I went with my son to eat sushi. My main problem with sushi is that it doesn’t taste Italian.
There is nothing worse than mom and dad being “cool” around their kids. You read about parents wanting to relive their college years with their kids going with them on spring break trips and college parties. I don’t try; I don’t have to. I could see my daughter cringing every time I just spoke to one of her friends during parents weekend at her college. Parents at 60 just don’t see life the same way as a 20 year old does but we do have our place in the sphere of life. I would love to start a line of tee shirts that say “Mom/Dad — Not cool, just awesome.”
Currently, if you steal less than $500 from a store in New York, you won’t get arrested. Mayoral candidate Mamdani wants to raise the limit to $1,000. The local prep school kids are hoping Mamdani wins because many of them are close to the $500 threshhold. (The stores keep a tab on the kids and arrest them when they hit $500.) I think they should form a political party called “Shoplifters for Mamdani.”
If you’re a terrorist in waiting, you might want to make your move during the next government shutdown. My son flew through Laguardia and said the TSA agents, who are not getting paid right now, couldn’t give half a shit what anyone takes through the checkpoints. I think that for future shutdowns, they should exempt FAA air controllers and TSA employees. What they should include is Secret Service Agents and all the people working at the White House and at Congress. If nobody was cleaning Trump’s or speaker Johnson’s bathrooms or cooking his meals or guarding his family, don’t you think he’d be more interested in making a deal?
Did you know that at Harvard a student can sign up for two courses that meet at the same time? Meaning it’s expected that you are not going to show up to class. It’s also true that 60% of kids get A’s in courses at Harvard. This is according to reporting in the NY Times. Kids don’t want to read or write; why should they when GPT can do it for them? My 18 year old son says that any text I send him more than 2 sentences long is too complicated to read.
Correction to an earlier story: I wrote in the last posting that there were 10,000 permanently disabled soldiers in Israel based on the last 2 years of the Gaza war. That statistic turns out to be false. It was manipulated for organizations that had an interest in raising funds. Many of the people counted in the larger figure were people with mental issues. The true figure based on physical injury is several hundred.
Never again? Consider that over the past 50 years millions of dollars have been spent on all sorts of organizations against anti-Semitism, having dialogues with civil rights organizations and building all sorts of memorials and funding educational projects. These days, anti-Semitism is out in the open and people are not even apologizing for it. It’s considered good click-bait and when the head of the Heritage Foundation starts referring to “globalists” and fellow Republicans want to whitewash it, you know you’re starting to see what are supposed to be mainstream organizations taking a really bad turn. But they will keep doing it until nobody cares anymore because people are getting immunized to all sorts of things as more stuff that is supposed to be beyond the pale keeps happening. Makes you wonder if all that money was wasted and if people just tilted at windmills for 50 years to no effect. Maybe a different approach is needed because the situation is getting worse. A major synagogue in our area also houses a gym where “Soccer Superstars” rents space for kids to play afterschool soccer. Moms are now complaining that they don’t want their kids going into a building with a synagogue. If they lose their tenant, it’s a good indicator of where things are going.
A thought about a current art exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art about paintings by Monet who visited Venice at the insistence of his wife who was sick of his endless obsessions with water lilies. Monet expressed profound thoughts in things he said or wrote that were captured. He said that people didn’t realize that painting momentary portraits of things of nature required much more time and preparation than people gave credit for. I always find Monet interesting because he only became famous after he died. These days I wonder what kind of people in our culture will only became famous after they die.
The following Sunday I went to another art exhibit. You can’t say there’s nothing special about living in New York City. This exhibit featured priceless Jewish manuscripts from around the world throughout history. They are generally kept under lock and key at the Jewish Theological Seminary but someone bequested money for JTS to hold an exhibition. Beyond the usual things you expect to see such as marriage certificates, bibles and prayer books, they had some unusual things such as Hebrew translations of works by Aristotle, a letter written in Egypt by Maimonides raising ransom money to free some hostages, and a letter by a trader in India to his wife back in Egypt written in 1204 that was sent back through their version of the post. I wonder what such a man would have thought had he known that 800 years later someone like me on the other side of the world that nobody knew even existed would be reading that letter. It’s nuts really. I wonder what kinds of things people will read of ours 800 years from now. We digitize everything and leave no papers behind. There are masses of material; who would know what items stand out? What will be interesting to people 800 years from now? Will anyone still exist on this planet?
After a drought of a few years, a few good shows have opened up on Broadway. Just in Time with Jonathan Goff is a musical about the life of Bobby Darrin, a pop star during the 1950’s. Chess is a musical drama about the life of chess champions and how they were used as pawns during the Cold War. I’ve seen both and recommend them highly.
About 90 minutes from my apartment via Uber is a new resort in New Jersey where Karen and I went autumn leaf-looking late last month. It’s called the Pendry Natirar. It’s not bad for a day out in the country but I wouldn’t recommend staying there over a weekend. It’s really for weddings and corporate retreats.
James Dimon, head of Chase Bank, recently announced that the bank is investing billions of dollars into strategic industries to help ensure that the US national security is augmented by access to things such as rare earth minerals. It’s interesting how the bank is doing something that you would hope government might do. I like Dimon and don’t understand why Wall Street didn’t put up somebody to run for mayor of New York City or president of the US. America has a lot of interests to protect and we deserve better than the crappy candidates the two parties keep putting up.
Mamdani said in a TV debate that he wouldn’t bother to read a report concerning inflation in rental housing costs that the law says he must consider before freezing rents. I find that disconcerting. Someone on the Columbia faculty told me that his father, a professor at Columbia University, criticized a report prepared by other faculty members about anti-semitism and harassment at the college. He said that he had not read the report, and that the report should never have been written. Like father like son. I recall as a teenager that when my dad was mayor, he commissioned a feasibility study to determine whether or not the city ought to sell electricity by itself instead of having a local utility do it. He had run on this issue in his campaign, saying that the city could do it cheaper and pass the savings along to the citizens. After the study said it would not work, he changed his vote and agreed to give the utility a renewal of its contract. I said, Dad, why did you change your vote? He said that once you’re mayor, you have to do what’s right for the city, and if you don’t, you’re guilty of malfeasance. Will Mamdani pivot on his positions after he realizes as mayor that he cannot do all the things he is promising? He is intelligent, but is he an ideologue or a responsible leader? People I know who have met with him say they are not sure, but next year we’ll find out.
Meanwhile, Mamdani deserves credit for running a great campaign and he won fair and square. Immigrants and Moslems can be proud to see one of their own work his ass off and make it to the top. He “stuck it to the man.” On that level, I am happy for him and for the army of people who volunteered for him. I saw women in hijab at polling places, very proud to be there. There were tons of Mamdani supporters and hardly any Cuomo people. I remember when my father stuck it to the establishment and how happy we and all our volunteers were after working very hard in a campaign to seek the mayorship.
Make sure to read till the end of this posting. If you do, I will tell you how to fix the dysfunction that exists in the American political system. I think I have the solution.
I’m dying to know which American industries are being helped by Trump’s economics. All I see everywhere I look, from pharmaceuticals to manufacturing and the sciences, is serious devastation. There is hardly any increase in American domestic manufacturing taking place and the Chinese are exporting even more than they were, just dumping stuff on the rest of the world instead. They are not losing money. The treasury is collecting money from tariffs but might have to refund it if the courts say they are illegal. Meanwhile, the damage to American companies and consumers are done. On top of this, diplomatically all the countries that would sit on the fence are all going to China’s side in regional associations because they are presenting themselves as the more reliable trading partner. You cannot reverse all this on a dime. Tariffs are making our allies go elsewhere for things such as armaments, which is an important source of income and security for the US.
I know that Trump and Republicans are framing the issue of clean energy as a reaction to fake science of climate change and as an affront to the oil industry. But there is a case to be made that shale oil development in the US is peaking and that the country is susceptible to energy insecurity. More clean energy development will help insulate the US against weaponized energy by its enemies.
I’m glad we can finally put the living hostages in Gaza behind us. I give Jared Kushner credit for this one and I’d give him the Nobel Prize and my nod for Republican presidential nominee, although Trump was also personally involved and added a personal dynamic to the negotiating atmosphere that made a difference. In synagogue, they said the prayer for the hostages the final time after the release. Only time I’ve ever seen a prayer added to the liturgy and later taken away. Maybe when the Messiah comes they will take away a few more prayers. There are so many possible things that can happen that I won’t waste your time trying to forecast them. Hopefully the Palestinians and Israelis will vote in new leaders during 2026 and they can make a fresh start. The Arab countries would like to move on from all this and were happy to give Israel a lifeline to climb down from the tree. They all ganged up on Hamas to do the same. The devastation in Gaza is so great that I’m hoping the people there won’t let Hamas do this ever again; was it worth it for that one day of glory to hit the Israelis where it hurt? Was it worth it for Israel to ruin their reputation for a few hundred hostages? Arms sales to Israel are now toxic on a bipartisan basis in the USA. That used to be almost a biblical article of faith. Democrats increasingly don’t even want to take AIPAC money anymore (the major pro-Israel lobbying organization that has jeopardized its credibility by tilting toward the Republican party). A generation ago it was the Democrats that were pro-Israel and the Republicans who were pro-Arab. Given that Qatar gave Trump a 747 and the Israelis can’t match that, I wonder what they expect in return.
I went to a recent venture capital meeting featuring 14 start-up companies and most of them were headed by immigrants from around the world. I wondered what will happen in 5 years if America keeps going on its path of shutting down immigration? Organizers told me that it’s already affecting people, because they can’t hire good staff here to build their companies. People are thinking about setting up companies in Toronto. And maybe in 5 years VC firms will have these conferences in India instead of America because that’s where the majority of the entrepreneurs are coming from. You have to be extremely stupid not to see the destruction of America’s competitive edge going on around you. India is going to have more people than China does; why would you go out of your way to piss them off after the US has tried for 30 years to get in good with them? The fact that so many people think that what Trump is doing is great or why a guy like Mamdani will be good for NYC as mayor helps explain why 1% of the population has 90% of the wealth.
You know what really bothered me about that circus we saw last month with Trump and his defense secretary Hegseth standing in front of all those generals berating them and their military, especially coming from a president who was too wuss to serve himself. From that whole crowd, there wasn’t even one brave soldier who would stand up and say “You guys are fucking idiots that are not fit to serve in your positions commanding us.” Nobody would have been shot. But at least the whole world would see that America is great because here people don’t stand up for this bullshit. And if a bunch of generals would have stood up with that person, nobody would have been punished. You can’t punish everyone. Years ago in Romania, there was a dictator named Nicolae Ceaușescu. You know how he fell from power? There was an event and someone got up and said he was an idiot. Others followed, the event was being carried live on Romanian TV. The whole country saw that their leader was not all that popular. Within a few days he was dead by firing squad. I remember watching that on CNN. This country needs that kind of a moment. Every day I just keep reading of new outrages and how Trump is ruining yet another industry. One day it’s pharmaceuticals with some new stupid price control plan that has been tried and failed before. Last month I commented on our steel industry. I’m tired of reading daily outrages in the paper. But nobody really stands up to him and it’s amazing to see the country take the hit. It’s so conceivable to me that the Democrats will hand the country over to Vance in 2028.
I wish Trump had more motivating him than just the desire to take revenge on his perceived enemies. He seems more willing to stand up to Jimmy Kimmel, the TV talk show host and comedian, than Putin who is attacking Europe more and more without consequence.
Remember Trump made a statement about how the Russians and Chinese wouldn’t dare act against him because he is so crazy that they wouldn’t dare to test him? If that’s true, why is Putin sending drones and MIG fighters over Europe? Maybe because Putin senses that Trump is weak and a blow-hard. Trump bullies allies such as India and Canada, but bends to countries that can threaten him. Look at how Trump backed off of China with the tariffs when they showed him how they could quickly bring the USA to its knees with rare earths and their own tariffs. Give Xi credit for working his ass off the past 12 years to prepare for the likes of Trump and to have China give the US a dose of its own medicine. I think it’s clear that so far in this trade war that Trump started, China has been wiping Trump’s ass. At the end of it all, based on what I’ve read (and I read many articles, including those written by hawks that say otherwise), the US is still the #1 game in town in the world and China doesn’t even come close. It’s demographics and the free market economy that are America’s prime advantages. The US will ultimately win, but China and Russia might fight that irrational war that nobody wants, to stave off their inevitable decline. No matter what the logic of political science is, nations don’t always act in logical ways. The tragedy of this century is that America has so much more promise because it has the potential; it’s just being squandered by the lack of leadership. The polarization of the country is due to the lack of direction and inspiration at the top. If someone told America that the way forward is to compete and get our act together instead of trying to build walls against progress and kick every non-white person out, the country could go much farther.
I’ve written about the lack of priority in electrification infrastructure in the US. A recent article in Foreign Affairs has an interesting twist. Roughly half of the electric infrastructure in the US sits idle at any point in time. Rather than building new stuff, becoming more efficient using what we already have would do the trick. Texas is a model for how this can be done, having made great strides in recent years.
Some say that the Israeli strike against Qatar was a brilliant move that led to the end of the war. I doubt it. But consider: the Qataris have been housing these negotiations for 2 years without anything happening or getting any credit for it; the Palestinians on the ground in Gaza are suffering and their leadership sits in cushy Qatar not having any skin in the game (and are probably happy it happened), and Israeli commanders want to negotiate directly with the military leadership on the ground in Gaza instead of political figureheads in Qatar. The Saudis and Emiratis have no love for Qatar and figure it couldn’t have happened to nicer guys. I remember flying on Emirates about 7 years ago and not seeing Qatar in the in-flight magazine map when they were boycotting them.
That said, I think the Israelis made a mistake by bombing inside Qatar. It takes away the argument that there is a common front against Iran when you start bombing your supposed allies. The Gulf states want to know that Israel is a source of stability and not local risk inside their countries. Doha is supposed to be a place where nothing happens. This is in the department of “just because you can do X, doesn’t mean that you should .”
The two-state solution is a dead horse in Israel. 99 out of 120 parliamentarians voted against it in a vote during the past year. People can keep talking about it, but there is just no support for it in Israel unless new leadership on both sides shows new possibilities.
Someone who recently went to the Gulf and met with regional leaders said that they all want Hamas to be disarmed before they are willing to invest in the area, but they don’t want to send any troops to the International Stabilization Force and they want the Americans and/or the Israelis to do the dirty work. This Gaza problem is going to be very hard to solve when everyone doesn’t want to get their hands dirty, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Israelis wind up back in there when Hamas reconstitutes itself enough to frustrate anyone else from trying to restore order in Gaza; it is still a no-man’s land filled with people who have no good choices before them. As it is now, Israel holds 53% of the territory which they might hold for years as a buffer zone, and maybe they just don’t need to care what happens to the other 47%. This is all pretty much what I said would happen 2 years ago when I wrote my first posting 2 weeks after October 7. So far the best idea I’ve seen is to have private security contractors go into Gaza to police the area. Indonesians who don’t speak Arabic are not the solution.
A few thoughts about the last 2 years as we wrap up another chapter of this saga: A Jerusalem Post story says that Hamas has rebuilt lots of its tunnel system in Gaza and that at least 60% of what they had 2 years ago still exists. Makes you wonder what the Israelis have accomplished after 2 years of ripping up the entire place. Is this hyping of the threat by the Israelis? Or is it an admission that they can never win? Anti-Israel sentiment is up even among the wealthy in Singapore where you never heard a bad word in the past. In the US, I can’t tell you who said this but imagine the most important Jewish communal leader in the entire country if not the world telling me that Israel has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and that the trajectory for Israel in the US is horrible and that Israel has lost the Democratic party and is on its way toward losing the Republicans. I’ve never had a conversation like that and seen that kind of depression before in a top Jewish leader. What you’ve been reading in Global Thoughts is actually happening. The Economist cover “How Israel is Losing America” is reality.
Reading the transcript of Trump’s speech to the Israeli Knesset, the mind boggles that these are the words of a US President, especially when he goes off script. There is something nice though about hearing the genuine words from a plain-spoken crass man who happens to be president. The speech is worth reading because it is real and special even if it can be painful to read through all of it which took over an hour to deliver. Full text of Trump’s Knesset speech: You’ve won. You can’t beat the world. It’s time for peace | The Times of Israel
What do you think the West should do when the Russians send jet fighters and drones over 3 NATO countries in the span of a week (Romania, Poland and Estonia)? I think they ought to shoot them down. Putin is testing the west because he senses that Trump is all bully-talk and no walk. He’s going to keep pushing the limits. I don’t know how it will end.
I do agree with Trump about one aspect of his European policy. If Europe doesn’t want to get serious about sanctions against Russia, why should the US take the lead?
How about if Trump and Europe threaten the Russians and say either we stop this war or we put up a no-fly zone, send troops to Ukraine and bring them into the EU. Why not NATO anyway? At this point, Ukraine has the best army and war tech in Europe. They need to put Russia in its place. It’s war already; it’s just under the radar but it’s not peace at this point. So far the West doesn’t seem to be doing anything to make Russia pay. China is taking notes. The so-called drone wall will take a decade to build if ever. Europe sanctions against Russia are really a joke and this is why Trump is refusing to spend American money on military aid to Ukraine if the idea of it is to protect Europe against Russia. Europe has continued to give Russia more money for its liquid gas than it has spent on military aid against Russia in Ukraine. Why should America help Europe if it won’t help itself, he says, not without reason. Russia won’t stop until the West makes them stop.
You should be concerned about Germany. The current prime minister knows he has 3 years to get the country moving or see it fall under the rule of the far-right AFD party. But so far he isn’t running the country as if he senses that danger. So far it’s just half-assed reforms. Germany has a lot of problems.
AOC wants to run for president and is hiring people who used to advise Bernie Sanders. Is this the best the Democrats can do? I like Rahm Emannuel but I’m afraid he is their Cuomo on a national level. People will say he is the old tired Democratic party and want something newer and younger.
There is something pathetic about having watched Trump back former president Bolsonaro in Brazil. He seems to be moving away from this because of how unpopular it made both him and Bolsonaro in Brazil. That country doesn’t want to give up its democracy and they seem to care more about it than Americans do.
There are two reasons I wouldn’t want to be president. One is that leaders want to build things and then have their successors improve on what they did. Today’s America is filled with people who just want to destroy what they find simply because someone else built it. This is probably because decisions to build things are based on small majorities and they flip every time there is a political swing. The lesson from this is to make decisions with more consensus so that people will not want to destroy what they find. The second is that if I tried to make a deal with another country, they wouldn’t want to deal with me if they thought that in 4 years they might get a better deal or that the deal they make now would be destroyed by the next president. This is going to be a big problem for America now that Trump destroyed everyone’s trust in the unwritten law that US foreign policy differences stopped at the water’s edge (the Potomac River next to Washington DC). Why would anyone legitimate want to walk into the presidency under such circumstances? Till our country changes and becomes more consensus in its nature, good people will want to build buildings and companies where they can expect more posterity and satisfaction from their efforts.
There is something very wrong watching the various TV networks cave in to Trump. These days their news divisions don’t make a profit and are not important to them. Neither are the late night talk shows. They are now considered nuisances within very large entertainment conglomerates, meaning they are expendable. In previous generations, news divisions were profitable and their integrity added to the value of the TV network. Maybe we need to go back to a business model where TV news and political satire are not sacrificed on the altar of corporate mergers of the moment. What is happening in the USA is what happened in Hungary and Turkey. It’s not good for the country, although I’m not sad to see the owner of Oracle buying a TV network. We are seeing the reaction to a generation of liberal-leaning media and cancel culture. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Hopefully at some point everyone will realize that we need a center again and not just crazies on the left and the right running the country.
Finally, a word about US politics and an idea how to fix our two-party system which is not working very well.
The New York City’s mayoral race begs the question I raised earlier in this posting – why are these our choices in a city that has roughly 10 million including the most successful and ambitious people in the world? Zoom out and you can wonder the same about our national leadership and heads of state around the world.
The reason we have these choices is obviously that all the good people don’t want to run for office. You are inviting physical threats and intimidation, and entering an arena where moderates will be tarred and feathered on Fox News and social media 24 hours a day, where AI will create fake videos with your likeness that circulate as fact that nobody wants to police, and for the rest of your life you can never do anything that a normal person would do that would help you be a person that understands the real lives of people that you are supposed to represent. This is so even though we complain that politicians don’t understand our needs. We complain but we have the system that we created and deserve.
I’ve thought about being involved in politics and that I could do good things and seek the center, but I know that I don’t want to touch it with a 20-foot poker.
There is a solution to this and it’s easier than you think.
Abolish party primary elections. Instead, let people run in open primaries with runoffs to secure a 51% majority. In Miami Beach, where I grew up, my father was elected mayor in an open election several months after polling showed his name recognition was only 11% at the time. 15 years earlier, he had been elected as a city councilman even though the Democratic party endorsed his opponent. He won because he had a compelling message and was well organized at the street level.
Money is overrated in politics. What counts is a compelling message and good organization. Mamdani was at 1% a year ago and is set to win because he has both and didn’t have to spend a lot of money. Bloomberg spent almost a billion dollars running for president and had no message and that’s why he got so few votes. Trump was outspent by Hillary Clinton and still beat her. Today, neither Democrats nor Republicans have a message. They have litmus tests. Do you know what their messages are? Do you know what their litmus tests are? I rest my case.
The two political parties have become captives of their fringes, and it’s impossible for moderates to get noticed. A small number of people in the parties and in primaries decide who will compete and that provides a false choice to voters. Trump vs. Harris or Biden and Trump vs Clinton were false choices in a country that deserved better. Political parties were supposed to vet candidates for competency and voter appeal and have instead shut them out. As a Republican, you have no standing in the party unless you want to declare publicly that Trump won the 2020 election. As a Democrat, you have to declare that you support the teachers’ unions even if you think they are part of the problem in US education that you want to fix. I don’t want to have to pass political litmus tests that the majority of our country wouldn’t pass to even be considered as a candidate.
Our two-party system is hardwired into our electoral system and we should unburden ourselves from it, not by starting a third party but by getting rid of the “fix” that either one party or the other will win each and every election. Efforts to draft a third party candidate last year went nowhere because the entire infrastructure down to political consulting has been rigged to keep outsiders out. There is no incentive to do better when you know that you win some and you lose some, but that you are never outside the tent as long as you don’t get involved with an outsider. The better way is to make it easier for people to enter the tent of politics and get noticed and to let the People decide. With a 51% runoff, it requires people to run for office that are closer to the center and can get people who can be persuaded to vote for them. With ranked choice voting, we get perverse results that make no sense to voters. Let’s make it simple and promote a system where everyone counts. Our current system is not competitive and offers few contested races to begin with. Open primaries offers the best chance to counter the effects of gerrymandering which are the reason our democratic system is no longer democratic.
It’s not democracy worth fighting for and maybe that’s why so many of us don’t care anymore, and why everyone is abdicating our rights to those who seem to care the most to get what they want such as those who oppose abortion or who don’t seem to care if the Russians take over Europe.
Right now our country’s politics is like color war in camp. Doesn’t matter who you are or even what you stand for – I might despise you, but you are either on the red team or the blue team, and I’ll stick with my color. Until we break free of this, we’re doomed to have mediocre leaders we don’t want and parties that have no plans because they can’t publicly stand for anything when they have nothing to offer except extremists that couldn’t be elected by a majority if they said what they meant.
Polls show that the majority of Americans are disgusted with the dysfunction in the political system. They want something better but because it hasn’t appeared, they are grasping at straws going for whatever seems to make sense at the moment. Going centrist is where public opinion really is. If someone with “rizz” (current teenage slang for charisma) can rise to the challenge and show the way, people will follow.
