pong from Atari. What a difference. My son thinks he is on vacation – as long as there are cocoa puffs and internet around him to play Fortnight, he’s fine.

Our kids keep talking about sleepaway camp all year long. How great the food was, all the camp traditions, the greatness of the activities.  When I was a kid, I felt like we got fed decent food on visiting day when the parents and the Red Cross came to visit. I feel like they are being like grandparents reminiscing over the great times in the old country. Unfortunately, lots of kids are getting depressed this summer sitting at home, some with parents who are afraid they might get sick. They might lose their minds first. In Miami, gyms, hotels and beaches have reopened and day camps are in session. Each day the camp remains open I am very thankful. A friend of mine in LA told me he wants to move here with his kids because California is still not happening; the local day school and real estate markets are booming with transplants from New York.

Jeremy keeps a copy of the US Constitution by his bedside and when he feels that his rights are being deprived, he consults with it to find something in there that makes him feel protected. Once when we banished him to the backyard, he took his copy of the Constitution out with him. Maybe he will be a constitutional lawyer when he grows up.

Do you ever find yourself lying in bed and noticing your own breathing and saying to yourself, boy I’m glad that I’m breathing normally. If so, perhaps the virus has brought you to appreciate some of the simpler things in life that truly count.

Someday people are going to look back on this period of time with some pleasant memories. Even though we all presently wish we could wake up one day and find out it was just a bad dream. One Friday my mother brought over a frozen lemon dessert that she had made for us. My wife sent her some fresh cranberry pistachio biscotti she had just baked, and I delivered to my parents a hot apple pie baked for them by a family friend. In normal times all this good cheer wouldn’t be happening. I am quite happy that during this global intermission I’ve been able to connect with almost everyone that I lost touch with over the past several years while everyone thought that a phone call was of low priority.

I would like to draw your attention to American Samoa, a place on the planet that had zero cases of Covid-19. I should add that this is the only place where Michael Bloomberg came in first on the ballot where he got all of 170 people to vote for him after spending $900 million. I would like to think that the good tribesmen and women of American Samoa are clever chaps who were both smart enough to realize that Bloomberg would have run a much better show than Trump has, and that also managed not to get infected. They cut off all air service to the island early on.

I’d say my low point in all this is the day I drove my rental car to the post office, paid for parking, stood on line to get in (only 3 at a time in the lobby), I get to the window and they were all out of stamps. Said they had sold their last two sheets before I came in. You’d like to think you could count on that, right?

Here’s a crossing of the Rubicon. My daughter was so bored  one day that she informed me that she was going to read this week’s copy of the Economist. She actually read through some of the stories and remembered the details. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of a great lifetime relationship for her with a great publication.

Here’s a sense of where things are as we try to reach a new normal: Masks have gone down in price – a few weeks ago it was $5 per mask and now Publix supermarket will sell you a package of 10 masks for $10. So far the most comfortable ones we have found are the reusable ones at Target for about $2.50 each.

You know about Fake News – I want to put in a word about Fake Plants. We decided that a living space looks better with plants, but fake plants. It’s hard to take care of real plants and there are fake ones that look really good. There was a BBC story about an opera house in Barcelona staging a concert for 2,600 potted plants that filled all the seats. That is something you can do with plants. The best part is that they don’t cough and open up candies during a performance.

I’m wondering if deodorant sales are down – if you are always 6 feet from other people, can anyone tell you stink?

Last week was John Bolton on the Stephen Colbert show. Can you imagine an odder couple than that? Colbert is not an idiot and was a good match for him. The two went the full hour which is an eternity for that kind of TV. I just received his new book today and will read it during the next month.  Whatever he wrote, I think he should forfeit the profits. It’s not right to tell-all when you’ve been a senior official and your boss is still in office. Maybe in this case it’s OK because the guy is so dangerous and it needs to be exposed but since he wouldn’t tell all to Congress and saved it for his book, he shouldn’t get the money.

A few years ago Donald Trump was ridiculed for going down to Puerto Rico and throwing packages of toilet paper rolls to the desperate people. Actually, I had reached a point about a month ago where I wouldn’t have minded if he or someone started throwing packages of toilet paper around. I had to go to the supermarket at 8 in the morning to get some with all the people hoarding paper goods. Amazon wanted $50 for what normally costs $25 and it was taking them over a week to get some Bounty paper towels to me, after not having them for several months. I want a partial refund on my Prime membership this year but there is nobody to speak to since they cut off all phone-based customer service. Even now it says on Amazon that it will take close to a month to get Bounty paper towels; I went to Target and got a better deal right then and there.

Consider this odd fact: Jerry Falwell was ridiculed for reopening Liberty College’s campus in Virginia mid-March. Well, they ran a good show. According to a column in the Wall Street Journal, till they finished the semester in mid-May there wasn’t one single positive virus case on campus. So I guess this means that colleges can run in the fall if they run a good show and should think twice before deciding to start from the ‘virtual’ default position. Likewise, there are nursing homes that ran a good show and managed to shut out the virus from their properties. They had PPE on hand and ran extensive testing of their staffs and residents. Many nursing homes worldwide were not really prepared and had a disproportionate amount of casualties; regulators will have to take a closer look at this for the future.

Since we’ve been in Miami Beach the past 3 months, I’ve been exploring the various neighborhoods and it is funny how things changed since I left here about 25 years ago. When I left, I was feeling pretty down because the city had been deteriorating especially after the 1992 hurricane, and I just felt that nothing was ever going to be fixed up and that the present generation was not investing in the next generation to make them want to stay. All my friends left the city to move away. But meanwhile, while Rip Van Winkle was sleeping for a generation, they rebuilt the city to something that it was not when I left. It’s all shiny and new, entire neighborhoods changed from crappy to desirable, people rebuilt their homes, roads were changed, big pretty buildings and new community centers and parks were built and lots of traffic resulted. The average age in the city has gone way down as well from something in the mid-60’s to 42 at present. But during the lockdown you could drive wherever you want pretty quickly, although lately there has been more traffic except that summer is off-season so it is still bearable. You can see lots of people in the creek with their kayaks and paddle boards and in the bay with jetskis and the occasional superyacht made for a villain right out of James Bond.  It’s a lot different from the tours I used to lead for my visiting friends which I called “Miami Beach Can Be Fun if You’re Under 65.” There are tons of mansions here and 25 years ago when I left town and the hurricane had just come, you could have bought one of these for half a million dollars. Now even an empty lot on a top line street is $10 million. Someone across the street from me is building a 12,000 square foot mansion with 3 levels on the waterfront and the interior of his house alone has $2 million worth of stuff. I am trying to understand what I would do with all that space. They are still doing the work on the house and I snuck around the back to see what it looks like; the kitchen and living room are just huge. You could fit 100 people into each room. I guess that’s what they’ll do – throw big parties. Both rooms have huge buffet tables in them built in.

The day Dade County Florida ended its lockdown, the price of gas went up 20 cents a gallon. When I went to an office building, I had to park on the rooftop level. When I had first arrived, you could go anywhere in that area and hardly see a car on the street. So this is a good sign; it shows that pent-up demand is there. I am hopeful that with contact tracing there won’t be a second wave, although in New York City the mayor made a controversial appointment to oversee contact tracing and if he made a bad decision, it will set the whole city back in terms of time it takes to recover. Dade County hired 1,000 contact tracers, which is as many as exist for the rest of the state of Florida. Around here, they do not want to fool around. The problem seems to run deeper though – people don’t want to cooperate with tracing and no amount of spending or technology will make up for that.

My kids are signed up for day camp here in Florida. We’ve been waiting to see if they would have sleepaway camp and finally the camp announced it canceled. I was waiting for them to put the kids out of their misery by just telling them already and giving people a chance to make alternate plans instead of leaving them high and dry a week before camp was supposed to start or worse pulling the plug after a few days of camp. I think it will be hard for a sleepaway camp to maintain zero infection for an entire summer. Nevertheless, privately run camps are under a lot of pressure from exhausted parents to open and set them free from their kids.

Here is a thought about recessions and retail. They say retail is dying and that we are in a for a big recession. In the past week, I went to 3 retail stores from national chains: Michaels art, Steinmart for clothes, and Macy’s. In all 3 stores, there was no greeter or person to help me find anything. We bought a minimal amount of merchandise or nothing and walked out. We had driven half an hour to get to the store so we were serious shoppers.  I don’t understand how stores can put out tons of merchandise in a huge store and have nobody on the floor to help sell it. You can’t tell a person what you are looking for, what you could not find and why you walked out. When you go to Macy’s, everything is organized by brand, and nobody in one department knows what another department is selling. So my daughter wanted a romper, a certain kind of dress, and we walked around aimlessly. This kind of retailing is absolutely frustrating and makes you regret that you wasted your time going to a store. They deserve to fail.

I know there is optimism in the stock market but I’m not buying into it. I see stocks go up 10% one week and then down 10% the next such as that Moderna company that had a vaccine trial last month. I think this is all manipulation and I know that active traders are making a lot of money. I’m not a trader and right now I agree with Warren Buffett that this is not a time to buy. I also think that people are underestimating how much time it will take before things get back to normal even if it turns out that the second wave does not come about as fiercely as anticipated. I went to a restaurant which is now open but it only has 2-3 tables it can use out of 10. They are open but choking. And of course now everyone wants an 18-20% tip instead of 15% because they have fewer tables to serve. Even before the recession, every store was turning around a point of sale machine at me looking for tips. I think this is all rotten because the whole idea of making the customer happy has flipped onto the customer making the hired help happy. There is a time and a place for everything and it would be nice someday to restore the idea that the paying customer is the person who is supposed to be taken care of.

Here’s the deal in the US as to Covid-19: Analysts are warning that states and the federal government are not using the intermission to get ready for a second wave. There is still no national plan out there and many states and Trump and Pence at the top are in denial hoping that it will all disappear. Efforts toward contact tracing and testing are not anywhere near countries that have been effective at pinpointing areas of infection and nipping things in the bud. It doesn’t help that Americans do not want to comply with the tracing apps; nobody wants to be told to stay home for 2 weeks because they ran into some person who was in contact with someone else who was sick and when people get off airplanes they just throw away the questionnaire and don’t bother to leave it to be found because they don’t want to participate in a quarantine for arrivals.  The question is really whether a second wave will materialize and whether it will be bad. There are anti-vaccine people who will always cause problems for everyone else because they will not want to be vaccinated. Even if people are not ordered to stay home, lots of people will as long as they are afraid of becoming infected. Indications are that death from this disease for normal people is not a high risk and that lockdowns are not the best way to deal with this; I suppose that a second round will try to avoid the massive lockdowns, but what will replace them? In places like Africa, they estimate that 140 more people will die due to lack of immunizations from other diseases for each person who dies of Covid-19. Kids not going to school is a big problem and so far the research in Europe is that kids do not spread the virus to the majority of adults although that may not be true in places such as Israel.

You would think that the environment would be enjoying all of this with auto use down, but now PPE such as masks and other stuff are winding up on the ocean floors. France alone used 2 billion masks so far.

I don’t know if China did all this to the US on purpose or by mistake, but if they or anyone else did, they showed the world just how fragile everything really is. It didn’t take much to drive everyone down pretty hard. It’s pretty scary to know what you could do if you actually tried to do bad. If anyone did this in order to ensure Trump’s defeat, I guess we’ll find out in November how well the plot worked out. I can’t see the back of this guy soon enough although my ultimate target for blame is Rupert Murdoch with his Fox Network. They exacerbated the fracture of America. They brought Trump to the presidency, have continued to back him and tarred anyone who called for government spending for the past decade, put plenty of people on the air who said the virus was a hoax and pushed stupid remedies, and I’d bet that even now after everyone has lost all their money and the worldwide economy has gone to pot, they will still endorse him over Joe Biden. My feeling is that had Hillary Clinton been president, we would not be in this mess. The world wouldn’t be so hostile toward the US and we would have been in front of this pandemic a lot faster. We might have still been caught without adequate pandemic preparedness, but we wouldn’t have squandered all this time and continued to run such a shit show in every way imaginable. We would probably be working with China to get over the hump. The whole world laughs at the US. Now I read that the US wants to suspend the H1-B program; so Mr. Miller in the White House can stop all immigration but China will be thrilled to welcome the world’s 65,000 best and brightest scientists and innovators to China instead. You couldn’t do any more then Trump or Fox to deliver this country into the hands of its enemies. If he is re-elected, I will seriously want to consider moving away from the US, perhaps to Singapore if they will take me. There is no future here if he gets in for another 4 years.

And yet, people who like Trump still like him. They look at Biden and say “Yeah, Trump is a liar and an idiot but Biden is a socialist.” If you are an Orthodox Jew, you are probably getting propaganda saying that Biden is anti-Israel. The guy has 30 years of history behind him and it ain’t true, but I see the crude propaganda flying around and people read it and want to believe it. I read it, research the history and see that the stuff is completely distorted and slickly produced to have a whiff of deniability.  This is America and it’s never been sophisticated.  You put your fate into the hands of idiots in this country and Fox is very happy to manipulate a large slice of it. They just put on their headsets, tune the rest of the world out and listen all evening long to one airhead after another ranting about enemies of the state and wrapping themselves in the red white and blue.

My dad for instance watches a lot of Fox and tells me that Sean Hannity is the only one out there telling you how things really are. My dad thinks that Biden will be controlled by a bunch of Obama and Hillary Clinton cronies. He thinks that Biden is senile and can’t finish a sentence. He also thinks that Obama was an Iranian spy and that he was a secret Muslim, but also says that he went to a radical church for 23 years. I said what kind of Moslem could he be after going to a church for 23 years?  He answered, you’re missing the point. So basically, there is nothing you can really say to argue with people like this. So instead I make jokes; I told him that the BBC stands for Bullshitting British Communists.

One thing that Fox and various conspiracy drivers such as the Russians have succeeded in doing is to convince most people that there is no such thing as accurate information coming from anywhere. Everyone distrusts nearly everything. Problem is that if you can’t trust anything, it’s hard to have an informed citizenry to know what it wants and to be able to express what it wants. To Trump, Fox and the Russians and others such as the Chinese, that’s great because it negates participation within a democracy and makes America easier to manage. Also, humans need to be able to trust each other to cooperate. If nobody trusts anything, you keep America down because nobody will cooperate.

I hate to say it, but I correctly predicted 3 years ago that everyone would lose all their gains and that the moment something seriously went wrong we would be completely unprepared to deal with it. At the beginning of this year, I said we were lucky to survive 3 years and hopefully we could get through just one more but we were playing Russian Roulette with this country. Need I say more. So it has been written, so it has been done. You can look at past editions of Global Thoughts and see it right there.

I still think that this is going to bounce around the USA for a long time with flareups from place to place. Whether or not there will be lockdowns later this year depends on how well contact tracing and testing gets ramped up, how much people will tolerate and if the hospitals can handle patient intake. There is still no national plan; each state is on its own. As I wrote above, in my area, the locals are not even waiting for the state to get on it and are making sure not to screw up.

A serious diplomat from a friendly country told me this week that his country has not yet ruled out bioterror on the part of the Chinese. I did not follow up and ask for a motive, although I should have. But it gnaws at me, what would be the motive? In today’s world, the secret stuff eventually leaks out and everyone will hate them if it’s true. What’s to gain? The damage is so great that it is greatly affecting China too.

However, here is another fact. A friend in a military-run graduate school reports that China is using cyber-harassment to slow down vaccine research in the US. I could understand that they want to get the first vaccine, but no matter who comes out first, it will be to everyone’s benefit. I guess I am just missing stuff here, but it is worrying that China and the US are really on opposite sides here and the Chinese obviously feel it is playing a zero-sum game in the world with this virus. What I don’t understand is why we are not hearing more about this if it is true. There is reason to be very wary of China; there is an article from a previous head of M16 saying that there is good evidence that Chinese scientists bio-engineered this virus to make it hard to cure or prevent in humans, and which mistakenly escaped from a laboratory in China – which is what my gut tells me all along is what happened.

I watched a recent edition of BBC Hard Talk with China’s ambassador to the UK. The man did not want to admit that the virus started in China. He would only say it was discovered in China. He did agree that it was important for China to shut down these animal markets where diseased animals are sold and consumed and he said that they were now permanently closed except that since then we see that the markets are still open because another wave of infections in Beijing emanated from one. Last time this happened years ago the markets were closed temporarily. I went to bed pretty unhappy; if China is going to act like a Soviet-style propaganda state and refuse to own up to anything, it does not bode well for any ability to cooperate with them in the future. I see around me and around the world people increasingly boycotting Chinese products and that could be a very powerful thing.  It would be a lot easier if they would just say, we screwed up, we’re sorry, these are the things we are doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and can we please move on. But although I tend to find Chinese to be rather clever, this time-tested escape route eludes them.

You should know that even if these animal markets are shut down in China, they exist elsewhere such as in Indonesia. Unless the world gets together and clamps down, it is just a matter of time before something else comes from somewhere.

According to a Wall Street Journal columnist who cited a Chinese scientific study noted in an abstract published by Yale University, in Wuhan China they looked at about 1,250 cases of infection involving about 320 clusters of infection. They found that 80% of the infections came about within people sharing a residence, 34% involved public transportation and only 2 infections came from contact outdoors. In Miami Beach, few people take public transport, many people live in large private homes and people like to go outdoors. This lockdown is not making a ton of sense here and people are starting to ignore the quarantine orders. Arguments are being made that lockdowns in many parts of America and indeed the world are an overreaction to this crisis, and I suppose that in a second round, better testing will permit more discretion with regard to lockdowns although it seems strange in the US that preparation for that second wave seems to be so shallow. There has been a learning curve here but I expect that by fall the world will generally be better prepared to deal with this.

For all of its history, the US mainland did not have to cope with invasion from a foreign power. The virus is an unusual circumstance because it invaded US territory. Except for the Spanish flu a century ago and a few stray airplanes in 2001, the US mainland has been protected. This is a new experience for Americans having its homeland breached by an enemy that does not have territory itself to defend in retaliation and therefore cannot be deterred It is a new type of vulnerability for Homeland America that it never seriously felt required to prevent.

A word about Sweden – their top epidemiologist now says that had he realized how many people would have been killed in Sweden as a result of its herd immunity policy, they would have locked down the country sooner. So I guess one thing we’ve all learned is that there was no really better alternative to the idea of a lockdown, at least for the first wave. Boris Johnson tried it and saw a lot of people die to the point that the British couldn’t stomach it. In the US, a lockdown a week earlier would have reportedly more than halved the number of deaths. So I guess the argument has been proven on this point.

I’ve been listening to some foreign policy experts discuss various countries. An interesting tidbit is that moving production lines away from China is not only a US matter; France is also looking at Morocco just as the US looks at Mexico. Another tidbit is that none of the Chinese state-owned enterprises want to violate US sanctions against Iran; they are afraid of pissing off US regulators if they do. The Iranians can justly claim that they did not get the benefits of the nuclear deal they signed with the US under the Obama administration; John Kerry, the US secretary of state, was begging companies to start to do business with Iran when they did the deal but the other side of the US Government was still enforcing sanctions. Even if Biden reinstates the deal, most companies will be afraid of dealing with Iran because the day a Republican comes back into office, they expect the sanctions will be reinstated as well and nobody wants to go into long-term deals not knowing that it will be safe to do so.

A word about Hong Kong – China has correctly calculated that foreign companies resident in Hong Kong will not leave and will indeed toady up to China, figuring that their business relies more on China than on what the rest of the world decides to do to China. The Chinese have a free hand to act in Hong Kong; rather than slap trade sanctions on Hong Kong which will hurt the residents and businesses that are ther and strengthen other Chinese cities such as Shanghai, the rest of the world is better off giving out passports to Hong Kong residents and doubling down militarily on Taiwan and telling China in no uncertain terms that the price for screwing Hong Kong and welching on their treaty obligations is that they will never get Taiwan back.

A word about the racial goings on in America – I think that the 9-minute choking of Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis is a disgrace and that on first blush I thought the 3 other policemen were guilty of enabling the murder. But then I found out that they had been policemen for about a week and they were in training under the officer’s tutelage. It would be unfair to take these rookies and hold them criminally liable. The first thing they tell a rookie officer is to forget anything they learned in the police academy. They were evidently in no position to be able to protest or to know what they should actually do. They should not be turned into fall guys. Their commander probably should never have been hired as a policeman and certainly should have been off the streets by the time this happened, considering his record. One interesting situation here is that the American military is 40% black and its leaders do not want the military being dragged into a race riot by an American president using them as a prop to stoke the flames to further his re-election “law and order” campaign. It is a moment in which military commanders are in a good position to take on their commander in chief; so far the Republican party has not put the president in his place. The pushback might yet come from the military (and indeed it did).

I’m not sure if the recent wave of protests contributed to the spike in viruses across the US. Considering that victims of the virus are disproportionately minorities both in terms of physical and economic injury, the last thing you’d think anyone would want to do is to make things worse. But then as you can see Americans can be really short-sighted and unsophisticated. I know some Russians here who say that this could never happen in Russia and I ask them “you left Russia for this?” They answer, “sometimes we really wonder.”  Nobody seems to want to state that the recent spike in hospitalizations across America might be partly a result of the civil unrest 2-3 weeks ago. Whether or not the media reports it, people are not idiots and will reach their own conclusions.

Speaking of the media, a word about NPR: national public radio. I often listen to it in the car during the day and hour after hour week after week this taxpayer-funded network is just rambling on about race, virus and police brutality. It’s become a real nag and I wish they would move on to other subjects.

Trump looked really forlorn stepping off his helicopter at the White House after the disastrous rally in Oklahoma. He liked an exhausted salesman who had a really bad day on the road. You wondered what he’d be tweeting throughout the night after telling people he was expecting a million people at the rally only to have 6,000 show up. I’m concerned that at some point he will realize he is going to lose or after the election concede that he lost, and then go and try to tank the country to take out his revenge. This is a man who puts himself before country and doesn’t listen to people.

Here are some other interesting thoughts I’ve heard from my contacts during the past month or so:

Fossil Fuels – Gas taxes are #1 source of revenue for many US states such as Florida, Alaska, Texas, and New York. Alternative forms of energy are generally subsidized. People are celebrating that the environment is getting a sabbatical but the money needed to pay unemployment claims, municipal employees and teachers and give aid to struggling cities and businesses will need to come from somewhere. Since taxes are not coming in from sales and income, there will be newfound appreciation for the benefits of transactions arising out of the use of fossil fuels, especially when someone like Mitch McConnell tells states to go bankrupt and they need to be able to issue municipal bonds to fund things.

Joe Biden – some people think he is old and is basically a guy who has “shown up all his life.” Others think he is a decent human being who would be a nice change from Trump. Both these opinions come from liberal Democrats. One of them felt that Kamala Harris would be a good running mate. The New York Times is touting Elizabeth Warren. I strongly feel that putting either on the ticket would be a great way to ensure the Democrats lose to Trump. They must put up two people that old-fashioned Republicans could vote for.  I personally recommend that Andrew Cuomo go for VP and stick around for 2024, but I could understand why he would rather stay where he is. Since I wrote this, Klobuchar withdrew and also was under scrutiny for her racer relations when she served in law enforcement. Kamala Harris I watched on TV and found her more watchable than I did during the debates. I don’t think that Biden should put up a black person just because it’s fashionable or politically correct;(and according to most polls Blacks agree with that statement) he must put up a plausible president that will attract middle of the road voters. That said, Condoleeza Rice is a plausible choice in my book. Susan Rice less so; I think she is too wishful in her global outlook based on what I read from her columns.

Ever hear of Tammy Duckworth? If Amy Klobuchar has taken her name out of contention for Biden’s Vice Presidential pick, take a look at this person. She would be a hard person for Trump to take down, she’d get the military vote and she has good credentials having been in Congress for a number of years. Her politics are said to be moderate and she is Asian-American.

America’s New Deal for 2021 – Somebody challenged me: What should be the New Deal for America in 2021 if I were President? Should it be to ensure 5G to every household in America? Should it be Universal Healthcare? Should we build massive infrastructure projects involving roads, trains, tunnels and airports? I am skeptical. Road projects will not get started for at least a year and will be bogged down for years in environmental impact studies and litigation by people opposing the projects. 5G is less than it appears; much of the world is already looking toward 6G and 5G seems to be dominated by Chinese Huawei and a senseless battle by the US to defeat it. However, given what we have seen, I could also see the imperative for the US not to cede defeat to China on this platform and to make internal development a priority although it will involve lots of money. People are asking if the US will become more pro-Universal healthcare; I think it is being treated as an emergency and that when the pandemic wears off, so will enthusiasm for that as well. If as much as 15% of Americans will be out of work, we will need to stimulate the economy and the question is whether government spending is the way to do it. For instance, right now unemployment benefits exceed what people were being paid when they were employed; people don’t want to go back to work and make less money. This is a real problem since the payroll protection program was meant to protect people’s pay checks. But companies are having trouble getting people to come back to work. By the way, if 25% of America is unemployed, so will the rest of the world. So America spending that money and causing inflation and hoping the Chinese buy its debt is not really the solution, in my opinion. If you ask me, the silver bullet is what the Economist recommended earlier this year in a survey about Immigration. The report said that if you wanted to do just one thing that would massively stimulate the world economy in a way that nothing else could ever do, you would simply allow people to live where they want to live. Free immigration would result in a massive stimulus to the world economy to the tune of 90 trillion dollars a year or doubling global GDP. So if I were president, I’d try to get the rest of the world and the US to make a massive push to enable free immigration. That would be my New Deal for the 21^st century.

What will Washington do? It will be interesting to see if the Democrats work with Republicans to fix things over the next 6 months or just hope they fail in the fall with a second wave and pray they win big time. You can see the conflict of interest here and why Trump is so cynical about statistics and what the media says about the virus. Lots of people are pretty upset with their elected officials over how slow the federal money has been to reach them, whether the whole lockdown thing is the best way to go about this and wondering if anyone truly cares about them. Mitch McConnel (Senate majority leader) looks like a guy who couldn’t care less and it will be interesting to see if the GOP loses the Senate because of him. In 2008, House Republicans blocked stimulus aid after the Lehman Brothers collapse and it was at that point that McCain knew his bid to be president was lost. If history is a guide, the GOP will lose the Senate because they will be scrooge-like; people’s salaries are being cut 10-20% by companies and this is the source of people’s discretionary spending. Take that away and your economy tanks because people spend all their money on their monthly nut. This is where Uncle Sam needs to help people get by. If history is a guide, if the Republicans hold onto the Senate but Biden wins, it will be a disaster because the Republicans won’t pass any more stimulus and the recession will go on for several years longer than it should. McConnel will be Dr. No blocking executive appointments, legal reforms and anything else and everyone will just argue and fight.

If it is any indication, Iran has decided to tone things down with the US for the next couple months figuring that escalation of tensions only helps Trump. They obviously are hoping he will be voted out. The Chinese seem to be doing the opposite; they seem to want to use the virus as a diversion to inflate tensions with the rest of the world and figure they will get away with it. They are giving Trump his biggest campaign treasure by targeting them as the source of all evil but they have evidently calculated that the benefits outweigh the costs. I personally think the Chinese strategy has been and continues to be poor and that all this in-your-face stuff with Hong Kong, Taiwan, the naval projection of power in the Pacific and the strong-arming with the virus is only going to ensure that the world hates them no matter who wins the American election. The Chinese are not going to win this way; they are just showing themselves to be a threat to the world and people will be wary of engaging with them. The Chinese are provoking India with a billion people on its border. Is it really good sense? Now that all the developing world cannot pay back their debts to China, they have to decide if they really want to try and foreclose on these countries where they tied up strategic assets hoping that someday they would be able to take them over – they will stoke revolutions that may cause them to lose their collateral. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point Mr. Xi loses his job because China’s leaders come to the conclusion that his aggressive stances were counterproductive. I think he could have done better with a more low-key style.

Under the radar, I notice that conflicts between countries are still taking place. To some extent, parties are using the diversion to score points. The Israelis are attacking the Iranians hard in Syria and the Saudis are still involved in Yemen. Belarus is making important moves to make sure it will not be a vassal of Russia.

The other question I’m wondering about long term is whether the term Investment will be a polarizing term. Democrats call for investment and Republicans say you are featherbedding unions, raising taxes, growing government and wasting money. Proper investment into pandemic planning would have cost one-billionth the amount we are now spending on lockdowns and 15% unemployment coming down the pike. Will the country and the rest of the world realize that preventive expenditures are an investment worth making?  It’s estimated that each month of lockdown is costing the US about a trillion dollars. A national pandemic preparedness program wasn’t going to cost more than $1 billion a year by a long shot. All of a sudden, you think about the $20 billion tunnel to connect New York and New Jersey that they’ve been fighting about for years because the current tunnel is seriously obsolete. Now they are going to pay for it because they will need to create jobs, but only after all this loss happened.

What about the term Social Justice? Would it be too much to advocate for Social Justice without having people spit at you and say that you are a bleeding-hearth liberal to be in favor of Social Justice? It’s funny because I see people who are very Republican and Trump-loving who are all excited about trying to get any money they can from the US Government in the midst of this pandemic. Some of these people are the last ones on earth who need the money as in self-employed people making six figures filing for $500 unemployment insurance checks because their businesses are closed. And yeah, they hate immigration but right now it seems that the essential services are being provided by immigrants. They will continue to hate immigration even if it turns out the nurse or doctor who saves their life or the person in the lab who develops the cure or the vaccine is an immigrant scientist.

Think about it — even the idea of wearing a mask has become a partisan issue in America. If you wear a mask, you’re now a bleeding heart liberal wuss and if you don’t wear a mask you are expressing your First Amendment rights. The whole thing has become nuts because you have a president who wants to play politics rather than to set an example. Fact is that wearing masks and keeping 6 feet apart helps limit the spread of this virus. If people could just stick with the program all over the world, we’d be better off. But people won’t so we never get out from under this.

Here are the funniest and cleverest four videos that I’ve seen during the weeks of lockdown. One is Randy Rainbow’s parody of Mary Poppins “Spoonful of Medicine” song making fun of Trump’s proposal to use disinfectants to wash out the virus, and the other is a British family parodying the Les Miz song “One More Day.” The fourth is an Israeli woman ranting about her kids in virtual school which went viral all over the world. No lockdown is complete without these, so be sure and enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdcS0Nbo7Ng

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPDPzbLFeP4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS9iiGJxbWo

https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/israeli-moms-rant-about-coronavirus-lockdown-with-kids-goes-viral/

My son enjoys watching Mr. Beast on YouTube. He gives away lots of things to people and it is a nice way to feel good about something when you watch him being nice to people. Some of it is pretty funny such as when he opened a bank and started giving away free money to anyone who came in.

I am using this time to try and self-improve, such as learning how to ride a bicycle without holding on to the handlebars or improve my 3-ball juggling. There are tons of TRX exercises, ranging from the simple to the absurd and you can find them on YouTube. I never thought you could do so many things with just that little strap, loop and buckle. My wife is doing some embroidery projects, and I want to alert you to the fact that at the same time from two computers, we both got different prices from Amazon for the exact same item to be shipped in the same way to the same place, except that I logged in as a Amazon Prime Member and she did not, and I was charged $4 more. Makes you wonder if Prime membership is as valuable as it seems if they are pegging Prime subscription customers as people who can pay more.

Here are some final thoughts: Every few years, something happens that makes demand change in the auto industry. When oil was expensive some years ago (remember $4-5 gallon petrol in the US), people said that the age of the SUV was gone. Now, oil is cheap and people are buying lots of SUV’s and other gas guzzlers for the past few years. Then all of a sudden it was a virtual certainty that nobody would be owning cars anymore and that ride sharing and autonomous vehicles would be the big thing. With the virus, people want their own cars again and ride sharing has gone way down. Considering that cars are planned 5-7 years ahead, it must be a terribly frustrating thing to be in the automotive industry. One reason this is important is that people keep saying that habits will change due to this virus; history shows that people revert to normal after a few years of lowered resistance to doing things they want to do.

Syria’s Assad might find it harder to survive in peace than war because very few other than Russia and Iran will help him now, and those two countries are pretty close to bankrupt. Not one Chinese state owned enterprise wants to do business with Iran for fear of US sanctions. Russia is using up its cash reserves and Assad is trying to squeeze business elites in the country who had propped him up in a marriage of convenience and who now might be more likely to plot against him.

The Economist is noting in a recent survey that Artificial Intelligence is showing itself to be a bit of a disappointment. Scientists are finding that the expenses involved in running experiments and training computers are far more than they expected and there are limits to what an artificial brain can learn that is simply no match for a human brain. Artificial intelligence has gone through peaks and valleys over the last half century and it looks like the present “fad” of AI will be another one of those. For instance, people are not talking as much about driverless cars but rather driver-assisted cars as developers hit walls and realize that the future is not necessarily now or in the manner previously imagined.

Our plan is to remain in Miami Beach till Labor Day and then to return to the Big Apple if the kids have real school. If virtual school continues, we’ll stay down here. Right now the odds are 50/50 of real school happening, according to the NY education authorities. I am trying to plan our first holiday for the end of August; hopefully we can make it as far as Atlanta and Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Our trips this summer to Ireland, Australia and Singapore will have to wait a year, hopefully not more than that. Meanwhile, Hooray for the Fourth of July this week!

There is this guy in Australia who has some kind of broadcast where he is playing Fortnight and babbling commentary while the game is being played. My son loves watching it and even after half a year of being addicted to it he still thinks it’s funny. He is constantly getting excited and screaming 4 letter words and the whole world is coming to an end. I think it’s a total loser thing to sit for hours watching somebody else’s game and being entertained by this. I know that Karen and I would love to find this person and literally throw him off the side of a cliff. Do you know anything about this guy? Is he driving you nuts too with your kids?

My household spent the first half of March trying to stay ahead of the End of Fun in the World. We rented bicycles and rode around Central Park when there seemed like nothing else to do. We went bowling in empty bowling alleys. This past year we traveled a lot more than usual not knowing that we might be grounded for roughly half a year. We went to Ben’s Deli during the last hour of the last evening you could eat out. Then we got out of Dodge and went to Miami. We bought bicycles in Miami on the last day you could buy something in a store. Sat at the pool at a hotel on the day they closed all the hotels and then all the pools in all the condo buildings. We were the second to last person to check out of our hotel as all hotels in the city of Miami Beach closed. Now we are hibernating in a house in Miami Beach hoping for the best and watching a really depressing reality show wishing someone would wake us up and tell us it was just a bad dream.

One of the nice things about this whole thing is that the entire world is on sabbatical at the same time. It’s like Christmas Week, Ramadan, Yom Kippur and everything else all rolled up into one. Everyone is sufficiently bored that you can now call people on the phone and they actually want to take your call. So I’ve been calling up friends who I haven’t spoken to in ten years to see how they’re doing. As long as their phone numbers haven’t changed, I’m OK because the phone book I am able to access from my PC is 10 years old.

Earlier this week I celebrated my 54^th birthday with a big BBQ in the yard and although we enjoyed a feast, I did feel bad for the people all over the world and in our country driving to food banks at 3am and waiting 7 hours for them to open to get scraps of food to feed their families. I keep telling my kids that people would kill for what they throw into the garbage.

The remainder of this posting is dedicated to the Covid-19 situation and my attempt to answer questions you may have and to put things into some perspective, although it is difficult to do so when so many facts are not known and so many assumptions are constantly being tested with new information. I apologize in advance that the photos are not so exciting, but are you really interested in seeing my trips to the supermarket, which is about the only place I can presently go outside of my home? At least I can go when I want; in Dubai, that pleasure palace everyone dreams of, you have to ask permission for a digital pass and then can only go out for 2 hours once every 3 days. So we’re all in this together it seems more than anyone ever expected.

Now I’m going to say something unusual about Donald Trump. Aside from the fact that I don’t like him, there is one thing that he is doing that overall seems to make sense, even if he himself doesn’t necessarily “get it.” He’s been under a lot of pressure to get the federal government to choose a track and to marshal all the nation’s resources to go down that track, such as nationalizing manufacturing companies toward making ventilators and testing kits. The truth is that as we go along the past 2 months, while the private sector has not produced enough of what we need as quickly as we need it and it seems atrocious that states were competing against each other and the feds for scarce resources, we have been testing our own assumptions as to what is actually needed and finding out all along that we don’t necessarily know that we want. It turns out that ventilators were not necessarily the best thing to use to treat patients, many tests do not work, and the virus does things to various parts of the body that we did not expect in the beginning. The private sector and hospitals have been very good at coming up with all kinds of ideas to make things and to adapt to new procedures as we find out what works and what doesn’t. Early assumptions were based on what China reported, and as we go along we are finding that China lied a lot and that the origins of the virus are not necessarily known. For instance, we are still finding out when the earliest cases reached the US (which turns out to be a lot earlier than we thought), we know that the species of bat which supposedly infected a certain food market does not exist within 100 miles of that market although a Chinese laboratory which was criticized for having lax security does exist near that market, and we don’t know if antibodies really do confer immunity and/or to what extent they do. So it’s probably a good thing in retrospect that we did not choose one path and force everyone to stick to it, which is what would have been done if we’d had a president who operated the way the normal establishment would have done things.

I do think that until they come up with a cure or a vaccine, the world is not going to be normal. But what might be the cure is something that you might not be reading about just yet. For instance, my brother’s in-law is a doctor in LA that is part of a group that has 200 patents on some kind of treatment involving UV lights and lasers that kill viruses. It’s been under development for 2 years for a different disease but the treatment can be used for this virus and human trials might start soon. If that works, it’s very interesting because it can probably be adapted to other viruses that don’t yet exist. I’m sure there are 100 other projects going on in the world that we haven’t yet read about so it is interesting to see that activity is going on, that research and development is moving much faster than ever before involving greater degrees of global collaboration, and that out of this challenge we might be able to deal with future even greater challenges faster that might otherwise have pushed us over the edge. Although this sucks, it may turn out to have been worthwhile for reasons we may not yet be able to appreciate.

Now of course you know that I think Donald Trump ignored the signals for several years (not just the past several months) even when it is proven that warnings were issued. Obama insisted that Trump’s transition team participate in a tabletop drill called Crimson Contagion which simulated a pandemic and was meant to show Trump that the nation was vulnerable to this. It’s not clear from Rahm Emmanuel’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal if that drill was held, but clearly Trump’s transition team did not heed it. (Rahm was Obama’s chief of staff, a senior advisor to President Clinton and mayor of Chicago.) His national security advisor closed the office of pandemics that was at the national security council level, gutted the CDC which I don’t even have to spell out at this point because everyone in the world now knows what CDC stands for, and even cut several months ago a $200 million early warning pandemic program that was supposed to be a cooperative effort between America and China. The ABC network says that military intelligence was warning the White House of this pandemic in China as early as November saying it could lead to a “cataclysmic event” and they were obviously ignored. I have no doubt that had Hillary Clinton or any Democrat been president, the country would have been more ready for this and that Nancy Pelosi, if she were currently president, would know better than most what to do. But let’s stop for a second and ask a good question: Even if Trump sucked, why did all the state and local officials and so much of the world fall flat? They can’t just sit there and blame the feds. Why was Boris Johnson in intensive care after dilly-dallying the UK through the early stages of this pandemic? Does Democracy work or will we continue with Fake News and tribalism so that no lessons are ever learned?

I don’t think the world can survive a second round of this type of thing, and this round was a 1 or 2 on a scale of 10. What if it was a virus like Ebola that was very catchy and killed most people it struck? What if an enemy of the West piled on with a cyberattack and knocked out the electricity and internet that the whole world is now basing itself upon? I was quite nervous when Russia decided to go after the US fracking industry and take on the Saudis with artificially low oil prices; they definitely wanted to kick when others were down. The Russians had stockpiled currency reserves in anticipation of such an event. I am still very fearful of the future because I’m not sure the world will learn its lessons. History says it will not. The US has a federal system in which the feds control things like the CDC and prevent states from acting such as creating and giving out virus tests (which created real trouble for the states early on), but yet many powers are reserved to the states such as lockdowns and even Trump had to admit that. You have loony bird governors such as in Georgia opening up things such as tattoo parlors and bowling alleys as essential businesses while neighboring states such as Florida are in lockdown. The US system is not really geared toward these kinds of emergencies where you would expect that you need a national standard and centralized purchasing power within a country where people can freely travel. The current situation with each state competing against each other for scarce resources seems ridiculous because taxpayer money is being wasted buying things at much higher prices. The European Union did not want to cooperate either in this affair until at a certain point they had to because the virus did not respect national borders. A hundred years ago after the Spanish flu, the world still couldn’t get the League of Nations together. Each state and city acted on its own in the US. Nothing really changed in 100 years since the Spanish flu epidemic when states and cities took the lead with differing results. The WHO today had a plan and was in a position to be helpful but was also clearly pandering to China and lost its moral authority with the US because of it. (Considering that the WHO also had to rely on Chinese cooperation because it has only persuasive power, it was in a no-win situation and a good amount of the criticism it has been receiving is unfair.) We don’t hear about the UN because the US, Russia and China are 3 of 5 seats on the security council and they don’t agree on anything.

This is a wake-up call for a much worse virus that could have struck and that will ultimately happen. Will China try to hide the next virus it gets? Will Mr. Xi browbeat subordinates into not giving him bad news? Mr. Xi did exactly that 5 years ago when there was a virus that originated in China, and then created a system to warn him if it happened again. The system didn’t work because his subordinates were still afraid to give him bad news. China’s autocratic system works well in good times and even in bad times, but it does not work well to prevent little bad things from turning into huge bad things, and that’s a big problem for everyone because China’s little problem turned into the world’s huge problem. China has to get this right for the future – China may think it deserves to rule the world or at least have the #1 economy, but if the rest of the world has no economy, there is nothing to rule. Right now China is 95% back online but it has no customers and its citizens are in big trouble meaning its government is in big trouble. So what good is it? People don’t believe what China says no matter how much propaganda they put out, because China clearly lies. If they lie, it’s harder to figure out how to get to the root of the problem and solve it which lengthens the time it will take the world to get back to normal. Democracy has its weaknesses, but transparency of information is important and a society where innovation and entrepreneurship are encouraged is crucial. China will never be #1 as long as it is strictly a top-down country and its leaders try to control everything. China is still obviously lying about what is happening there; the American Enterprise Institute believes there were over 2.9 million virus cases in China rather than the 82,000 the country reports. If China is not being truthful, the rest of the world is having a harder time making sense of this virus because they are working on false information. I personally think the world ought to demand reparations from China after all this over but the damage is so severe that no nation could ever pay the bill for it. There should be a price to pay for taking the whole world down with you. As it turns out, they’ll be lucky to even get an apology from this man because even that doesn’t warrant losing face. I personally don’t understand that – you screw up, you apologize and then you move on. But hey, I’m not Chinese and they run on a different frequency in that part of the world. And by the way, other countries are also lying about their numbers.

If you want my take on what is going to happen, I don’t have a confident feeling yet because we are not sure if we are still climbing one side of the mountain or descending the other side yet. The markets feel that we are close to or past the peak in New York, although the rest of the US and then much of the developing world is still to come. Japan for instance is now dealing with its second wave. Singapore is trying to prevent a second wave. How well they do will matter because if Japan and Singapore can’t keep a second wave under control, there is no chance the US can be expected to do better. Although the stock market hit its low and is on the rise, I’m not sure the rally is justified and I personally sold my stocks in February and chose to lose profits rather than to risk principal. I’m not sure that the markets are realistic about the future or have fully priced in the long-term effects that we may not yet fully realize, and I am not yet prepared to invest in a market index. It could be a full year more of this uncertainty before people feel good enough to travel and work without restriction. I’ve noticed in the Dade County area of Florida (Miami city) there is more traffic this week than last as people go out and start exploring.

A bright spot is impressive innovation from states and cities in the US and the UK where the national governments failed. Too little too late to keep the death counts down but at least mitigating damage. Israel had 45 deaths per 8,000 cases; Florida has 200 per 12,000 cases. Israel would be in better shape had the hospitals been invested in more during the past decade; the health officials were prepared for pandemic but the facilities are what they are. I know one of the leading experts in pandemics in Israel and can tell you that 25 years ago he was running around 16 hours a day from meeting to meeting dealing with contingency planning for a pandemic. I think that Israel expected a pandemic as part of biological warfare more so than from a bat out of hell in China. What they did not expect was that a health minister who got the job as a sop to an ultra-orthodox political party holding a cabinet position would actually have to manage a pandemic. The health ministry utterly failed. So the country turned to its Mossad intelligence service to beg, borrow or steal whatever it needed from around the world, which it promptly did. Some years from now we’ll read stories as to the crazy things that agency did to get stuff to Israel, including things ordered by other countries that they diverted. Bibi is now in an emergency unity government because, like him or hate him, everyone agrees that he’s competent and brilliant and they want the best guy running the show in a crisis. Netanyahu successfully kept Israel clean during the 2007 meltdown and is so far doing very well with this crisis. I assume that low death rates in countries neighboring Israel has something to do with a high level of cooperation between this government and theirs.

How long will it take to test for antibodies and to get contact tracing up to speed? Right now I’m told that 1/3 of the tests for the virus are false negatives. That’s very worrisome and it says to me that testing by itself is a red herring unless the tests tell you the truth and even if they do, a test is only a snapshot; what if you get infected an hour after you took the test? We can’t keep testing everybody. Testing really works in the early stages of a pandemic along with contact tracing but you can only do this at the very beginning while you can still trace people and isolate them. Once you pass a certain point, you can’t figure out anymore how you got from here to there with virus transmission. Countries will have to really get on top of testing for future waves of this virus or future pandemics and move quickly to close borders and isolate people. Hopefully after this exercise, people will take such warnings more seriously since they know that failure to do so will compound the misery of everyone. What people will need now more than testing is antibody testing to be able to see who has immunity and can move freely within the society. So far I haven’t seen evidence that those tests reliably yet exist and are in a position to quickly penetrate the market. In the US, the number of tests is about 1/3 of what is needed, and it is no certainty that these antibodies confer any lasting immunity. There is too many unknown unknowns to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous quote.

When will the US go back to work? Because of our federal system, this virus could keep pushing around the country endlessly since there is no national standard for lockdown and some of the states are acting recklessly. As of a week or so ago, you could still eat in a restaurant in South Dakota. A few days later you read the South Dakota was the nation’s newest hot spot for the virus. Do you recall the governor of Georgia who essentially said in late March that he didn’t know this virus could be caught by touching? This whole thing could go on bouncing around the country and throughout the world until a vaccine comes around, something that few expect to happen in 2020. I understand that vaccines are complicated creatures that cannot be quickly brought to market. The latest issue of the Economist tells you in great detail the complexities involved in creating and distributing a vaccine. In this case, the risk of side effect will have to be weighed against the probability of success to shorten the timespan usually needed to bring a vaccine to market. Unemployment could temporarily reach 32% according to Stratfor. During the Great Depression, the top figure was 25%. I would like to think I’d be going back to NY in June, but there will be more waves, hopefully handled better than the first one (and at this point I think it will be on the local and state level). Considering that China is just now going back to work, it won’t be fast and everyone will be scared and distant until the vaccine comes along. We are supposed to travel to Hawaii, Singapore and Australia in August, and I still don’t know if that will happen although in each of those 3 places, although they are all experiencing various levels of lockdown, the virus has not been a big problem. Still, I am being told that several countries such as Australia and Israel may not welcome tourists for at least the next 3-4 months so summer camps and vacations that were on tap for this year may not happen.

When will you go back to the gym? Are you going to want to touch the same equipment that countless other people have touched, now that you are scared of what might happen if you touch a shopping cart in the wrong place? Or if you had to touch an elevator button that some unknown person touched if you live in an apartment building?  One of my instructors correctly predicted when this all started that the level of paranoia is going to rise dramatically when people start to come out of their treehouses.

Would you take a cruise after this? Would you want to be on a ship that becomes a floating petri dish where everyone gets sick and then your ship goes around the world for weeks and nobody wants to let you get off? I think they had better agree to some rules such as if there is a virus with known infection at a certain port of call, that cruise cannot go there and that at a certain point cruises get cancelled. The cruise industry is a powerful lobby but really there are only several companies that operate in this industry and they are mostly self-regulated. They won’t do anything unless forced but they are really a huge threat to countries when they carry sick passengers aboard. In Florida, it felt like every time a cruise ship was allowed to dock, it was going to bring enough infected people to screw up the whole state which was otherwise trying to flatten the curve.

What have I and presumably We learned from all this virus stuff? Well, so far we know from US government sources and various studies that the virus reached America more so via travelers from Europe, not directly from Asia and that it started in America in mid-January and in New York in mid-February, several weeks before the first confirmed case in New York which was on March 1. So stopping flights from China helped but did not ultimately stop the virus from reaching our shores. If you want to stop something, you have to stop everything coming in from anywhere. This virus was a toughee because asymptomatic people carried it and early on we didn’t know that. In fairness, nobody really foresaw a lethal virus that transmits via non-symptomatic people and this throws out much of the playbook that people would have been expected to use. Alas, nobody could have foreseen to start testing each and every incoming traveler so early in the game and I’m not sure that’s even possible. Imagine the chaos at a border when Trump announced travel restrictions from Europe and the fact that by the time the result comes back a week later what do you then do after everyone has gone off and infected people all over the place? So basically, unless the host country shuts itself down very quickly, there is almost nothing you can do in today’s world to stop the worldwide spread of a virus. If the host country gives warning before it shuts down, it runs the risk that lots of sick people will try to escape before the dragnet closes, which is what happened in many cases around the world. But how do you expect people to live when you shut borders without warning? You create tons of stranded people which did happen and that also became a big expense all around. At some point, you can issue travel certificates stating that someone is either negative or has already contracted the virus, assuming that there really is immunity, something we have not confirmed.

A very important thing we learned was that social distancing works but that there is a huge culture of denial in western countries and that people from the top down did not want to take those steps until it was almost too late. People thought that somehow the economy would be saved if we avoided this, but at some point people realized that you would have greatly more death, panic, shortages of vital things and economic failure all at once if you did not do this. This more than anything created the results that we saw and I’m not sure that any amount of stockpiling and preparedness would have prevented this considering that human nature and culture overrode the pandemic playbook. In the absence of testing, social distancing was the one sure-fire way to prevent the spread of the virus and even after lockdowns were announced, many citizens failed to take it seriously for a good while. At this point, only 20% of Americans polled said they would want to resume a normal life even if restrictions were lifted, so clearly attitudes have changed, at least for now. History shows that after some time, people will go back to normal and then the question will be did they learn a lesson from this for the next time around? Probably yes, assuming the next time is within the next 5 years.

Hospitals wanted ventilators and doctors had protocols for treating viruses. We found out that a strong majority of patients on ventilators ultimately died and that ventilators were part of the problem as much as the solution, and doctors found out that you don’t treat this virus the same way you treat other viruses. For instance, one nasty fact here is that after a week people think they are getting better and then all of a sudden it takes a big turn for the worse. All sorts of side effects on the human body, some of them permanent, seem to be invoked with this respiratory virus. In fact, they haven’t yet developed a sure-fire cure for this virus. So basically we learned that sometimes we will be hit with new diseases that we don’t know how to treat and that assumptions as to what will be needed might be for naught.

We found out that face masks for regular people are more for preventing other people from getting infected than preventing yourself from becoming infected. We saw that eggs, toilet paper and paper towels would get hoarded and that at some point beef and chicken would run low. People will probably want to keep some back supply of paper goods around permanently.

Will Biden be the next president? Who knows at this point. We don’t hear much from him. At least Bernie Sanders gave up, figuring nobody was paying attention. I thought years ago that Cuomo might run, but he probably wants to stay in his post as governor since he is doing a good job there for now. Maybe in 2024. Someone suggested that if he run as Biden’s VP, he would know that he would be a likely president in 2024. Right now nobody is going to criticize Trump in the middle of an emergency when they need his approval, but I’m sure the governors are furious at him for not really bringing the federal government to the rescue by nationalizing production of vital necessities and for absolutely neglecting this problem for the past several years, and all fall you will see commercials showing how he did not care or thought the whole thing was a hoax or a Democratic plot, and I’d like to see Michigan vote after they run commercials of Trump telling their governor that he would not be returning that person’s calls because he thought the lady governor was a bitch. Tell that to Detroit that was hard-hit. Tell that to all the states when he said “you’re on your own,” and “I’m not at all responsible for this.” Imagine if Cuomo said that; that’s not what a national leader says. And then they’ll play tapes of Trumps saying just a few days later that he gets to decide when the states get to reopen because he wants to take the credit for it. I can tell you that few minds are being changed; Fox News is still putting out its message and the rest of my family thinks Trump is good and Biden is bad. I think that Biden will ultimately win because a second wave will start up in the fall and remind people that everything sucks and people will blame whoever is the incumbent for it. So far, according to the Economist, countries have calculated that the cost of prematurely opening up and then having to close down again is greater than the cost of waiting till they are more certain that they can open safely. Trump doesn’t want to go that route. Health experts warn that although you won’t see the results of a poor decision for several weeks, at some point, there will be hell to pay, so you better make the right decision early on and haste makes waste. I am supposed to stage a Bar Mitzvah for my son in October and feel that the best thing to do is to just postpone it for a year till I can be more certain that things will not be interrupted. I have till June or July to decide and I hope I’m wrong, but by then we should have a better idea if the country is on a safe path or not with more testing and more experience of other re-openings around the world under our belts.

I’m not telling you any state secret here but Baddies might want to create viruses and blackmail countries into paying them to not release them. But let’s consider this a second. Baddies such as North Korea, Iran and mafiosos have to consider that they will also kill their own with such viruses; that they cannot be contained. Even if they somehow came up with a vaccine that they used on their own, we’d know about it and what if the virus mutated and negated the vaccine? Who would be left? And anyway, what would be the benefit of being the only ones left with nothing to spend your money on after the world was basically finished?

So far, even though it seems inherently boring around here, I have managed not to have too much time on my hands. I don’t know how that happened, but it seems that this is a great opportunity to pursue a hobby and to self-improve. You could look at these several months as a sort of quarantine with your kids around, or you could see it as an enforced sabbatical to spend time doing things you always said you’d do when you had more time. I managed to get a bicycle, tie a TRX to a tree and have access to a swimming pool, so at least I’m staying fit and sane.

Here are two interesting things to think about that might make you feel better. The past several months before this all started I went to a wedding and a Bar Mitzvah. At both parties, I witnessed lots of people bored stiff who were looking into their phones trying to entertain themselves. I’ll bet you know what I mean. Last week, someone had their Bar Mitzvah in their home and friends connected via Zoom. Karen and I were focused on our telephone watching the Bar Mitzvah and listening to every word. And we saw other people on the screen doing the same thing. Maybe it’s a novelty that will wear off but I must say it was the most intimate Bar Mitzvah ceremony I’ve attended, more so than the real thing. There might be a lesson in that for people.

Earlier this month we watched The Ten Commandments, the 1956 movie with Yul Brenner and Charlton Heston. If you’ve never seen it, now’s the best time to take over 3 hours off to watch it. There is this scene where the Hebrews are having a meal in their homes while the Angel of Death plagues Egypt killing all the first born sons and passing over the homes of the Hebrews, hence the “Seder” meal of the holiday of “Passover.” When Jews have their Seder, which is by far the most observed ritual in that religion, they are supposed to feel as if they were reliving that night in Egypt. But people mostly think of that night as a festive night anticipating freedom of leaving Egypt the next day and rushing to get out. They are told to recline and feel as if they are noble and free. They don’t see that scene in the movie of the Hebrews huddled in their homes in terror, as screams wail across Egypt Land, and waiting for the horror to end. This year it is sort of reliving that ancient ritual, with people huddled in their homes without their parents and/or children, hoping they will not be afflicted by this strange virus that kills indiscriminately, where they have seen their friends, religious and political leaders die giving lie to the idea that you can get immunity to this due to your stature or piety, and having to actually prepare a Passover at home for the first time in years which is fate almost worse than death to thousands who have gotten used to traveling to exotic locations and participating in Passover programs around the world. It’s back to basics. But it’s also a chance to make lemonade out of lemons. This year people can focus on their Seders and the little things in life that got lost among those exotic trips.

There is a bad feeling you get when you look at your parents from 15 feet away and they look at you as lepers that might make them sick. There is a bad feeling you get when you walk down the street and want to talk to your neighbors and they are afraid of getting close to you. What would happen if I knocked on a doctor’s door 3 houses away because my kid got a concussion? Would they help me or just not answer the door? I can’t tell you that the political map will change from this and that China, Russia or America will be any better 2 years from now than today, but all I can tell you is that I try to smile a lot when I see people, I try to say Hello with enthusiasm and at least give people the feeling that I’m human. I hope the world will realize that we are really all in this together, not only in times of crisis, but that we need to cooperate more both among tribes in our own country and across the world. I am hopeful that maybe this calamity will help us all realize that and perhaps we will be better off if we do. What kinds of things might change I don’t know yet, but perhaps on things such as climate and disease, there will be more empathy that we will all suffer the consequences of inaction and that denial of reality doesn’t work in the long run. So far I still see Bill O’Reilly putting out crappy articles that play on xenophobia and the fact that there is a willing paying audience for his stuff, and Republicans still think that Trump is great while Democrats think he sucks. Don’t expect people to fundamentally change because of this episode. At best, people may at least learn immediate lessons from this that will change their behavior next time round.

This is not a joke, but it is the weirdest news I’ve observed so far about the virus. In Latin America, gangs are handing out masks and enforcing social distancing rules where governments are not. Why? Because if everyone gets sick and dies, there won’t be people to extort or consumers for drugs. So basically, to protect their revenue streams, they want people to stay healthy!

I hope that this posting has provided you with some perspective after a month of reading all kinds of news, analysis and trying to sort the useful from the crap. About 40 days ago, I posted a thought that this virus would not kill more people than the flu and that turned out to be wrong. A lot of what we thought we knew a month ago turned out to be wrong and it will be even more so a month from now. I could sit on my hands and write nothing and that would be the safest thing to do, but people have to make decisions based on imperfect information and the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. Leaders all over the world have to try to get it right, to balance the needs of a starving out of work population against the odds of succumbing to a virus that may be more or less lethal based on which statistics you trust and what we actually know. There is room for valid opinion on more than one side of this issue; in certain ways actions that we think are irresponsible may ultimately be justifiable, as I stated clearly at the beginning. We just don’t know what we don’t know. So with that humble thought in mind, I pen these words and turn it over to you. Feel free to let me know what you think.

I love this saying I heard: Education is what you’re left with after you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned in school.

Our 12-year-old son Jeremy has kicked off his teenage rebellion by declaring that he is a Nazerite, and is taking ascetism against haircuts. He is especially keen on upsetting me because I tend to get haircuts rather often. I asked him what he would do with a trillion dollars, because a billion is not what it used to be. He said he would be a dictator and use the money to buy military stuff. Hey MBS, would you like to take on a summer intern?

I had to drive to an airport so I put on Waze and it starts sending me off in the wrong direction, so I ignored it. Turns out that the access ramp to the interstate highway was closed for construction (no warning signage along the other highway that accessed it), and Waze was diverting me from it. I wound up going all over the place through insane traffic jams and the worst parts of Miami trying to get around the diversion and Waze kept telling me to do the opposite. And it was right. Most of the time. The next generation for Waze is for someone to be able to ask it “Why?” and to be able to get an answer. If it would have told me that the access ramp was blocked, I would have understood from the beginning why I needed to go a different way.

As you might guess, people are on pins and needles around here and freaking out. But I won’t dwell on it. You know that. So let’s move on. If you’re sitting around and bored, you’ll love this posting because it’s pretty long.

Trump has his supporters; there was a dinner in New York City the end of December among people in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and they raised $5 million for Trump that night. 80% of Jews will probably vote for Biden in November, but among the Orthodox, Trump is popular, mostly because he has been steadfastly pro-Netanyahu and so are many of them. I’m not going to write pro-Israel, because that concedes the argument that there is only way to be pro-Israel and I don’t think that is true.

I would be happier if one of the Democratic candidates in a debate would have said that anyone at the age of 70, if they have no skeletons in their closets or things they have not said that they regret, have not lived a real life and have no experience sufficient to be president or just about anything important. They should have talked more about what they want to do, and less about finding fault with each other. They were just making life easier for Trump. This virus, which is going to stop rallies from happening, is not healthy either for Bernie Sanders or Trump who thrive on circus, and it’s good for Biden, because it will give him fewer opportunities to mess up in public.

An interesting thing to remember about China is that until the Middle Ages, China was leading the world in technology. Europe only started catching up around the Middle Ages (it did so by imitating Chinese inventions, which is how we today view China in reverse), culminating in the industrial revolution in the 1800’s at the same time that China made some big mistakes. China is desirous of regaining what it sees as its rightful place as #1 in the world, which is not an unreasonable position for a country with 1/7 the world’s population and #1 status for most of civilized history to have. Right now though, the Chinese seem to be #1 at producing weird viruses growing out of backward bouts with diseased animals that their humans want to eat and surround themselves with. I wish they could move beyond this and that their leader would have learned from their last virus, but he did the same thing – tried to cover it up till they couldn’t. So he is not learning from his own errors and nobody is holding him to account. Chances are that unless things change in China, he will do the same thing all over again.

About the virus: People are probably more likely to get the flu than this particular virus. But people are not running around getting flu shots. They are panicking though – in Australia, a policeman used a taser gun to stop a fight over toilet paper. And someone else pulled out a knife in a fight over toilet paper. Evidently people think they will be cooped up at home for weeks using toilet paper. I couldn’t buy plain old alcohol today in a pharmacy. You are more at risk to die getting into a car than anything else but people are still driving. What I want to know is can the rest of the world sue China for being backward and starting this whole thing when they knew that such animal markets carry this kind of risk (and I don’t think they have closed down those markets), and then lying about it trying to cover it up while it became an epidemic. Of course China is going to lose face and money because of this, but they should be held responsible for damage they caused to the rest of the world as a disincentive for letting this happen again. If enough people die in Iran and China, and so far I don’t know that it will happen, I wonder if this will finally cause revolution in those countries – both governments care more about protecting themselves than in guarding the lives of their citizens. It is absolutely clear because in both countries health officials prosecuted and threatened doctors and health workers who raised the alarm. In Iran they forced them to sign false death certificates. Iran lied about the missiles with the Ukrainian plane. People don’t trust these governments. Humans need to be able to trust each other in order to live; this is a perfect example of proof of that biological fact of life. Now that leaders of Hizbullah are sick with the virus and top Iranian officials are sick and dying, maybe they will think twice about how they deal with this stuff.

Israel takes pandemics very seriously, and I have known its previous head of pandemics. Israel wanted to shut out Americans, but with a view toward not insulting Trump decided that everyone coming from anywhere would be quarantined upon arrival, essentially closing down the country for 2 weeks. The real message is that the US is running a shit-show in terms of public health and the Israelis want no part of it. What I want to know is how South Korea was able to test 100,000 people so quickly as to a new virus and why the US could not test even 1% of South Korea’s figure?

The reason this virus is scary is (1) there is no vaccine yet; (2) many more people have it than we can determine because the US is so behind on being able to test people; and (3) everyone has to sit around for 2 weeks in detention being a suspect because the US is so behind on testing and therefore must act insanely to stop its spread so that it can ramp up readiness to deal with tons of sick people. This is a good reason to remember why good government is necessary and why vaccines are desirable. Trump cutting out virtually all funds and personnel to combat disease and then making his non-medical VP head of the national response which for this guy is something like “Let’s just pray for everyone and run all public comments through me and the prez” is just not going to stir confidence in the financial markets or the emotions of people. I would have preferred to have a guy like Bloomberg in charge of this, but Biden would also not let himself be caught with his pants down. Trump simply didn’t and doesn’t care. For him this whole thing is all about how good or bad he looks.

I think there will be short-term disruption that will be severe, but that eventually the crisis will end after a few months and the world economy will recover. Russia is fighting with Saudi Arabia over the price of oil precisely because the Russians prepared for this type of situation and is now trying to gain advantage because it built up cash reserves while Saudi Arabia was spending its reserves. The question is whether this will be the needed wake-up call for governments around the world to learn to cooperate and prepare for a much more dangerous virus, which is sure to come. Europe, for all its bureaucratic standards, is not coordinating among countries. China did not allow American epidemic specialists to observe what was happening. Americans were not prepared and wasted weeks allowing this problem to fester. This was a poor test run and it did not take much to scare the world even with this.

The world of business has to look at the continued viability of just-in-time manufacturing and of relying so much on China. India, for example, is hoarding its supply of medical equipment and drugs to meet its domestic demand and not exporting stuff the rest of the world needs. China right now cannot produce the stuff. The US is relying on China and India. Apple vetoed a factory in Vietnam a few years ago and put all its eggs into China and now it is going to pay a price for that decision. Trump is actually right in telling American companies to diversify its manufacturing away from its reliance on China.

Funny thing about all this is that because the whole world is going nuts right now, this will probably be a low death year for people from the flu. Israel has pretty much created a vaccine but it will now have to go through trials. Depending on how long that takes, it will take at least several months to reach people. And Taiwan has figured out how to get the testing time to about 4 hours, so there is promise that if everyone freaks out right away, they might actually make up for lost time and get this under control faster than people expect.

Consider this too: If you are young and single, go on a trip. A few months ago you couldn’t get within 50 feet of the Rosetta Stone or the Mona Lisa with hundreds of tourists, mostly Asians, standing there taking selfies. Now the galleries are empty. Planes and hotels are empty. My barber said one of his customers just bought a round trip ticket to London and Paris on Delta in business class for $200. Shows that we had to book 6 months in advance are giving away $50 tickets. If you have kids, stay home. We were supposed to go skiing in Tremblant next weekend, but who wants to get stuck in a hotel that gets quarantined for 2 weeks if the wrong person walks in or be shut out of the US if it decides not to let people in from Canada? What would I do for 2 weeks stuck in a Fairmont hotel room in rural Canada with 2 kids?

A few noteworthy statistics from an Economist survey on Housing: Over the past 60 years, the median American’s rent payment rose 61% in real terms while the median renter’s income grew by only 5%. Even though the cost of construction is about the same, the average cost of a house in San Luis Obispo, California is $725,000 while a house in Pine Bluff, Arkansas is $90,000. In France, a one euro rise in housing subsidies raises rents by 80 cents. A 10% fall in rents in high cost cities such as New York results in an 8% decline in the number of homeless residents. American GDP would rise by 10% if there was new housing construction just in New York, San Francisco and San Jose. What I get out of this is the following: There is a problem with housing costs. Lowering housing costs would reduce homelessness and increase the economy, but you will not do this by giving out housing vouchers and new construction will not decrease rents. The reason is that there are too many restrictions against new construction which keeps housing costs high. In New York for instance, the city approved 30,000 new housing units in 1960, but only 21,000 new units for the entire decade of the 90’s. Also, when taxes collected by local authorities are sent away from the home base such as to the state or county level, local governments have no incentive to improve the local housing market such as by reducing regulation and improving the neighborhoods, so allowing local districts to keep more of their properties taxes at home will help the housing market. Look to Switzerland and Germany as models with high percentages of rents but low cost increases and happy tenants who stay in their places a long time. Britain built lots of houses but has so much regulation that housing prices keep increasing. Tokyo built even more homes but has a different regulatory scheme and prices stay steady. It is a complicated problem but there are some schemes that work. So far the US is on the wrong track and the Democrats who are raising hell about the issue are not coming up with solutions that will work if history is a guide. One thing you can take to the bank: The stigma of renting versus owning is really misplaced; renting is often a better deal over the long term

During the month of February, you’d have thought that Bernie Sanders was going to be the lead Democratic candidate. I decided to keep quiet and see if March, beginning with the South Carolina primary, would bring about a different result. I was glad that it did and am fine with Biden especially if he picks a good VP candidate, although I had wanted Bloomberg to come out on top, and am afraid of what will happen if and when Biden stumbles between now and November. He basically needs for some Fairy Godmother to be watching him so that we all get through this election without Trump getting re-elected. Sanders was an odd figure who rose to prominence 4 years ago because Hillary was such an unwanted candidate; Biden does not suffer from this malady and so it is far easier to avoid Sanders now. I’d like to think that even America’s enemies who thrive on seeing America in chaos would prefer to see a professional back in the White House and see things in Washington return to a more normal consistency. During the cold war, the two superpowers were rivals but liked the idea that each acted in fairly predictable ways. Right now the US is not acting predictably and everyone fears uncertainty more than anything else.

While I was out of the country, I watched Trump’s state of the union speech and saw how the Democrats had their fiasco with the Iowa caucuses. Unless you are of the 1% reading the New York Times which probably annotated his speech and pointed out all the lies, it was good theater on TV and sounded reasonable. Meaning most people who watched the speech probably liked it and did not like watching the Democrats sitting on their asses and looking like they were almost anti-American. What I can’t tell you is how many of Sanders voters who would be upset if he were not the candidate would actually have come out and voted in the first place even if he were. It appears that he has more followers than actual voters, even in the states that he won and this thesis was confirmed yesterday with the Michigan vote where Sanders won in 2016 but lost decisively to Biden this year. Biden has increased Democratic turnout over what it was 4 years ago across many demographics and Sanders has not. These are very clear signals that he is favored to beat Trump. Personally, I would want someone like Bloomberg sitting across from Putin or Xi rather than Trump or any of the Democrats running but evidently my opinion did not prevail. Black voters seemed to be willing to vote for Bloomberg and this is important because he needs their votes as blacks are 25% of Democratic voters, although they clearly preferred Biden and this is good because Hillary Clinton would be president today had more Blacks in key states been excited enough to vote for her. A third of Blacks voted for Trump and that ain’t gonna happen again. Bernie Sanders has his supporters who are vocal and active, but they represent a small portion of the overall vote in this country and would be creamed in a general election. The party knows it and they’re scared of Sanders.

As Global Thoughts readers know, I was strongly in favor of Michael Bloomberg’s run for president, but it is not hard to explain why he failed. It is surprising to me that such a calculating man erred in such an elementary way. A central rule of politics and leadership in general is that people want to follow a messenger with a compelling message. Bernie Sanders has a message of change that is compelling though he is a false Messiah. Bloomberg said offhandedly during a debate that the presidency is a managerial position – it is more than that. The American President is the leader of the Free World and has to inspire in times of crisis, and explain what kind of change he wants to deliver. Bloomberg took it for granted that people would see his brilliance and accomplishments and translate that into support for his presidency. He was wrong. One lady at a rally said to the NY Times that she wanted to vote for him but he didn’t smile and didn’t seem human enough for her to vote for him. She said if he would have at least smiled a bit, she would have been more willing to support him. I just feel that those two little stories explain why his $500 million didn’t really buy him all that much other than a victory in American Samoa in which 175 people voted for him. It would have been cheaper for him to give each of those people $3 million in cash That said, we’ll find out whether he was the impetus to accelerating the consolidation of Biden’s campaign which was looking unhinged when he entered the race, and whether it helped create focus and dislodge Sanders as the party’s leading candidate, and ultimately extricate the nation from Trump.

Bibi Netanyahu had a strong message and he worked hard to go after every single vote. He was justly rewarded with better results in this latest round of voting. Benny Gantz is a bland challenger who did not offer a compelling message and took for granted the idea that people would be exhausted with Bibi holding the nation hostage to his own criminal case and eventually vote against him. He did not realize that many voters do not care how guilty Bibi is; they think he is a good prime minister and don’t want to throw him out unless the new person will be better. I’m sure that a leaked video that circulated the last few days of the campaign showing Gantz’s campaign manager telling a rabbi that Gantz would be weak against the Arabs turned some voters against him. Israelis do not want a weak prime minister to face off in the Ultimate Fight against Iran, a conflict that we all know is soon to come. They know that Bibi is a bad-ass and they want a bad-ass in their corner in that seat. Gantz needs Lieberman to form a government; he needs both Lieberman (who hates Arabs) and the Arab Joint List party to form a government. Lieberman promised neither to cohabitate with Arabs or Ultra-Orthodox Jews in a government. He has to break at least one of those promises to be in the game unless he wants to sit with Bibi, and he hates him. The next prime minister of Israel will be decided by a man who will do what’s best for him and by a Mr. Gantz who will fail three times to form a government if he can’t figure it out. No wonder why the Arabs and Mr. Lieberman are talking to each other. Personally, I’ve said here that it makes no sense for moderate Israelis to say that keeping Arabs out of government is the way to go. There are responsible parties within that community and most Israeli Arabs want to play a role in the Israeli state; one reason they showed up to vote like never before was the recent publication of the Trump plan that put some of Israeli Arabs in a Palestinian state. Almost none of them want to be part of Palestine. I have no idea what the outcome will be, and Bibi is certainly getting the benefit of the virus to have a crisis to show he’s in charge.

I recently attended a briefing by Somer Cagaptay, a very senior level expert on Turkey who was touting his new book, Erdogan’s Empire, which I am making sure to read (although it’s pretty tedious reading). I’ve watched Turkey over the past 20 years with Erdogan’s up and downs and I visited the country about 20 years ago. It’s one of those countries that I observe with casual interest but realize that especially in this country what appears is not always the reality, so I tend to be cautious about what I believe to be true about the place.

Mr Cagaptay remarked that Erdogan, after surviving an attempted coup that almost killed him, was quite happy when Mr. Putin was the first foreign leader to call him afterward and ask how he was. Erdogan realized that if you look around the world at Venezuela, Syria and Iran, you see that trouble-makers that align with Russia never are allowed to fall, while countries that align with the US such as Egypt might well fall. Erdogan knows that if is ever defeated in an election, he and his family will be arrested afterward so losing at the ballot box is not an option for him. He is 66 and in good health and likely to be around for quite a while.

I asked Somer what he would do if he were an American president in 2021 trying to re-establish credibility in the world for America. Would he try to knock off Assad or Maduro and prove that siding with the Russians against the West is not advisable, or would he stick with dictators such as the Saudis and keep them steadfast and assured even if you knew you were on the wrong side of history and were part of the reason why 9/11 came up in the first place? It’s a tricky wicket because on one hand if you break it you own it (ie: Iraq after Saddam or Libya after Khaddafi) and America really wants to stay out of foreign entanglements which do us no good, and on the other hand you stir up resentment by the masses for backing dictators in return for maintaining the status quo and supposed stability. Egypt was an instance where it appeared that overthrowing Mubarak might be good for Egypt’s populace and it turned into a disaster when the guy who did totally screwed up and turned out to be an even worse dictator in disguise. America lost a lot of credibility in the region after that. Russia got a lot of credibility in the region for backing Assad when it appeared inevitable that he was going to fall. They also got a lot of credibility in our own backyard for backing Maduro after we backed an opposition leader who was close to taking power but couldn’t quite manage it and we basically left him hanging and the Russians came in hard core and backed up the incumbent. So what do you do?

Here’s a sensible reason to not do much. Putin had a price for his support. He demanded that Turkey buy his S-400 missile defense system which unnerved the rest of NATO. Turkey is the second largest army in NATO and an important ally, love Erdogan or hate him. The cost was small at $2.5 billion but Putin knew this would destabilize NATO. Erdogan had no choice but to buy it, although he had to give up F-35 planes on Turkish soil as the price from the rest of NATO. At first, Putin was helping out Turkey in the Syrian theater. Now they are at odds with each other, but Erdogan can’t go against Russia. He has not a single friend in the region at this point except for Qatar, which is also an outcast and which is the only power in force that also supports the Moslem Brotherhood, which he champions. When he got elected, his main foreign policy was going to be that Turkey would remain friends with everyone. So now you have the really ridiculous situation that Turkey sends all its trade on a ship to Haifa in Israel where stuff gets unloaded and shipped via Jordan eastward because none of the Arab countries around him will trade directly with Turkey. If you’ve noticed, Erdogan broke up the very strong alliance that Israel had with Turkey and had cut off relations with them for a number of years, so this is really nuts because if Israel cut off that trade route, Turkey couldn’t ship a darn thing eastward. Turkey’s economy is tanking after almost 20 years of constant growth and the world itself is not in a happy place this year. Erdogan is building palaces, surrounded by sycophants, putting his family in charge of economic ministries, and all of this spells trouble for him because the source of his power has been economic success. Turkey may well need a $10 billion bailout not too long from now, and Russia is not going to give it to him because they don’t have it. He will have to come to the West for it. So in my book, I would say that if I were dealing with Erdogan, I would not let the S-400 sale with Russia play into Putin’s hands. I’d say, OK, buy their stuff and do with it what all the Gulf states do with the military kit we give them – just keep it in a box and don’t turn it on. Or put NATO troops in charge of the hardware. As long as it ain’t gonna get used, who cares? Or sell it to some other country. He didn’t promise Putin that he would use it or keep it; just that he would buy it. And I would wait patiently for the bombastic Erdogan to come hat in hand to the West, which he surely will at some point, and then you can deal with him. Right now the Russians and Syrians are giving Erdogan a very hard time in Syria, Turkish soldiers are being killed and Erdogan is pretty much boxed in. He can try and throw refugees at Europe for leverage, but Greek soldiers are shooting people who cross the border. So Erdogan has to negotiate a face-saving solution with Russia, but with Russia having the upper hand.

So you might ask, how has Russia propped up Venezuela? Where’s the money coming from? The actual truth is that Maduro had to change his spots in order to not have his country go bankrupt because the one thing the Russians don’t have is cash. So if you’ve noticed, in Venezuela there is now more capitalism than there was a year ago and the government is giving back some of the companies that it earlier nationalized, albeit to a good extent to its cronies and of course Russia is getting some of it. Not enough to do well, but enough to survive and keep people happy enough so that at least the poverty and disaster level is not enough to get on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. It’s probably a “good enough” situation to keep the US out of it, and the US doesn’t really want to be in it. So in my view, the Russians get some concessions there, they basically expend assets propping Maduro up, but it’s a case of nuisance more so than anything else because as long as no military kit goes in there, it’s just another economic basket case in the hemisphere of no real use to anyone. If American goes in there, they might get back some companies that they lost, but then they’d be responsible to prop up some corrupt and weak government taking Maduro’s place. Nobody really cares so why start?

Travel Notes – London for Festive Season

If you want to fly upstairs on a 747, British Airways still has a number of those planes flying. Some of the seats don’t work but otherwise it’s a nice bird. And you get these big storage bins on the side of your seat; the 777 just has a little drawer that you can put some eyeglasses and some papers in. My wife’s seat didn’t work so they sent her a $400 coupon within a week; I got stuck in Copenhagen over the summer with a complete debacle on their part and they did absolutely nothing for me. If you book way in advance, the Heathrow Express is a really cheap ticket – 16 British pounds for the entire 4 of us one way on any train the day we chose and that’s from the terminal all the way to central London. It costs over $30 for us just to get on the monorail at JFK just to get to the subway, which is nuts after paying $1 billion in taxes to fund it. The Oyster card offers a 50% discount to kids ages 10-15 for up to 2 weeks at a time (Foreign Visitors Discount) – just approach someone at a tube station to put a code into the kiosk that sells you the oyster card and you get the discount. If you are a family of 4, it pays to take a taxi for short journeys, and from Paddington to hotels in the Mayfair district the taxi fare is about 10 pounds. We spent two weekends in London at two different hotels in the Mayfair area. Claridge’s Hotel offers a nice setup just a few blocks from Bond Street Station near Oxford Street or about 3 blocks from Selfridges and the flagship store of Marks and Spencer. Their pool and sauna were under renovation but their sister property the Connaught is a 5 minute walk away. Families can get 2^nd room at a 50% discount at off-peak times and this makes this hotel roughly the same price as the Langham. At peak times, this hotel seriously jacks up its prices and is out of the market. At least they ought to fix the toilets in the bathrooms, both of which did not work well. The family setup is like a 2 bedroom suite with a sitting room in between, breakfast is a la carte and the gym is not bad. The lobby parlor eating venue is beautiful and they decorate the place beautifully for the festive season. I was particularly happy that we had two rooms in our hotels because there are a lot of people from around the world who stay in these places who smoke and you can feel the second hand smoke in some of the rooms. In both hotels, I had to sleep in the second room to get away from the smoke odor, which is something I am very sensitive to. They do look after guests pretty well there. The Langham has better facilities in-house such as swimming pool, saunas and a better gym but it is a big sprawling place and you are a bit more of a number there, especially when it comes to getting a table. Breakfast is a buffet and we liked that better. The location is great, just 3 blocks from Oxford Circus and it is all around my favorite of the lot in London. We noticed a JW Marriott at Grosvenor Square a block from Claridges and that would be an excellent choice of location and probably a place you could use Marriott points. It has a Gordon Ramsey restaurant within. The American Embassy moved away from Grosvenor Square so that is no longer a factor (they are building some kind of hotel in its place). We found ticket brokers at hotels to be rather useless; there is less of a secondary market for seats to good shows in London than there is in New York. I wanted to see Magic Show Goes Wrong and couldn’t find any tickets no matter how many times I checked.

We attended sabbath services at Marble Arch synagogue – there are no external signs that say it is a synagogue and we wound up walking right past it and to another synagogue whose security guard sent us back to the other place. Security concerns forced them to remove signage which is pretty pathetic in a place like London. There was a very nice kiddush lunch after services but only about half a dozen young people at the service. The Rabbi was a rather good orator and deserved a bigger audience. We went to see Hamilton and I got 4^th row orchestra seats for about $120 a ticket a few months in advance and boy am I glad I didn’t pay NY prices to see this show, which was clearly not one of my favorites. The kids knew the songs and didn’t mind 2 hours of talking and singing in rap, but Karen and I didn’t care for it. We liked the one scene with the King of England singing his la-dee-dah song and the plot thickens in the second act, but I was watching all this stuff and having not much of an idea for the first half hour who was who (ie: you mean that guy is supposed to be George Washington?) and what they were saying. If the show were just a bunch of white people re-enacting history, nobody would care about this show and I get that. But there is something weird about making all these characters non-white and seeming to rewrite American history. I strongly suspect that the hype over this show is being driven by progressives eager to see American history being portrayed in a different way than it actually was.

Top level food court at Selfridges is still a great reasonable place to have dinner – choose what you want and they have a great juice bar and make stuff up while you watch. From fish and chips to pizza and crepes you can get a good meal for under $20. Rovi restaurant is part of the Ottolenghi empire of local restaurants and it was good. We’ve now tried Nopi and Rovi and both are worthwhile. Rovi is a few minutes walk from the Langham. The Imperial War Museum is worth 2 hours and the World War I exhibit is really good; they are still redoing WW II. It also has a good café and some nice items in the shop. Hatchers is a famous bookstore on Regent Street with an excellent children’s section and people working there who actually know the books. We found lots of titles Elizabeth hadn’t seen before to bring home. Next door was a famous food emporium (Fortnum & Mason) that was a total mob scene pre-Christmas so we just looked at its central staircase and went on. At Trafalgar Square, Chabad Hassidim were staging a first night of Chanukah party with a live band and kosher food and a Chanukah menorah lighting. We got some hot dogs and burgers and moved on. We realized we needed more luggage and Marks and Spencers had this great sale where you could get 3 suitcases, 2 of which fit inside the third, for 100 pounds. It was cheap luggage but it was a great deal. That evening we went to a night-time Christmas Village at Hyde Park all lit up with festive lights which had some crappy crafts but also had carnival food and some great rides such as a roller coaster from Germany with 5 loop-the-loops over which Jeremy was gaga. So of course Elizabeth and I had to go with him on it and the view from the swinging chairs was pretty. Not nearly as classy as Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens but good fun.

Next day we took the train from Euston station to Birmingham. If you take a taxi there, pass by Honey & Co. about half a mile away and pick up some great treats for the ride. It is a shop run by Israelis with really special bakery and other items that are superlative. The train gets you there in just over an hour and in our case it takes you to the airport station which is a few minutes walk to the NEC Convention center and casino and to our hotels where we were attending a conference. First class on these trains is beautiful and if you buy your ticket in advance at an off-peak time you can get a family of 4 on this journey for 65 pounds. The bus coming back from Birmingham on Boxing Day cost 90 pounds and took nearly 4 hours with all the traffic (the drivers don’t have access to GPS and in our case it would have saved us roughly 2 hours), and it’s insane that England still has their train service suspended on Boxing Day when so many people want to move around the country. There is a Hilton there with an indoor swimming pool and gym which is the best of the lot. A few minutes walk away is the Bear Gryllis Adventure Center which is really well done. You can do a great outdoor ropes course, indoor obstacle course, shooting range, indoor skydiving, the fear room, and other stuff. I did a level 3 obstacle course with the kids; not bad for a 53 year old.

I just want to add here while I mention that bit about no train service and roundabouts tying up traffic for miles, that instead of wondering whether Britain wants Brexit, I want to know why the rest of Europe hasn’t kicked the UK out for being such a backward country.

The Limmud conference we attended in Birmingham, England (about 3,000 people from around the world attending something like a Jewish-oriented fringe festival) was a great networker for people like my wife who know a lot of people through her work. My daughter enjoyed the conference and even participated on a teenage panel. My son hated it and sat in the room watching video games. The program for boys was too esoteric and not enough “boy” in it for his liking. He would have been happy with more dodgeball and less British 17^th century history and touchy feely subjects such as finding your confidence levels. The food of course was awful – baked beans and potatoes for breakfast, and again for lunch. Very little fruit was available. You had one get out of jail ticket you could use for a meat or chicken dinner but otherwise it was all veg for as many days as you could stand it. Gender neutral stuff has become all the rage at these conferences and bathrooms for men who only want to be there with other men (and similarly situated women) were hard to find. We were there 2 ½ days which was enough for me and the kids at least. I spoke at the conference and you can read my article on this site if you like. Go back to the homepage and click on the link if you like. The article is about the relationship between America and Israel, both between the countries and the peoples. The part I liked best was the Non-Gala gala which made fun of the official closing gala.

One speaker stood out; he spoke about the American industrial help that was given to the Nazis during the 1930’s because heads of large American companies such as Ford Motor and IBM were sympathetic to the Nazis. Without all that technology, they couldn’t have fought World War II or did all the nasty things they did. At its essence, you can’t make war unless you have money and/or technology. Basically, American companies brought about World War II by empowering what became their enemy. It is a good reason to care about the spread of technology and where it goes even today. If you want to give a dictatorship-run China the ability to perpetrate a Holocaust on its own people such as its Moslems, and if we wind up in World War III with China, it will be because American companies made it happen as the leading artificial intelligence centers run by American companies are now in China and not in the US. If it happens with Iran, it will be because of companies in Europe that sold them the technology to go nuclear when it is obvious that the people running Iran absolutely want to destabilize neighboring countries throughout the Middle East and send terrorist operatives all over the world. I just watched some speeches from a ceremony marking the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and it is striking how people emerging from World War I did not want to see war happen again only to see in their own generation World War II. And even today you can see the slide toward the conditions that made World War II possible. Nobody wants to learn from history because everyone is so smug living in the present and thinking they are reinventing the world and that evil exists in those who see the world differently than they do; it is not the act that creates the evil today but the tribe you come from that determines your evilness. If you are a Democrat, then Republicans are evil. And vice versa. If other people are caught in the middle such as victimized minorities, then they have it coming to them if they are not from your tribe.

One speaker referred to another famous survivor who espoused what he called the 11^th commandment: Thou shall not be Indifferent. Auschwitz did not fall from the sky; it came about gradually because as conditions became worse, people accepted incremental change and became immune to the fact that conditions were deteriorating. When the world had a conference at Evian about a Jewish refugee problem in 1938, none of the 50 countries involved except for the Dominican Republic wanted more Jews. Hitler saw the indifference and proceeded to speed up his plans to dehumanize and exterminate Jews. What concerns me in today’s America is that people are indifferent to what Trump and his Republican followers are doing; they are indifferent to the fact that he is whittling away at America’s and the world’s institutions and people are just accepting it. If he gets another term, he’ll speed up his plans. I could go on and on about this but I think you get the picture. History repeats itself and I would just like to see America reassert its values and regain the respect of the world that looks at a country that appears to have lost its way but doesn’t itself realize it. Why have we become cynical and immune to babies being separated from their parents at the US border? Are we innately that mean or have we become conditioned to becoming that mean?

Back in London, Ruben’s restaurant (the only kosher one in central London) is back in business and was rather good. Our kids were thrilled to see some good food again. My daughter went to a Gulf-region friend’s apartment for a sleep-over with their daughters, and I took care of Elmo. We were supposed to go to the Arcelor Mittal slide in the Olympic park (a real twisty slide around a huge outdoor sculpture which looks fun but is over in 40 seconds), but their lift was broken for the day so we had to pass on it and instead rode the light rail from a nearby station to Canary Wharf (things to see and do if you’ve never been), and then jump on the tube to the London Bridge area where you could go atop the Shard. The observatory is a waste of a lot of money and you can just go to to the lobby of the Shangri-La hotel and look around for free, which is what we did, since I had stayed there before and knew you could do this. London’s City Airport is nearby and might be a good alternative to Heathrow; British Airways flies there from JFK in NY. We visited Covent Gardens that has some interesting stalls in the middle court, and most of the vendors who were selling stuff we really liked the first weekend were gone on holiday and so my strong advice is that if you come to London at this time of year, go to Covent Gardens before Christmas or else the stuff will be gone afterward. The cookies and gelato places will be around (look for Ben’s Cookies and Morreli’s Gelato, both at the end of the covered market aisle), but that’s the icing on the cake, not the batter. I personally like the hand-painted silk ties by Jane Ireland (there is a website also at janeireland.com); I bought one in August and liked it so much that I took another two in December. There’s a stall selling scarves that my wife likes a lot.

At Leicester Square, there are all these places called “Official Half Price Ticket Booth” and they are come-ons. The only real half price booth is the TKTS booth in the square itself and hardly anyone actually reaches it because they don’t know it’s there. That’s where you go for the cheap tickets at the last minute. We had booked Everybody is Talking about Jamie – it’s a good show but you could be really offended if the idea of a teenage boy wanting to be a drag queen is not to your liking. The boy’s mother sings a song called “He’s my Boy” which brings down the house and nary a dry eye is left. There is also a Moslem Pakistani girl character who is also being bullied and allies with Jamie, and she is very good at her part. This is a top British show that will probably not make it to Broadway and useful if you want to see something in London that is not the same as what you see in NY. At the TKTS line, we got orchestra seats for “& Juliet” for 29 pounds each and we had no idea if we’d like the show. The kids loved it and Karen and I liked it more than we expected. It features lots of songs from the past 20-30 years and is a “what if” Shakespeare had changed the ending of Romeo & Juliet. You gotta have an open mind here again but it’s a good show and it’s what I love about London – you take your chances on something you never heard of at the TKTS booth and 9 times out of 10 you’re gonna love it. Last time we visited this time of year we went to a circus on the Leicester Square (La Soiree) which was not there this year; instead there was a different circus called Le Cirque but it was for ages 16 and up.

The British Museum is best avoided during the festive season. We arrived for a private tour and it was a complete zoo. We were so happy that our guide showed up an hour late and we had cancelled the tour in the meanwhile. The lines to get in are around the block, there is a security check and there were 50 people standing around the Rosetta Stone all taking selfies (most of them Asians) and we weren’t going to get anywhere near it even with a guide so it would have been a complete waste. There are just tons of Asians visiting now and it is insane. This museum needs either to move to timed tickets or start charging people serious money to manage the demand. We were supposed to see the Soames Collection which is like the Mansion on O Street in Washington DC, but I didn’t know you have to reserve 3 months in advance. Again, it’s free but it’s impossible so what good is it? Anyway, Here are two guides for the British museum which is only worthwhile if you have somebody taking you through it: Viator’s guide is Natacha Adjovi at 44.759.196.9588 and then there is other guy named Lawrence Owens who is a professional archeologist whose prices might be sky-high but he looked very interesting and was booked to someone else that day. His phone number is 079.8017.4014 and both of them have websites in case their phone numbers change.

Early Saturday evening, we transferred with an Uber to the Sofitel at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. It is a good airport hotel connected to the terminal by a walkway that takes about 3 minutes. If you go there the night before, you can check in your bags while the airport is dead quiet and have your boarding pass in hand for the next morning. Still, Terminal 5 is a zoo and in the morning we would have never made our flight had we had to check our bags, even with business class. The fast track security is awful because as I’ve said before, once they remove your bag from the line (and they remove almost everyone’s), there are only 1 or 2 people checking the bags and you have to sit there and wait. You can avoid this by putting your liquids in one Ziploc bag or just putting it in checked luggage. It took half an hour to get out of there and then the train to the gates and it took almost an hour to get from the airport entrance to the gate. Which basically means you’ll never visit the lounge and there is hardly any food to buy at the C-gates which means that if you didn’t think to buy stuff in the main building, you might be very hungry for the duration of your long-haul flight. I think it is an awful airport and I hope that JetBlue which is supposed to start flying to London next year avoids the place. BA has a monopoly at Heathrow so nobody cares if you have a crappy flying experience there and even though you pay hundreds of dollars per ticket in airport fees. I have two domains basucks.com and heathrowsucks.com and I’m wondering if I care enough to use them. I do have a life though.

Travel Notes: Bahamas and St. Barths, Sea Island in Georgia (US)

I think that Z-line seats on business class planes are going out of style; you have to step over people if you are in a window seat and it is a real pain. One thing you can do here is fly nonstop to Nassau in roughly 9 hours from London; there is a daily flight and by 3pm you can be in a hotel in Nassau enjoying the sun and beach, which is really a great idea after 10 days of dreary wet London where sunrise is at 8 and sunset is at 4. The flight stops in Nassau and continues to Cayman, but Cayman is really expensive at this time of the year. Beware: BA charges for Wifi even in business class. Upon arrival, it took a long time to clear customs because they put out so few people to process the arrivals. Fortunately, the Bahamar resort is a 10 minute taxi ride from the airport (about $40 or so) and the Hyatt allows you to come at the festive season with only a 3 night minimum. The other hotels in the area all want 7 nights. You have to book for New Years weekend almost a year in advance otherwise the hotel is sold out by the end of January for next year, so if you’re inspired by this article to go there, it’s probably too late by now for this year. The ocean was cool but not cold, the kids had fun because there was always something to do, and there was no good reason to stay in the Rosewood at 3x the price; the Hyatt was perfectly good and the food at all the outlets was better than expected. Certainly better than Atlantis, and next year when Bahamar finishes its water park, Atlantis is going to have some real competition. We went to a Junkanoo dinner buffet and show which was something to do, but pretty pricey for what we got. There was a New Years Eve party which was very well done but again quite expensive and really for a younger crowd. It was really noisy at one point and I just sat outside. The midnight fireworks were superb and put Disney in its place. The next day we flew United back to NY and the snacks offered were the Biscoff biscuits and pretzels. I took neither and the guy next to me did the same. The guy at the window asked for both and the flight attendant said he had to choose only one. I went to the purser and said like what kind of crap was that? Especially on a flight on New Years Day where everyone was paying 3x the going rate to be on that flight. The purser said that the flight attendants are hoarding snacks because the airline shorts them so much that they often run out of snacks 10 rows before the end of the plane. JetBlue lets you have as much as you want of anything they offer and United can’t even put enough of these crappy 5 cent snacks on board? They may be spending millions of dollars trying to reinvent their image but they will only be as good as the flight attendant passing out pretzels to the guy next to you.

We were supposed to go to the Homestead in Virginia for winter skiing but as of mid-January there was no snow so at the last minute we went to Sea Island on the coast of Georgia midway between Savannah and Jacksonville airports (about 90 minutes from each). The Cloisters is a good family friendly resort. It was almost deserted when we got there as we came at the end of the Martin Luther King holiday weekend and temperatures went down into the 40’s during the day for a cold snap which is rare but it happens. Nevertheless, we did family things such as go bowling and biking to see the mansions along the main road, see the stars shine brightly at night, walk along the huge empty beach and play volleyball, the kids went clay shooting and Elizabeth is a rather good shot at this point, and took a guided nature walk. There is a beach club with lots of pools but it was too cold for us to go there. The gym there is among the top 10% of any hotel gym anywhere (with an indoor pool) and the food was rather good. There is also a very nice spa. At this time of the year, rooms and flights are cheap and you have the ability to be spontaneous. In the summer, it’s a zoo and everything has to be planned weeks if not months in advance. The Lodge at Sea Island is for honeymooners who want to be near a golf course. We’d go again but at this time of year hoping for luckier weather; last week the temperatures were in the 70’s and 80’s.

I flew with Jeremy to Orlando to see the Pro Bowl, an all-star game of American football. Because the game is just for fun, nobody cares and tickets are dirt cheap. It is amazing how much it costs to see an NFL game in the US even in a secondary market like Nashville, Tennessee. Orlando has grown as a city with a nice downtown and a pretty lake in the middle where you can go paddle-boating and see a weekend farmer’s market. We were in a hotel (the Grand Bohemian) that was hosting the LA Clippers basketball team. It was very funny; I saw these guys walking down the hall getting up for breakfast and putting on their shirts in the hallway. I asked them if they were there to play ball or watch ball – the guys could have been the most famous players in the world but I had no idea who they were. I didn’t know if they were fans or players. The guys said they were there to play. Their breakfast was probably better than mine. The football game was actually darn good and we saw memorable plays and a closely fought game. The weather was perfect, sunny and 70 degrees and Jeremy was thrilled even though we got nowhere close to anyone to autograph the football he brought.

I went to St. Barths for a few days to see how things had changed since my previous visit there about 10 years ago and how they were recovering from a serious hurricane a few years ago. At St. Maarten airport, if you have a printed boarding pass in your hand, you can bypass immigration and customs and go directly to departure security to get to your connecting flight. It took me 20 minutes to go through the airport because my Win-Air online check in did not work, but I got in early and quickly enough to get out on an earlier connecting flight on the commuter flight to St. Barths which is all of 10 minutes long. They tend to use larger Dash-9 planes rather than Cessna’s but the arrival into St. Barths is still insane through the mountain peaks. Get a front row seat for a real thriller of a ride and don’t be intimidated by anyone throwing a telephone camera in front of your face to film the landing. Wear shorts and tee shirts on those planes; there is no A/C and it’s hot. Upon arrival you see the best-dressed passport control ladies anywhere who all look like my late college political science professor. Cheval Blanc is probably the best resort on the island at this moment; Guanahani is still renovating and Eden Roc is a bit of a zoo unless you like it. Food at Cheval Blanc is unusually good for a hotel. It is a full service resort with all good amenities and it truly is a hideaway. Le Toiny does not have a beach and Le Serrano is not in the same league although the latter has a nice lagoon for kids to swim in. Bungalows are a good category of room here. Also, the hotel is 10 minutes drive from either the airport or center of town on a quiet road. The other hotels are on the main road with lots of traffic. Gaunahani is supposed to be good with kids; Cheval is more for couples. There is a supermarket in center of town that is open all day long and town is open everyday except Sunday now. You can become a resident here if you live here 6 months a year for 5 years. Then you pay no income tax. But it’s expensive here; a mango in the American Gourmet store in center of town cost 13 Euros, twice as much as in Zurich.

We visited the Ocean Club at Nassau during Presidents Week in mid-February and I asked the kids to compare the Hyatt at Bahamar to the Ocean Club on Paradise Island about half an hour drive apart. The results were very close. Bahamar is ten minutes from the airport, will have a water park a year from now, has a fairly calm beach with water sports, lots of food choices that are good, and some fun pools, one of which includes a rock about 10 feet high you can jump off of and an aquarium you can see from a pool. They have a great gym and a spa, but you have to pay to use the steam room if you don’t have a spa appointment (and use the one in the coed area because it works much better). You have to walk a lot and it is not a quiet relaxing place. The Ocean Club is near Atlantis about 40 minutes from the airport (and when the cruise ships come in the transfer is a nail-biter), but that park has become a zoo with tons of cruise ship people and in-house guests get no priority so you are advised to go to the park around 3pm for the last 2 hours of the day after most ship-to-shore people have left but you still stand in long lines and I think it’s a rip-off of a ticket at close to $150 a person if you had to pay for it (Ocean Club guests get in for free). Transferring to the hotel from Atlantis can take 45 minutes if you are not lucky with the shuttle and you have to bring photo ID with you to get in (and I was not thrilled to have left it at the front desk and then for the desk safe to be locked without anyone there after I returned to pick it up after the 5pm closing). The Ocean Club has only one place to eat dinner and it is slow and very pricey. The surf more often than not is too rough to swim but you get a quiet beach. You can walk around the property and see hardly anyone around you with plenty of beautiful gardens. The gym is smaller but fine and the resident trainer knows your name and how you looked compared to your last visit. The rooms are a bit nicer; if you book in advance on a non-refundable basis, you can get garden rooms at a price comparable to Bahamar and in fact those rooms offer more privacy than ocean view rooms. In my opinion, the two properties are totally different experiences; they are both compelling. The kids enjoy the movement of the Bahamar but my daughter also enjoyed chilling out at the Ocean Club sitting alone on a beach just watching the ocean and listening to music.

We were supposed to go skiing in Tremblant, Canada in late March where I expected good value from the Canadian dollar and a sure bucket of fresh snow in a place that gets 200 inches a year. But with the virus scare, you wouldn’t want to be quarantined in a 350 room hotel if the wrong person walked in, and I wouldn’t want to be locked out of the US if they quarantined arrivals from Canada. So we are just sitting this one out and will hopefully enjoy skiing next year. Air Canada doesn’t seem to be want to let people out of their tickets, so I expect a fun fight ahead. They are granting changes on new tickets being bought, but not the old ones.

Synopsis:

I have a question for you – how do you know who your friends are? Are they people who trade favors with you? Are they people who share your values? Now, let’s be honest here. We’re talking friends, not acquaintances or Facebook Friends. Somebody once said a real friend is someone who would lend you $10,000 he didn’t have extra. Would a real friend take a bullet for you or is that asking too much? Let’s say you really get along as friends, but you know that this person wouldn’t do a thing for you, would you still say you’re friends?

People have friends, and countries have allies. America and Great Britain have something their leaders have called a “Special Friendship.” Allies expect each other to spend billions of dollars and send young adults off to die for them. At least they expect that. Can people count on anything these days?

The reason I’m asking the question is that right now Israel is asking itself a question – can it really count on America as its so-called ally to really be there for it? To all appearances, Donald Trump is a fair-weather friend who talks a good game but isn’t there for his friends. When the Kurds needed him, he said that they never really fought for us anyway in World War II and were just a bunch of mercenaries, and just left them stone-cold after they gave over 14,000 lives to help the US fight ISIS. When Iran hit Saudi Arabia’s oil fields wiping out 50% of their production for at least a couple of weeks, Trump said well, we’re not being attacked, so who cares? If Trump can’t deliver for Saudi Arabia, a country that he has totally otherwise sucked up to in expectation of future benefits, where does that leave a country like Israel?

Trump will probably be gone in a year replaced by a Democrat but you can’t underestimate the Democrats’ ability to blow an election just like Labor did here. Worse comes to worse, you get 4 more years of him but then he must constitutionally be gone. If past is prologue, you can then expect a Democratic president. But the Democratic party doesn’t talk about Israel like it used to. None of the major candidates except Biden, who may or may not be a viable candidate, are particularly friendly to Israel. Bloomberg is friendly to Israel but we don’t know if he will win his party’s support. In the past, you could expect that between AIPAC and Jewish voters, the Democratic party would be mindful of Israel and Jewish voters and of Jewish money. According to a recent study by the Ruderman Foundation for American Jewish Studies at the University of Haifa, 50% of Democratic and 25% of Republican money in 2016 came from Jewish sources. And that 25% figure was calculated before Sheldon Adelson started putting in his money behind Trump which was huge. But today’s Jewish money is not like the Jewish money of a generation ago. There are quite a few Jewish billionaires like Mark Zuckerman at Facebook but they don’t necessarily care about Israel; Pete Buttigieg was getting the most Jewish contributions so far this year and he is not particularly friendly to Israel, and neither is Bernie Sanders.

And the attitudes of Jews and non-Jews in the US are quite different along generational and partisan lines. In the last midterm election, according to a poll taken that day, only 4% of American Jews said that Israel was one of their top 2 most important issues. 65% said they were somewhat or very emotionally attached to Israel; I don’t know much of that figure was “somewhat” but it is also clear that 35% said they were not emotionally attached to Israel at all. This is in line with another survey a year earlier by the American Jewish Committee that found that only 25% of Jews listed Israel as one of their top 3 issues, although more than 70% agreed strongly or somewhat that caring about Israel was a very important part of being Jewish. Again though, 30% did not care. We know that the number of people who don’t care or who feel less supportive of Israel goes up drastically the younger they are and it matters which party they support. According to a recent Pew Research poll published in many major publications, only 27% of Americans under the age of 30 think favorably of the current Israeli government. 61% of Republicans and just 26% of Democrats had favorable views of the Israeli government. A generation ago those partisan percentages would have been flipped. Let’s see how this plays out with Bernie Sanders, who has a good deal of Jewish support. He has been extraordinarily critical of the Israeli government by the standards of American politics, even suggesting that some of the US aid to Israel should instead go to Gaza. But at the same time, he insists that he is pro-Israel and criticizes those on the left who would deny its right to exist as a Jewish state. Those two positions were designed to meet the threshold of what it takes to get the support of the majority of American Jews. If you are Israel, that’s not a heck of a lot to bank on for your future support if you favor Likud or even the Israeli Center, but it is enough to keep you out of the cross-hairs of being considered Anti-Israel for the majority of American Jews.

The odds are that a new government will not look all that much different than the present government, even if Benny Gantz has a softer edge than Bibi Netanyahu. Today’s American young voter is much more apathetic toward Israel, Judaism and progressive or liberal in their politics. Even the younger generation of Evangelicals is less pro-Israel than their parents, and the truth is that Trump cares more about pleasing evangelical voters than Jewish voters because Republicans know that whatever they do, at least 70% of Jews will never vote Republican, but Israel is an important issue for evangelical voters, of whom there are many more and who reliably vote Republican when they vote so Republican leadership have to keep them engaged. For the past 20 years, Israeli leaders knew this and put their eggs in the evangelicals’ basket. I once asked someone who was close to Prime Minister Sharon’s spokesman why they wanted to get in bed with all these evangelicals who were only really interested in Israel in the hopes that someday the Judgement Day will come, that this kind of government would hasten the end of days, and that at that time all the Jews will either become Christians or die and go to hell. He told me that they figured that if and when Jesus comes back from the dead we can talk about it, but meanwhile we’ll take whatever support we can get. That’s a practical approach but it was one thing to be friendly with them and to play up to them – and beyond paying Sheldon Adelson back, the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem was meant to suck up to Evangelicals — and yet another for Bibi Netanyahu to side with Republicans in American domestic politics, particularly when he came to Congress to make a speech directly challenging Obama’s deal with Iran. Democratic leadership have not forgiven him for that intervention. It would be naïve to say that America doesn’t try to influence Israeli politics but secretly funding non-governmental organizations that supported the Labor Party is different than having a prime minister making a speech in front of Congress contradicting a major presidential initiative.

For the next 45 minutes or so, I’m going to discuss this in much more detail now and some of what I say will be very direct, extremely cynical and perhaps disturbing to those who have strong feelings about Israel, but I want you to know that I’m not taking sides here and I’m trying to point out what I see as a strategic issue and you have to be brutally honest in order to be strategically wise and not get caught with your pants down. I am not trying to make a moral argument here. I am fully supportive of the country of Israel, whatever kind of country it turns out to be. I want Israel to succeed and have visited the country and contributed only to non-ideological, non-religion-promoting and non-political charities for over 30 years, but I won’t shy away from facts that I think matter to fully and hopefully you will feel honestly analyze a subject of interest.

Just so we understand where I’m coming from, here’s where I’m going to wind up at the end. I’m going to say that Netanyahu, who for the past several years was more interested in his own political career and ideology than he really cared about the country’s long term future, made many moves that were in the country’s or HIS short-term interests but that clashed against the kinds of values that serve as the basis of a lasting friendship between America and Israel. It might get him plaudits on Fox News and Israelis might be blocking out other news networks such as the BBC that they don’t like to watch, but it has meanwhile alienated roughly 90% of the American Jewish community as well as Americans in the Democratic leadership and even in the military and intelligence communities. He has done things that make Israel seem unreliable as an ally. Fox News looks important but it is increasingly talking to a demographic that is disappearing and it knows it because it is making changes in its board of directors that reflect an American that is not white and over age 70. Right now those people vote more than younger people do and so that demographic matters and is of great financial success to the owners of Fox who literally create and shape news to addictingly appeal to this demographic, but it is not America’s future and it will become clear all of a sudden at some tipping point that this is true. You will literally wake up one morning the day after an election and realize that America has changed.

America has also changed its values as its demographics change and doesn’t see Israel the same way its parents did. There is no chance today that if Israel were under Iranian nuclear attack that people would run to emergency prayer services in their synagogues and buy huge quantities of Israeli bonds like they did in the 1973 Yom Kippur war which I still remember. Just getting a whole generation of increasingly agnostic Jews into a synagogue even on Yom Kippur would be a major project today. Israel’s demographics are also changing – here are some disturbing figures from the Shoresh Institute for Socioeconomic Research in Israel. For every university graduate who leaves the country, 4.5 didn’t come back in 2017; in 2012 that figure was 2.5. This is important because there are 130,000 graduates a year in a country of over 8 million people and something like 20% of the population pay over 90% of the taxes and 50% pay no income tax at all. The less education, the more right-wing the population will be and the less interest there is in being a democracy. The mortality rate from infectious disease in Israel has doubled in the past 20 years because there are fewer doctors and the country’s hospitals are congested at the highest rate in the developed world. The numbers are not going to get any better as Israel puts more money into paying off coalition partners and to its defense than to research and development, education and health care, and these kinds of priorities are obviously not making its best performers feel that they have a future there. Israel is great at start-ups but then the companies get bought up or move abroad as they grow. Earlier generations of Israelis were more European Ashkenazi in nature that had more in common with their Jewish brethren back in America and wherever they were dispersed after World War II; the future of Israel is going to be more Russian, Mizrachi, Haredi Ultra-Orthodox and Israeli Arab, and the Ashkenazim are not having nearly as many kids and are angling to get outta there – who exactly are we going to be supporting in Israel anyway? They are not going to be people who have a lot in common with us. Yes, they’re Jewish but increasingly the question will be, what do we Jews in America have in common with them and do they care about us the same way they want us to care about them? Later I’ll talk about some of those statistics and they are also worrying.

By the way, these demographics are also changing similarly in Arab countries. Arabs in the Middle East are also less into religious parties and religion, especially among the young. Participation in religious parties is down by a third in the past 5 years in the region; more specifically, down 50% in Tunisia, 25% in Algeria and 20% in Egypt. Egypt is particularly striking because it is a place where religion is really part and parcel of ordinary people’s lives. Participation in Friday prayers in Iraq is down by a third. So some of these changes are universal to all 3 monotheistic religions.

Obviously, the reason we are sitting in this room today is that you too can see the writing on the wall. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince MBS went out on a limb with Trump saying he would obliterate Iran and now the prince can’t say anything even though Trump is a paper tiger and it is obvious that Iran is emboldened and going to attack Saudi Arabia again, next time worse. Netanyahu put up posters all around the country showing him buddy-buddy with Trump. Neither Netanyahu or MBS can say anything against Trump for fear of making themselves look like idiots. Since Netanyahu failed twice in putting together a government, Netanyahu’s phone calls to Trump are not being returned at this point and Vladimir Putin won’t release an Israeli being kept in a prison as a bargaining chip on a trumped up charge because he doesn’t want to give Netanyahu anything to crow about in an election campaign at this point now that Bibi is damaged goods. Netanyahu must be mighty disappointed because he ran off to Moscow almost 2 dozen times to sidle up to Putin. Netanyahu’s whole foreign policy revolved around the idea that he was a master player that would keep the country safe because he could play everyone else off so skillfully. Well, the gig is up but meanwhile Bibi has left a whole mess behind for the next guy to clean up.

For example:

1. He’s embraced anti-semites and leaders of autocratic countries such as the Philippines, Hungary and Brazil. They used him to say how anti-semitic can we be if we are friendly with Israel. I’m not sure what Israel got in return from these countries other than that both Bibi and the leader of Hungary don’t like George Soros who was operating in Hungary and has been thrown out. All these stories that show Israeli companies selling spyware to dictators around the world spying on their own citizens from Mexico to Saudi Arabia plus the embrace of all these dictators causes people to wonder which side Israel is on when it comes to the good guys in the world versus the bad guys.
2. He’s passed various legislation in the country that sticks it to Israel’s Arab citizens saying that it is a Jewish state and that they are not co-equals as citizens. It may have been done in practice for all these years, but passing a law that says so to get the support of racist coalition partners to shore up a failing government is a great way to show the world that Israel is not practicing what it preaches about being a democracy with equal rights for all its citizens when in fact Israeli Arabs have lots of nice things to say about being Israelis and most of them certainly don’t want to be citizens anywhere else in the region.
3. Israel has been harassing and denying entry to Jews who say or write liberal opinion pieces that the government doesn’t like. This did not used to happen. We are not talking about crazy liberals; we are talking about people who are respectable members of the Jewish community except that they are journalists, which as you know rate even lower than lawyers. I see one of them in an Orthodox shul he regularly attends and his kid is in my kid’s class at a Jewish day school. Israel denied entry to two elected Democratic members of Congress because it did not like their opinions about Israel. It used to be that Israel’s strategy was to say come and visit and see for yourself, and people would often reconsider after doing so. Now it’s just stay away. And it was not lost on observers that Bibi did this as a sop to Trump who didn’t like these Democrats.
4. Bibi had a deal with Reform and Conservative Jews to use the Robinson’s Arch area near the Western Wall as an egalitarian prayer space. Right now you cannot have a Bat Mitzvah at the Kotel and 90% of American Jews are not Orthodox and even quite a few Orthodox want to be able to attend an egalitarian service or participate in a celebration where women are not stuck behind a partition as spectators and where a girl can perform in a Bat Mitzvah ceremony such as to read from the Torah. Under pressure from the ultra-orthodox to keep his coalition intact, he welched on the deal. The area is now under “renovation” expected to last forever. Try to tell 90% of American Jews that you can’t find a single place near the Kotel for them to have a bar or bat mitzvah where they feel comfortable and nobody else has to notice them?
5. Israel’s ultra-orthodox rabbis have been really on the warpath, telling prominent Orthodox rabbis in America that they don’t recognize their conversions. People such as Rabbi Lookstein of KJ on the East Side who has led over 100 missions to Israel were told they were not good enough. At least El Al bought a full page ad in a dinner journal honoring him. There is a constant stream of disgusting statements coming from religious authorities in this government that blame the Holocaust on non-religious Jews and use very insulting imagery to refer to non-orthodox streams of Judaism. When the terrorist shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh, the religious authorities in Israel who put out a press release about the news called it a “community center” because they didn’t want to call a conservative synagogue a place of prayer.
6. Trump has backed anti-semites, such as the neo-nazis who did things in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Netanyahu has given them respectable cover. When Israel sent officials to pay their respects to that synagogue in Pittsburgh, locals viewed Israel as instigators to the terrorism and refused to accept anyone from the Israeli delegation. The only person who greeted the Israeli cabinet minister who visited Pittsburgh was another Israeli official. Digest that for a second – somebody shoots up a synagogue in America, the Israelis are viewed as having been part of the cause, and are told in no uncertain terms that their condolences are not welcome.
7. Israel’s politics have become so cynical that Jewish and governmental agencies abroad are never quite sure who really represents what in Israel. For instance, Knesset members will approach foreign governments to try and cut side-deals in order to claim credit for it for themselves as they jockey for position within the party. The government will ask for more money given for a line item and then cut the budget that it used to use for that line item to make up for the extra money. It’s very embarrassing when governments around the world have to deal with Israel and find themselves being used as pawns for domestic political purposes. Israel’s politicians used to fight each other at home but have a unified front abroad. Its leaders put the country first; not any more. Now it’s every person for themselves right up to Numero Uno at the top. I’m not naming names and giving examples, but in real life what is going on is worse than you can ever imagine using Holocaust survivors as pawns, for example in negotiations with Germany and in the US.
8. AIPAC used to be pro-whatever government was running Israel. Now it only supports governments that agree with what you would call right-wing policies. But most Jews don’t agree with those policies and people with plenty of money have had enough of this. So they are backing other groups such as J Street which are too far left for many people’s comfort. It used to be that almost every politician showed up to the roll call at AIPAC’s annual dinner because it was the place you had to show up and be counted. Now, Democrats will avoid AIPAC as a badge of honor and you can be sure they will show up at J Street to prove their progressive credentials. AIPAC makes noise with its 18,000 attendees but it’s a distorted picture because it is really small potatoes against the whole of American Jewry. This is a bad thing because a divided American Jewish community can be played off against each other and it won’t be good for Israel. Half a century ago, the Jews formed the Conference of Major Jewish Organizations to make sure they spoke to official Washington and the rest of the world with one voice. Jews by themselves are not so powerful that they can afford to put themselves in a position to be divided and conquered. For the past several decades, Malcolm Hoenlein was executive director of this Conference of Presidents and he ran a tight ship and was a really good player of the game. He is retiring and the new guy is a technocrat from a small-fry organization and not of the same political suavivity. Jewish community Federations around the country used to send a lot of funds to the United Jewish Appeal which gave its money to Israel. Most of that is gone because Jews can’t agree on what they want to fund in Israel. Now people send their monies to various causes on the left and right that they agree with; the government though is trying to shut down causes that they don’t agree with. So Jewish money going to Israel ain’t what it used to be and the degree to which Israel was an emotional issue for people is going out the door. Yes, the Orthodox support Israel 110% but it was not their money that helped build the country and a couple thousand people visiting on frequent flyer and Starwood points on Jewish holidays and during vacation periods is just not moving the needle for Israeli businesses that rely on tourists year round as the number of missions going to Israel decrease overall.
9. Chinese companies have been buying a lot of Israeli companies. All kinds of companies. Russia has also been interested but Israelis have been circumspect about taking Russian money because they know that Russia wants to get inside Israel’s political system to destabilize and corrupt it. Meanwhile, if you accept Israel’s explanation, some idiot supposedly decided to give the Chinese a huge contract to build and maintain Haifa’s new port for 25 years. The American military docks nuclear submarines there and so does Israel. The Chinese dug the Carmel Tunnels in Haifa a decade ago. Everyone knows that the Chinese are making moves all around the world to acquire technology, spy on people, get control over commodities and impose their policies on governments around the world through creating debt traps, inserting military assets into strategic places, planting moles inside governments, companies and universities, and stealing technology. The US and Europe, after a quarter century of trying to engage China and hoping that constructive engagement would lead to a more open China, has become disillusioned and realizes that China is playing dirty and won’t stop. Russia might be annoying and clever at making trouble using few resources, but they are pipsqueaks economically. China threatens to become the world’s #1 economy and they are not fighting fair to get that dominance. China is now becoming Public Enemy #1 in America on a bipartisan basis, meaning both Democrats and Republicans are very concerned about China. I’m not saying this is correct or the best way to manage the problem, but this is the current climate and China for its own part is whipping up nationalism in its country to cover up for its own shenanigans. The Americans went to Israel and said if you give the port of Haifa to China, they are going to spy on our submarines and we’re not going to dock there anymore. The Israeli cabinet met about it over the summer and decided to do nothing about it except to study the matter. They are supposed to meet around now to decide what to do and I don’t know what they did, but the damage is mostly done.
10. The contract was signed a long time ago and evidently Israel must have known exactly what it was doing because just last week it was announced that Israel’s first private power station will be built by Chinese companies. A Chinese firm is digging the underground section of the Tel Aviv Light Rail which runs only dozens of meters from the General Staff and Military Intelligence headquarters. This project is considered by most Israeli military and intelligence experts a major security risk. I want to assume the Israelis are not idiots but I’m not sure I can say that – Yossi Melman, one of the country’s top journalistic experts in intelligence matters, writing recently in Haaretz quotes a Professor Shaul Horev, the director of Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center at the University of Haifa. Last year he criticized having the Chinese get a concession to build and maintain the Haifa port. He is also a retired rear admiral who was in charge of the submarine fleet, managed the construction of submarines in Germany and headed the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. When Melman asked him why he didn’t object to the Chinese going into Haifa port while he was in charge of all these things, he said “I didn’t know. It was a project run by the Transportation Ministry.” So you really do have wonder if anyone is really on top of what goes on in that country? If we want to think that it is not chaos and that the Israelis have a method to their madness, then in the overall context of things, Netanyahu probably figured that looking forward to the next generation, China is a better bet than the US. China is winning the war on 5G technology and the US is fighting a losing war at trying to get countries to line up and boycott it, China’s economy is growing and the Americans are not investing in anything like infrastructure or promoting immigration and all America has done for 40 years is experience political gridlock and argue among itself. China is not a democracy with a bunch of liberals that can never be pleased; you know who to talk to in order to get what you need and the Chinese are capable of getting stuff done quickly and thinking 20 years ahead whereas America runs in 4 year spurts with each president rewriting history and Congress never agreeing to a budget from year to year. He probably figured that China was the future for Israel more so than America. Or perhaps the Chinese paid people off and we’ll find out only in another 20 years about that.

If you take a deep breath and think about this strategically, it all makes sense. The wind is blowing in the Chinese direction and the Chinese couldn’t care less about Palestinians, they are all business. The Russians are filling the void in Syria and the region that America has created; Putin is like a mafia don and so is Bibi. Evangelicals are solid supporters of Israel while American Jews are increasingly simply not interested and not worth the political capital or anything beyond lip service. A recent Federation convention in Israel was called “It’s Time To Talk” and attendees there said that nobody actually spoke about anything controversial, partly because they know that nobody on either side wants to listen. Millennials on social media talk about geting paid junkets to Israel to meet leadership and write about them, but the ground rules are such that no controversial questions are to be raised. There is no evidence that the Birthright Trips make a long-term difference to people and the trips themselves have been discredited by a vocal minority as propaganda missions and a good number of kids don’t even want the trips now for nothing because they think they are being used to manipulate them. A recent poll in Israel published in Haaretz shows that a majority of Israelis feel that American Jews should not be consulted with regard to their country’s policies. 46% said their government should not consider the concerns of American Jewry; 31% said they should and 23% had no opinion. So the feeling is mutual. American Jews increasingly don’t care about Israel, and Israelis don’t care much about American Jews, let alone Americans. What I said about the Federation conference is important – in a marriage, it is one thing to have an argument with your spouse. But when you have contempt for each other and you don’t feel it is even worthwhile to talk about what you disagree about, you know it’s over.

So why am I dredging up all this stuff? You probably know a good amount of what I just told you, except that I packaged it up nice and neat. There is a point here that goes beyond raising the evidence to prove a point.

Think back to the first thing I said when I started this talk. I raised the question about what makes people friends or allies and whether or not you could really count on them these days. I talked about trading favors and shared values, but the operative terms being used being these days as to foreign policy is about transactional relationships as opposed to shared value relationships. Most people think that Israel and America have a relationship based on shared values because there are wealthier countries such as the Gulf States that can have transactional based relationships with America that are much more monetizable than Israel can ever be. Presidents of the US know they will get paid $25 million to make speeches in the Emirates after they leave office; Bill Clinton’s fee to the Jewish Federation was maybe $200,000 and even that amount made headlines. Much of Europe has favored the Arabs over Israel because that’s where the money was. Even when it comes to Israel, whenever money really counted, Israel always loses the argument even if it means military consequences. In the early 1980s, Saudi Arabia wanted to buy an air defense system known as AWACS. Israel was dead set against it because it would enable Saudi to see everything going on around it and Israel felt its air advantage was the element of surprise. But that sale was big money to America and we were in a recession. Boeing is America’s largest exporter. And cheap oil was necessary to get us out of it. So the Israeli lobby in the US was shut out and the sale went through. Ronald Reagan was president and considered friendly to Israel even if several people around him such as defense secretary Caspar Weinberger were not. The Republicans were in control of Congress at the time. Pat Moynihan, a famous NY senator who is now dead, said to me at the time that the Israeli lobby was over-rated and needed to know its place – that it was only powerful if it did not push up against America’s vital interests and that America would always put itself first. He said diplomatically what Trump says openly. Now, to be fair, Israel has a lot to offer America. It is a good place to invest in technology, the Israeli military tests and improves American military technology – for years it was more active than America’s military in battle and could give feedback the Americans were not getting themselves. And for all its faults, virtually every Arab would rather live in freedom in Israel than in their own country where almost nobody has any rights under corrupt monarchies.

So here’s the question – is America’s relationship with Israel value based or transaction based? Are we friends because we share values? Maybe we used to, but maybe we increasingly don’t. Netanyahu might have been prime minister but he was there because a majority of the country agreed that he should be there and supported his policies. Public opinion in Israel has moved further to the right over the last generation; the liberal side of Israel counts for next to nothing these days if you judge it by Knesset seats. But America has moved further to the left and doesn’t agree with the majority of Israel’s view of what it wants to be and in the direction it is heading. America has stood for a two-state solution and the majority of Israel is moving away from that vision. Israel’s point of view is that it needs better propaganda; America’s view is that Israel needs better policies. It’s not just a matter of how you feel about Arabs; most educated Americans on the mainstream on this subject believe that a one-state solution just means endless war and a loss of a democratic country as Jews become a minority as they try to govern an Arab majority. The problem may not be solvable now, but that it is reckless to take steps in the meantime that make it impossible to later consider a two-state solution, steps which this government is taking. So there is disagreement both as to the ends and the means.

On the transactional side, Israel’s usefulness as an ally is really in question. Is Israel pivoting toward China just as America is going into a cold war with it? As America tries to withdraw from the region because it is simply sick of sending people to die for oil or intervening in civil wars that America doesn’t really care who wins (ie: do you think we care what happens in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen) – get it? Well, should Israel rely on the idea that if it were attacked by Iran that America would actually do anything for it? The answer is that American troops will not go to the Middle East to fight for Israel, but that’s why America has allowed Israel to get nuclear superiority. Nukes in place of troops. This is why there is no defense treaty between America and Israel.

And Israelis are willing to fight and risk mass casualty events which may eventually happen, although I think the cause will not be Iran’s nuclear program but its Precision Guided Missile Program which hardly anyone talks about but which is Israel’s military’s most immediate fear and one for which they are absolutely willing to go to war over – because it is a conventional threat convertible to nuclear capability, which means that the likelihood of conflict is greater, so we are not talking theoretically. Israel has made at least 1,000 strikes against developing missile sites abroad in the last few years and the Iranians have not stopped their program and it is very scary what these new missiles can do – they can hit something within 3 yards of accuracy as opposed to previous technology which could hit within 200-300 yards of accuracy which means you can strike a target so much better using just a few percent of the arsenal you had to use until now. At least the Arabs around it know that Israel is the only country in the world that is actively using its military to fight Iran. This is good transactional stuff for the makings of an alliance of convenience with the Gulf states, but the moment the threat from Iran is negated, that alliance goes up in smoke because Israel and the Gulf States have nothing else in common except perhaps the desire to trade, and so far the Gulf States have not really been all that much into business. They talk a lot but they don’t do much. Israelis are not going to go out and fight or finance America’s wars and you can see that the Kurds got nothing for putting up their fighters for a decade. They get consistently screwed by America every other decade or so and that’s not going to stop. So if I were Israel, I wouldn’t count on America as an ally in the sense that we would lend them our last $10,000 or send people over there to die for their country. I have wondered for about 20 years whether or not Israel could actually destroy Iran’s nuclear capability and have recently concluded that they cannot; they can delay it and drive it further underground, but they cannot stop it. Trump does not have a strategy for the Middle East and after a year or two of hoping that he did have a strategy that was simply not appreciated by the regional players, the conclusion all around the region is that he has no idea what he’s doing. Three US presidents, Bush Jr, Obama and now Trump have all passed the buck on Iran. So Israel is striking Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan and whatever else it thinks is required to keep Iran at bay, but it is a battle the Israelis cannot win in the long term. Iranian drone technology used against the Saudis was just about as good as Israeli technology and 85% of their missiles hit their targets and each tanker was hit within one meter of the target precisely at the center. The Iranians have shown that they can accurately hit a target from hundreds of kilometers away. At this point the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona is proven to be vulnerable to a direct hit and the potential damage from an airstrike could be worse than the benefit of keeping it running. You can’t keep Iran down forever and you can’t win in this region alone.

The Saudis are talking to the Russians about buying arms after the American air defenses didn’t work and the Emirates and Saudis are both engaging in talks with Iran. They are backing down from their earlier bombast against Iran because they see they are being left exposed. The Chinese are strictly into business and are too smart to get their hands dirty. The Russians want to get their fingers dirty enough to draw everyone else into the mud. Europe is a talking shop without any responsibilities or consequences for its actions. It’s not really a good situation for Israel to be in strategically without any real friends who can do anything for them. Netanyahu talked a great game but has been caught with his pants down with an American paper tiger having his back. It’s not a good place to be and he is going to need the other half of America to be there for him knowing that he staked his and Israel’s future on Trump’s vision of America. Only America has the possibility that it could help; it cannot afford to alienate the future power brokers of America and even then I don’t know if America would ever actually do anything. But just imagine how vulnerable Israel would be if America abandoned it or if some Democratic president who fundamentally disagrees with Israel’s positions had to be counted on in times of need. The best defense is a defense you never have to use but which at least looks credible. We’re going to find out sooner than later what this alliance is made of because Israeli military intelligence keeps saying that Iran is going to strike at it and Iran has every reason to believe it can get the better of those around them.

Actually, I can’t think of hardly anyone we in America really care for these days. Even Britain, our so-called Special Friend. Have you dealt with British Airways customer service or Heathrow Airport lately? When I have to deal with them, I start to wish that the Germans would have won the war and I could deal with Lufthansa or the German airport authorities instead. They are infinitely more pleasant to deal with and I can’t imagine sending my kid to fight for a country with its two top parties run by Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum that seems to be committing national suicide figuring out how to handle this Brexit thing that was not exactly started by the smartest or most responsible people in the land. Or turn the camera the other way: Would you want to send your kids to fight a war started by Donald Trump against North Korea?

Let’s be real and cut to the chase and state that friendships or relationships between countries are mostly transactional on a day to day basis because people run countries and people respond to incentives, but that having similar values helps keep those relationships in a decent place when two parties go through ups and downs. Think again of a marriage – there are good times and bad times but if husband and wife respect each other and feel their interests are in line with each other, they will get through the bad times. But if there is contempt, it’s usually over or on the rocks even if there are shared interests or they have to live together to pay the rent, because at one point anyone who feels they don’t need to be in that relationship (ie; they can pay the rent on their own) will bug out. This is why Israel and America have potential in their relationship that Saudi Arabia and Egypt don’t have, even though they are also American so-called allies. America doesn’t need Saudi oil as much as before, and it’s not going to bomb Iran when the price of oil is not as affected as it was 30 years ago. After Iran attacked a few months ago, the price spiked for a bit and went down soon after. The transactional nature of the relationship is not what it was, and the values are certainly not there. Hardly anyone in the US wants to be friends with MBS, a guy who cuts people up into pieces inside an embassy in a Western country. Even the recent IPO of Aramco which should have been really tempting since it is a hugely profitable company was a bust because everyone knows that the shareholders will be subject to the whims of a dictator; almost all the international funds stayed away and the Saudis were bribed with 10% bonuses to invest and were made to understood that they would be seen as disloyal if they didn’t invest.

I’m not in the business of trying to save Israel from itself and I don’t contribute to political causes either on the right or on the left. I can pass along some innovative strategic suggestions such as Israel offering to give back the Sheba farms to Lebanon which are strategically insignificant but would remove Hizbullah’s stated reason for being in Lebanon and would certainly call their bluff. The Israelis might have a stronger center and get behind a party with an absolute majority in the Knesset instead of being dependent on five-percent swing kingmakers such as Avigdor Lieberman. Likud and Blue/White are really indistinguishable and together would create a stable government. Another possible way to do this is if they would bring Israeli Arab parties into their government; all indications are that a good deal of them are responsible parties who very much want to be Israelis and not part of a Palestinian state and they represent 20% of the population. These kinds of things, which I believe would make the country more stable and strengthen its strategic position, won’t happen. But Israel could learn from the UK which realized that for better or for worse, a divided parliament was exacerbating stalemate over Brexit to the point that people couldn’t make plans or do business in this country, and that the country had to go forward one way or the other, even if many Johnson voters were against Brexit.

I see dangers to the American-Israeli relationship because on a transactional basis, some of the incentives are losing their luster and on the values side, both countries have rising demographics that don’t share the same values of democracy, pluralism and desiring a peace that will be a win-win for both sides. If Israel wants to give China entrée into its country it runs the risk of making itself an unreliable ally to the US. If Israel wants to cozy up to dictators around the world and lessen its own commitment to pluralism and democracy inside its country, it will alienate progressives in the US who see Israel as an increasingly authoritarian country. If Israel doesn’t care what American Jews think and that it is more important to maintain coalitions with ultra-orthodox Jews who are in positions of power to lock out 90% of American Jews as illegitimate, then they shouldn’t expect that 90% to be supportive of them. They’re not going to want to visit, contribute money or write letters to congress or their editors in support of policies they don’t agree with. Jewish newspapers for one thing are going out of business, which is a reflection of a more apathetic community. The Jewish Week of NY in a city of a million Jews has at most 10,000 paid subscribers including anyone who gives $50 a year to Federation. They will be more susceptible to BDS-type arguments on college campuses the more Israeli policies show itself to be a country that appears to be the kind of country the BDS supporters say it is. I’ve been predicting BDS for years; Israel has become the South African bogeyman of this generation of college students. BDS is bothersome and it offends us, but fortunately for us Jewish money does disproportionately fund colleges and so far it is just student council resolutions that are mostly being ignored by the people in charge.

A little bit of cynicism is also in order here. BDS is out there and some of its leaders and campaigns are being funded by insidious groups that hate Israel for merely existing, but the people fighting it are also using BDS to whip up a frenzy to pay for propaganda to counter it. Fighting BDS and anti-Semitism is great for fundraising; after that march in Virginia and several other anti-Semitic incidents, the Anti-Defamation League raised tons of money. Politicians from the Israeli government are making a big deal about their fight against the threat of BDS, but that publicity campaign covers up the underlying reasons why BDS is gaining traction – it’s not about winning a propaganda war, it’s about the policies being pursued by Israel that not everyone else agrees with. If it were not BDS, it would be something else. It is a rule of propaganda that in order for it to be effective, it has to be enveloped by a kernel of truth. And if 70% of Americans under 30 think that Israel is on the wrong side of history, then it’s up to Israel to either pay attention or to say they don’t care. But it’s not productive to think that all Americans are naïve and simply need to be explained better. People know Israel is in a difficult position and that its problems with the Palestinians may not be solvable in this generation. But there are good and bad ways to deal with people who don’t agree with you and there are steps that are being taken that don’t need to be taken that don’t win arguments and just make people angry. Israel used to be good at faking it and talking about peace even if it weren’t happening but at least it provided a hope for a positive future. The current vision of endless conflict and saying it’s all the other side’s fault just doesn’t wash anymore – my 12-year-old son has visited Israel several times and calls it “the freaky place of death.” He doesn’t like seeing people walking around with guns and a bunch of people wearing black all over the place and knowing that everywhere he goes he might be attacked. I don’t think the next generation of educated Israelis wants this future either. My son has been to Jordan and the Emirates and he views those places as fun places he can’t wait to go back to. Visits don’t include constant reminders of Holocaust, Jewish martyrdom, wars and impending terrorism. Indoor skiing, roller coasters at Ferrari World, a choice of water parks, scenes from Indiana Jones movies, an outpost of the Louvre and taxi drivers who turn on their meters and don’t try to rip you off is so much more inviting, even though what you see in the Emirates can also be lots of glitz that runs very shallow. He’s not stupid or naïve – twice this week he corrected his social studies teacher for making historical misstatements of facts while teaching about the American and French revolutions. He’s been to 25 countries by now and he can compare apples and oranges and we don’t avoid difficult issues in our dinner table discussions. There is something wrong with the picture he sees and he can tell.

Bib Netanyahu made a lot of trouble for Israel by aligning himself with the Republicans and it will be up to a future prime minister to reset relations with America from top to bottom. Ron Dermer who has been right-hand close to Bibi for all these years and was the ambassador to the US, was mentored for years by Frank Luntz, a Republican operative through and through and helps explain why Bibi chose sides in America. AIPAC has to either go back to its roots as a pro-Israel bipartisan entity or see the pro-Israel lobby get irrevocably split with J Street and run the risk that American Jewry will be set up for divide and conquer as a lobby and that Israel will become a partisan issue in America where the other side of the political fence will see the worst in everything it does as just another sideshow in American political theater. Eventually all this will threaten to bring down the house on this alliance. Israel has to look at its geopolitical strategy and decide how it is going to position itself in the world; if it is willing to risk some of its relationships in the world selling anything to anyone who will buy it but stand for its principles and decide what those principles are. Two decades ago it had to cancel a big contract with China over the Lavi fighter and risk Chinese wrath because it involved American technology that America did not want to share with China. Maybe now it’s decided that was a mistake it doesn’t want to make again and that business with China comes first. Maintaining strictly transactional relationships is short-sighted because it doesn’t withstand the loss of the incentive that perpetuated the transaction itself China is not as stable as you think and taking sides there is dangerous because the minute power shifts, the guy who was in power before winds up in jail or dead. Arab countries are subject to revolutions; Israel, America and Europe at least have stable political systems where people vote and leaders represent citizens. It’s easy to ignore that in the search for quick solutions and a guy at the top who can make decisions for a country, but it really does count in the long run.

I just want to add why the future of the American-Israeli relationship is a problem for everyone. Many countries see relations with Jews and Israel as a pathway to getting what they want from America. Call it the myth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to our advantage, and Jewish leaders of international stature know it. Lose that leverage and Jews and Israel are much more dispensable to the rest of the world.

There are good reasons for America and Israel to be friends and allies. There are both transactional and value-based elements to that relationship. It is reasonable to admit that both transactional and value elements are at play, and it is naïve even if it is politically correct to think otherwise. The question is what kind of strategy is Israel really pursuing and, post-Netanyahu and post-Trump, what needs to be done to put the relationship back on a track that is more sustainable through ups and downs that is based on what each side truly needs, wants and has to offer – and can reasonably expect from the other.

Ivan has presented at four Limmuds and travelled to over sixty-five countries. He has been the host of staging-globalthoughts.kinsta.cloud for twenty years where the wide range of political, social and travel commentary tends to be more pragmatic than ideological. Ivan lives with his wife and two children in NYC.

IVAN NOTE: I got various reactions to this speech, some positive and some negative. One Israeli in the audience mentioned that there were nice water parks in Israel too. Another said that if they hadn’t contracted Chinese firms to do the various infrastructure projects, they would be waiting another 20 years for them to be finished.