My son Jeremy seems to have found a summer job watching the World Cup for the next month. He’s generally thought that soccer was boring to watch, but decided that if you have a bet going on a game, it becomes more interesting. Considering that he turned a $125 bet on the Knicks wining the championship into a $2,500 payout, he’s a good bet. Not such a good bet: the guy who bet $1M that Cape Verde would lose to Spain – the match ended in a draw after a mythological Cape Verde goalie fought back a relentless attack by Spain for much of 90 minutes.
On my birthday around 3pm the front door rang. My son is in 12th grade and they are playing senior assassin where everyone tries to kill each other with water pistols. People go on city buses and into apartments to hunt each other down. So I didn’t want to open the door fearing assassins were after Jeremy. So I ran to Jeremy’s room to see if he wanted me to let the people in. My wife was standing behind me screaming “Open the door!” So I opened it and my 2 brothers were there surprising me on my 60th birthday. One flew in from South Florida and the other from Los Angeles. We played mini-golf and went out to dinner and it was a super nice birthday surprise.
Our family recently celebrated my father’s 90th birthday in Miami Beach. My favorite moment was when our whole family of about 30 people sang a little tune at Friday night dinner. For generations, the Ciment family would sing a little ditty that they used to sing in Hungary, which is where my grandparents came from. If you lived in that village, you sang that song. There are no words except “yum buddy dum” and a few “ayy’s.” At least when we sing that song, I know that there are hardly any other families in the world singing that song and I know that we are doing something unique.
Jeremy was supposed to meet me across town for dinner. I get a text from him that his phone is broken and he has no idea how he will get across town without it. He needs the phone to use the CitiBike system to use a bicycle. I told him to pretend he can’t ride a bike and take the bus across town. Voila — No phone needed.
You want a solution to crime in the big cities? In New York City, crime has been down by about 75% during the time that the NY Knicks have been playing in the post-season. Just keep having post-season tournaments involving professional basketball teams and see what happens. The Bros’ want to watch the games; they can heist cars and climb through windows later.
Elizabeth is spending the summer in Tel Aviv doing an internship. She is having a ball; there are lots of American kids there for the summer and her social calendar is way fuller than it would be if she had stayed in NYC. It’s a small universe of people all going to the same clubs and bars but it’s something. When she arrived, she was afraid to sleep at night because every night they didn’t know if Trump was going to bomb Iran or not. Her apartment was a few minutes walk away from a shelter designed for ballistic missiles and she didn’t relish the thought of running through the streets in the middle of the night looking for a shelter. She says not to worry about her ever living there; it’s way too stressful for someone who doesn’t like living on the edge all the time. From my end, it’s nuts for me trying to have a Plan B for her to get out of the country and booking the last seat on the only flight available from Tel Aviv either to New York, Rome, London or Paris over the span of an entire week. And that’s a $2,200 one way ticket in business class to Paris. Why would you want to go there as a tourist and be stuck in the country? Why would you want to be a citizen not knowing if you can get in and out of the country for weeks at a time? For all these reasons, in my opinion, life in Israel is not viable unless you are nuts. American teen tours are not happening to Israel except among the Orthodox who are oblivious to normal risk factors and just go.
What are the odds? One Wednesday in April my wife had tea with the British ambassador at her residence in Vienna. The next Wednesday I had tea with the British ambassador at his residence in Washington DC. Imagine betting on this in a predictions market.
My law school 35th reunion fell out on the night of Jeremy’s high school prom and he wanted me to stay home to see him in his tuxedoed glory, so I skipped out on a weekend in Philadelphia. Out of 225 classmates, only 28 showed up anyway and very few of those were people I was friendly with. I’ve gone to these reunions before and felt that I was probably having more fun in life than almost anyone else in the room. Two things I wish I had known 35 years ago that would have made it easier to avoid the practice of law in big law firms: 1. That most famous law firms at that time would eventually merge and many partners who thought they had job security would be tossed into the street. 2. That mandatory retirement would force partners out. I got married late, so this would have happened to me just as my kids were in college and I was spending the most money I would ever have to spend.
One of the great things about the West is that news gets out – all sorts of news. The NY Times and Wall Street Journal are reporting that North Korea is booming right now relatively speaking (the country is still mostly poor). More homes were built in its capitol city last year than either Chicago or Los Angeles. I’ll bet the Dear Leader enjoyed reading all the nice stories in the capitalist press about how great he’s doing. He was in the right place at the right time; Russia needed help for its war and North Korea stepped in and is profiting from it. Might not be so great for them in the long run if the war ends and Putin falls from power.
If you want to know the state of antisemitism in the world today, here is a vignette: my wife was visiting sick people in a hospital in Sydney, Australia. The Jewish chaplain doesn’t make hospital visits because Jewish patients are too scared to put their names down on a list identifying themselves as Jews. That is because anti-Semitic nurses want to kill them; they already tried and it scared everyone else. My relative had to share a hospital room with someone who said that they didn’t kill enough Jews in Bondi when an Islamic terrorist shot up a bunch of people there last year. Australia has many more Moslems than they used to. So does Europe. Jews are feeling a lot less comfortable in these countries. In France, they are moving kids to other school districts so that they can go to school safely. In Vienna, almost 50% of all youth in public schools for elementary and middle schools are Moslem. It would be nice if Moslems in these countries wanted to get along with others but it appears that many of them who came from certain places such as Syria do not. There are no Jews in Syria and relatively few in Europe so it’s lovely that they hate them so much.
A good article by 3 Harvard professors in Foreign Affairs notes that the redevelopment plans for Gaza have been drawn up by outside powers without any regard to what Gazans actually want or what would be practical in that space. It may be why there is no enthusiasm on the ground to implement any of these plans. Trump’s Board of Peace is going bankrupt because few of the pledges to fund it are being kept. Wonder where a Trump plan for peace with Iran will go? The 60 day period for coming up with a deal for Gaza has long passed and the same will happen with the 60 day period for Iran.
In my last posting, I mentioned that I was the guest of honor at a dinner party in Oman in February in which many issues were discussed. Just before penning this post, I checked with my Omani friends to verify what I said at that dinner party because if in fact I remembered things correctly, everything I said would happen happened. They confirmed that I predicted that Trump would go to war without a strategy and an incompetent team, that he would create a bigger mess, that nobody has ever managed regime change with air power alone and that a ground war was out of the question, and that therefore the Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction would wind up in tighter control over Iran. I guess I win? At least you can expect quiet until at least November and my daughter will have a quiet summer in Israel. The Iranians have no reason to start a war as long as the US is going to steer away from it.
The long and short of it, from people on the inside in DC, is that Trump doesn’t have policy recommendations being made by a national security council. That doesn’t really exist anymore. He relies on a couple of friends and advisors like Witkoff and Jared Kushner to decide what he wants to do, and they are out of their depth in international relations especially when it gets technical, because they might view as an Iranian concession something that is actually a US concession. When Witkoff has a meeting, there is nobody professional to follow up on it. He goes to the next item on his list and nothing happens. The Russians have become tired of meeting with him because it’s a waste of time. Professional diplomats have a reason to exist. It may be that lots of people have Trump’s phone number and he talks to them, but he hardly listens to them so it doesn’t really matter what goes on with his phone calls. This is something new in Washington, that experts and professional technocrats are being sidelined from making policy. It’s driving professionals nuts. When they had the negotiations in Pakistan, the Iranians sent 75 experts there. They were shocked to see hardly any experts from the US side present. When China has a summit with the US president, they prepare carefully for it. It doesn’t compute to them when Trump shows up and there is no real preparation.
One of the things I predicted at the start of Trump’s term was that he would not be very effective as president because of all this. So we have pretty much as expected: he makes a lot of noise and breaks china plates, but very little actually happens. The DOGE project is a great example of this. They fired many good people that they cannot replace and probably spent more money than they saved. But after all is said and done, the courts undid much of what they did and hardly anything changed.
About War
There are some important lessons being learned during the past year or so about War. It’s almost as if these wars exist as laboratories for the great powers to learn from these exercises. Trump has done some things that I might have wanted to try as president, such as using the US military instead of hemming and hawing viz a viz Iran. He warded off the naysayers that always tell you why you shouldn’t use the military. And what good is a military that never gets used? Well, in this case we found out the inconvenient truth that using the military and not getting the job done makes the deterrent value of the military that much less. At least we know some things he did that did not work and why, so another president might have to think differently about how to go about things. This has been an important decade – Russia, the US and Israel all tried to put chokeholds on others and go for ultimate victory. They all failed. China now has to decide if the same tactic will get Taiwan to submit. It won’t and maybe Mr. Xi now sees that.
Ok, so Trump went to war with Iran without a strategy, but is that really all of what we need to know? The Israelis might have had a strategy for Iran, Lebanon and Gaza, but it probably failed assuming one existed. Hamas and Hizbullah are not going anywhere and neither are the Iranians. The Russians presumably had a strategy for Ukraine but they failed and are being humiliated as Ukraine causes Russia’s soldiers to be killed faster than they can be replaced and strikes in major Russian cities are bringing the war home to civilians. War has never been simply a matter of might makes right; the cost of defending and counter-attacking has never been lower. Once the Ukranians figure out how to produce their own ballistic missiles again, and this will happen because they once produced these missiles, the Russians are going to have to either go nuclear, suck it up or stand down.
Putin is in a trap of his own making and so is Trump. Trump can’t get out of the Iran war and save face, and the Iranians are not giving him a way out. Putin can declare victory but the whole of Russia has been overturned for the sake of this war and when it’s over, the naked swimmers will be viewed for what they are when the tide turns out. Tons of soldiers will come back really angry and looking for jobs. This happened in the 1980’s after the Russians exited from an invasion of Afghanistan and it is one of the reasons why the USSR went kaput. Tons of people making money off this war will be looking for alternative sources of income. The list goes on and on.
About 5 years ago, I asked a top-10 senior Israeli official if the Israelis had the power to take out Iran. He said they did, but the issue was what would happen the day after? He needed to know that the Americans wouldn’t throw the Israelis under the bus. In this case, the Israelis did have the ability to cause a great earthquake in Iran, but Trump was an unreliable ally who threw the Israelis and the Gulf countries under the bus in no time at all. So the guy’s answer turned out to be correct, more than he ever knew.One thing that is disturbing, but at least we know now instead of later: The US underestimated what the Chinese and Russians knew about US bases through satellites and use of AI.
My take on this war is that it is probably unwinnable by either side and the various things that America wants can be reversed or replaced later such as removing the enriched uranium. The Iranians can try and hold the Straits of Hormuz hostage but it will just generate more investment to work around it. The Iranian people are angry over the internet blockages (so are the Russians) and the diversion of resources to fight Islamic wars abroad. There is a generation of true believers that want to exercise raw power no matter what and right now they can but they have to deliver results to the Iranian people and they probably can’t. The new Ayatollah is a figurehead who has not even yet appeared in public and he is not going to command the following that the previous one did because nobody really likes him outside the Revolutionary Guards and he’s not qualified either on a religious level. Sooner or later the government will fall. If I were the Iranians right now, I would make some kind of a deal with Trump. Once he is gone in 3 years, they can break the deal and the odds are that whoever is president of the US at that time will not bother to do much about it, just like the past 30 years have been. A future Israeli leader might not take as much risk as Netanyahu did, and the funny thing about Netanyahu is that until the last few years he was pretty risk averse himself. The Iranians in charge think they will be in power forever so they might as well act this way. I know that they must think that after the November elections Trump’s leverage will be even less, but the truth is that right now he is viewed as a paper tiger anyway that doesn’t actually commit to anything but just flits from one thing to another. It’s better for business to make a deal with him now and just play nice for the next 3 years and keep him at bay. The Gulf countries will gnash their teeth but they will play along because it’s their nature to seize quiet and try to keep it that way as long as possible. Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s strategy of paying off the Iranians didn’t keep them from getting hit for even one day once the war started; you’d think they would learn from this but they can’t fight their nature and are of course trying to pay them off again. What’s new is that Trump is trying to bribe everyone to make peace and it won’t work for him either. The Russians haven’t budged with Ukraine, the Cubans are sticking with their mud pile and the Iranians are not going to give in either unless taking the money doesn’t put them at risk.
After a lot of consultations, I agree that the best thing to do with Iran is probably very little. Making a nuclear agreement is likely to cost the US more concessions than the Iranians. Taking away the bogeyman of the US will increase pressure on the Iranian government to deliver for its people who are at a breaking point. The sanctions are hurting ordinary people while pro-government people get even richer. Releasing frozen funds to the Iranians is a red herring because if the price of oil goes down with an open strait, they will lose more income than they will gain from the frozen funds. With Lebanon, the Israelis need to give President Aoun a chance to rally support within Lebanon against Hizbullah instead of having the Israelis give them a pretext to be defending the country against an outside aggressor. Holding the south of the country was a loser 30 years ago (which is why the Israelis withdrew) and it’s even worse now because Hizbullah’s drones can hit Israel from virtually anywhere in the country and there is no way the Israelis can occupy the whole country. There is a kernel of truth to Trump and Vance saying that the Israelis can’t kill every last person or blow up a building every time a Hizbullah person steps out from it. The Israelis are married to a concept that they can pre-empt any threat because they can’t afford to wait until the threat materializes on their doorstep. This is an overreaction to October 7 and it’s unrealistic because they cannot have a viable country that is always at war and that has wars that go on for a long time. Good people will leave and business will go elsewhere when nobody can reliably travel there. Just ask Dubai and Doha where everyone thought the water was warm. Remember last posting when I was in Jeddah and saw the empty lots near the palaces and was told they were stationing Patriot missile defense batteries 25 years ago. I wondered why couldn’t they just move on, and then 2 weeks later Saudi is being bombed again. It’s not a future here for anyone unless everyone sits down and makes a deal. You can say that Iran doesn’t want any deals. Well, you can’t expect them to want to deal with Trump who talks and bombs at the same time. And who keeps changing on a dime. Any real deal will await America’s next president who hopefully will be a pragmatic person.
An interesting article in Foreign Affairs questions whether America should keep trying to ensure freedom of the seas around the world. It says that it’s no longer possible to do so, and that America’s navy is not fit to counter every terrorist or state with cheap missiles that can close a waterway. The future may involve paying tolls to those who control waterways and we might have to accept that as a fact of life. Unless it becomes a mutual interest to keep the waterways free, they will become like highways on land and shippers will have to price it into their costs.
We interrupt this edition of Global Thoughts for a second. to reality check a pulse. If you ever wondered why these photos of carefree life are interspersed among the commentary of such dreadful real world subjects and if I have absolutely no sensitivity to the context, the answer is THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT. The contrast is entirely intentional. The photos take on added irony when pasted against the commentary. Unlike bleeding hearts who want to solve all the world’s problems as long as they’re not affected by the solutions, I’m telling you that I know that I am fully aware that we are living our lovely little lives here oblivious to everything while the US and Israel are blowing up places around the world with people trying all day just to survive and then up nightly and running to and from hospitals and lacking shelters, and that the whole thing is insane, if you think about it.
ISRAEL TODAY
At a recent conference about the Middle East, I saw Israel’s ambassador to the US say that the majority of Israelis making trouble in the West Bank Arab areas are not settlers but problem kids from elsewhere in Israel. Then I read an article in the Economist written by an Israeli ex-general which was very credible and detailed disturbing events involving settlers. Then you read Nicholas Kristof’s oped piece about dogs in Israeli prisons trained to rape female prisoners, which appeared carefully edited with an eye toward possible lawsuits based on a good deal of hedged innuendo from suspicious sources and a lack of real evidence. It’s hard to make sense out of all the things I read. Nobody knows what to believe. Bad actors want it that way so that everything you think you know is suspect. Good actors owe it to everyone to make sure that what they print is accurate and keep credibility alive so that we can at least argue about a set of facts that are real.
And then comes Ehud Olmert, a past prime minister of Israel, who wrote an oped piece in the Haaretz daily Israeli newspaper which I found devastating. He said that Israel is practicing genocide in the occupied territories. He even backed up Nicholas Kristof’s article in the New York Times to some degree. He did not agree that they were practicing genocide in Gaza but anywhere is enough. You can’t ignore Ehud Olmert, a Likudnik who was a prime minister. This is a really serious problem and Israelis and their supporters are going to have to face up to what Israel is doing these days in the West Bank with Smotrich and Ben Gvir at the helm. America and the majority of American Jews are not going to support this.
A cousin of mine through marriage is a young patriotic Israeli. He sees a future in that country but it is one that believes that the only possible future is war every so often because there is nobody to make peace with and that the Palestinians want only war and respect only power. He is pursuing a PhD in science and is living in America and fights in the Israeli army. He is one of the few in his combat unit that showed up the past year when called to reserve duty. He is more worldly than most other Israelis his age. Most young Israelis are more hard-core Rightist. He is considered a centrist. Most Israelis that are more liberal and want a brighter future are leaving the country and they are leaving the more ideologically driven people behind. I don’t see a bright future for that country if that’s the only future they can see. And yet people like my cousin feel happy about their lives and think that everything is just fine because it could be worse. I just don’t see how you can be happy by comparing yourself to things that are worse than your condition. Maybe you want to strive toward a better condition. But it explains why Israelis consistently rate their country high on the happiness scale. They measure happiness by a different standard. If everyone around them lives in shit (look at Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and mostly poor Saudi Arabia), they figure they must be doing all right.
Brett Stephens, the NY Times columnist, wrote an essay that has a different take on this point. He said that Israelis are happy because they are resilient and feel their country is worth fighting for. This is unlike America and other Western countries where striking majorities feel that their country is not worth fighting for. Brett feels that Americans could learn some things from Israel such as that America’s strength comes from the strength of its ideas and not just military power. That Americans are unhappy because they no longer see the worth of American values; either they think America is a bad oppressor country or that America is strictly transactional and doesn’t stand for anything. The answer for America is neither in MAGA or Progressive thought. It is for re-establishing centrist values and agreeing that America should be a force for good, that the world does want America to be involved (even its enemies have use for it as a stabilizing influence), and that not everything that is worthwhile has a price tag on it. Trump took it for granted that he did not need to muster that resiliency for this war and he lost the country before he ever had it. But that doesn’t mean that Americans couldn’t rally behind a similar effort at a different time. I don’t think this war should have been fought because it was not a war that could be won under these circumstances. But that doesn’t mean that war should never be fought or that the US cannot someday prevail over Iran. I just think that the solution to Iran lies within Iran more so than from outside. America can do more to support Iranians and should.
Last edition, I discussed how AIPAC (the American Israel Political Action Committee, a major pro-Israel lobbying group) had gone off the rails. Another crazy point I just came across: In the last election cycle, they supported over 100 candidates who were 2020 election deniers, meaning they insisted that Trump had won the election. Many of these had voted that way in the Congress. Yes, AIPAC has done a great job for itself of alienating itself from the congressional mainstream.
Nevertheless, whatever you think about Israel, there is an important point to be made about US military aid to Israel. It’s not charity. It’s very much in America’s interests to do it. There is no other country in the world willing to put up and to be able to perform as much as Israel in terms of taking over the US footprint in any part of the world. The money is being spent in the US and the improvements come back to benefit US military interests. If the US wants to stop its military relationship with Israel on moral grounds, it had better be prepared to pick up the slack and it will cost it even more money and troops. There was no European, Asian or Gulf country able or willing to fight alongside the US as an equal against Iran. If you ask Israelis, they will tell you that they probably would have done better fighting by themselves because an unsteady Trump was a drag on a war effort, buckled under pressure and caved into a bad deal.
AMERICA’S COLLEGES
A majority of young Americans think that college is not worth what it costs. If that’s so, it should be harder to get into those colleges and harder to graduate from them. That way, the world of employers will have a higher degree of respect for those who graduate from them. Right now the statistics are awful; almost half the kids in University of California engineering programs showing very high grade averages from high school are in remedial math programs. A prominent Chicago hospital is hiring EMT’s because of skin color who are awful. I know this because an EMT working there who is competent says he can’t stand working among such incompetence and is leaving. Keep all this up and nobody will respect the output. This is not just an American problem; it’s going on in Britain and Australia and in Europe. It’s a reflection of a rot in liberalism and it’s on the way out , especially among people of color, as people realize they were robbed; it’s like the 13 year old who was told he was a champion by well-meaning parents and teachers until he went to junior high school and saw the competition and then realized he sucked. He realized he was being lied to and hated it. This whole idea of telling people that participation trophies for showing up is good enough and that actually succeeding is not important is good for the ego but bad for society. There are winners and losers and people have to realize that. The objective should be to give everyone an equal chance to succeed no matter their socioeconomic status; it is not that everyone gets raised up even if they don’t work hard or don’t have the right stuff simply because of their origins.
TRAVEL NOTES — MIAMI BEACH Fontainebleau resort, Orlando’s Evermore Resort, Chicago Revisited
Over the past few months, I visited Miami Beach and stayed at the Fontainebleau hotel. Over the past 50 years or so, it’s been renovated several times and a property of that magnitude doesn’t look anything like it did when I was a kid. It has totally new pools and a very nice gym. The problem there is that the gym and pool all close around 6:30pm, which is rather early for an expensive hotel. It expects its guests to be getting dressed to go out all night. It’s not a bad hotel, but it’s a zoo and service is more like you’d expect in a hospital than a luxury hotel for which you are paying luxury prices. Go there for lunch by making an online reservation, and you can sit at the pool if you do.
We stayed at the Evermore Resort in Orlando for a family weekend. For us, being in a real house with a small swimming pool and hammock and corn toss in the yard was a real treat. We made BBQ on the grill with food we brought from NYC and the homes are a section of a resort that has villas, flats and a 4-star hotel. From the hotel’s rooftop restaurant, you can sit on the terrace and watch the Disney fireworks over the Magic Kingdom. There is a big lagoon with fresh water so you can simulate swimming in the ocean without fear of biting fish. You can also paddleboard and kayak along the lagoon. There are water slides, a dock with a rope for jumping into the water, a Mister Softee ice cream truck and various swimming pools. What more could you want? We never left the property for all 3 days; going to the theme parks was of zero interest. It was also easy to get to and from the airport. At this point, I just use Uber and don’t bother renting a car.
Finally, I just visited Chicago which I haven’t seen since the pandemic. At that time, everyone was stressed out and hostile. The place has improved markedly although as a city the place hasn’t really modernized over the past 30 years. Tap water tastes pretty metallic. The public transport will get you where you need to go but they closed down a bunch of stations during a busy tourist weekend and the trip from the airport to the hotel on Friday took about 70 minutes, which was faster than an Uber and saved me $100. The red line to Chicago Station was a 7 minute walk to either the Four Seasons, Peninsula or Park Hyatt. Going to the airport on Sunday in an Uber was a nailbiter because of all the traffic everywhere. The interstate I-90 highway only has 3 lanes in each direction. It could use a tolled lane for airport traffic. Other cities such as Cairo have done more over the past 30 years to deal with traffic issues. Here on a Saturday afternoon, they closed the main bridge for cars and pedestrians crossing the river along the main shopping street. People on a city bus sat there for half an hour. Pedestrians stood around the bridge that never went up waiting for something to happen. There were no police or anyone giving instructions or explaining why this happened. Finally, I noticed that a block away was another bridge that people were crossing and I just went there and crossed. In New York City, this would never happen. Instead of just standing around forever all nice and compliant, people would say “FUCK THIS” and just start walking across the bridge.
I stayed at the Four Seasons which is near the Peninsula and Park Hyatt at the north end of the Magnificent Mile shopping street. The hotel was an excellent city hotel and the blueberry donuts on the breakfast buffet were memorable. I did lots of walking around; took a walking tour to see offbeat city highlights such as the Empire Room at the Hilton Palmer House Hotel (once a famous cabaret), the Walnut Room on the 7th floor of the main department store (now Macy’s), and some beautiful rooms at the old Public Library that have been restored with stunning domes. Bistronomics was a good French dinner restaurant near the hotel. For me, a deep dish pizza at Gino’s East is a pilgrimage (order online and then pick it up instead of waiting for a table and then an hour for them to make the pizza). A personal size cheese pizza with spinach and pineapple toss-ins cost $40; wow. Cheesecake Factory is also a treat because there are none in NYC. The Transit app that I have in NYC works in Chicago and it’s amazing how apps on our phones have changed the whole concept of navigating a city as a tourist. You know where to catch the public transit, when it will arrive and when you will get to your destination. You can see how to walk to somewhere and how long it will take.
Speaking of technology, my United flight to NYC featured the new Starlink Internet service on board. It’s really good; feels just like being at home. However, at the O’Haire airport, they need to modernize some facilities. 5 toilets in a terminal for a dozen gates at a time is just not enough. However, CLEAR works really well with the new E-Gates and security took me all of 2 minutes and I came out right where my gate was.
Real estate here is pretty cheap for a big city. You can get a 1,000 square foot (100 meters) apartment in a good location near these hotels for less than $250,000. You can get a 2,500 SF apartment in a nice residential neighborhood for $1 million with 3 bedrooms and a large kitchen. The problem with the $250,000 apartment is that teenage gangs take over the streets of downtown every few weeks and people don’t want to live there. The city’s mayor is a progressive who feels more sorry for the disadvantaged youth than she does about restoring law and order and refuses to punish the kids. So if you have an eye toward the future, you can invest here and hopefully some time from now things will pick up and that property will appreciate.
I went to a Blues music club called Blue Chicago. I enjoy it but it all sounds the same and half an hour for me is enough and everyone there is a tourist standing there with their phones shooting videos of the band that they will never watch later. Just costs $20 to get in. Chicago for me as a tourist is a nice contrast from New York City. The shopping street has flowers on it and compares nicely to Fifth Avenue or Times Square. It’s a smaller version of the big city. Things generally work except when they don’t. For me it’s a nice place to visit but the winter is super cold and people living there are unhappy with the city’s mayor and the state’s governor. The Democratic party machinery is in total control and it’s unlikely that things will change anytime soon because not much has happened the past 30 years since I first visited. There are always some nice buildings going up and I’ve taken the architectural boat tour too many times. My first cousin lives here 30 years and she loves the place, so you gotta give it to Chicagoans for liking this place and sticking with it.
Happy Father’s Day! Time for me to eat a blueberry pie my son brought home for me. Wow, he remembered….
