A link to Travel Notes about our recent trip to Egypt with stopovers in Athens and Vienna is at the end of this article.
Two days after getting home from Europe, Jeremy is halfway over his jetlag. Now instead of getting up at noon he is getting up at 9am.
I go to bank ATM’s and either they don’t give out $5 bills or they don’t give out $50’s and make you take $100’s. So I went into TD Bank with my $20 bill and asked a teller to give me change. He asked me to insert my ATM card and PIN to give me change for a 20 and said he couldn’t do it without it. Which means that if you didn’t have an account in the bank, you couldn’t get change for a $20 after going to the ATM and being charged a service fee on top of that. Banking is becoming inconvenient even in the USA – in Egypt the ATM’s don’t give more than $80 and in Argentina not more than $40.
I heard that it cost the US Government $40 million this past month to jail and deport 400 people. That doesn’t sound very efficient to me.
I was expecting market chaos with Trump and his tariffs and other assorted BS, and I’ve hedged against it. People I talk to figure that as long as Trump works with Israel to put Iran in a box nuclear-wise, all will be forgiven, at least by them. This problem is a nightmare for the whole region for 25 years and everyone from George Bush on down kicked the can down the road. I can’t imagine anyone in the region having a good night sleep once Iran goes nuclear so they have to deal with it before anything else can really happen. I just read that Iran has pulled most of its advisors out of Yemen and that the Houthis are on their last legs after weeks of American strikes. America has 1/3 of all its B-52 bombers sitting in the middle east right now. You think the Iranians might be a little scared?
I don’t know why everyone is so edgy about Tik Tok. So what if the Chinese know all about you? The truth is these days that intelligence agencies can and do purchase tons of information about people from corporate sellers that collect this information even better than the government can. People are worried about government; they should be more worried about all these consents they tick off to businesses that store and trade on their information.
One reason I watch so little TV is that when I want to watch the cold open of Saturday Night Live, I have to come into the living room at 11:25 about 4 minutes early just to go through 3 remote controls to set it all up.
I’ve noticed that hotels all over the world don’t want to put foam rollers in their gyms because guests walk off with them. Easy solution: Buy 36 inch rollers which nobody would want to take with them. In the meanwhile, I’ve started traveling with my own small one. It’s a godsend at the end of a long day on the road, and I came back from a 2 week trip not having to see a chiropractor.
Someone I know who is normally very quiet was pretty upset about Ivy League schools. During the past year, they didn’t pay any attention to alumni who complained about the Palestinian protests on the campuses. Only when the US Government started hitting them in the pocketbook did they pay attention. Trump taking $400 million from Columbia was a case in point. I think the US Government should tax endowments of universities and people should be asking why the US funds 25% of Columbia’s operating budget. These places are making tons of money and are not charities, and we should not be subsidizing them. Columbia is one of the biggest holders of real estate in Manhattan. I think that one thing that is overlooked is faculty tenure. They should stop it because one of the problems is that people in charge of universities seem to know things seem to have gone off kilter with runaway faculty members teaching stupid ideologies such as intersectionalism (ie: dividing the world into the oppressors and oppressed, as if it were simple as that), but faculty have a lot of power. They can gang up and vote to remove a college president.
Elizabeth has been growing and overcoming challenges on this pre-military gap year program she’s been on in Israel. She is not going into their military but the Israeli kids on the program are. She is part of a group of foreigners going along for the ride in the training program during her gap year between high school and college. The latest gig was a 4 day hike in the wilderness in the steps of Abraham and Sarah. Carrying a 45 pound load, she has had to weather the desert nights and days with a very small cohort and they dropped her some basic food and water each day. Staff monitor the kids but keep their distance. One night they brought her dried apricots, a few slices of bread and a can of tuna. She ate the apricots only as did most of the others. I’m really proud of her for taking all this shit and growing with it. It will make her into so much of a better woman. Can’t wait to see her save her date or husband in the jungle just like the movies.
I just attended something approaching my 40th high school reunion. I commissioned a documentary film about our class after people did not express much interest in actually attending a reunion. I figured that maybe people would appear in the film and then want to show up to a premiere. To be fair, 2/3 of my class lives outside South Florida and would have to get on a plane to be there, but by now people do have time and money to do that if they actually want to with their kids all grown up and out of the house. So instead the premiere of the film was held in Miami in early February and who showed up? Maybe 5 classmates out of 40. I had asked the film-maker to try to get enlightenment from classmates with questions such as “what do you wish you knew 40 years ago that you know now that would have changed your life?” People clammed up. People didn’t want to send me photos of themselves and their families. One person wouldn’t even say where he lived.
Other people in other classes have had similar problems organizing reunions. The film-maker says it’s because of social media. People have fantasized that their friends are living idealized lives and they are afraid to compare themselves to others. They might think they are too fat, too poor, too old-looking, and that their lives were not successful. They are afraid they will not be fascinating or fascinated by actually meeting their classmates at a reunion where it might not be easy to just click out and disappear from a Zoom call-in. It’s pretty pathetic that this is where the majority of people find themselves 40 years later and I was not anticipating opening up a pandora’s box of anxiety in people when I tried to plan a reunion. Back in 1984, we all thought we would be friends for life and that there wasn’t any world we could imagine beyond our high school class. I still remember that as if it were yesterday. I grew up but I never forget how I felt as a child.
I’ve had a telephone directory on paper which was typed up years ago single spaced and takes up about 6 pages. About 25 years ago people looked at me as one of the most networked people they knew. After I got married and had kids, I didn’t keep up with people. I never gravitated toward social media, never really liked phone calls when I used to just go anywhere on the planet and meet people face to face. Recently, I looked at my directory and figured that many of the people were dead or I’d lost contact with them. Maybe from all those rows of names there was almost a dozen I still cared to call on the phone. I get birthday greetings by email and then can’t reach the person to talk because he doesn’t care it’s my birthday or want to talk to me; his computer did it automatically because I was on one of his old lists. I don’t like this. Makes me wonder what will happen in the next part of my life, since it is hard to make new friends in New York City and soon I will be an empty nester without kids keeping me busy.
I like to say that had I known before my wedding how few of my friends would show up and then how few of even those friends I would ever see again, I wouldn’t have cared nearly as much as I did. It is a real regret of mine that I cared at the time. One of our cousins in Europe had a destination wedding in Mallorca and it was a great weekend at a reasonable cost to the parents. For my kids I’m going to recommend destination weddings so that only those who actually care show up and I don’t have to worry about inviting and paying to host people that I don’t care about just to try and fill up a room and then have to hear all the excuses why people wouldn’t show up after going through all that trouble. We all know how people are jerks when it comes to RSVP’ing. You will never believe how many people told me they were moving into a new apartment in the middle of October when Jeremy’s bar mitzvah happened. I knew that when I made my son’s bar mitzvah, it would be the first and last time I would be hosting a party for my family and neighborhood friends who mostly seemed to be doing me a favor by showing up. Let’s face it – most people don’t really want to go to other people’s parties because most parties are boring. We can’t all have Drake show up at our party at $650,000 an appearance. I heard about all these girls going to bat mitzvah parties from my daughter’s class – standing around looking into their phones, walking outside and leaving after an hour. Parents wasted a ton of money hosting kids that didn’t really want to be there. I didn’t want to play in that league. You may recall that for my daughter we went to Jerusalem and made a party in an orphanage with 150 kids. Those kids didn’t know Elizabeth from Adam or Eve, but they and my daughter had the greatest time that night enjoying a live band and a beautiful buffet. The party had meaning — we were making 150 kids happy, many of whom were enjoying stuff like live music for the first time in their lives, not to mention on their campus.
My Russian friend Alex left Moscow to Dubai. At this point, none of my friends from Russia are still there after 30 years of my knowing people there. If past is prologue, after a few years he’ll get tired of Dubai and move on. None of my friends who ever lived in the Gulf are still there. Whatever you think of the USA, people do want to live here.
And you thought the US was a safe and stable place? Have you seen LA lately?
I wonder if America First will turn out to be America Alone? Trump is guaranteeing that America won’t have a friend in the world. Except maybe Israel. They love him there because his stated desire to get rid of the Palestinians meshes well with today’s Israeli opinion which is pretty disgusted with anything Arab after October 7th. There are very few liberals there now. But I wonder if that will be a true a year from now because Trump is not really in favor of anything or anyone except himself.
Somebody suggested to me that one reason you see all this masculinity by MAGA people is to cover up that some of their leaders are closet gays. I’m told that Senator Lindsey Graham deserves a look.
I don’t even want to watch the video of Trump, Vance and Zelensky in the White House. I am so embarrassed watching a president and a vice president acting like such jerks that I can’t bring myself to even watch it. The Saturday Night Live (SNL) cold-open version of it was super funny though. This month I will be in Egypt, Greece and Austria and I expect people to criticize me for being an American with a moron as its president. And I will say please don’t blame me for this asshole that I never voted for. But I fear the Democrats’ strategy is to wait him out and hope that people come crawling back to the Democrats. Except that if they run another progressive, people will vote even for a guy like Vance or maybe Marco Rubio. I think that guy committed suicide by giving up his seat in congress to take a job as secretary of state which will last no more than a year till he gets fired but then maybe he will have a perch from which to run for office in 4 years. Already you can see he’s been eclipsed by Witkoff and is not happy in his job. But SNL made him look like an idiot and I don’t know yet what to think of him – does he have a mind of his own or is he just a zombie secretary of state in Trump Land.
So, now that I took our trip, I only mentioned Trump a few times and generally the reaction from people we saw in Egypt, Greece and Austria was “to be honest, most people think that he is an idiot.”
Trying to make sense out of Trump, Ukraine and Europe: Here is where I come down on all this: The minerals deal the US was touting for Ukraine was not as onerous as it seems (it will be really hard to actually get to these minerals and the fact that there is instability means that nobody will want to invest there), and it would probably make good sense for the Ukraine to agree to it. More than anything, it would allow Trump to save face and justify backing the country. There are indications that the flareup at the White House was a setup and that Lindsey Graham warned Zelensky in advance not to take the bait. He did anyway, and that’s why Graham later called on him to resign. There are many things to criticize about Zelensky and the way his country is running its war, such as its draft age and the way it is fighting the war. The war itself is and will be a stalemate and the end result for Ukraine would probably be similar even if Biden were still president. As far as Europe, Trump is calling Europe to account for the fact that it is freeloading on America for its NATO defense. Europe talks about increasing defense spending but is not unified or serious. Its defense capabilities are a joke. According to their own generals, nothing the UK or France has ever done operationally comes even close to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Europe is extremely divided and can’t agree on anyone to speak for it so that the region would have a place at the table along with the US, Russia and China. If the new head of Germany is timid and doesn’t shake things up, there is a real chance that in 3 years the AFD far-right party might actually run the country. That party seems awfully close to both China and Russia.
I’m wondering if Trump will turn on Putin when he realizes that he is being played. Visiting foreign diplomats are sitting for 1.5 hours waiting to get into the White House and say it’s a shit show over there. I don’t have to tell you about the latest scandal with all these people leaking plans for a strike against Yemen on a chat line that foreign spies could easily capture and that a journalist transcribed and published. So far what I see is backlash in various countries against associating with Trump from Italy to Canada. China and Russia are being quiet – no sense interrupting your enemy when he is hurting himself, as Napolean used to say. With regard to Ukraine and NATO, the Europeans are to some extent pretending to step up with increased defense expenditures but some of it is just moving various expenses into the “defense” column even though it has nothing to do with defense.
I find that I have less anxiety the less I read about the news these days. I also find that there is no reason to care too much about the details. Every two weeks, Trump reverses himself, so if you don’t like the weather, just change the channel. Being in Egypt was great; there is no news there and some American expatriates I met said they live there so that they don’t have to hear the daily drama of America.
The US Democratic Party is getting its just desserts after 20 years of progressive ideology. People across America are actually happy watching Trump and Musk breaking dishes all over the place. Peggy Noonan said so in a recent Wall Street Journal column. They think government got too big and that people and programs should be massively cut, that all the DEI people should be tossed out, that foreign aid is mostly wasted and should be stopped, and that nothing was ever changing so putting a sledgehammer to tried and tested ways of thinking is necessary. We’ll see how happy they are in another few months when they see inflation and recession around them.
When Trump took office, I was in the ocean in Puerto Rico with 4 other guys saying that we must be the smartest people on the island because none of us were listening to his speech. Nobody I talked to wanted to watch it. I’ve been visiting the Dorado section of Puerto Rico for about 15 years and it’s one of my happy places. Unfortunately, they’ve overdeveloped the area and when I drive around on a bicycle, I can’t go more than 10 seconds now without running into a car. So much for Ritz Carlton claiming that this is a “Reserve” property of distinction. But for Puerto Rico, it’s still the best they’ve got. The Four Seasons is supposedly taking over the St. Regis in another area of the island but they are in a rain forest with rain 10x a day and rough windy beaches; I was there and you don’t want to go there. I was offered a free trip to get me back and turned it down. However, weather patterns have changed on the island and now Dorado gets more rain showers than it used to.
The Middle East: I suspect that Arab countries are privately saying that Israel needs to throw out Hamas from Gaza and then they can talk about what comes afterward. What I’m being told is that they are too cautious to recommend that even in private because of concerns of possible consequences, but they would be happy if the Israelis were to succeed. The Saudis will sit on their butts as to any big deals with Israel and America until after the Israelis and Americans make sure that Iran is in no position to threaten them, which is probably why you will see military action happen over there against Iran and in Gaza. Given that every plan for the Day After in Gaza fails because it doesn’t say what to do about Hamas, this makes sense. Nobody wants to invest in a place where the guys holding the guns are in the back room making all the decisions and can restart a war any time they want after proving to the world that they had no interest in governing the territory but were only interested in using it as a launchpad against Israel and had no interest in the citizens living there. It’s also pretty clear that most Arab countries view the citizens of Gaza as sympathetic to the Moslem Brotherhood and to Islamic organizations and therefore view them as security threats. That’s why nobody wants to take their Palestinian residents into their countries. Arab governments are super sensitive about troublemakers. I was just in Cairo and it’s been 13 years since there was a revolution in the main square of the city, Tahrir Square. Even today, pedestrians are not allowed to walk in the square. It’s basically a closed military zone.
I was not amused watching Hamas dribble out Israeli hostages and throwing crap in Israel’s face to show that it got the better of them after over a year of war. I suppose they will pay a price for that. The Israelis seem to be good at biding their time and gaining advantage at some point. I just keep thinking that if I had been running Israel, they could have finished this whole thing of the hostages in a week. The prime minister could have said “you have one week to release all the hostages. Otherwise, we are holding 3,000 security prisoners and in one week we will start shooting every last one of them, and the most famous prisoners such as Marwan Barghouti will be first to be killed.” Do you think Hamas would have let that happen? What they cared most about was the return of their prisoners. But the reason the Israelis didn’t do this, beyond the fact that it would have been brutal and beyond the pale (but the kind of thing you or Putin might do if you really wanted to end this thing instead of having your country fighting a war for a over year with something like 50,000 other people killed), is that the people running Israel didn’t want this war to end. These guys have this Messianic fixation that they would keep a war going in Gaza and meanwhile reannex and settle the district with Israelis. Netanyahu doesn’t want to be prosecuted. So you had this war for over a year and now, because he and his government are utterly incompetent and were not remotely interested in dealing with the reality of actually providing for Gaza’s governance, Gaza is returning to its pre-war state with Hamas in charge with thousands of soldiers reappearing after being kept in reserve just for this moment, and a year from now, everything will be the same as it was. Until the next time the Israelis “mow the grass.” What a waste. Unless the Israelis go in for the kill, which they might do now, because it is obvious that the whole thing is completely stuck. But here on Global Thoughts, it is exactly as I predicted two weeks after October 7th 2023. What you do see now and what I called for in that edition of Global Thoughts was the creation of buffer zones, which the Israelis are now doing all over the place, in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
I have a thought about Trump’s Gaza Riviera plan. The problem with Trump is that he is not completely crazy, which is why you can’t simply dismiss him. Nobody else has had any solutions for Gaza except to say that IF X, Y and Z were true, THEN do A, B and C. Except that none of X, Y and Z are true so therefore what do you do? And the answer of course is always “I don’t know.” So along comes Trump and reshuffles the deck and challenges everyone to say “What’s Your Idea?” Well, I thought about it, and I do have an idea that could make such a plan work. You can always count on me.
The main objection to it is the forceful eviction of its residents (maybe temporary, maybe winding up permanent) which is a problem, even though you really do have to get everyone out of the way if you want to clean up the place in less than a decade and do it right. What if you gave out shares to each adult in Gaza (with greater values for having a family) which entitled a person to a piece of the land (think “40 acres and a mule”) and the person could either use what he has or trade or sell it. If the shares had real value (ie: $50,000 a person in a territory where the annual income is less than $5,000 a year), which could realistically be paid out, lots of people would probably sell and leave. Large Arab companies would probably buy up the shares and consolidate the holdings to build that Riviera. Sure, the rich would be winners, but they always are. And the richer they are, the more attractive the territory will be. Hamas will not survive in that environment because they only exist when there is misery around them. You might say that this privatization was done and failed in Russia after communism, but I say that you can learn from history and that 1991 Russia is not Gaza.
This will offend people but think about it: If you get rid of enough Palestinians in Gaza, you don’t have much of a Gaza or Palestinian problem. So far, every single plan for Gaza doesn’t work because unless you get rid of Hamas, nobody will invest any money or personnel because they don’t want to be shot at or threatened by Hamas. The Israelis will probably have to resume fighting even though their army is sick and tired of this war and reservists don’t want to show up. In Gaza, if Israel starts up again, it looks like 50% of the troops might not show up feeling the war is all about Bibi and not much else — and then if the campaign fails, the prime minister will blame his own citizen-troops for stabbing him in the back. When the war started, the show-up rate for reservists was 130%. This time the ones who show up who will be the most motivated will have to go harder and forget about saving hostages and see if they can wipe out Hamas. They need to evacuate as many Palestinians there as possible. Seems ridiculous that you have to deal with 2.4 million people to get rid of maybe 20,000 bad eggs among them, but nobody has a better idea. The Egyptians and Americans have great plans but they all fail unless someone gets rid of Hamas, so I guess the job falls to the Israelis. Same thing in Lebanon. Unless you manage to keep Hizbullah out of the picture, Lebanon has no future, so the Israelis have to continue to keep them at bay since nobody else really has the arms or the will to confront them. Give the Lebanese credit for at least trying, and the Israelis have a good back channel through the Americans to coordinate with them. Turkey, for all its bombast, has a pretty good back channel to Israel as well and people such as Trump are hoping that the two countries can carve out spheres of influence in Syria and make it work.
Suppose that 20 countries each took in 50,000 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. Would that be so bad for those countries? Egypt with a population of roughly 120 million couldn’t take in 50,000 people? That would be 1 million people who probably would love to get the heck out of there. It would greatly reduce the scope of the refugee problem. You keep hearing how Palestinians will destabilize other countries; at this rate, I just don’t see the threat rising to such a level to make all these countries reject them with a phony excuse if each of them took in a small amount. Look at Israel, the wealthiest country in that region apart from the Gulf where wealth is distributed more than earned – most of the ones who move to Israel are not exactly making tons of money and don’t expect to do that living in Israel. Many Israelis want to move to better places because life is hard there. You think that shoving a few million Palestinians into a Palestinian state that has nothing going for it is going to be a great success? Why are we all insisting on this and making Palestinians remain refugees for 80 years as hostages to populating some future failed state? People are offended because after 80 years nobody talks about an alternative, but it just seems that the world is on a treadmill it can’t get off when it comes to this issue. It would make more sense for a good number of Palestinians to be absorbed elsewhere and then focus on the ones that are left to build a more successful state without lots of uneducated unhappy people dragging it down. I’m not advocating expelling Palestinians; I’m saying that maybe if everyone worked together to optimize the situation and shunted some of the population elsewhere, you could wind up with a more successful state instead of just having only the desperate remain.
You know what I would do if I were the president of a country in Latin America with a tariff-trumping US president? I’d call in the Chinese and invite them to set up a military base in my country. Let’s see how long the US deals with that. Cuba has been around for over 60 years and the US can’t do a thing about it. Maybe the Canadians ought to do the same.
Did you know that in Greenland there is only one shopping mall and no golf courses? Of course that is why Trump feels the need to take over the place.
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York is running for mayor of NYC and was speaking at my synagogue and said that there are 600,000 registered Jewish Democrats in NYC and 780,000 people will vote in the mayoral primary. If the Jews can get their act together, they could vote him in. I wasn’t aware till he mentioned it that top city officials are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, which he painted as a very antisemitic and anti-Zionist organization. The head of the city council in NYC as well as the city’s comptroller are members of the DSA. Cuomo said that mainstream Democrats need to get these people out of power and to back centrists like him. He said that if these people took power, all the wealthy people who would be forced to pay for all the free things they want government to give out would all move to Florida.
I walked up to Cuomo and said I know you won’t run on this, but your slogan ought to be “One Tough Motherfucker who gets Shit Done.” He laughed and said he liked it. Every time I drive past Laguardia airport, which he was instrumental in having rebuilt, I think of how petty it was that he was not invited to the ribbon cutting ceremony because he was then out of office and under investigation for sexual harassment.
New York City needs a good mayor after 12 years of horrible mayors who should never have been elected but for a Democratic party machine that controls the city and put them there. The Republicans have hardly ever been able to muster a viable candidate or campaign and the progressive wing of the Democratic party has been in control of it. I was told by someone who spoke with the unpopular local district attorney that one reason it’s become impossible to prosecute a criminal in NY is that the progressives in the state capital Albany created all kinds of rules that prosecutors must follow in a criminal case which makes it very hard to prosecute anyone without some kind of error. 22% of cases were dismissed this year for errors due to these laws. The Governor is trying to change the law because people see the Democrats as soft on crime (and that prosecutor is getting blamed for it), but it’s not clear if she has the votes to do it. My kid in high school sees everyone around him shoplifting and jumping fare gates as an entitlement because they know that nobody will prosecute these activities.
Here’s an interesting thing to know – I heard that Rahm Emmanuel is thinking of running for president as a Democrat in 2028. That would be interesting. He has a lot of experience and respect. He was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, mayor of Chicago and ambassador to Japan. He’s foulmouthed and hot-tempered, but he knows his stuff and people say they can work with him. I hope he runs and that he can get past a Democratic primary.
Here’s a feasible way to fix our broken 2 party system
Suppose I want to run for president or congress. I’m a reasonable person in the middle who could find common cause with probably 80% of people in this country. But I could never stand a chance in the primaries of either party, which are each controlled by the 10% activist fringe that do not want people in the middle who compromise. They would rather be ideologically pure and lose elections. They want a country that the rest of us don’t want. They have taken over the parties and our political system is rigged to support a two-party system. The majority of Americans are unhappy with the system we have but we feel trapped in it.
It is anxiety-provoking to read press coverage of the Democratic party as they continue to be on track to lose elections, because its leaders insist the problem is that they don’t get their message out properly and refuse to acknowledge that people don’t like their message.
Everyone who talks about changing the system talks either about reforming the parties from within or starting a third party. People talk about making changes to the electoral system. None of these options are available, and it’s just talk. So here’s a different strategy:
Get some billionaires together to form two new political parties: The New Democratic Party and the New Republican Party. Choose leadership and show that talented people exist within those parties. They can even choose to support existing Democrats and Republicans and endorse them. They will make it clear that they are not trying to create a third independent party but trying to show electoral strength to get the existing parties to respect the majority of voters. Once they show that they control a significant number of votes (I would guess they would get more popular votes than the existing parties), they can each approach the existing parties and request that they merge. They can then set merger terms that force the existing parties to yield from their extremists and bring new leadership to the existing parties.
Down the line, a think tank that organizes simulations in congressional negotiations would be helpful to show legislators and staff members the art of compromise. People are getting elected without even being interested in getting things done and they have to be retrained for jobs that require responsibility and not just offer power, the limelight and ability to fundraise. Even Mr. Murdoch is probably unhappy because he surely realizes that although he is profiting from stirring the pot, the country and the world are becoming more unstable and it’s not good for his investments. At some point, Fox News might simmer down from tarring and feathering and allow people to compromise.
These are the things that need to happen to get the country back on track.
Here is a link to Travel Notes about our recent trip to Egypt with stopovers in Athens and Vienna.
