When the kids were small, they would wear whatever clothes I bought for them and they did look good. Then they refused to wear anything I bought them and I finally gave up. Now after hearing the insults these past teenage years, I got the ultimate vindication when Jeremy wiped out half a shelf of my shirts to take with him to college. I know he’s serious about looking good; after refusing barber-haircuts for years and cutting his own hair, he took himself out for one and he’s spent his summer starting to work out in the gym. And as Jeremy prepares to go away to college, I am washing his dishes and picking up his droppings throughout the apartment with extra gusto knowing that I am soon to be liberated from the home prison sentence I have been serving these past several years and that Karen and I will soon be empty-nesters where we can shut the door to our bedroom and know it will not be breached in the middle of the night.
It seems like only yesterday that Karen and I were engaged and talking about having children on the flight to New York from a weekend in Miami. Now we are empty nesters with both kids in college. I am no longer the butler picking up the droppings all over the house and worrying about who is where after midnight. When I took Jeremy to Colorado, he puffed himself up outside the dormitory after we had gone to the UPS store to pick up a package and said he had something important to tell me. “Thank you Dad for everything you’ve done. You did a great job. Everything is fine.” And then, I added, “And now what, Fuck Off, Dad?” He said, “Yup.” I hardly had a chance to pee and sit down in his room for 3 minutes to rest before he drove me out. He cringed when I was there hoping I wouldn’t say anything stupid to embarrass him in front of his new room-mate he had just met. It’s fine; I get it. Nobody took me to college. Boys are not like girls. When Elizabeth got to her dorm last year, there were 15 Amazon packages in a dumpster along with her mom and 3 checked pieces of luggage to help organize everything. Jeremy went with one large suitcase, one small suitcase, one duffel bag and a backpack. My role in organizing him was to shove the stuff under the bed to make sure it all fit. At least we know he’s not a snowflake and I’m not a helicopter parent.
One thing I love about living in New York City is the entertainment in the subway stations. It’s a happy place with aspiring musicians and singers, dancing bunnies, acrobatics, and it’s all free!
There is just something about reading all these tributes to Dolly Parton that gets to me. One of every 6 American kids under age 5 are reading a book that was sent to them each month by her charity Imagination Library. Even the NY Times obituary writer wrote that she was loved as a super good person. It’s emotionally gratifying for me to read about someone this way in the super cynical world in which we live.
We were in the Canadian Rockies this month and in Jasper you see lots of wildlife such as bears, elks, moose, bald eagles and some rodent called a marmot. But in New York City we have our own wildlife. When I go jogging late night, I see rats running across the street or sidewalk ahead of me. Not quite the grisly bear but it’s something! Rats have an image problem, if they were called marmots, everyone would be taking tour buses to look at them.
Qatar reportedly paid 1,000 people to pretend to be fans of Qatar’s national football team at the World Cup. They had their hotels and plane tickets paid for, were responsible for going out in the streets and staging rallies. Interesting to see how far a country will go for its image. The Qataris feel had; they gave Trump a billion dollar airplane and got next to nothing for it.
A cashier at the grocery store had a great laugh when my son and I were checking out with some fish that he bought to make himself some sushi for dinner. I put a piece of fruit and a snack bar on top of his fish that he was using his phone to pay for. He went apeshit on me – I’m poor, how can you do this? I responded that I am transferring him the money he is using in the first place to pay for his groceries. He didn’t seem to care all these years when he put food in my cart for me to pay for, or when he constantly leaves food to spoil or be thrown out which I had to pay for. Isn’t it lovely how things are when the shoe is on the other foot? Someday, I will be visiting his house and will leave the AC or lights on and we’ll see how he reacts. For now, he thinks I’m an old cheapskate complaining about the high cost of electricity.
I’ve been noticing that professional people who are active on social media are talking about the idea of getting off it because they feel that it is no longer credible and that it is just bad for your karma with all the rotten people out there making comments online. Social media companies will make money but clearly people are getting averse to the genre. More regulated portals will be the wave of the future. People are not as gullible as we want to believe and they don’t trust what they are seeing and reading online especially with AI being used to manufacture images and writing articles. Trusted sources will carry a premium.
Forget about the polls which are not accurate anyway. Prediction markets are easily rigged by insiders bidding up their candidates. Vance will be seen as being part of the problem just as Kamala Harris was. Rubio has a chance but the Republicans are in trouble this year.
The average time a Russian will live until he is killed once he reaches the war front in Ukraine is 20-30 minutes. Think about that.
Time will tell – over the next few years, the Strait of Hormuz will become less vital as nations work around it. The Russians will get their ass kicked once the Ukrainians develop something akin to a Patriot anti-missile defense system. So far the world has been protected against a major energy shock but it was very much due to the Chinese who, for their own good reasons, brought down the amount of oil it imported, released major reserves and put controls on what it exported. This also exposed major leverage that the Chinese could use in terms of controlling the world’s oil markets. For instance, we have learned that they are not going to be hit hard on the oil front if they try to go after Taiwan. The world learned a lot about how to prepare for future oil market shocks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the world will turn away from oil. Give the Chinese credit; they have worked for years to make sure they cannot be put in a pinch with regard to oil imports. The Asian countries around them all went bonkers because they had no Plan B. The UAE announced to great fanfare that they were stopping trade with Iran; so far it’s all theater. They have a lot intertwined and it’s not going to be easy to unwind it. Meanwhile, the Americans are stopping more of Iran’s oil than they are stopping everyone else’s. Over time, things are not in Iran’s favor.
Although I think that climate change is real, it’s interesting to see how the universe of solutions change as technology advances. What people think is the answer to global warming today may not be the same in 10 years. Biden had placed big bets on solar and wind power. Now it seems that nuclear and geothermal power offer greater opportunities in the clean energy arena.
Who knew years ago that today’s world population would sour on having kids? Nobody could have forecast that but it means a lot in terms of planning for the future.
I had a feeling after the last election that Democrats would sit on their asses and wait for the country to come back to them in the next election. It just might happen. Hegseth and ICE will be remembered for the next generation as morons and evil masochists interchangeably. Remember that 2 years ago I said the Americans will be vulnerable to attack. Look at our hollowed-out Army corp of generals. It’s not a pretty picture.
Elizabeth had a summer internship in Israel which is a great place to find internships that are more challenging than those offered in America. One project involved the creation of an AI model analyzing hundreds of thousands of flight records. She had no experience in AI but it didn’t matter. Chat GBT used Python software to construct a model based on a small amount of records that she was able to scale up. She was amazed at what she could do. So was a student who had spent a year learning Python who said that based on his education alone it would be very hard to construct that model.
A Wall Street Journal article about America’s relations with Europe had two little vignettes buried inside that I found very disturbing. Germany’s head of state Merz visited the White House and Trump took him and his colleagues into a side room with MAGA-type merchandise and told them to take what they wanted, and that their wives could sell this stuff for thousands of dollars. France’s Macron visited the White House and Trump threw a computer tablet across his desk and onto the floor in a fit of rage during a conference call with the Canadian prime minister. Beyond whatever outrage people have at Trump’s official acts, these little stories tell you that we have an unstable guy at the top. I’m reading Maggie Haberman’s book about him and it mentions an aide whose job is to show him flattering news and she drops notes around him saying how “he’s everything to me” and how it’s all about him. It takes a real loser to need that kind of emotional support.
The Golden Rule says that you should do unto others as they would do unto you; the Silver Rule is the inverse meaning don’t do what you don’t want others to do to you. This is universally accepted as good wisdom because it makes sense. The justices of the US Supreme Court will eat their hats someday when a Democratic president uses the imperial powers the court is giving the presidency. The Democrats started to whittle down the filibuster in the Senate and didn’t like it when the Republicans took the inch and tried for a mile. Both parties have paused on this because they see that it can be bad to be on the short side of the stick.
If you want to know what is going to happen in the next US election, take a bunch of Uber rides and ask the drivers. Several years ago, they would have told you that Biden was in big trouble. Right now, Trump is in trouble. They don’t like his tariffs, immigration crackdowns on people without criminal records and the war on Iran has made things too expensive. People are not going on vacation because they need the $2,000 to pay for petrol. Just to give a sense of how stupid this whole tariff thing is: I just read that a Canadian auto plant had to close after many years because they couldn’t run it with all the US tariffs. Now they are going to sell the plant to the Chinese who will be selling cars out of Canada. The very thing Trump is trying to prevent is what he is causing. A sizeable portion of the price of American cars is tariffs and the automakers are hiring tons of people to navigate Washington’s maze of on and off again tariffs. They can’t do business this way because automakers can’t turn on a dime. They need to plan years ahead. I think that after the next election, Trump will turn into a lame duck and people will start to ignore him more.
I’ve always thought that Mr. Abbas who is the head of an Islamic party in Israel is a smart cookie and people I know that know him personally think the same. In a masterstroke, he appointed a former Israeli police commissioner with the #2 slot in his party guaranteeing his election to the next parliament. In the last government where his party was a member, the police commissioner was extremely popular both among Jews and Arabs. This is a good move because it enables Jews to support this party’s inclusion in the next government and Arabs will also not object. Whoever wins the next election in Israel has to choose: either bring in the Ultra-orthodox or the Arabs. The silent majority of Israelis would prefer neither but they would take the Arabs over the Ultra-Orthodox who don’t serve in the army and who take a lot of benefits that cost everyone else money. This opens up the chessboard in a major way for the upcoming election in late October.
I am wondering if Israel will stay on the sidelines viz a viz Iran, at least until the November elections. The Iranians are more scared of the Israelis than Trump and don’t generally attack the Israelis directly unless they are retaliating. The Israelis have gone on the attack twice with America against Iran over the past 2 years. Both times, Trump starts up and then pulls out early and it’s obvious that amateurs are in charge without a gameplan because the failures were anticipated by almost everyone else. The Israelis are used and then tossed under the bus. Their image takes a hit everywhere. Whether or not Netanyahu bluffed Trump into starting the war is not really important from this perspective because the endings have been injurious to Israel both times and it’s clear to me that the damage reportedly done to the Iranians is less effective and more temporary than it seems. Militaries talk about numbers and percentages but it’s a false metric. The Israelis would be wiser to stay out and not get sucked in to Trump’s wars, whether or not they want to beat up on Iran. I don’t think the benefit exceeds the costs especially right now when elections are coming and this war is unpopular and may be unwinnable. I still don’t know if the West can maintain safe passage in the Strait of Hormuz at an affordable rate and if it is possible to create the conditions to get rid of the Iranian regime without an invasion and it is clear that nobody has the appetite for putting at least 500,000 troops on the ground to do it. I haven’t seen the evidence that shows me how this gets done. If the Israelis really know what to do, they are probably best off just doing it themselves after November. But Netanyahu has elections in October and who knows what’s in his head especially since he puts his own interests ahead of the country’s? Will the Iranians trump Trump and stage their own attack in October just to embarrass him before the mid term elections? That could also happen.
Here’s my take on things. An Associated Press poll shows NYC mayor Mamdani with a higher approval rating among Jews in NYC than either Trump or Netanyahu. The clear majority of American Jews in high places want Netanyahu out. Those that say that Israel needs better propaganda ought to consider that among Jewish Americans, Israel is losing the argument, so why worry about what the rest of the country thinks? Whether or not Israel committed genocide is a little beyond the point (and I think that the term genocide is cheapened with this kind of accusation when we all know what genocide really means (I’m looking at China, Russia and Africa for starters) – most people feel in their guts that whatever happened on October 7, the Israelis did not need to spend 2 years killing roughly 100,000 people to get even and people didn’t have to watch it on their TV screens daily for 2 years. Cynics will say with some level of justification and evidence that Netanyahu was more interested in keeping the war going than in getting the hostages home. It’s not a pretty picture.
Israel has long seen American Jews as a chorus that sings on demand and not given a whit as to caring what they think. The new generation of American Jews is not accepting offers to go on paid Birthright Trips to Israel and they are not interested in the future of a country that is always at war and whose best and brightest are leaving. You can’t reliably plan a trip to that country now for several years and there has been but one airline flying at extortionate prices (Delta and United resumed just now but who knows for how long). If something goes wrong, on a moment’s notice you can be trapped in the country for weeks. If you were a multinational company, you wouldn’t want to deal with businesses in that country trying to fly in and out. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent trying to combat anti-Semitism is wasted when Israel looks like an aggressor country being at war for several years and killing close to 100,000 people and not even accomplishing all that much when all is said and done. What is needed is not better PR but better policy and leadership, both in Israel and in America among Jewish leadership. Failing to tell the Israelis the truth and just backing them come what may has not been productive and has been extremely hurtful to Jews all over the world who are more vulnerable than ever since World War II.
Two more thoughts about Israel and public opinion. Turns out the Israeli government has spent millions of dollars on influence campaigns in the USA with social media and influencers. The money’s been mostly wasted according to a Haaretz investigation which followed the money and saw that it bought virtually no results, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a political slush fund in disguise. You know there is a serious credibility problem when I see a story in the New York Times about 6 people dying in violence on the West Bank, and I don’t even care to read the story because I know that whatever the Israeli government spokesman says is probably not true. I pretty much know what the other parties are going to say and I don’t read the story because I have no way of knowing how much of whatever they are going to allege against the Israelis will be true but figure it is probably going to be true and just don’t want to hear more of it. This is what you get when you have an Israeli government that is not trustworthy and puts up an ambassador to the US that goes around lying to sophisticated audiences who no longer believe what they hear. The result is that people are inclined to believe the worst about Israel even if it is not true.
The right-wing of Israel has to ask itself if it is worth losing America as an ally in order to have more territory in the West Bank to bring more “security.” Russia, China and Europe are not allies you can rely on. Even the enemies of Israel see they can’t rely on them either. Senior level figures in Israel say that they rely heavily on the US for force projection and security, despite the rhetoric that Israel is an independent country. At some point, everyone has to “get real” about what kinds of things will bring Israel real security and what kinds of things are just “nice to have.” To my mind, many of the settlements in the West Bank are not bringing real security but are in the “nice to have” category that are more of a liability than an asset. Israel will ultimately wind up with many of those settlements which are now cities and towns because 60 years of putting facts on the ground is not something you can just turn the clock back on. But the dream of some Biblically-inspired Messianic metropolis will have to take a back seat to political reality.
That said, my daughter was having a ball this summer doing an internship in Israel. There are lots of kids there from all over America, many of whom previously went on gap year programs. The quality of the internships is much higher than what is available in USA. She produced an AI model to review hundreds of thousands of flight records from an airline to calculate the penalties the airline would be liable for in Europe due to the recent introduction of climate-emission regulations. Nobody in the USA would give her such an assignment. And that was just one week’s worth of work. After work, her social calendar has been insane with activities going on every night in Tel Aviv, a city that is totally fun. She is having tons more fun there than she would have had if she stayed home in NYC. My wife and I keep checking our Find a Phones hoping that she will get home before anything bad happens. When she first arrived, the missiles were flying and people were asking her “Why are you here?” She said, Stop asking. I’m here. Her apartment was several minutes walk from a bomb shelter that was built to withstand ballistic missile attacks. Ah, to be young and innocent. Would you want to go there to spend this summer?
Israel needs a brighter future and Sparta is not what people have in mind, even if that is what Netanyahu is selling. The country cannot go it alone without allies even if it thinks it can. Even the US couldn’t go far against Iran once Saudi Arabia pulled the plug on the last round of attacks once it realized that Trump wasn’t going all-in. Israel could have a GDP that soars like Singapore did; just being better than Spain or Greece is not achieving its potential. The Arab states are actually interested in building pipelines that go to the Mediterranean Sea, especially now that the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea don’t look like great options. Everyone sees that Israeli arms and technology work and they want to buy them. Israel has a future, but they will have to take some risk and deal with the Palestinian issue instead of just saying it can’t happen and hoping that everyone out of self-interest will look the other way. For my money, either Bennett or Eisenkot will work. I think that Eisenkot is the more probable choice; he has street cred from the fact that his own kid died in the most recent war in Gaza.
I’ve noticed that some Americans think that pressuring Israel will force it to change. I don’t agree. Nations don’t go against vital interests due to outside pressure and Israel has a lot of leverage it can use against America. America relies on Israel for many things; it’s not a one-way street. And those who want to point a finger at Israelis have to explain two things about October 7: 1. The places attacked by Hamas were the most left-wing places in the country. 2. The reason the attacks were so successful is that they were based on intelligence provided by Palestinians who worked inside these communities and betrayed them. Now no Palestinians cross the border from Gaza to work in Israel. This kind of betrayal runs very deep and it will take a generation to restore trust.
About 2 years ago I reported to you that Egypt warned Israel about the October 7th attack before it happened and the warning was ignored. Now comes word via a new book coming out that UAE’s president MBZ had a 45 minute phone call with Netanyahu about a week before the attack to explicitly warn him that it was coming after the head of Hamas Mr. Sinwar repeatedly demanded that someone warn Israel that he was preparing to execute an “earthquake” and he felt that his prior warnings were being ignored and that’s why he insisted that MBZ make the call. Netanyahu did not report the call to his intelligence services who thus could not put together 2+2 from the other warnings they had already received and didn’t know what to make of them.
It gets worse. I just read at the time of this posting that according to the Times of Israel, Israeli military documents show that on October 7th, Netanyahu took a full 2 hours to leave his home after he was told at 6:30am about the insane events going on that morning when 5,000 Palestinians breached the border from Gaza and started causing havoc in Southern Israel. It took another hour to get to the Israeli version of the Pentagon and in all those 3 hours he never once called any of the military top leaders. It wasn’t till almost 10am that the order went out to secure the border. He has said otherwise but these documents prove otherwise. Maybe this was held till now to be dropped conveniently before elections. If this story holds up, as Jeremy would say, “he’s cooked.”
I read the book about the first year of the second Trump term that was written by Maggie Haberman, White House bureau chief of the NY Times. Almost everything in the book I had already heard about from previous news reports including leaks about the book. It’s mostly drivel at this point because we pretty much know all about how bad it is. Bob Woodward is not even bothering to write a book about it at this point, as far as I know. The main takeaway I get is that had Trump won in 2020, he would have continued his presidency as he did his first term. Lots of bluster but little to show for it. Because he had 4 years in exile to prepare his return, he was much more lethal in the second term. Biden really screwed America by not using his term to set up a decent successor. That last point is my opinion.
My take on all this talk about NATO is that although allies of the US are hedging and forming new alliances with each other to make up for the unreliability of the US, they know that there is no real alternative to the Americans and they are hoping that 2 years from now they can reset the clock. At the same time, they are moving their asses to have backups because they see that the US keeps changing gears every 4-8 years and they can’t rely on it based on this kind of instability. Yet, if you look at the past 80 years, there have been threats to the NATO alliance worse than Trump (if you can believe that) and people have been crying for years that the alliance is doomed. For all the BS in the headlines, not much has really happened and deep within the workings of the nations, the alliance still holds.
I have made my plans to visit China at the end of Q1 2027 so that i can see for myself how the country has changed since I last visited it in 2007. I see the pictures of me and the travel notes on Global Thoughts from my previous visits to Beijing and Shanghai. But I can’t remember any of it. I’m expecting to be impressed and you’ll get a chance afterward to read what I think of it.
Now that we’ve dealt with Global issues, let’s talk about some fun stuff. Feel free to click here to go to my Summer Vacation notes about trips to Vancouver and the Canadian Rockies, Connecticut, DC for America’s 250th, Miami Beach, and Denver/Boulder.
