Today is my 60th birthday. Both my grandfathers didn’t make it to 60. My dad just celebrated his 90th birthday and still has his marbles. I can feel that I have seen some of history go by over the years. Things are not what they were, but I also feel that the future is not bright. We don’t seem to be learning anything from mistakes and I’m not sure I want to be around 15-20 years from now if World War III is going to happen or if AI creates a virus that kills us all. As long as Putin and Xi are around, I think the world will not be a happy place because they are stuck in a time warp ideologically and see no way out. I wanted to hope that by 60 we could solve all sorts of problems not just medically but societally. Instead, people are even farther apart. Covid showed how mean people could be all over the world, every person for themselves. I try to tell my kids about mistakes I’ve made hoping they will not repeat them; my son doesn’t want to hear about it. He either thinks he is too smart to learn from me or just wants to be left alone to make the same mistakes himself.
Here is a great example of why I’m not optimistic about the future. I was at a roundtable hosted by a sophisticated someone who likes to stage salons of assorted intelligent people. Virtually everyone around the table had an Ivy League degree and was in significant employment or what you would call a Type A person. Conversation turned to a New York Times investigative piece published the day before about Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump and his cabinet before the start of the war. It took about 20 minutes to read the full story written by a veteran reporter Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. People said they read the first few paragraphs on the front page but didn’t read further. They came to the conclusion that Bibi talked Trump into going to war and worried about its ramifications for Jews in America. I mentioned that the article was not so simple and that it was important to read the full text. There is a lot of nuance in the story and you don’t get the full picture of the people involved unless you read all of it. For instance, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff didn’t come across so well in the article, but the authors explained the tightrope he set for himself trying to give advice to the commander in chief. You may judge him for what he did or did not do, but at least you get a full picture of what he was trying to do. People didn’t want to hear that from me. One person who deals with the most complex minutia of tax law said that he would probably not take time out more than to read 3 paragraphs in the NY Post (a tabloid) about it. One person just sounded like a MAGA drone and said that anything Trump did had to be good. Another person pushed back about reading the article in full and just said they would wait for opinion makers to tell them what to think. I’m sitting here and I’m saying to myself, these people are highly intelligent and educated, but strangely narrow-minded and lazy. Imagine the people populating the halls of Congress these days. If you are hoping for high quality people to sort through our nation’s problems, you’re not going to find them at that salon or probably anywhere.
New York City’s mayor Mamdani and his wife reported a total taxable income of $145,000 in 2025. $138,000 of it was his salary as an elected official in the NY legislature. The rest of it was his wife’s income as an artist. They gave zero to charity. Think about this. The guy runs around hating rich people and telling people to be generous to other people. He doesn’t lead by example. And does it make any sense that the mayor of a huge city with 50,000 employees and a budget of billions makes as much as an elevator repairman? You know that he must be hungry to make extra money as mayor and that corruption will be irresistible. At a recent lunch, I said that NYC should pay its mayor something a million dollars in salary because that’s what the private sector would pay anyone with a similar job. People thought I was nuts because they can’t imagine someone making that kind of money. There was enough taxes from the people at that dinner table to fund the entire mayor’s office. Again, you get what you pay for and if you’re looking for better government, you ain’t gonna find it coming from the people I talk to.
Jeremy discovered that this new AI tool Claude can make a whole slide show presentation similar to what Power Point did in just a minute. So he created one for school. I said to him, you can cheat this way but in the real world, nobody will pay you 100K a year to work in a company and push a button to create presentations if they can do it themselves. You will have to offer value if you want to not be one of those programmers who a year ago was making 150K a year and who is now sitting in a trailer in Arizona. The truth is that teachers need to keep up with these technologies and give the kids assignments that force them to think and create something that they cannot do just by pushing a button. It’s not good enough to blame kids for being lazy. We all use calculators because it’s a waste of time to do arithmetic by hand and still wind up making mistakes doing clerical work that does not really ask you to think.
Here is a really curious item. I just read that the United Arab Emirates is asking the US treasury for a bit of a bailout because they are having a cash flow crunch due to the war similar to what happens when third world countries like Argentina go into default. Huh? These are supposed to be the guys with the most money in the world. It turns out that the money is tied up with oil. Shut down the industry for a few weeks and all of a sudden these guys can’t pay their bills.
People have been asking me for a few months why I haven’t posted anything about the war. I’ve been waiting for it to settle so that I could write something more than day-old. There is a pause now and so I’m posting but 2 weeks from now something could yet still happen to flip the boards.
I was looking at the pretty photo of planet earth from that Artemis spaceship on its way to the moon and I thought, wow, amazing what happens when you get a new iPhone. Did you know that the Space Shuttle had less technology in it than a very old version of an iPhone?
When I heard they were going to send ICE agents to airports to help TSA agents, I figured what will really happen is that ICE will start rounding up and deporting TSA agents. Lots of the TSA agents are probably immigrants making minimum wage. Don’t believe this? Well, would you believe that ICE agents detained the wife of a soldier training to deploy to the Middle East because she was an illegal alien living in the US since she was a toddler. She was in the process of applying for her green card under normal procedures. How’s this guy supposed to be a soldier fighting for his country while they are deporting his wife? It took 5 days of detention and a front page article in the NY Times to get her out.
In case you were wondering about America…. I was having a spa appointment and said to the facialist: What do you think? They got the Ayatollah. She said “ What’s that?” I said the same to my somewhat more aware building doorman and he said “I hope nothing happens on the subway.”
I knew Trump was in real trouble with that shooting in Minneapolis when my son Jeremy said to me “What do you know about ICE?”. He had seen the video and said it was a complete murder by an officer.
It’s not just us – in Mexico, kids at birthday parties take aim at pinatas that have the image of Trump on them. Meanwhile, their president has 70% approval ratings and is considered to be doing a good job “managing Trump.” That’s what I hear all over the world from government officials who have to deal with the US these days, that Trump is a nuisance to be managed.
One thing I can tell you is that it is becoming clear that the US is losing influence in the world. People who have leverage in the world based on US power are not getting their phone calls returned or the meetings they want because it is becoming easier to ignore the USA. This is not something that is evident to Everyman but it is going to affect their lives and it was completely expected when Trump was elected. America First is becoming America Last.
One reason America is losing credibility is that Trump keeps sending people to negotiate with the Iranians and Russians who are not expert negotiators in the subjects they are negotiating. You can’t send a real estate developer to negotiate a technical nuclear arms deal. It’s a failed effort and just leads to rolled eyes on the other side of the table when you have such a mismatch. One side thinks the other side is offering one thing, not realizing what is really being offered. It’s been a disaster.
If you want a good example of US corruption, the Economist has a detailed article talking about people taking million-dollar contingency fees to get mergers approved at the Department of Justice. This means they are sure they can get paid for their efforts because the corruption is so entrenched.
One good thing about a blizzard is a break from bicycles running amok on the street.
I noticed that the Qatar sovereign wealth fund wants to buy Papa John’s pizza chain. I’m waiting for Jewish watchdog groups to ask: Does that mean that they will start putting out anti-Semitic pizzas? If you read the daily newsletter “The Jewish Insider” you’d think the whole world is filled with nothing but anti-Semitism. People you would otherwise never heard of are all of sudden raised to the level of Public Threat #1 every time they do something.
Don’t think I don’t care. The head of the US Coast Guard ought to resign. After an outcry, they promised Congress that a proposed new policy of making a swastika or a noose not qualifying as “hate” would not be implemented. A few weeks later, they implemented the policy and now such things are simply considered “potentially divisive.” It is a stain on the US military and nobody who let that happen deserves to be in charge of a branch of it. I mean, really? Frankly, antisemitism seems to be becoming more normalized on both the Left and Right in America and abroad and it can’t end well this way. People are tolerating jokers like Nick Fuentes and appearing on his shows because he is making money generating clicks and figuring it is all one big joke. Tucker Carlson is doing the same and if not for the fact that these people are now attacking Trump, he’d be all in with them. Israelis and Americans just fought in a war as allies and somehow Israel is hated by everyone because the war itself was not won and was not popular. Where were all the supposed allies that were too scared to step up?
Isn’t it amazing that the sun travels 93 million miles to Earth but when you are on the beach trying to get a suntan, a little cloud up in the sky is all that is between you and that sun.
I waited for this war to end before posting comments because nobody really knew what was going on in the middle of it. If America and Israel claim to have won the war, I sure hope this is not what winning feels like. I still don’t know what the outcome is, but for now there seems to be a break in the fighting and my sense is that nobody really wants it to resume because nobody thinks they can win. That might be true. This election is a loser for Trump in an election year. Netanyahu would like to keep it alive but he is constrained by Trump and he might just get a deal on Lebanon that keeps the peace but I can’t see the Lebanese choosing civil war over peace with Israel. Lebanon will be a problem for Israel as long as the Iranians choose to keep Lebanon as a protectorate. The Iranians can shut down the strait of Hormuz and destroy Gulf infrastructure such as desalinization plants. The Americans and Israelis can destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure but it will just piss off Iranians and leave the government still in charge. Iran can make life miserable for the Israelis.
For all the statements by the US and Israel about how much they were destroying the Iranians, the other side seemed to be perfectly able to cause lots of damage to military and civilian facilities. I think that military planners are out of date in terms of the way they define “victory” and that asymmetric warfare (meaning a mismatch between two militaries) needs new strategies. Iran was able to block the Strait of Hormuz by hardly doing anything and found new leverage it didn’t know it had. The Chinese will rebuild virtually everything the Iranians lost in the war within a year. The Americans and Israelis paid a shitload of money and disruption for less gain than it might appear. Just 8 months ago they were crowing about how they had obliterated Iran, which turned out to be false. Hizbullah in Lebanon, despite being attacked daily by Israel, was doing just fine rebuilding itself. Iran threw $30,000 drones against billion dollar weapon systems and was able to take them out of action. I would hardly call this a victory even if my friends in the military do. The US is in a bad position with China and Russia having used up all this military kit. They cannot spend years replacing this stuff, since it didn’t really work that great to begin with. Military planners need to rethink how we fight and get their shit together. We can’t spend a month getting a group of marines in place abroad to fight somewhere. We can’t keep throwing million dollar interceptors at cheap drones and we can’t afford to have billion dollar refueling planes and radar systems get hit by cheap drones either. Congress is at fault here too because they know we have a problem and they are more concerned with spending tons of money on expensive contracts that benefit their districts. Nobody is really concerned about winning wars and we ought to be since our opponents certainly are.
With regard to Iran: Larijani was the brain, and they might regret having gotten rid of him once they realized that regime change was not possible. It might be smart to leave Ayatollah Jr in place because nobody in Iran really wants him except the IRGC which thinks they can control him. Trump boxed himself in because he publicly declared that he must win: the Gulf states must win the war or live with an angry tiger. Trump had no choice but to try to win or be labeled as a TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) for eternity. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote – when you strike at a king, you must kill him. Some Gulf states are still telling Trump privately to finish the job. Oil prices have been high forever due to Iran premium of fear; if you get a more accommodating country out of this, it will bring the price down. Consider this: Hizbullah in Lebanon gets 90% of its money from Iran. Houthis only get 10%; they will stay in business after the war unless someone brings them down from their tree and makes it more profitable not to do this business. The Qataris feel (and told me) that they believe that having the Houthis be included within the Yemen mainstream is their goal. Qatar is trying to pay off the Iranians even now, but they know it’s a problem. Having the Iranians strike and damage a liquid gas plant that is 25% of their business is a big problem and that happened quickly in this war.
I really have seen things change during my lifetime. Miami is unrecognizable from where I grew up. Saudi Arabia, which I visited in February, is also unrecognizable from my previous visit in 1999. And Arabia was a place I was sure would never change. Imagine me standing 25 years later in chop-chop square in Riyadh (where they used to behead people) in the exact same spot and you can’t recognize the place. A stage was being set up for a music festival. Funny thing: In Jeddah, there was all this empty land near the seashore and the palaces of princes who have nice homes in that area. I asked why all this land was empty. They said they had stationed patriot anti-missile batteries there years ago. I figured well, all these years have passed and why don’t they just get rid of it already and move on and develop this beautiful area. It was just a few weeks later that cities in Saudi Arabia were being bombed by the Iranians. And that’s the whole point – you can’t just move on in this region until something is done about the Iranians who keep everyone else on edge. So far, this war has solved nothing for anyone and might have made things worse. I’ll give Trump credit for at least trying to solve a problem that has festered for close to 50 years but it would have been kind for him to at least have a Plan B when Plan A didn’t work (he didn’t believe the military commanders who warned that Iran would shut down the Strait of Hormuz and then he had no plan when they did). The embargo that is now in place might work or it might not. Who will hold out the longest? Only time will tell now but considering that Trump let Iran sell oil for weeks when nobody else could, it doesn’t give you much hope for a great strategy.
Consider this paragraph I wrote 2 months ago which still makes sense today: Trump keeps threatening the Iranian government by pulling out his penis before realizing he didn’t have one at the ready (meaning the military wasn’t ready, the government wasn’t going to fall and there was no alternative in place to take it over). Till any of these things can happen, it’s a bit silly to tell Iranians that we’re locked and loaded and that help is on the way. The Ayatollah didn’t flinch and put down the resistance until it was over.
Some predictions at this point: If the US does not resume fighting in the next few weeks, the ceasefire will hold through at least the end of 2026. Netanyahu will lose the next election. Israelis feel he overpromised and meanwhile Trump decided when the war would stop so the Israelis are not masters of their destiny and they are angry about it. Lots of economic damage has been done after 3 years of nonstop war and Israelis will hold him accountable for this as well as October 7th. Putin, who is having a miserable year with losses of clients in Syria, Venezuela and perhaps Cuba, would be wise to cut a deal with Ukraine which is killing Russian soldiers faster than he can replace them, now even with unmanned attack weapons being used at the front; even with a sudden windfall in oil revenues, the economy is bleeding, Ukraine is doing a good job counter-attacking and he is not winning. But he is stuck on rewind and might just keep fighting till he dies. The Democrats will do well in mid-term elections but that doesn’t mean they will win the presidency in 2028. They will have to put up a good candidate to achieve that. Rubio qualifies if he is not tarnished with this war. I will discuss Rubio in detail later. China is sitting pretty but I don’t think they will rush into Taiwan after seeing what happened in Iran. Even if America has lost lots of armaments, Xi has a problem with his military leadership and the economics of this phony war in Iran are sobering.
All these rich and crazy people are trying to extend life. I’m more intrigued by the phone we put in a charger at night and wake up seeing 100% on the phone being fully charged. I would like that 100% fully charged feeling to be inside me. I am only as good as my last night’s sleep and half the time I don’t wake up feeling 100%, so I wish we could figure that part of life out. As for me, I look around at people over 85 and don’t want to be alive to suffer their fate. I would worry less about aging and more about optimizing sleeping.
I am starting to feel that Karen and I are leaving chaos in our wake. We went to Mexico and barely got out before a blizzard hit NYC. I got the last train home from Newark airport before they shut down the railroad. I had to book another flight at an exorbitant cost (good to have travel insurance) when American Airlines cancelled our flight. The day after we came home, drug gangs raided airports around Mexico and they closed all the airports. Karen flew to Europe via Amsterdam; hours afterward two planes from the airline she flew collided at that airport. And now virtually every place I visited 2 weeks ago (UAE, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia) has been bombed by Iran. I think we are just chaos muppets. If we go someplace, stay away afterward. Golly, even Oman was bombed, and that’s the last place you’d expect.
I recently visited Universal Studios’ new theme park in Orlando Epic Universe. These days the theme parks emphasize scary dark places. Dragons are in. I prefer the Mario Brothers Nintendo section with bright colors and happy music. But the rides emphasize 3D goggles and shooting things that you see in your head. I have no idea how it works and I just tried to enjoy the ride because making things happen was beyond me. These rides make no sense for adults who didn’t grow up playing video games.
A big thing kids think about when choosing a college is Greek life. Colleges say they have great Greek life. But they don’t really know what the reality is till they get there. My daughter is at WashU in St Louis and 90% of the girls who apply to join a sorority are rejected. There are about 35 places for roughly 350 kids applying. They are told that computers and not other kids are increasingly choosing who gets in so that it is “fair.” Because they had a snowstorm the weekend of “rush” they had Zoom sessions to judge the applicants instead of having in-person sessions. This is a really stupid way to choose who gets in. The reason girls care (some of them so much that they bought a new dress for each day of the rush period) is that the best parties involve fraternities and sororities inviting each other. But consider that boys are closing themselves off to 90% of the girls, many of whom are great applicants who might have well been chosen. This to me represents a market failure at campuses across America and it’s something that an enterprising capitalist would call an opportunity. Elizabeth got into a sorority and then discovered that she was happier than she would have been had she gotten into the sorority she originally wanted to apply to.
Sometimes I look at my 18 year old son and wonder if everything I’m investing in him is worthwhile or if I will just be disappointed for the rest of my life. But then I look around at everyone I know that has a son about the same age and I don’t know a single person who is happy about how that kid is doing right now. So I accept that these feelings go with the territory. Most kids turn out OK in the end.
It makes me very happy to see Ukraine go from begging the world for help to making billions of dollars selling arms and know-how to the Gulf in just a few years. There is a lesson here. Trump forced them to fend for themselves when he wouldn’t help them. Now he has no leverage there to stop the war with Russia because they don’t need him. This is what the US is going to have all over the world – no leverage because they have dissed everyone taking away the football and sent them packing to get their own footballs.
China has done a good job of diversifying its energy needs so that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t paralyze them. Australia shut down its refineries years ago in a quest for a more greener country and now their prime minister is telling people to use public transport to get around. One unintended consequence of Trump’s war is going to be that the world moves toward alternative forms of energy. Trump has moved the USA all-in on petrochemicals leaving the US in a bad position to deal with Iranian threats over global oil supply.
In the topsy turvy department, won’t it be nuts when Trump, Netanyahu and Putin are all in the dock at the International Court for war crimes? Wouldn’t you like to be the fly on the wall to hear the 3-way conference calls as they plan their defense?
The issue of birthright citizenship was one that I was ignoring until I finally read about what they are arguing. The idea is that if you were in the USA illegally or temporarily, a baby born to you should be a citizen. Actually, on plain common sense grounds, I agree with Trump on this one. Under common law, if you buy stolen property, you don’t have title to it and have to give it back even though you paid for it. If you are in the USA illegally when you are born, your parents are stealing citizenship for you, and you shouldn’t be entitled to it. When the 14th amendment to the Constitution was passed over 150 years ago, you didn’t have people illegally crossing borders or getting on airplanes to live temporarily in other countries. Had this been the case, the people who voted on that amendment would probably have made an exception for these kinds of people not wanting them to be citizens.
So Trump wants to threaten Greenland to get back at Denmark for not giving him the Nobel Prize? And then he threatens tariffs of the week on Europe for backing Denmark? 4 hour waits in airports because the country is so dysfunctional they can’t pay TSA or solve the situation with air traffic controllers pay? What a country we’ve become. I feel like I am wasting my time reading articles one after the other that tell you that Trump is ruining the country and making the world unstable. I don’t watch TV because if I turn on the BBC News for ten minutes it’s so depressing. Watching California Governor Newsom berating the Europeans for having “no balls” and trying to appease a T-Rex named Trump is chilling. We’ve seen this movie before and 60 million people died from it. My takeaway from the Greenland fiasco is that Europe needs to stop trying to appease Trump and use whatever leverage they have to get him to back down. Telling him to get lost when he wanted them to cooperate with the Strait of Hormuz was a good start. I’m waiting for the US Congress and Wall Street to come to the same conclusion.
On Christmas Eve, I went with Elizabeth to a Solidcore exercise class, a form of pilates. The class cost $45; the visit to the chiropractor afterward cost $85. Elizabeth has now turned 20; she has left teenagerhood behind and is now a 20-something. Standing in line with her all dressed up, she was talking to me like a young lady at a job interview. All that poise – it was scary but nice to see how well she’s grown up. Our son Jeremy just 19 months behind her is finishing high school this year. He’s going to University of Colorado at Boulder and has a new snowboard ready to go.
During the past year, the shampoo I like (T-Gel) was taken off the market and Oral B changed its dental floss to an inferior product. The floss was changed because the US government banned some kind of plastic substance that was causing cancer, and T-Gel was sued by people who said there was an ingredient in there that was bad for you. I’ve been taking both for 30 years and I’m still here. So now I get the T-Gel sent over from the UK through eBay, and the dental floss I bought on eBay till it was all gone so now I have a good stash of it. Even in Taiwan Oral B is a leading product on the shelves.
A few years ago I quoted a story that said that 40% of Americans would go bankrupt if they had an unexpected $400 expense. Now comes a story that the median amount in people’s private pension plans is $955, and only 17% of Americans have such pensions. Really, what can you do with $955 in your pension?
I hate to say it, but don’t you think humans are kind of stupid? We had covid about 5 years ago and nobody seems to have learned anything from the last pandemic. During that pandemic people acted pretty stupidly to begin with. I feel the exact same thing would happen again. This Ukraine war is bad for the world economy and nobody can seem to figure out how to fix it. China and the US are wasting tons of energy fighting each other when they could both accomplish a lot more by cooperating. The Middle East has the Palestinians and Israelis still fighting after 80 years. Europe’s top 3 countries (England, France and Germany) are looking at right-wing governments that don’t have answers to their problems. We’ve seen that movie before and know how it goes. I’m sorry but humanity is no credit to being at the top of the food chain. Jeremy likes betting in prediction markets where you bet against other people’s bets instead of betting against the house because he’s come to the conclusion that most people are pretty stupid and that gives him a better advantage when it comes to placing bets. He’s actually doing pretty well; he doesn’t come asking me for money.
The problem with Trump’s tirades is that there is a kernel of truth to them and that is why most of the people that voted for him still support him. Europe is becoming a more hostile place toward Jews because there are so many Muslims that have immigrated there and the politicians have to pander to them. America looks at Europe and doesn’t want to become like them so they are anti-immigration and want to make the country more White. People think that Europe is free-loading on the USA and want to stick it to them; Trump is forcing Europe to think seriously about carrying more of its weight and not just hiding behind socialist policies to avoid it.
If the Democrats take over the country in 3 years and then start their own crusade of retribution, it will be a disaster. We will just keep flickering between two tribes that want to crush the other side and stuff their policies down the other’s throats. DEI was extremely unpopular even among minorities and became its own little Nazi-like movement which is now being mirrored on the Right with loyalty tests, cancelling of people, and book-banning. Half the country objected to government agencies actively supporting DEI initiatives and bullying corporations into doing the same. They are not unhappy seeing government agencies being destroyed and irreplaceable expertise tossed out along with the garbage. There is almost no difference between militant progressives and right-wing nationalists – the one thing they can both agree on is that Israel and Jews are the enemy and the cause of all evil. Have you seen anyone from either side demonstrating in support of Iranians after thousands were killed in a week by a government in its death throes? The Israelis didn’t do anything like that in Gaza.
I might have a good reason why it’s all about the Jews. Think about it – after 3,500 years there is only one fight going on in the world that goes back 3,500 years. The Jews are fighting the Persians who want to destroy them. All the other biblical conflicts don’t exist because the people involved have all disappeared. So I guess if those pesky Jews would also disappear, so would these conflicts? It’s a thought but it’s a red herring. If Israel would disappear, the Arabs would still be killing each other.
This is no way to run a country, especially one that is important to the rest of the world. China and Russia are enjoying watching us eat ourselves and our allies and it’s only the fact that their systems are still lousier than ours that keeps us on top despite ourselves. We have to move back to the center and become genuinely inclusive and caring about people we don’t agree with but with whom we must work in order to come up with programs both sides will consistently support. This sounds trite but it’s not in today’s world. I fear that it will take a disaster to make this happen. The challenge for America and the world is not to make it happen that way.
You might be wondering why AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee became so toxic to the Democratic Party. AIPAC has changed a lot in the past ten years. AIPAC has existed since the 1950’s. Until a decade ago, they were almost exclusively a lobbying organization trying to secure foreign aid to Israel. They spent their money lobbying Congress and telling people that Israel was good for America. Israel was generally popular in America as a US ally sharing the same values of democracy and freedom. They were very popular in Washington and their annual convention dinner featured a “roll call” of an elected who’s who in DC and everybody made sure to be there. Then about ten years ago they switched tack and instead of spending 99% of their money lobbying, moved toward spending almost 99% supporting and opposing individual candidates for office. This made them more enemies because now they became game-players to be feared. Instead of carefully maintaining support for Israel as a bipartisan issue, activists within AIPAC that were pro-Republican moved the organization in that direction picking up steam when Netanyahu started inserting himself into the domestic political debate over Iran policy when he addressed Congress during Obama’s presidency. Being generically pro-Israel wasn’t good enough; you had to be pro-Israel on all kinds of things that forced you to sign onto the right-wing camp’s agenda. AIPAC was increasingly viewed as a pro-Republican organization and when Israel fell from favor due to the Gaza war, it became convenient and politically viable for mainstream Democrats to position themselves against AIPAC.
I will admit that I didn’t think the US would remove Maduro, but I’m glad to see that they were able to do it as easily as they did. (Unfortunately it led to the mistaken belief that you could pull this trick as easily everywhere else.) The Vice President who took over the country (Mrs. Rodriguez) is a seasoned professional and it makes sense to leave her and the institutions in place since there is no better alternative at the ready. But I really wonder what will be there a year from now and whether anything will really change. As you can see, nobody major is going in there to do business until they feel that there is going to be rule of law and protection of investments. The rulers of Venezuela might just patiently wait out Trump and then revert to form. That would be a pity. It’s a great country that could use a comeback.
Kids look around and see a world stacked against them with the sense that AI is taking away their starting job opportunities. They feel pressure to make money and increasingly feel the odds of winning money exceed the odds of trying to earn it. Gambling has really taken hold, and not just sports gambling. Crypto has become the world’s biggest casino. But it’s really pathetic; an Uber driver in Miami put on a ballgame on his radio featuring Philadelphia playing some other team and I asked him why he cared about such a faraway game. He said he knew the game would suck but he bet on it, so he felt he had to sit there for 3 hours and listen to it.
Hong Kong seems to be finally recovering.
I know that Europeans were insulted when they heard Trump and Vance belittling Europe and saying how their military contributions to NATO were somewhat greater than zero. But it brings to mind a story I once passed along to you from my friend who was on an air force base in Afghanistan. They had a picnic and the Italians who were placed at that base wouldn’t get up and help move a picnic table. They said “Our mission is to be here.” And they meant it, meaning “here” as they pointed their fingers to where they sat and indicated that they weren’t moving anywhere or helping. This is where those kinds of stories come back to haunt. People who were in the military remember this stuff.
MAGA keeps harking back to this mythological great period in American history that they would like to turn the clock back to, such as the 1950’s. In their view, people lived in great homes and the world was nice because it was all White. People today feel bad that they can’t live the lives the previous generation enjoyed. The problem is that it’s not true. Homes in the 1950’s were half the size as now, and they had fewer appliances. Washing machines, refrigerators, radios (no mass availability of TV’s yet) were all new but they were rudimentary. Only 6,000 homes had TV’s in 1949; by 1962, 90% had them. Compare them to what people can easily afford today and I don’t think anyone really would like to go back in time and live those lives all over again. My dad paid $1,200 for our very basic first video cassette recorder when I was about 10 years old, something you can now get for $50 if you still want one. A roundtrip airline ticket from NYC to Miami for Thanksgiving weekend was $358 when I was in college 40 years ago. It is pretty much the same today for regular travel.
One important reason why the Saudis are not normalizing relations with Israel is that the Saudis are increasingly aligned against the Emirates. The Emiratis have been increasingly aligned with Israel in regional conflicts. If the Israelis are going to make nice-nice with Saudis, they will have to reconsider some of their alliances with the Emiratis and that will be hard because they want to be reliable allies since the Emiratis have been really great about sticking with the Israelis through the last several years. If you flew through Tel Aviv airport since October 7, 2023, the only foreign airplane you might have seen during its darkest hours was either Emirates or FlyDubai.
OK, let’s talk about Iran now. The attack started on Saturday morning in the Middle East. On Friday morning my time, I was hearing that Israeli fighter pilots were being called up and that the US ambassador told employees they had only Friday to get out of the country and that the US would pay for their families to get out. So I knew something was coming. But when I went to bed Friday night and nothing had happened, I figured we were good till Saturday night. So did the Iranians who held meetings on Saturday morning that proved fatal.
The Iranians must have made a bad mistake attacking all these Arab countries. Saudi Arabia was playing a double game, telling the public that it wouldn’t allow its airspace to be used against Iran but telling Trump privately that he should strike Iran now (according to the Washington Post). But I’m sure that Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain all wanted this to go away. Oman certainly didn’t want to be involved. But the policy of appeasing Iran fizzled in less than a day because Iran bombed all of them. When I was visiting, I said to elite-level people that I didn’t see any chance that they could sleep well at night as long as this Iranian government was in charge, and I feel vindicated. These countries probably now are telling Trump that he better not stop till he gets them out of power.
On July 5, just a week or so after the June 12th campaign ended last summer, I wrote 3x in a Global Thoughts posting that in 6 months the rockets and fighter bombers would be in the air again against Iran. Looks like the 6 months ran out. I was not impressed when Trump said how he had obliterated their nuclear program. The question this time is whether Trump wants to finish the job or just declare half-assed victory again leaving the IRGC in power to kill another 50,000 Iranians a month from now. These things never work from the air, so I have been waiting all this time to write something because everyone knew this from the get-go and I’ve been wondering what they might do on the ground.
If I were a cartoonist, I would draw up a picture of American and Israeli soldiers in Teheran’s central square holding the keys to the country and asking if anyone would like to take them. The big problem there is nobody is ready to take over the country except the Revolutionary Guards, something we all knew from the get-go. Sending in the Kurds will just create a civil war and roughly 50% of the country’s citizens are not Persian but a mix of all kinds of people. I liked the idea of seizing Kharg Island or at least blockading it but I’m not sure it will actually work.
The US will be in a bad place with the Gulf and its other enemies if the Iranians are seen to have frustrated the US to simply walk away from a bad war. I’m not sure how this ends well even though the sides are completely mismatched, unless ground soldiers get involved. The problem is that I don’t think you can actually “get the job done” in this war. The world may have to live with this Iranian regime for a long time unless the Iranians figure out how to get rid of them, and that doesn’t seem likely to happen. You have mutually assured destruction here – it is too easy to disrupt shipping at least for the next 5 years until the Gulf countries come up with an alternative way to get oil out of the Gulf. The real answer is that this will need to be negotiated and the Iranians can either choose to live in shit for the next 50 years with constant mowing of the grass or they can get with the program and move into the 21st century. Perhaps the new leaders will consider the alternative. They will rush for a bomb but it will not give them quiet.
I never paid much attention to Marco Rubio but the day after the US seized Maduro I watched the press conference starring the various players such as Hegseth (who must have spent 6 hours doing his hair) and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Rubio put on a good show and looked presidential. He is in an interesting place, running a foreign policy that is not exactly Trumpian but keeping Trump’s trust. He is more liked than Vance, and he is careful to work the phones and talk to congressional leaders every time he does something important. This is important in Washington and it is why the person who was picked by Trump to run the Federal Reserve got the job even though he was not the top candidate. He had friends around DC stepping up for him. Vance has no friends. Rubio is backed by Norman Braman, a billionaire from Miami who I’m told by many people is a “class act” and a smart guy who became a billionaire in the auto dealer industry and who owns an NFL football team. If Braman has been backing Rubio all these years, he must know something. I like what I see in him, and I think it’s important that after Trump somebody runs a foreign policy that has some consistency and who knows who our enemies are. I don’t want to swing over to the Democrats who I think are acting shamefully as spoilers over this current war. As I said in my trip notes on Oman, the one thing every dignitary around the dinner table agreed on was that Kamala Harris would have been a disaster. I think Rubio will be the next US president and based on the Democratic field I see, that will be a good choice. I never cared for the California governor but based on how politically opportunistically he is acting during this war pandering to his progressive base, I am totally opposed to his candidacy and I suspect he will have trouble raising money. The only issue with Rubio is that if this war is a flop, so will his political ambitions.
TRAVEL NOTES TO PLAYA DEL CARMEN NEAR CANCUN, MEXICO
I’ve been afraid to go to Mexico as a tourist because it something happens there, you can be stuck in Mexico. As you saw above, we barely got out of there. Airports can close without notice and flights get cancelled leaving you stranded in a foreign country. The place is open for tourists but when you go to major sites such as the ruins of Tulum, the bathrooms are gross. In Egypt, all the bathrooms in tourist places were decent. The roads are primitive and you can get stuck for hours on the way to the airport if there is an accident. You can’t drink the water or brush your teeth in it.
But if you dare, there are some beautiful resorts here. My travel agent told me to visit Casa de la Playa and said I would be impressed. It was built by someone who spared no expense to build and maintain this property. Karen and I flew to Cancun and then it’s an hour to Playa del Carmen, a tourist district with tons of resorts. Tons of flights going to Cancun each day, who knew? They use e-gates at the airport to enter so you can get out of there quickly if your passport works with them. Mexico’s version of Walt Disney built half a dozen xCaret resorts and theme parks of various kinds with a twist; instead of nickeling and diming you, it’s all inclusive. All the theme parks, entertainment and hotels and food at one great price. Only thing you pay for is liquor and spa if you want it. I was happy because I don’t like paying for something I don’t use such as alcohol. Although it is expensive, the overall cost is reasonable when you consider all the incidentals you pay for elsewhere and what you get here for your money. It comes out about the same for a comparable property elsewhere but you come out ahead here. The Hotel Arte is a beautiful property for people with kids over 16 that looks like fun. The sister property Hotel Mexico is for families with kids and more of a zoo. We stayed at the adults-only Casa De La Playa which is a sumptuous property built with someone who as I said spared no expense. It is also all-inclusive and they could cut corners here but they don’t. The cheeses on the breakfast buffet, live musicians all over the place (even a harpsichord at breakfast), a room filled with high quality chocolates and ice cream for the taking. A 2-star Michelin restaurant with an 11-course tasting menu. Although it was Mexican food, they don’t put too much spice on things here as 60% of their clients are Americans. The facilities were excellent at both hotels. The architecture is stunning. They have an infinity pool that juts out over the sea and beautiful interiors in the hotel. The beach is not swimmable due to the rough seas but the Arte hotel next door has a man-made beach you can swim in. The Hotel Arte is filled with instagrammable photo ops. Although I thought it was stunning with lots of wow, I am somewhat happier going to the Hyatt at the Baha Mar in Nassau. It is half the flight, one-fourth the cost and it ticks all my boxes – beach, pool, gym, food, ten minutes to an airport with lots of flights and pre-clearance in Nassau. The FAA controls Bahamian airspace so you are not really outside the USA in terms of getting back. And you can drink the water.
We visited the ruins at Tulum an hour away. You can see it in 2 hours and it’s interesting but not particularly impressive. Something bigger is Chichen but that is a 3 hour drive away each way. There is nothing else in this area to do afterward so we just went back to the hotel. If you are on a cruise ship going to Cancun, the ship docks in Cozumel, an island offshore, and then it is an hour by ferry over rough seas to this area. And then an hour ride to the ruins. I wouldn’t take a cruise to get to Cancun or Playa del Carmen. Then there are the theme parks. They are cool for kids and adventurous adults. I wasn’t crazy about the water since the temperature is 72 degrees in the water and I find that cold. The main park Xcaret takes about an hour to walk through and it is not fun when it is hot outside unless you want to go on the lazy river and into the caves or to the beach. The aviary is impressive and the aquarium was pretty standard but had lots of nice sea turtles. At night there is a spectacular show with about 300 performers showing Mexican culture. It is really long at 2 hours; the Mexicans really love it though. You don’t want to skip it but think of Prince Charles spending a lifetime watching African tribal dances.
I had a very hard time getting home from here and could have been stranded for days. Local hotels took advantage of stranded tourists and tripled their prices. I’m assuming it was a great effort toward building loyalty for return visits. It’s a reminder that Mexico may have some beautiful places but the veneer of civilization is very thin and can crack at any moment. Mexicans are very proud of their country; they need to have a government that will get the country under control and solve real problems.
