Global Thoughts — 12 August 2014

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Niagara Falls, June 2014

We told the kids about our upcoming summer vacation to Europe. Elizabeth was very upset that she was going to miss trip day at day camp. Jeremy held us up for close to 10 minutes while he went to the kitchen to look for jelly to put on his crackers. As you can see, kids have other priorities. Now that she’s learned how to read, Elizabeth can read signs in languages she doesn’t understand.

AirBnb is an interesting phenomenon. I didn’t think people would want to rent out rooms of their apartments and houses to strangers coming for a night or longer, but it seems that people think they know people via the internet and the desire to make the money to pay the rent or the mortgage is strong enough to dispel doubts. This is actually nothing new; people have done this for over a century probably knowing even less since now at least there are rating services to fill in the information gap. Contrast this against an oped article I read lately about electrical blackouts in the NY Times. Technology exists to eliminate blackouts due to excessive demand. A little box next to your air conditioner can receive a signal from the local utility when there is high demand and reduce a bit of power to your unit. You would hardly feel the difference but having everyone in your neighborhood with a box would reduce demand enough to eliminate the threat. The problem is not the technology – the problem is that utilities can’t get enough people to cooperate and install the boxes. However, they found that if they can make people feel that their neighbors know if they are cooperating or not, they are more likely to cooperate. Simply paying them $25 to register doesn’t do it. So you have two seemingly disparate stories here that make sense together – people will do things if they feel part of a community where people feel they know enough about each other to expect them to cooperate or at least behave civilly for the common good.

At airports they are making people turn on electronic devices so that they can be convinced they are real presumably in response to intelligence that someone is going to try and sneak something aboard. You know what is going to happen – a bomb maker will create a device that appears to “power on” with some phony screen and which fools the airport screeners. They are basically going to look quickly at the device to see if it seems real and pass it by without really looking at it. That phony screen could be writing on clear plastic and it would probably get by them. You just know this is what is going to happen. Hey, in 2001, I said the only thing they weren’t doing post-9/11 was to check people’s shoes and you know what happened next.

I want to complain about sexism and stereotypes in literature. I keep reading these children’s books and in those books, the husband is always spending every last dollar of savings on hair-brained get-rich schemes and does stupid things for bad reasons, while the wife is the compass of moral rectitude and responsibility.

In the downtown area of NY City near the World Trade Center, they have built up completely new neighborhoods with beautiful parks, buildings, hotels, shopping malls with artisanal food courts, escalator walkways under the West Side Highway directly to the subways, marinas, etc. Governor’s Island is a great weekend day trip reachable by 10 minute ferry ride from the southern tip of Manhattan with all sorts of things to do there and very pleasant surroundings that make you feel miles away from the City. Mayor Bloomberg is behind a lot of this development and tourists should spend a day just enjoying these sites. The downside here is that in my neighborhood, which is the upper west side of manhattan, all sorts of stores are closing now that they can get higher rents. Gone are the children’s clothing stores and in are more French style bakeries than we can support. I’m not sure why landlords prefer croissants over clothing but it is really making things more inconvenient than they were. Now you have to go online to buy stuff.

I went to see Michael Buble in concert at Madison Square Garden. It was a real pain in the ear; the noise is so loud I had to sit there with my hands over my ears. People stand in front of you dancing all the time and block your view. They had a warm up act; the singer didn’t come on until 50 minutes after the starting time. I’m probably better off just staying home and listening to the CD and saving my $162.50. I wonder if somebody makes adjustable noise cancelling earphones for concerts, where you can adjust the volume to a comfortable level. I looked online but I’m not sure this exists. I called Bose and they don’t have such an animal.

Imagine my surprise after the downing of the Malaysian flight over the Ukraine by local rebels when I heard that flights were being re-routed to fly over someplace safer, namely Syria.

The US unemployment figures keep dropping but economic growth is stagnant and what the statistics don’t tell you is that more people have given up looking for jobs. Obama’s health law is als*o discouraging people from working because they don’t need to work to get health insurance. Disability programs have taken the place of welfare; people pretend to not be able to work because they get paid disability that goes on seemingly forever. Congress is doing nothing and hardly 5% of the seats in Congress are being truly contested in elections. Congressional districts have become so ingrained for one party or the other that it is virtually impossible to have a real congressional race anymore. Only party radicals can get elected and they get elected by very few voters because most voters realize their votes don’t count. By contrast, 30% of Europe’s monarchies have new people in place over the past few years. It is a recipe for the long-term decline of America. Infrastructure is 50 years past due; corporations are fleeing the country’s taxes and regulations and moving abroad; the world’s most talented entrepreneurs are being sent abroad because the US won’t update its immigration system after a generation and the number of unfilled jobs is at a 7 year high (which means that unions are nuts for trying to shut down skilled immigration because they are not taking away jobs but precisely the opposite – they are preventing the creation of jobs), social security is not being fixed as people age longer, the list just goes on and on. Hamstrung government plus a president who views business as evil with the same type of deal in New York City (the capitalist hub) just are more reasons that record numbers of Americans are giving up their citizenship and moving abroad. It’s not feasible for me to do so, but if I could I’d much rather make my fortune somewhere else such as Singapore. But not in Europe – see below.

I think the top rate in the US income tax system should be a flat 25% for anyone making over $250,000 a year and the only deduction that should be allowed is state and local income taxes. Everything else from charity to home mortgage interest should not be deductible. There should be a law that state and local taxes cannot together exceed an additional 5% of income. To encourage savings people should pay their taxes now and then be allowed to put up to 25% of their annual income into retirement accounts that will appreciate tax free. The US tax system should not require people to have to pay accountants thousands of dollars to figure out their taxes. I get bills in excess of $6,000 a year to have someone figure out my taxes and I really fail to see why it is so complicated because my income is a rather simple affair to calculate and I don’t have a lot of deductions.

I heard a native French speaker whose family has been in France for over 500 years say this week that the rabbi of the most prestigious synagogue in Paris said that not a single marrying couple tells him they intend to stay in France long-term. The new chief rabbi was told by authorities that there are 300 jihadis in France back from training in Syria who want to kill Jews but that since they are French citizens, the authorities cannot act against them until they break the law. Jews are emigrating from France in record numbers, but even if immigration to Israel doubled this year, still it’s only 6,000 which is about 1% of the country’s Jewish population. Incidentally, France is the only country in Western Europe that still has no economic growth. Historically, countries that treat Jews poorly become poor. I wouldn’t place my bets on France these days. Norway – that bastion of tolerance – reports that the Jewish Museum has been closed there for weeks because the police can’t provide security for it.

Park Hotel Vitznau, Switzerland June 2014
Park Hotel Vitznau, Switzerland June 2014

I have been equivocating over the past year with myself over Obama’s foreign policy. I have been in favor of his leading from behind and trying to keep America’s nose out of the rest of the world’s business. I have felt that America needs to keep its focus on economic recovery and meddling into Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yeman, Somalia and getting into tit for tat with Russia, China and Iran is sure to be costly and disruptive. The problem is that at some point this is going to come home to roost and Obama has not a single foreign policy success to show for his close to 6 years in office so far. China’s leader looks at Obama as a lame duck and is pressing advantage across Asia and making a lot of countries nervous. Putin talks moderately to prevent sanctions which so far have harmed his economy but on the ground he has invaded the Ukraine and is trying to destabilize the country. Iran is biding its time and the Gulf Arabs are in a panic. Eventually there will be a war and the US will have to spend money on it, which will be the payback for this neglect. Obama makes nice speeches but he has utterly failed at getting the world to do what he asks them to do, and the problem is that American soft power only works if there is a credible threat of force behind it. Europe has had the good fortune for half a century to use soft power backed by the threat of American force; now that it has to deal with the Ukraine on its borders with an American pacifist president, it realizes it has no power. It cannot get anyone in the Middle East to listen to it, laments the foreign editor of Die Welt writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times, who realizes now that Europe was mistaken in the “European-like” president it wanted and got in Obama. The odds are that Syria would not be in the mess it is in now had the US acted earlier to stop Assad. What brought 9/11 to America was that Afghanistan became a lawless country and the Taliban were able to stage Al-Qaida from it. You can multiply that now by a dozen lawless states. The next US president will probably have to move away from Obama’s policies and invest a bit more in what I call deterrence maintenance. This is whatever it takes to keep order in the world so that US words have greater weight. Obama simply cannot go and draw red lines around the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then do nothing when they actually get used. That will have turned out to be an expensive mistake, even though frankly we really don’t care that they were used. The problem is now that there are millions of refugees in Jordan and Lebanon destabilizing those countries, and you have tons of jihadis crossing from Syria into Iraq and inspiring revolutionaries across Africa and the Middle East – what happens in Syria doesn’t stay in Syria even though we like to think that it does. The Americans probably need to partner up with some unsavory characters in Syria just to stick it to the Assads; have to put the Chinese in their place in Asia by countering their grabs at international shipping lanes, and need to tell the Russians that either they leave the Ukraine alone or expect that Sweden, Finland and the Baltics will be entering NATO and that we will be putting a lot of missiles there.

The matter of deterrence maintenance brings me to the issue of Gaza. Netanyahu was forced to act after verbal threats alone failed to deter Hamas after several years of this type of activity. He was not about to be blackmailed into not responding simply because the attackers were hiding behind skirts and kids below ground and daring his country to risk war crimes tribunals by coming after them. He wasn’t interested in exercising the right of self-defense as long as nobody else got hurt, which is what it seemed the rest of the world wanted. Now that the fighting is over, journalists are confirming that Hamas really did shoot rockets from schools and hospitals and that the “massacres in the UN facilities” came from Hamas shells and not Israeli fire. The reporters are now admitting that they knew it at the time but weren’t allowed to say so at the risk of their lives. At least the truth is coming out now if not never. Ancitipcating that, I have been waiting for the smoke to clear about Gaza before writing about it. I did not feel while the operation was in progress that I had a full report of what was going on. I still would rather wait but I am leaving next week for 3 weeks of vacation and people have been asking for me to write about it. In the beginning I thought it was going to be another phony war of bombing empty buildings at night but then after the Israelis caught a bunch of people sneaking into Israel through a tunnel they had to really deal with this. (I think that right now the parties have reverted to the phony war to save face while ironing out a ceasefire.) I still think the $64,000 question is why the Israelis went after the homes of Hamas leaders rather than the people themselves – 5 years ago that’s what they did from the get-go and it made a difference at the time. I think that Hamas expected Netanyahu to bluff and not to actually send in the troops, which might have occurred but for this. When Al Jazeera started leading with the Malaysian plane crash I knew the Israelis had a free kick and the ground war started that very evening.

What I see is that Hamas had a big problem with Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. It had lost its main funders and its access to Egypt had been shut down. The Palestinian national unity government was in fact designed to strangle Hamas. They went to war against Israel hoping that a cease fire would include better terms from Egypt; essentially they went out to attack Israel on a “fundraising” mission trying to score some success to rally the Arab street and money to their side and were amazed when they were met in the Arab world with silence. Hamas might have even been pushed into this war by Iran who was egging on the various factions in Gaza to attack Israel and forced Hamas into a box not being able to look like patsies to their own side. I’m still not convinced that the leadership of Hamas planned the kidnapping of the Israeli teenagers; the operation was a botched amateurish job which is not how they operate. What Hamas didn’t count on was that Qatar and Turkey (their only two real friends with ties to the West) were ignored by the PA, Israel, Egypt, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and that the US and UN diplomatic efforts which reached out to Qatar and Turkey were virtually ignored by Israel and were ridiculed by everyone else in the Arab region, aside from Qatar and Turkey, that wanted Hamas to disappear. Hizbullah wasn’t going to touch this with a 20 foot poker either. The Israelis were focused; they went in to do what they planned to do and then got out. They presumably coordinated this with Egypt in advance who both wanted to bring a crushing blow to Hamas. The Israelis, Egyptians and Palestinian Authority will all take care to make sure that Hamas does not come out of this ahead with any added legitimacy. I think the Israelis were surprised at seeing all these tunnels reaching across the border into Israel; they were thinking more about tunnels coming into Gaza from Egypt. But they shouldn’t have been surprised. They were just being selective about what they viewed as threats worth dealing with and underestimated the depth and scope of their enemy’s attack capabilities.

It was negligent of them because the army brass had been warning political leaders for over 10 years about this and people had been offering technology solutions which had been ignored whilst tests were going on for solutions that didn’t work and it seems a lot of bureaucrats shuffled papers around for years on this subject. I’ve heard from people who found tunnels years ago that came back to haunt the Israelis this past month. I’ve read notes about written reports that mentioned the idea of kidnapping through tunnels for years. Hamas was probably surprised at how little their rockets mattered, but the Israelis underestimated the tunnels which tells you that in a future conflict with Lebanon, it will require ground troops to deal with Hizbullah – the rockets won’t do much but there will be a lot of ground fighting. I watched TV for a few days but gave up on it because I really wasn’t learning anything from the coverage and to just turn on the BBC and watch pictures of crying babies in Gaza is good television but lacks context. Reporters in Gaza only show what they are allowed to show by their Hamas hosts. I found it nauseating to watch all these BBC anchors dripping with bias interviewing Israeli and Jewish representatives from phony left-wing organizations that they put on the air so that they could show “balance” with accusing tones and not really being interested in their answers. I recall Mayor Bloomberg excoriating Wolf Blitzer on CNN for inflammatory questions and Tony Blair exasperated at the naivete of his BBC interviewer Jon Sopel. You look at a lot of Europe and you see a bunch of people just waiting for the Jews to make a mistake so that they can point a finger at them and say how horrible they are. They seem to have this complex that somehow helps them justify the Holocaust – I just don’t know. The fact that Hamas wanted as many telegenic civilians to die both in Gaza and Israel versus the Israelis who wouldn’t be doing a thing in Gaza if they had just been left alone did not seem to be of interest. I’m not aware of any army anywhere in the world who tried harder to avoid civilian casualties than this one, said a British general in Afghanistan talking to Israeli TV a few weeks ago. I’d like to see how these smug people would have dealt with London being bombed and if they would have been criticizing the allied powers for the fact that the body count of the Nazi powers exceeded that of the allies during World War II (which was true in fact). You just don’t go around with a score card creating number games; context counts. An example of context is that generally in urban warfare about 80-90% of casualties are civilians. This operation had civilian figures between 50 and 70% depending on who you believe was a civilian; in any event, it is probably one of the lowest figures of civilian casualties in modern warfare which is impressive considering that Gaza is one of the densest civilian population centers in the world. I am not saying the Israelis are blameless and made no mistakes; war is messy. What I am saying is that they probably tried harder than any other military organization on the planet to act properly. The same week where a few hundred people died in Gaza, over 700 people were killed in a day in Syria. It was the highest death toll in the civil war going on in that country. But it was hardly reported. There are 40,000 members of a minority religious tribe in Iraq starving on a mountain top and being selectively executed after being besieged by Islamic fanatics and I don’t see the world putting it on the front page, demonstrating in the streets or calling UN meetings about it. Let them put on TV the Israeli platoon commander who spoke to a small group last week in New York (where I was present) who said that he felt terrible walking into somebody’s house in Gaza the week before and seeing a 12 year old girl pee in her pants. He gave her all his candy and said that he knows very well that even though he is a soldier fighting a war he constantly thinks about the fact that there are real people on both sides of the border. Some of his platoon members have 6 kids at home, and he understands that Gazans are real people – not animals. The other Arabs and Europeans would rather believe that the Israelis see their opponents as animals so that they can make it justifiable to look at the Israelis the same way.

So where does it go from here? On the Gaza side, hundreds of millions of dollars that could have gone to build houses and infrastructure went to build tunnels underneath hospitals and schools that lead directly to kindergartens in Israeli kibbutzes that were to be the target of mass terror attacks. The “siege on Gaza” came about because of the terrorism; the Israelis did not blockade Gaza before they started making trouble. When the Israelis withdrew, they left behind millions of dollars of infrastructure which Hamas destroyed. There have been at least 3 military operations with Gaza during the past 6 years. Does it make sense for the Arabs there to tolerate this continued diversion of resources for these limited purposes? I don’t see any sense or profit to it. Let’s say they succeeded – so let’s play this out, spend a few hundred million more bucks on building more tunnels and rockets while people in Gaza continue living with donkeys and sewage in the streets and plan the attack of the century on Israel where 100 school kids in Israel get killed, then Gaza gets terrorized again for 3 weeks with another 2,000 Gazans dead and Gaza spends another few years rebuilding yet again. Is it worth it to the Palestinians? I think the point of the Israeli campaign was to hope that the Gazans come to the conclusion that it is not worth it to tolerate having Hamas keep diverting all their resources to being able to someday stage terror attacks in Israel proper. I just read today that the spokesman for Hamas was beaten in the streets by Gazans fed up with this war. That could be a good sign. The Israelis were not interested in removing Hamas from power because they are still preferable to Al Qaida and Islamic Jihad, and it is still not clear to me if they want the Palestinian Authority involved in Gaza or if they prefer to keep the Palestinians split among themselves. It seems like Netanyahu is coming around to seeing the Palestinian Authority as a potential partner. The Egyptians are helping instigate internal power struggles within Hamas by only allowing into Cairo those people they like to negotiate the cease fire. For instance they favor Mashal’s deputy “Marzouk” over Mashal on the political track and don’t let their military leaders in. In terms of the tunnels, which have proven to be more “scary” than the rockets, I assume there are two choices: Either build a big ditch along the border or put seismic sensors there; my understanding is that both ideas have been considered and rejected but I don’t know what plans are in place instead. I assume the Israelis and the Egyptians will coordinate and have arranged to make sure that virtually nothing enters Gaza from the Egypt side that doesn’t belong there. The above matters to Lebanon too – I’ve said that one lesson here is that rockets don’t matter; it will be a ground war with a lot of destruction in Lebanon if it comes to that. Hizbullah and Lebanon ought to decide now whether they want to see Lebanon go through what Gaza just did and I’m assuming the Israelis meant for Gaza to cause the Lebanese to make those calculations. In general, I think the Israelis have been dealing cautiously and deliberately; there is a strategy at work here that is multi-dimensional and not just limited to the here and now in Gaza. The point was not to win – this is not a winnable war. For Bibi, the point was to achieve objectives and to stay in power. He succeeded and managed to convince the country and the powers that be whose support he felt he needed that he did a good job of dealing with the problem in a responsible manner. It is interesting that these days the US is not seen as being the power that matters. The Israeli leadership probably has better relations with Egypt’s Sisi than Obama and it is interesting that Bibi hangs up the phone on Kerry and Sisi makes Kerry go through a metal detector when he visits him. Gives you a good idea what they think of this guy who ran for US president last decade. Israel has been very careful throughout the Ukraine ordeal not to say anything negative about Putin and he has returned the favor during this episode.

The big question to me is whether the Israelis are going to just see themselves as having “mowed the grass” in Gaza and now will start counting down again until next time, or whether the parties will move toward a more permanent arrangement that lets Gaza breathe and gives the Israelis quiet. I don’t know yet. I think that Netanyahu is willing to give it a shot as long as the Egyptians are the guarantor and that both of them would prefer to see the Palestinian Authority control the border. The Arab countries that would be donors want to know that their money is not going to be siphoned off by Hamas, whom they detest. I think that Abbas should ultimately be replaced by a Palestinian of a younger generation such as Marwan Barghouti. I assume the Israelis do not want to be inside Gaza any longer than they need to be. I am told it would take 10 days to occupy the place but then 1-2 years to actually destroy all the terrorist infrastructure. They obviously were not interested in doing this and they did not go after the leadership of Hamas which were hiding underneath Shefa Hospital. They knew where they were but said they were not willing to kill all the civilians necessary to get to them. The root of the Gaza problem is in Iran; they are not interested in seeing the Palestinians enter into a settlement with Israel. If you want to win in Gaza, you need to make the Iranians feel the pain. If you want the war in Syria to stop, make it too costly for the Iranians. They really have been given too much of a veto over the rest of the world’s stability.

It is also nuts that the key political decisionmakers of Hamas are sitting in world capitals making millions and holding billions of dollars being far removed from the miserable reality they are placing on Palestinian civilians. Khaled Mashal, the political leader of Hamas, reportedly controls $2.6 billion of assets mostly in Egyptian and Qatari banks. The Egyptian bank part is curious; the Egyptians right now are against Hamas but they aren’t trying yet to seize their assets. They just outlawed the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt and starting seizing their assets. But not yet Hamas which is an offshoot of that Brotherhood movement.

Except for the fact that the leaders of Hamas are removed from the reality of their people and the Iranians are just interested in pouring oil on the fire, I agree with Thomas Friedman who says that if Gazans see Hong Kong taking shape next to them, they will demand the same thing and tell the militants to buzz off. Right now nobody has anything to lose in Gaza and that is a recipe for keeping the militants in charge because the civilians there are more afraid of Hamas than Israel. I do agree with those that say that a massive economic development program for Gaza would be a good thing provided it was monitored. So far it looks like a bad investment; Israelis all seem to feel that it is only a matter of time before they have to go back into Gaza. Like I said at the beginning, they view this as “mowing the grass.” The Arabs will have to decide if they want to demilitarize and rehabilitate or just keep fighting from time to time. I hope that the Gazans come together and urge Hamas to get out of the terrorism business. I think there is opportunity there if they would just get rid of the rockets and tunnels and stop diverting so much money into guns and ammunition. I feel very bad seeing all these people get killed, hurt and displaced from their homes — 25% of the area’s population was driven from their homes. It is a big waste and it was utterly preventable — as I said, as far as I know, Israel made Gaza a prison AFTER the rockets started and sent in its troops after Hamas invaded Israel and kept breaking ceasefires. Hamas is allied with an organization that is considered an enemy of the state in Egypt. Gaza could get all they wanted just by ceasing to threaten its neighbors. A friend of mine in Israel is raising money to buy potatoes to send to Gaza — potatoes? They should be building computer chips over there.

A word about public opinion – I think it is overrated. Most people don’t watch the news anymore and anyway, if public opinion mattered, the US Congress might be actually doing something about all the issues before them that affect the lives of Americans and the fortunes of the country. But as I said before, despite all 435 seats in Congress up for re-election, there are less than 15 seats actually contested. So why would public opinion matter about Gaza?

Consider this intriguing fact: During the latest stuff going on in Israel, on the day that the 3 Israeli kids were kidnapped, Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas’s wife was having leg surgery in Tel Aviv’s newest hospital. About two years ago, the sister of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ prime minister of Gaza, accompanied her husband (Haniyeh’s brother-in-law) for emergency treatment at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, and stayed with him for about a week. Also, Haniyeh’s granddaughter was treated in Israel about six months ago for an acute digestive disorder. Hamas officials’ families being treated in Israeli hospitals? During this whole campaign, the border crossings to Gaza from Israel remained open (except for one day when Hamas shelled the crossing) and several thousand trucks a day crossed the border with commercial goods and people such as journalists going in and out. That doesn’t happen in a real war. Doesn’t it make you wonder if this is all a very carefully choreographed farce?

The Economist’s front cover laments the current state of affairs in the Arab World and seeks solutions. To me it starts with leaders like an Ataturk trying to get people in those countries to start thinking like states and not factions, and pulling Islam out of government. These Islamic states are not going to work; Tunisia and Indonesia so far are the best you can hope for in this area and it ain’t much. You can’t have peaceful countries with various religious factions fighting each other all the time and trying to cut out everyone else that doesn’t agree with them. Pan-Arabism didn’t work because they were dictators; you need democratic movements and women to be involved, because when 50% of the society is sidelined, you have 50% being unproductive and you are showing that your mindset is of another era. Business has to be encouraged to be free and competitive rather than controlled by a few princes and government has to be fair and not corrupt; low taxes by itself won’t do it. The Arab world is stuck in the pits because it is stuck in hate. Forget about Israel; they hate each other even more. Just look all around. Better times will start with better leaders. Egypt’s revolution did not succeed because there weren’t better leaders to run with the ideas of the opposition. They had ideas but nobody to follow through and it fizzled when the Islamists stuck in a poor leader and old ideas, and the army stepped in knowing it would fill the void after everyone got disgusted. I’ve always felt that the Americans should invest more in education and grass roots developments but really – the Americans can’t make it happen. They tried in Egypt to support the reformists and it failed – an Arab solution will have to come from Arabs. Good luck to them. I was in Switzerland in June and I saw a Saudi in his mid-50’s who said that he thought that change would come to his country in another 20 years. He thought that would be just fine. Meanwhile, he had a bunch of kids and was on his 5th wife hoping to create even more Saudi citizens who just might someday land a job in that country. On one hand you have this guy sitting in a Jacuzzi in a spa with the world’s top .1% and on the other he is sitting there with a mentality that is on another planet than the others who make up that elite.

In synagogue I got a leaflet about Operation Pizza Storm. The flyer encourages you to call a pizza store in Israel near the border and order pizzas to be sent to random army bases and families in the area to show moral support. I could just see some Israeli family sitting in a bomb shelter getting a pizza delivery from some unknown person in America. I can’t wait for the TV satire shows in Israel to get ahold of this. But it is a nice Upper West Side of Manhattan kinda idea, isn’t it? Jokes aside, this is why the Israelis keep refusing to disappear, contrary to the Islamic propaganda that keeps stating that they will. People are delivering pizzas to the front lines. The Tel Aviv stock exchange is still open for business and I’ve noticed that it’s been going up instead of down during this ordeal. The Israel Film Festival went on as scheduled. The airport was disrupted for 2-3 days by some but not all airlines and that was about it. A person guilty of corruption went to jail and a friend of ours emigrated with his family from the US to Israel smack in the middle of this “war”. Gaza is a problem but life goes on in the country with even a sense of humor and I am hearing that Israelis are more united than ever as a result of this operation because solid majorities feel that it was handled correctly and that this was about defending people’s homes and families. A distant cousin of mine was an infantry soldier who died. When reservists were called up, more showed up than were called – people wanted to volunteer and to take the hardest jobs. The press reports that virtually every family in Gaza lost somebody this past month. People can survive this with humor and bravado but it would be better all around to move beyond the cycle.

A last word about the politics involved with the Gaza episode — Netanyahu ignored as best he could the right-wing elements of his coalition government. The foreign ministry run by Avigdor Lieberman (who is his biggest rival to the right) was basically shut out of all the ceasefire negotiations. Cabinet meetings were briefed on ceasfires as a fait accompli and were told that re-occupying Gaza would be a disaster without much discussion. For this he won a lot of respect in the rest of the country and in world capitals. But if this ceasefire doesn’t hold and rockets and attacks continue, he will be humiliated and Lieberman will be the next prime minister. On the other hand, if Gaza is demilitarized and the Palestinian Authority gets its act together and can administer both territories, Netanyahu could team up with Tzippi Livni and run a government that could actually enter into a long-term agreement with the Palestinians. When the chips were down, Bibi sat in a room with Livni, the defense minister and chief of staff, making the decisions, and found Abbas to be a guy he could deal with. This Gaza episode actually has the chance to reshuffle the deck and open up some options — it doesn’t have to be simply mowing the grass.

2 Comments about professional sports. Number One – it makes no sense to me that a billion people watch a soccer game and one referee gets to decide all on his own when the game is over. It is sort of like God looking down on the world with everyone playing the game of life deciding when everyone dies. Number Two – The owner of the LA Clippers basketball team looks like a real shmuck and his reputation has been earned and tolerated for decades already, but I think it is criminal to force a guy to sell a team because a private racist comment he made to someone gets recorded illegally and leaked to the public. You don’t strip away a $2 billion asset from somebody because of it. If he was stealing and cheating people with team assets or holding himself out in public in ways that were embarrassing the league, it would be different. You can embarrass him, switch to another team at the end of your contract, and fans and sponsors can boycott the team to force change. But it is not illegal to be an asshole, even a racist one. He seems to be more of an elderly crank at this point than a poster boy for racism anyway. He’s the kinda guy that gives racism a bad name. I expect that courts will strike down the forced sale of his team. There is a point at which the capitalist system of property rights takes precedent over the feelings of people. You can’t have this precedent which allows other people to be forced to sell assets because they’re not the “right kind of people.” Where does it end once you start along this line? Will a homophobe win or lose because he winds up in a court in Alabama and not in California?

Portofino Italy, June 2014
Portofino Italy, June 2014

We’ve tried two weekend hideaways from NYC over the past month. Crystal Springs is a resort about an hour and a half away in central New Jersey. We liked it but not as much as the Marriott Fairway Villas in southern New Jersey about 15 minutes from Atlantic City, and about 2 hours drive from NYC. The Marriott has 2 bedroom 2 bath villas with 3 pools, kids camp, a spa, and a full service golf resort next door called the Sea View. Princess Grace of Monaco had her Sweet 16 there. Food there was good, and we could let Jeremy ride around by himself on a scooter. We preferred the Marriott; the food was better, pool was heated, there is the kids camp, fewer people around, more relaxing, less chaos getting tables at restaurants, and many more things to do on property. Another interesting place for adults only is the Lodge at Woodloch, a destination spa in the Poconos about 2 hours drive from NYC. This was a good place with a beautiful spa, good food, and lots of activities to do such as a painting class, lots of nature trails, a great gym, and a nearby resort with a nightclub where you can watch a show and hear a band. This compared well with the Mayflower in Washington CT or Glenmere in NY. Better value for money and more things to do on property.

Today we are leaving to Europe with our kids for 3 weeks. We will be in Evian, Paris, Bavaria, Venice and Florence. Will be in touch after we return hopefully with the answer to a very important question – how much gelato does it take for a family to sink a gondola?

 

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