Art is 80

So, tonight (Monday) is Purim. At Adas Israel, and all other American synagogues, there is the reading of the Book of Esther, and most likely a satiric Purim spiel, alcohol, food, costumes, fun and games. I said on Sunday that I was not going to go to the reading of Megillot Esther this year, because it tells the story of Jews vs. Persians, and ends with the massacre of Persians by the almost-killed Jews, and I thought that was a little too close to the situation in Iran today for comfort. But that is only me, and the mass of synagogue-going Jews will not let contemporary affairs affect their standard ritual practices. Okay, I accept that. To quote our great president (from another context), “that’s just the way it is”.

But interestingly, in Israel, with Iranian drones blanketing the country, there will apparently be no public readings of the Book of Esther this year, no Purim spiels, no costumes, fun and games. I have read that, by order of the military, all public gatherings have been banned, including gatherings for the purpose of celebrating Purim (even if they are held in bomb shelters). The reason for this is obviously different from my reasoning, although the two rationales are obviously related. But it does show that it is not impossible to cancel religious observances (at least those characterized in Jewish law and practice as “minor” observances) in appropriate circumstances. I rest my case.

But I want to raise another problem, one that is more worrisome. Edie and I generally have supper while watching MS NOW, and tonight (Monday), that is what we did. We were watching the Weeknight show (7 p.m. to 8 p.m. EST), whose hosts tend to be very much against the current war for all of the reasons you may suppose.

No one on MS NOW or anywhere else knows how this military action will end and what will happen after it does, and no one at MS NOW or anywhere else knows why Trump ordered it in the first place. Is it because there was an “imminent threat” to this country? Is it because Iran was not negotiating on its nuclear plans in good faith, or because Iran refused to negotiate about its development of long range missiles? Is it because Trump wanted regime change in Iran? Or to totally destroy Iran’s military capacity? Is it because Trump wanted to divert our attention from his other problems? Or because Iran was simply a self-stated enemy of the United States? Was there intelligence that the government can not share with us normal folks that would have convinced us this was the time to do what we are doing?

Any, all or none of these reasons may be correct, but this afternoon (I am writing this Monday), Secretary of State Rubio gave a different reason, something that administration officials had not stated before. Rubio said that there was an imminent threat because “another country” was going to attack Iran and when this “other country” attacked Iran, Iran would strike back not only at this “other country”, but at the United States. Thus, presumably because we were not able to (but aren’t we all-powerful?) or didn’t want to stop the “other country” from attacking Iran, we had to attack Iran first because their threat of retaliation was imminent (or, I guess, imminent-ish).

There is no question what country the “other country” is. And since Rubio has made those remarks, I have heard several anti-Trump voices on television state that (and I paraphrase), “It looks like the United States is just the pawn of Benjamin Netanyahu, and it is Netanyahu, not Trump, who is calling the shots, while Trump is just following his lead.” And, from the right wing, people like Tucker Carlson are saying the same thing.

The latest CNN poll, released today, shows that only 27% of Americans approve of our attacking Iran. And it means that many many of the 73% of Americans who currently disagree with Trump may believe that this misguided war is not Trump’s, but is Netanyahu’s. At a time when antisemitism is rising all over the world, there is now another reason for antisemitism, a war caused by Jewish power, Jewish wealth, and Jewish everything else. The powerful Jews wherever they may live are all led by Netanyahu, and have turned Israel’s long battle with the Iranian regime into a battle between the United States and Iran. We, the Americans, are fighting Israel’s war. The war with Iran is not Trump’s fault. It is the fault of the Jews.

So, how to fight against this dangerous conclusion? For one thing, we need to realize that, while the Trump administration will deny it, it just might be to some extent true. Just like American policy today is to turn Gaza into a world class resort and to move Palestinians out of the West Bank (and maybe out of Gaza). Trump and his family and friends want to profit from the transformation of Gaza, and American Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has announced that the West Bank is legitimate territory of the State of Israel (deeded to them by God, of all people).

I have long suggested that the Netanyahu government believes this is the time for Israel to take extraordinary, often unpopular, and often cruel steps to secure Israel’s long term future. Whether this is appropriate and will be successful over time is unknown. It is a gamble. And it helps Netanyahu to have America on its side. And with Trump in charge of the United States, the two countries seem to share Netanyahu’s goals. In the short run, these goals will lead to destabilization and create dangers. In the longer run, we do not know.

And these dangers go beyond the veryy serious dangers of war itself. There is the danger of increasing world wide antisemitism and all the ills that that can bring about.

The 17 million Jews of this world of 8.5 billion people (less than .002% of the world’s population) remain, as they seem to always have been, at the center of major world events (and therefore the cause of major world problems).

There seems to be nothing we Jews can do to escape our fate. We  are thought  to control world finances, world politics, world culture, world everything. And if it ever looks like we don’t, the assumption is that we are going through a phase where we are being very clever hiding our power. If we perform acts that benefit the world, that just shows both that we are arrogant show-offs, and that we are pretending to be good, when deep down we are evil.

Yes, the war with Iran will increase anti-Israel, and therefore anti-Jewish, sentiment across the world. What else is new?

You know the old question: Is it good for the Jews?

But you may be deluded into thinking that there is more than one possible answer. In fact, the answer is always “no”.

We needed a break on Saturday, so we drove to Baltimore to visit the American Visionary Art Museum. We had not been to this unique and wonderful museum for years.

We needed lunch before our visit, didn’t want to battle downtown or Inner Harbor Baltimore, so drove a little south and wound up just outside the city line in Brooklyn Park, Maryland.

While wandering around looking for a decent place to eat, we were reminded not to be totally distracted by the war in the Middle East.

We found a Salvadoran-Mexican restaurant, Les Esperanza. It’s a fairly large, and remarkably clean restaurant that was almost entirely filled with family groups. I counted more than 80 customers, and they all looked Hispanic. I asked the waiter if we were the first non-Hispanics that he had ever served. He laughed, and said, “Oh, no. We get 4 or 5 every day.” The food was very good.

The Visionary Art Museum specializes in what Wikipedia calls “outsider art”. You have not heard of the artists, and they include folk artists, artists who learned their craft in prison, in hospitals, in orphanages, in mental institutions, and in concentration camps. The signage tells you a lot about the artists’ unique backgrounds, and often equally unique world views. For the most part, the quality of the art is first class.

And in addition to wall art and sculpture, there is a large model of the Lusitania. Anything unique about this model, other than its size? Yes, it is made entirely of 194,000 toothpicks.

After the museum, we strolled around Federal  Hill Park, with its high-up views of the city.

And then, we came home, but went out again, to see our old friends, Little Red and the Renegades, playing in Silver Spring.

Then, as the not young crowd thinned out by 10 p.m., we slowly drove home.

Monday night begins the holiday of Purim. A “minor” holiday, in that it does not require one to cease work and spend all day at a synagogue, but a major holiday in that it is a celebratory day, a day which is a response to the biblical story of Esther and her cousin Mordecai, and evil Haman. Haman, an advisor to the King, determines to kill all the Jews. But Esther, the King’s choice to succeed his wife Vashti, and who is Jewish (something she keeps from the King) convinces the King that this would be wrong, and the King turns against Haman and has him hanged.

So far, so good. And the contemporary Purim celebrations at synagogues world wide, are very celebratory, and are more and more concentrated on children. Carnivals, and costumes, and games and fun, along with the reading of the Megillat Esther, where Haman is booed with voices and groggers, each time his name is mentioned in Esther, and that would be 54 times. And then there is the tradition of the Purim Spiel – generally a comic play, often interspersed with the reading of the Megillat Esther – often raucus, showing off the talent of the amateur players. SNL skits writ large.

Our synagogue, Adas Israel, probably does Purim more lavishly than any other synagogue in the history of synagogues. Well, of course, I don’t know that to be true, but the staff works very hard turning large parts of a large building into a make believe world, serving food and frivolity both before and after the reading of the Megillat. And, oh yes, there is another tradition – a strange tradition that says you should get drunk on Purim, so drunk that you can no longer tell Haman from Mordecai.

But, as usual, there are complications. Two that I can think of this morning.

First, the story of Esther (as far as we know, it is only a story….but you never can tell what the next generation of archeologists might turn up) takes place in Shushan. Shushan, also known as Susa, and today the mid-sized Iranian city of Shush, is located on the western edge of Iran, near the Iraqi border. It was a major Persian city in ancient times, and the home of a large palace built by Darius and finished by Xerxes. Archeological remains of the palace have been found. And, in fact, King Ahasueros of the Book of Esther has been identified historically as Xerxes I, who ruled a kingdom that stretched as far east as India in the 5th century BCE.

Second, the Megillat Esther is more than just a story of the Jews being saved from an antisemitic tyrant who was out to destroy them. I quote from Chapter 9, from a translation found on the website Sefaria.org.

“For Mordecai was now powerful in the royal palace, and his fame was spreading through all the provinces; this man Mordecai was growing ever more powerful.

“So the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies. In the fortress Shushan, the Jews killed a total of five hundred of them. They also killed Parshandatha, Dalphon, Aspatha, Porata, Adalia, Aridatha, Parmashta, Arisai, Aridai and Vaizatha, the ten sons of Haman, son of Hammedatha, the foe of the Jews. But they did not lay hands on the spoil. When the number of those slain in the fortress Shushan was reported on that same day to the king, the king said to Queen Esther, “In the fortress Shushan alone the Jews have killed a total of five hundred, as well as the ten sons of Haman. What then must they have done in the provinces of the realm! What is your wish now? It shall be granted. and what else is your request? It shall be fulfilled.

“If it please Your Majesty”, Esther replied, “let the Jews in Shuham be permitted to act tomorrow also as they did today; and let Haman’s ten sons be impaled on the stake.” The king ordered that this shall be done, and the decree was proclaimed in Shushan. Haman’s ten sons were impaled, and the Jews in Shushan mustered again on the fourteenth day of Adar and slew three hundred men in Shushan. But they did not lay hands on the spoil.”

“The rest of the Jews, those in the King’s provinces, likewise mustered and fought for their lives. They disposed of their enemies, killing seventy five thousand of their enemies; but they did not lay hands on the spoil. This was on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar, and they rested on the fourteenth day and made it a day of feasting and merrymaking……..”

So……

I think we have a double problem here. I have always had a problem with Chapter 9 of the Megillah, with Jews killing more than 75,000 and then merrymaking and feasting. But today, Purim 2026, we have a second problem.

Israel and the United States are engaged in a heavy bombing campaign in Iran, today’s Persia, the country of Shushan. This is happening in large part because of the strong anti-Israel stance of the Iranian government since 1979, and its actions to support groups determined to destroy Israel. I could argue both sides of the question as to whether or not this is a legitimate war (although I think one side of that argument is the right one), but we must remember there are at least three reasons why this war is being fought (forgetting a possible fourth – that Trump was looking for an Epstein diversion):

(1) Iran was out to destroy Israel

(2) Iran was out to destabilize the entire Middle East

(3) The Iranian regime was an enemy of the Iranian people, who deserve better.

All three of these statements are correct. But in the attempt to safeguard Israel, stabilize the Middle East, and “free” the Iranian people, the country is being bombed in a campaign that as of yet sees no end. Innocent Iranians, as well as Iranian political and military leaders, will be killed and wounded, and their country and properties and lives will be badly hurt or destroyed. It is not a time for celebration, for frivolity, for Purim spiels.

To celebrate with hi-jinks the revenge taken by the Jews in Chapter 9, while Israel and the U.S. are bombing the same country, and descendants of the same people, today seems to me to be the height of disrespect and arrogance. Disrespect of, and arrogance towards, those very people we say we are “freeing”.

I for one do not intend this year to go to tomorrow night’s Megillat reading and party. I understand the investment of creativity, work and money that has gone into the preparations for Purim this year at Adas Israel, but I still think the celebration should be cancelled. A simple reading of the Book of Esther would suffice.

As for the kids and their Purim Carnival, I think that could go on. The kids have nothing to do with the war currently being staged, and they deserve and need a good time. So I wouldn’t stop that (that is going on today, by the way), but I would make an abrupt change to what is planned for tomorrow night.

Of course, the Adas Israel  festivities will go on. No one will be swayed by what I say. Many will disagree with me.

But……

I will be brief.

He is attacking Iran. His partner in doing this is Israel. He has asked the Iranian people to rise up. He wants regime change. He is the head of the Board of Peace.

Iran’s people rose up at his request several months ago. He did not support them. Thousands were killed, wounded, or arrested. He did not care. He did not intervene. He is the head of the Board of Peace. He is not the head of MIGA.

He attacked Iran before, the head of the Board of Peace did. They did not fight back, although they did send rockets to Israel, which damaged property more than life.

The Board of Peace head’s first attack on Iran turned out okay, he believes. He obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities, he said. Not quite, so he is doing it again.

When Putin moved troops to the Ukraine border, some said it was for show. Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend (who does not read these posts), who said the military might moved by the Board of Peace chief into the Gulf of Arabia was just “kabuki”. “Au contraire”, I said, showing both my disagreement and bilingual strength.

Now, Iran is again attacking Israel. I have two thoughts about that. First, it will be a more serious attack and, second  it is totally unnecessary. It is Israel, maybe more so than Iran, which should rise up against its “leaders”.

In the meantime, the head of the Board of Peace talks about further conquests. We know about Gaza and Venezuela and Greenland and the Panama Canal. We will learn more about his plan to take over Cuba peacefully. What can be hard about taking over a little (well, not so little) island in the Sea of Trump?

March comes in like a lion, they say. Sometimes, it goes out the same way. Not with Eliot’s whimper, but with Vachel Lindsay’s “Boomlay, Boomlay, Boomlay……Boom!”

The two burning questions of the day. First: why do so many people (okay, 40% of the electorate qualifies as “many”) support Donald Trump? Second: why do so many people (more than 40% of the electorate) distrust the Democrats?

I think the answer is the same. Trump supporters believe that the current system is stacked against them, and that Trump and MAGA generally will destroy that system and that whatever they put in place will be better for them than what they currently confront. Trump supporters believe that the Democrats (and you can add to that those traditional Republicans, now known as RINOs) are the ones who have created and control the system they find stacked against them.

Of course, you have to add something to that to get the full picture. You have to add Trump’s cleverness, and Trump’s ruthlessness, and Trump’s chutzpah. His cleverness allows him to lie continually, convincing his supporters that his lies are a necessary part of his plan, that they are strategic lies and should be ignored as lies. His ruthlessness allows him to approach potential enemies, especially those with access to enormous resources, and tell them that they will follow his wishes or wind up (along with their entire business enterprises) in the gutter. His chutzpah allows him to ignore standards, norms, laws, the courts, constitutional standards, really anything, and claim his actions all as necessities.

Only he can fix it: people believe that. He can murder someone on 5th Avenue: there are always casualties in a war. People who disagree with him are his enemies: you have to quash them, or they might win.

I have said it before. We are lucky that Donald Trump is 79 years old. If he was 29, or whatever Castro was, when he took over Cuba using many of the same techniques (putting aside his very different vision for his country’s future), he was able to stick around for 58 years. And the one thing that Trump has not, and can not, take into granted, is what will happen after he is gone.

And, although we presume he will be gone in 2028, you never know what is up his sleeve. He could try anything. The most likely of the very unlikely scenarios would require the Republicans to win the presidency (Vance or Rubio or someone else) in 2028, and win at least the House of Representatives. The House, when it convenes in 2029, for the first time elects a Speaker who is not himself a member of Congress, a man named Donald Trump. (An alternative would have Trump, as his presidency winds down, run for Congress in, say, Palm Beach County or somewhere in, say, rural Mississippi, and be elected to Congress.)

Once Trump is Speaker of the House, the wheels will be set in motion. The newly elected President of the United States resigns, and the newly elected Vice President resigns, and – according to the Constitution – the Speaker of the House is next in line. Donald Trump becomes president for his third term, without violating the Constitution which says that no one can be elected more than two times to the presidency.

The biggest stumbling block to this scenario might be the president’s age. In 2028, he will be in his 80s. But, in spite of the Big Macs and Diet Cokes, he may be a healthy octogenarian, providing that his mental capacity does not continue to decline.

For that reason, perhaps the most troublesome problem we have is the sanctity of our elections. And Trump and his crew are going to try very hard (they already are trying) to limit the number of people who would vote against him by controlling or patrolling voting places, by limiting mail in and other forms of early voting, by placing ID requirements on voters that many would be unable to meet (at least on a timely basis), by challenging voters at the polls, by challenging close elections after the ballots are counted, by general intimidation, and by actions that we may not even yet contemplate. All these must be opposed – both through the courts, and on a precinct by precinct, state by state basis. How this will play out…..we just don’t yet know.

As you can see, I haven’t even mentioned the Democrats, who need to find a way convince so many (perhaps the majority) of the populace that they are not the enemy. To have Democrats moving to the left with progressive policies at this time is probably not a good idea. That time may come, but it is not now. Now, the attempt must be to convince that great center of the American voting public – the “independents”, whose votes most count, and especially the independents in the “swing states”. And, equally important, the Democrats have to get out the vote in the urban centers (thinking particularly in Pennsylvania) where the turnout will decide the race.

The question is: can the Democrats unite where there is such a danger if they fail to capture Congress in 2026 and again in 2028? Unity is not something that Democrats are very good at. That is one thing on which we can all agree.

I wrote this last night. A more professional or thoughtful writer might have erased it and started over this morning. Not me.

I am just sitting here on a Wednesday night thumbing through today’s newspapers with the television on across the room, not clear that any thing I see, hear, or read makes any real sense. Look at what I mean.

We all know that Kash Patel, who should never have been named head of the FBI, went to Italy over the weekend to see the U.S. – Canada Olympics final hockey game. We know he went on the FBI’s jet. The New York Times tells us that he is the FBI director is not allowed to fly commercially because he needs to be in contact through a secure communications system at all times. Why this is necessary, I don’t know – after all, there are deputies and others at the FBI who could man the ship for a while, as they would if the director, say, got sick.

Digression. In Letters From Groucho, Groucho Marx wrote Joe Dimaggio balling him out for going out to eat wearing a normal business suit. What would you have done, asked Groucho, if a ball game had broken out?

Yes, some people are indespensible.

End of digression.

Patel has been director of the FBI for under a year, but has taken at least the following taxpayer-paid trips, none of which are cheap:

1. His trip to Milan for the hockey game.
2. A trip to play golf in Scotland with a bunch of his Navy buddies
3. A trip to see his girlfriend perform in State College, PA
4. A trip to a Texas hunting lodge

In each case, he has said that his trips were really for important meetings, and that the frivolity was just coincidental. And if you believe that….

Next, on CNN, I was listening to the story about Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales, who had an affair with one of his staffers (married, with children), at least partially the result of a boss pressuring an underling. Heis being pressured to resign. He is not going to resign, he says, and he is running for reelection, with an endorsement from President Trump. Will this hold?

By the way, Gonzales, who is 45 years old, also has a wife. And he has 6 children. And, I haven’t yet mentioned it, but you probably know this. The woman with whom he had the affair committed suicide by setting herself on fire! Can this just be ignored?

And then what about Trump and Epstein? I think we know that, even with all of the material that the DOJ has released, and with all over the over redactions and the under redactions (all in favor of the men involved), the DOJ has not released everything. Maybe not even mostly everything. And now we have a prime example. It turns out there was a woman who claims that, when she was underage, Epstein introduced her to Trump. What happened after that, I don’t know. But this survivor told her story, and was apparently interviewed by the FBI several times. Nothing concerning her is among the papers being reduced, but there are documents relating her story that clearly must exist. Unless they have been somehow erased.

And what about our Peace President, whose Board of Peace, is beginning with the reconstruction of Gaza and in theory going on from there to pacify the rest of the world? While managing his Board of Peace, and while claiming to have ended eight wars, he has assembled half of the U.S. military’s attack forces (outside of ground forces) near the Iranian coast, with promises to attack the country again and again if they don’t do his bidding. He sees no conflict between war mongering towards Iran and maintaining he is the Peace President. And I guess he doesn’t think we should see a difference either.

And finally tonight, I heard that Trump is taking credit for the death of cartel king El Mencho over the weekend. I guess this is because the U.S. provided some intelligence to Mexico. Well, my question is: if Trump is the force behind the capture and murder of El Mencho, isn’t he also the force behind the 60+ people who were killed in the riots and attacks in Mexico over the weekend? Or is this just like the 100+ who have been killed in Venezuelan and Colombian fishing/drug boats? As to these folks, his response seems to be “who cares about them, anyway?”

Switching gears, this evening there was a Haberman Institute program (you can see it on YouTube or on the Haberman website, habermaninstitute.org) featured Rabbi Daniel Zemel, recently retired from over 30 (or is it over 40?) years at Temple Micah in DC, and now co-chair of Truah, a rabbinic civil rights group. The topic was the relationship between Judaism and civil rights, both historic and today. I thought Zemel summed it up pretty well in discussing the moral failures of today. They stem, he thought, from failure of people to recognize all people as equal, with the same rights as others, irrespective of skin color, nationality, religion, or personal ancestry. Okay, that is simple enough. But he thought we were at a crisis today, both in American and Israel, where a strong form of nationalism is taking over, and people of other nationalities, religions, or cultures are less valued. People, he said no longer seem to believe that you can be both a nationalist and a universalist, that you have to be one or another. He said, and I agree, that should not be any reason one cannot be both. I would add that finding the proper balance might not always be obvious, but that this is part of the challenge of being both, and it is a challenge we should take up.

Zemel quoted his grandfather, who was also a rabbi, who said that the problem was ……… well, I don’t really remember what he said his grandfather said, but it again led to that illusive balance. We should not be so nice that we put ourselves at risk, nor so mean that we don’t take into consideration the rights of others.  Something like that.

Sort of like what I quoted a day or two ago about Ukraine – too weak to win the war, too strong to lose it.

This also relates to the discussion of yin and yang, as described last Shabbat by Micah Goodman at Adas Israel. But how it relates to yin and yang, I don’t really remember.

You can see that I have a lot of things in my mind. Maybe it isn’t worth the effort to cram them in if all they do is jingle around in there.

Friends of the right and the left…

I speak tonight about the condition of the left in my world. But I will start with the conclusion.

The state of the bunion is good. And there is no reason to think that it will grow any worse during the next year.

The bunion first appeared on the inside side of my left foot sometime between thirty and forty years ago. I did not know it was a bunion, because at the time I had no idea what a bunion was. I just thought my foot was acting a bit weird, swelling a bit at the side toward the front, becoming a little red, sometimes sore to the touch. But it did not seem like a bite or anything like that. It just seemed like my foot bone.

Now, you who do not know, ask. What is a bunion? According to Google AI, a bunion is: “a painful, bony bump at the base of the big toe caused by misalignment of the metatarsophalangeal joint, forcing the toe toward the others.”

At some point after my strange condition first appeared, I learned that I had a bunion. I don’t remember exactly how I learned it was a bunion, but it seemed weird to me because if you had asked me what a bunion was, I would have told you something much different. Not that I know what I would have said, but I would have probably come up with something more like a callous or something. But the bunion itself isn’t a new something that appears on your foot. It’s just that one part of your foot changes shape.

It didn’t take long for me to learn that my bunion decided to hurt, especially when I wore certain of my shoes that rubbed against it. And when I said it hurt, it wasn’t like a slight discomfort but a sharp pain, a shooting pain. I quickly learned to avoid certain shoes, those that were narrow, or whose leather was particularly stiff.

At some point, I went to a podiatrist. I don’t remember who he was or where his office was, but he told me that my bunion would not disappear, that it might grow and get more sore, and that while I could get by for a while, that eventually I would need surgery to repair it.

I remember asking him that, if I was eventually going to need surgery, why should I wait until it gets worse? Shouldn’t I get it now? He told me that I could certainly do that, and that some people would do that, but that others would wait until some time later. Then I asked him the possible downsides of surgery.

He told me that there were many. Assuming that he did not operate on the wrong foot (he had never done that yet), he might bungle the surgery, there might be an infection, it might not work, or even if it does, that the bunion might reappear and that more surgery might be needed, and that the recovery might be long, painful and slow. It was a different speech than I heard from my eye doctor, who would give me a list of all the things that could go seriously wrong with my cataract, by ending with the words “but you are more likely to be hurt driving to the surgery center before the procedure”.

I never saw the podiatrist again, although I left his office knowing that some time, some time soon perhaps, I would have to have the surgery. But I learned that, by not wearing shoes that made my foot ache, and instead wearing shoes that were wider and softer, I could walk, run, really do anything, and forget that I even had a bunion. Yes, now and then, I would feel a shot of pain, but it was much less often than I assumed it would be. And it would ease up soon.

I stopped buying expensive dress shoes, and began buying my shoes at Payless, and found their less expensive shoes were often much more comfortable to wear. It was a tragedy in my life (of course, a mild tragedy), when Payless closed their last store in 2004. Since then, most of my shoes have been bought online. Turns out, for the most part, okay.

But last year, I bought a pair of sandals from some company in China, after seeing an ad that intrigued me on Facebook. The sandals took quite some time to arrive (there are reasons to use Amazon, in addition to the reasons not to use Amazon), and they really looked nice when they came. It was spring, 2025, and I started wearing them in place of my aging Rockport XCS sandals.

Unfortunately, I found that, the more I wore the sandals, the more I noticed my bunion, and the soon, it was only that I noticed the bunion, but that the bunion was really bothering me. The strap was wrapped around my foot right on the bunion, and this turned out not to be a good thing. After several weeks, I stopped wearing the sandals, but the pain did not go away. For most of last year’s summer, my bunion really bothered me and I thought, once and for all, I would have to find a new podiatrist and probably have surgery. It was no longer a question only of deciding what shoes to wear. Now, my bunion hurt even when I was barefoot.

In late October, we went to St. Louis for my 65th high school reunion, my foot hurting. I was holding off until this event because one of my closest high school friends has been a podiatrist for the past 60 years (still practicing), and I thought I could get some free advice.

Miracle of miracles, a day or so before the reunion, my bunion stopped hurting. I didn’t even mention my bunion to my old friend Ed because I felt fine. Whatever the Chinese sandals did to the bunion, that was now history.

That was four months ago, and my bunion has not bothered me since.

The state of the bunion is good.

As to the state of the union….

I am caught today between two topics. I don’t think they are related, but maybe I will see that they are as I write this post.

First, I want to tell you that I will accept your congratulations for finishing reading Ladislas Farrago’s The Game of the Foxes, all 659 pages. It’s a fascinating book and, for some reasons (although I am not sure what they are), an important one. It tells the stories of British, German and American spying in the years before and during World War II. It was written after certain German archives were opened to scholars, allowing Farrago to see things that had been hidden from view, and to get a picture of the extensive spying that occurred that never could have been seen before.

I pretty much doubt that the type of spying that went on the 1930s and 1940s goes on now. We now rely more on technology.

As you probably know, we have been watching the eight years of Homeland, which fictionally deals with CIA activity, largely in Europe and the Middle East. While there are a few undercover agents in the story (such as the husband of the American Ambassador to Germany, who it turns out is working for Iran), the plots are not at all based on networks of spies ferreting out information that they hope is factual and turning it over to their handlers.

But in World War II years, there was an unbelievable amount of it, and this book outlines the big picture, and is also filled with fascinating stories of individual spies, some successful, many not so.

I will just give a bare outline (I am not going to remember details, anyway). During the pre-war years (1933-1939), the Germans set up quite a network of undercover agents in the United States. It was not difficult to do this for a couple of reasons. First, the U.S. was filled with individuals who had immigrated from Germany and still had ties with their homeland. Second, spying for Germany was not necessarily at that time spying against the United States, because the United States and Germany were not at war with each other, and were not official enemies. Thirdly, the United States was not using great efforts to root out German spies. And fourthly, Germany paid well.

There were two basic types of spies recruited by Germany during those years. The most important I would call technical spies. These were people who worked for enterprises that manufactured items that were important for military use. Items that Germany did not have. It must be remembered that Germany, with its military history and with loss in World War I, was carefully monitored to ensure its keeping with restrictions on military development implemented as part of the Treaty of Versailles, and subsequent agreements. There was a lot that we knew how to do, that Germany did not. So photographs, drawings, and outlines of manufacturing techniques were very important.

At the same time, there were other spies that I would consider sociological spies. Their job was to survey American culture and especially American feelings towards Europe, towards Germany, and towards its own government.

And then, of course, at a higher level, there were the individuals who were the handlers of both of these groups, whose job it was to make sure the information collected got to Germany, who monitored the performance and trustworthiness of each spy, to make sure they did not know more than they needed to about each other, and to recruit new agents.

As time went on, Germany’s priorities switched. The technical spying, while it did continue, was not as important as the Germans developed their own expertise. But spying within the U.S. government and military became more important. For several years before the U.S. got into the war, the question was whether the U.S. was going to enter the war, and when it would being doing so. And before it entered the war, when we were nominally a neutral country, was the United States secretly supporting the allies, and how, and could that support be disrupted?

Germany was putting agents in Britain just as it was putting agents in the United States. A⁹nd Britain (much more than the United States) was putting agents in Germany. But sometimes these agents were not what they were cracked up to be. A large segment, perhaps the majority, of German agents placed in Britain were, or became, double agents, serving Britain as well as Germany, and serving Britain much better. It’s an interesting story, how a Brit recruited by Germany had second thoughts and became an agent of the British. For the Germans, he became the individual who would meet Germany’s new assets (often just after they were parachuted into the country) and quickly find a way to blackmail them into becoming part of the Double Cross (XX) system.

And you learn that not all spies are careful or good, that it was hard to tell good information from bad (and the wrong choice often made), and that there was both success and failure. The Germans, Farrago determined, failed more than the Allies. The Germans were not aware that their agents in Britain were mainly double agents, they were caught unawares when the Allies invaded North Africa and, in spite of that, were fooled by deceptive British actions designed to hide the date of D-Day, and where the British and American troops would land in Europe. The Nazi bureaucracy was also complex, and there were competing German spy networks stumbling over and competing with each other.

Interestingly, although spies got caught and paid the price (sometimes the ultimate price) for their activities, there was no violence described in the book. No one was injured or killed as result of what they were asked to do. And while some of the spies were poor, uneducated men with no real chance for success in their society or with a grudge as to what had already happened to them, many were sophisticated, educated, suave, wealthy men, and there were many equally sophisticated and educated women, generally young and attractive, who used their desirability to help them reach their goals.

The book contains much more than I have conveyed to you in these few paragraphs, and because it goes into such detail, and contains very detailed notes and sources, this book is a great resource for anyone interested in any of the many people whose activities are described.

You would think that, after reading 659 pages about spies, I would choose another topic for my next book. But, no. I am now going to start reading Getting Smarter. If you can’t tell a book by its cover, can you tell it by its name? Getting Smarter is a memoir by Barbara Feldon, otherwise know as…..Agent 99.

I will just mention my second topic. I can pick it up later in more detail, after I get a chance to think about it more. It is about the relationship of the Democratic Party to Israel. It appears that the Republican Party is 100% pro-Israel, primarily based on the number of Christian Nationalists/Christian Zionists in the G.O.P., and that this has attracted some Jewish voters, especially members of the Orthodox communities, and many very wealthy (and therefore visible) Jews. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is the more traditional home of the majority of American Jews, but a sizeable number of Democrats are what are now known as “progressives”, who have disdain for the way Israel has been handling itself and/or support, at least to some extent, the Palestinians under occupation either to free themselves from occupation or in some cases to displace Israel one way or another. The disaffection of the progressives from the Democratic Party could influence Republican victories no matter how generally unacceptable the Republican candidates may be, and the disaffection of Jewish voters would hurt the Democratic fundraising, and would threaten Democratic victories in a number of states, including swing states, with sizeable numbers of Jewish votes.

What should the Democratic Party do?

The headline obviously is not original with me. It’s a quote used often when talking about what might happen if a leader of the Executive Branch of the government decides to ignore what the Supreme Court says. We now may actually find out.

I expect that our president will do three things at once. He will continue to berate the Court and the majority of its Justices. He will say that, irrespective of that, he will always follow the Supreme Court. He will then ignore the Supreme Court and do whatever the hell he wants, and no one will stop him, except perhaps (and only perhaps) the voters. And by the time the voters react, it just may be too late. Even if the 2026 midterms put one or both of the houses of Congress into the hands of the Democrats, the president will still have the ability (because this is his greatest talent) to continue to do what he wants, no matter what the legislature or courts say.

The immediate issue of course are the tariffs and I have not read the Supreme Court’s decision or the many, many dissents and concurrences, so I may not know what I am talking about. But, as I understand it, the United States has put tariffs on most items coming into the country, some of them based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, and some of them based on other authorities. Those based on the IEEPA were struck down, and that covers the majority of his arbitrary tariffs.

In response to the Court, the president has placed a 15% tariff on everything coming into the country under another law, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which gives him the right to do so for a period not to exceed 150 days, unless approved by Congress. For some countries, this means tariffs are now higher than they were before the Supreme Court decision, for some lower, and for some (I guess) the same. Rationality is obviously not part of this policy.

At the same time, the president and advisors like Treasury Secretary Bessent have said that the president has many, many, many, many, many alternative ways to put tariffs on good coming into the country. “Just you wait and see”, more or less. And to complicate things even more, the U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer (who he?) has said, in a BBC interview, that nothing has changed in trade policy.

And then there are the countries that have made “deals” with the president under the pre-Court ruling situation, where the tariff levels for their countries have been kept lower than otherwise threatened by our president. Do those deals still hold? For those countries whose tariffs have been raised under the new 15% assessment, are they still bound by the deal?

The answer to that question is unclear. The president says that he expects all countries to keep their side of the deal, and that no one has so far said that they will not. But no one has said that they will, either, and (as I listened this morning to Andrew Ross Sorkin, who by the way is the son of old friends, on MS NOW), the answer to this question may take many forms. In some countries, the deals made with the US are politically unpopular and viewed to be the result of American coercion. In other countries, the deals violated their own laws and, to legitimize them, laws had to be amended and passed. Presumably, in some places, this has been done, and in others legislative changes are in process.

And one more thing about tariffs. The Court did not tell the president what to do. Business are very confused. Some people think refunds are in order. Chaos may result. If so, the president will not be the only one at fault.

Tomorrow night, of course, is the State of the Union address by the president. I don’t want to watch it, and I really want to watch it. You, too, I assume. Some of the Democrats are not going to come (I don’t think that is smart), and it is unclear if all of the Supreme Court Justices will be there (as they usually are). Typically, the Justices of the Supreme Court come and are very clear not to show any bias or emotion. They don’t clap, they don’t boo. They just sit there (presumably listening) and stare. But tomorrow, you can expect that the president will attack some of them (to be clear, 6 of them), presumably by name. Will the Justices just sit there as they are attacked and belittled? And if so, will the president’s attitude change the way they look at the cases now pending? There are many such cases. One is, of course, the birthright citizenship case, which again seems to be one which the president will obviously lose, perhaps not 6-3, but 7-2. We will see how that plays out.

We may, in his speech, also learn the latest on Iran, where the president has placed military resources in the neighborhood ready for an attack. He has said that, unless negotiations on Iran’s nuclear future look successful, he might order a “limited” attack and then, if they are not successful after that, a stronger attack. When the US attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities a year ago, Iran did not respond with its own military. The same is true when the US a few months ago moved into Venezuela to arrest its president and take over its natural resources. This might give our president a big head, no? He can do anything with no response.

I wouldn’t count on it, with all of the US resources in striking distance of Iran, and with possible retribution attacks on Israel as well. There may be quite a mess ahead.

As to Israel, the Haberman Institute and Americans for Ben-Gurion University of the Negev had a joint program last night featuring Professor Ehud Ohana of Ben-Gurion talking about advances in medical research, particularly in ways to treat diabetes and certain cancers. One of the rockets sent by Iran into Israel last year hit the building at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva, destroying Professor Ohana’s labratory, among many others. A video recording of this presentation should be available on the Haberman website (www.habermaninstitute.org) today or tomorrow. It is about an hour long. Professor Ohana is a very clear speaker, and I really suggest you listen. Go to the Program Recording Archive.

(1) Ukraine has basically been out of the news recently in American media. But for the Ukrainians, the war continues, deaths continue, Russian attacks on energy sources continue, the fighting continues, and like during the heart of World War I, nothing much seems to be happening to change the facts on the ground. There was a line in Homeland that I thought was applicable to the situation Ukraine finds itself in: “We are not strong enough to win the war, and we are not weak enough to lose it.” The line was a complaint, not a brag, and I think it typifies the situation Ukraine finds itself in.

(2) Last week I complained about the play The World to Come and wondered, since it got such good reviews, if I no longer can enjoy theater. Last night, we saw Jodie Foster’s French language film Private Life (I know that is not a French title, but….give me a break, please) at the Avalon with our friends, the Gandals, and none of us enjoyed the film. Jodie Foster (who was quite good) plays a unhappy Jewish psychiatrist in Paris, who is surprised to learn that one of her long time (nine year) Jewish patients has suddenly died, and even more surprised to find out that the death was ruled a suicide. I described both Foster (a/k/a Lillian Steiner) and her patient as Jewish, because none of us were expecting this to be a Jewish-themed film, which perhaps it was. And I saw “perhaps” because the film is so unusual (should I instead say “so French”) that it is hard to understand what is core to the film and what is incidental. Foster (Steiner) determines to find out who murdered her patient, shows up at the funeral and at shiva (she is kicked out because the widower thinks his wife’s psychiatrist drove her to death), determines first her patient was murdered by her daughter and then by her husband, and then determines that ……The film involves not only therapy and psychoanalysis, but also a hypnotist, and dreams, and past lives (at one point Steiner decides that her adult son was, in a previous life, a Nazi-supporting member of the French militia who wanted to arrest her in an opera house where she was playing the cello, and that that explained why she never loved him).

I admit to two things. I have never understood French intellectual thinking — all of those famous French intellects and philosophers. None of them have ever made any sense to me, try as I might. And, I have never understood psychoanalysis as something that has ever benefited anyone who has undertaken to be analyzed. I have always viewed it as an expensive hobby – more expensive than, say, doing crossword puzzles or putting together jigsaw puzzles. The film did not change my view of either.

(3) My old friend Jeff Dwyer made a comment on yesterday’s post, suggesting that it is time to find a wormhole that could take us to a parallel universe. He asked if I would join him. It’s not a bad idea at all, but my thought is that if there is a parallel universe (and, to be truthful, there are probably an infinite number of them, if any), how would we know that we would be better off there than we are here? And our universe still has plenty in it for us to explore, doesn’t it? After all, we have only really explored in some detail one planet, and touched upon other planets in one solar system. Our solar system is, so they estimate, one of between 100 to 400 billion solar systems in the Milky Way (our own personal galaxy) alone. And, they estimate that there are about 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. That is two trillion. Now, even if you take the low number (100 billion) as the average number of solar systems/or stars in each of 2 trillion galaxies, and multiply 2 trillion times 100 billion, and you ask AI to give you the answer, you don’t get an answer. That is how many stars are in the universe. I think you would write the number: 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Is that 2 quintillion?

I myself would be satisfied if we were able to explore those 2 quintillion (or maybe even 8 quintillion) stars and their planetary systems. I would be looking for a planet with life on it (I see there may be up to 500 million planets in the Milky Way alone that may have some form of “life” on them). And not just any life, but life similar to human life. Specifically, I would like to find a planet where the highest form of life can do everything we do, but also have three, rather than two, arms. A planet where, when you to a lunch buffet, say, you are able to hold your tray, and a drink, and still pick up your desert. That is all I ask. And I would hope that be three-armed would not be a recessive trait.

The sermon at yesterday’s Shabbat services at Adas Israel was on the concept of an omnipresent God (is God omnipresent, or only located inside of you, or do you have a choice of putting God where you would like God to be; that isn’t doing it justice, obviously – or maybe it is). But if there is an omnipresent God who is (as he must be) present in 2 trillion galaxies, can you expect him to be present in all of those parallel universes that Jeff would like to explore? Eager minds would like to know.

(4) Have I rambled on long enough this morning? Maybe not.

Yesterday afternoon, at Adas Israel, having nothing to do with the morning sermon, we heard from Israeli thinker Micah Goodman. Goodman, born of American parents in Jerusalem, author of several well respected books, and scholar at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, talked about everything in the 2 trillion galaxy universe except for the omnipresence of God. He is a charming, and obviously very bright individual, easy to listen to and watch, and able to answer any question put to him with ease. Starting with talking about how Jewish religious texts are constructed with rules and then with narratives often challenging the rules (sometimes successfully), he wandered into the discussion of many European thinkers, and then into the details of Zoroastrian thought and more. His mind is brilliant, but very crowded. Perhaps overly crowded. He is trying very hard to sort things out, and perhaps he is succeeding. But perhaps just confusing himself more, although I must say that he really enjoys the confusion, it appears. But if you ever have met someone who raises a question and gives it a brilliant answer which raises more questions, and where this goes on infinitum, I think you have Micah Goodman. And I am not criticizing him for this. More power to him. And, cousin Kiku Day, he clears his mind by taking ice baths.

(I dedicate this answer to (4) to friends Mel and Barbara Gelman, who were curious as to what I was going to write about Micah Goodman.)

(5) After the film, we went to a new (to us) Indian restaurant in Silver Spring, Spice Street Restaurant on Georgia Ave. Add it to the list of Indian restaurants we like and go to: Cafe of India, Malabar, Delhi Spice, and Maya. And I am leaving one out, I think (not on purpose).

See you tomorrow (I hope), when perhaps we will talk about the attack on Iran that might happen between now and then.

You will see that I broke my normal rules by mentioning 6 people today. A good thing to do? Or not?

In sort of a hurry this morning, wondering about how much snow we will get tomorrow in Washington. The estimates (the “first calls”) seem to range between 1″ and 20″. Can we put it up to a vote?

Before we get to tariffs, let’s talk about Black History Month. That would be this month, and the federal government’s initial thought on the matter seemed to be to ignore it all together. But then, under some pressure, Mr. Trump…..

A digression: “Tariff” is Trump’s favorite word, as we all know. But none of you know what my least favorite word is. It is “trump”. And not only when used to name our president. Even when used as an uncapitalized, standard English word. I have banned it from my vocabulary.

……..did mention Black History Month and even talked about some of the wonderful Black people in our history…..

Another digression: Marco Rubio (i.e., the Cuban) spoke to the Europeans about how central to the continuation of civilization are the Europeans with their history, and of course, for this purpose we Americans are Europeans – white folks who came from Europe before we came to this continent. He talked about how we shared those great musicians Mozart and the Rolling Stones, and he ignored the many Americans of either Western Hemisphere indigenous backgrounds, or the many Americans of African backgrounds, and he pretended that all Europeans were good guys, who never fought, knew how to share, and really loved each other.

……, including that wonderful guy Herschel Walker. Remember him? Former football player, who wanted to be U.S. Senator from Georgia, while he lived in Texas? That’s the guy. And Trump appointed him to be the United States Ambassador to The Bahamas. Well, when mentioning him this week at a Black Month event, he described him as the Ambassador to The Bahamas, or Bermuda. “One of those places. Nice place.”

And then, of course, yesterday, Trump, when asked about his two Supreme Court appointees who voted against his tariffs, he said he thought it was an “embarrassment for their families”. This remark is even odder than his failure to know the difference between The Bahamas and Bermuda. What could he have been thinking when he said that their families would be embarrassed? I guess we will have to wait and see. I hope that some news service follows up and asks their kids how embarrassed they are.

I bet they are not nearly embarrassed as the children of former Prince Andrew (and how embarrassed his grandchildren would be, if his children are not able to shield them from this information). And here is where embarrassment will come into play. As the Epstein investigations continue and deepen, and the alleged perpetrators of or witnesses to Epstein’s sexual crimes are made public, it is their families who will become embarrassed. Maybe that is what was in the recesses of Trump’s mind as he stood there and projected that embarrassment on the families of Justices Barrett and Gorsuch. Maybe that it what was looming somewhere in his mind as Howard Lutnick was standing right behind his left shoulder. Who knows?

And then of course he said that the Justices of the Supreme Court were (all?) influenced by foreign powers in making their decision on tariffs (and maybe on everything else). Like Carrie Mathison on Homeland, a lifetime of service to one’s country cannot stop presumably intelligent people from deciding that, all along, she was working for the Russians. Maybe the Justices of the Supreme Court are really assets of Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe they are involved with deals with Arabs to pour money into their children’s ventures, to buy their crypto currency, to invest in their outside business interests, to give them a jet plane, to give them permits to build skyscrapers in their major cities. Perhaps that is why Justice Barrett voted the way she did.

And then there was our Federal Communications Commission chief, who spoke this week and suggested that, at least from now until July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the country, all American broadcast stations should start their day with the Pledge of Allegiance. And should have programs of music by American composers, and stories about the wonderful events in American history (there may be fewer of those than he thinks).

And the Secretary of the Treasury, who parroted his boss, Mr. Trump, in saying that the tariff decision of the Court was in fact a victory. A victory not only for the president, and for the American people, but a victory for the use of tariffs, and a victory for the use of presidential power. He said this, by the way, in the same speech where he compared Olympic gold medal skier Eileen Gu to George Soros. Now I ask you. Did you ever see George Soros ski?

Yes, the United States government, like the old, gray mare, is not what she used to be. And the spillover effect continues. I read this morning that Harvard (yes, the same Harvard that seems to be fighting the Trump administration in court) has cancelled its annual Women’s Research Symposium, because speakers would be selected by gender. Think about that for a minute. Harvard, which some would criticize because of support for trans-gender individuals, is now cancelling programs that support a clear male-female divide. What is next? Hillel must allow in Christians? You never know these days.

Okay, I gotta go now. You see my mind is a bit scattered these days. And you see why.

What was my favorite Wall Street Journal headline yesterday? 

“Top Lawyers’ Fees Have Skyrocketed. Be Prepared to Spend $3,400 per Hour.”

It reminds me of a cartoon I saw years ago, which I will now update: A man opens an envelope from his lawyer and looks at the invoice, which reads, “Saw you on the street, crossed to say ‘hello’, realized it wasn’t you, re-crossed the street. $1,700.00.”

When I stopped practicing law in 2012, I think I was charging $500 or $600 an hour. That seemed outrageously high to me. But then, in many cases, when you looked at what the clients would gain from the transaction or from a positive end to a dispute, you realized that, compared to the client’s gain, your fee was small potatoes.

Many of my clients were developers and managers of government subsidized housing projects. The programs designed by Congress provided for several groups to benefit. One group of course were the residents, who were able to get good rental housing at rates they could afford. Three other groups were those who provided funding for the construction of the properties. One of these groups was comprised of the mortgage lenders, who made market interest rate loans without any real risk, because their loans were insured by the federal government. Then there were the investors who provided equity money in return for federal tax write-offs. And then there were the various middlemen, who received large, industry-standard fees for putting the deals together.

If you were one of these middlemen, collecting syndication fees, asset management fees and what-have-you, you could maybe do well if you did one deal, although that one deal would take some effort and risk because you were doing it for the first time. But if you then did a second deal, and a third, and maybe a thirtieth, the transactions would become easier and more routine, and you would become richer and richer.

After construction was finished, the biggest jobs were maintenance, renting and rent collection, and property management. Many subsidized properties were managed by companies affiliated with the developer through common ownership. Other properties, particularly those owned by non-profit entities, were managed by companies who specialized in these types of properties. Subsidized housing management can be a very difficult business, and takes a degree of dedication, as you might imagine, and this should not be ignored. But management of subsidized housing can be very, very lucrative.

The management fees for these properties are not negotiated (you can’t negotiate fees between affiliated owners and managers, anyway), but are set by government regulators. This means that, if you manage only one property, you will likely go broke. The cost of the equipment you need, the expertise to comply with all of the arcane government rules, and so forth, make management of these properties a specialized business.

But your management fee is not related to the number of properties you manage, so that once you have three or four under your belt, and the necessary personnel and skills to ensure complance, every penny you collect as a management fee is gravy. And there are companies with 100 or more subsidized properties under management. You can imagine how much the owners of these companies earn every year.

Of course, the governmental mortgage insurance for the lenders and the tax write-offs for the investors are not enough to keep these projects going, especially if they are designed to serve very low income (and sometimes, no income) residents. So you have to add monthly government rental subsidies, which normally equate to the difference between 30% of tenant income, and a rent approved by the government based on a set formula for fair market rents.

You see what this means. It means that for larger operators of government assisted housing, taxpayer dollars, often in excessive amounts, go directly into the pockets of increasingly wealthy developers and owners of subsidized housing.

Maybe, there is a better way, but no one has found it.

We started this post with excessive legal fees. And now we see it is not only the lawyers. And all of these people are members of the top 1%, or close to it. They are all beneficiaries of the system I described, as are the very low income residents of these properties. As to the largest segment of Americans, who are neither one bor the other and who work to develop and manage these properties, what about them? By and large, their salaries are not in the least reflective of what their bosses are making, and like many today, they struggle with the increasing cost of living.

So what else is new?

It’s Thursday morning, and that means that I started off my day listening to one of my friends make a presentation at our morning breakfast meeting. Today, Ken Glazer spoke about “Theseus’ Boat”. Ken is a retired lawyer, who has been studying philosophy at the University of Maryland for the past six or seven years, and now teaches a course on “philosophy and the law”.

And what is Theseus’ Boat? I couldn’t have told you 90 minutes ago, but now I can. Imagine an old wooden ship. A plank needs replacing. Then another, then another, then another. Pretty soon, while the boat looks just as it did before the first plank rotted, each and every plank has been replaced over time. The question is: is this the same boat? It is still Theseus’ boat, if he still owns it, but is it the same boat?

Take Abraham Lincoln’s axe. Made of two pieces, a handle and a blade. The blade gets too old and worn to sharpen, so it is replaced. Is this still Lincoln’s axe? If so, and the handle is replaced  later, so that neither the handle nor the blade is the same as those that Lincoln held in his hand, is it still Lincoln’s axe?

Take a river (this is more common example). The water in the river keeps flowing. When you look at a river at the same place, you never see the same thing. Is it still the same river?

You may not (okay, I am sure you do not) remember when I talked about the historic renovation low income housing project in Baltimore that, in accordance with various federal rules, was to retain a certain portion of the existing, historic external walls. The developer/builder knocks the walls down in their entirety. But he preserves the bricks and stacks them up, concluding (incorrectly under federal rules) that if he uses the original, old bricks in constructing the (new) walls, he will have retained the historic walls. Putting aside the federal rules, as a matter of philosophy, if not law, is he correct?

And then there is a question of animals. The most prominent example? A caterpillar turns into a butterfly. Is it the same animal?

And what of human beings, who grow, shed cells continuously and so forth? Is an 80 year old the same person as he/she was when they were 8? If you measure this by the cells that make up the body, maybe not. If you measure this psychologically, that might be a more difficult question. But it comes into play when you think about someone who, as a teenager, murders someone else and is sentenced to life in prison without parole. Forty years later, after four decades in prison, he seems like a “new man”. He shows no trace of violence, he is kind to all, he has earned university degrees, he writes, he counsels, he certainly does not get involved in threats or violence in any way. Is he the same person as the teenager who was sentenced for murder? Does it make sense to keep him incarcerated for life? What does society get out of this, other than the expense of his imprisonment?

That reminded me of something else. You may have guessed it already. It’s the Epstein situation. The crimes alleged in the Epstein case took place 20 to 40 years ago. All sorts of individuals were presumably involved, many of whom have presumably led honorable lives (you know what I mean) over the past few decades. Are these people the same people who committed crimes 30 years ago? Does it make sense to “cancel” them or to arrest and try them in 2026 for things that happened in, say, 1996? And what about the victims, the survivors? Are they, in their 40s or 50s, the same people they were when they were 16 or so? Does dredging up things that happened so long ago constitute justice or retribution? Is it fair to the alleged perpetrators as they are today (or to their families), and does it do anything for the survivors, other than bringing up their old trauma again and again? Are the legal answers and the philosophical (or moral) answers to these questions the same, or different?

To me, these are all very provocative questions and thoughts, and worth pondering. So I thank Ken for my morning wake-up.

But, as usual, something said at the session got me wondering about far away places. Such as El-jem, Tunisia. Two thousand years ago or so, it had a different name, Thysdrus, and was a city of the Roman Empire, Africa province. There was an ampitheater there at the time. It is still there.

Are Thyrsus and El-jem the same city?

You do not have to answer this last question.

I am happy to say that we are only 13 episodes from the end of Homeland. Elizabeth Keane, the first female president of the United States, has just been kicked out of office through the use of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. Arizona Senator Sam Paley has convinced the majority of her Cabinet members, and the Vice President, to sign a certification that she is unfit for office. This determination was based on her failure as a politician to convince others (and sometimes herself) that her policy of compromise with bad foreign actors is best for the country, her reaction to a pre-inauguration assassination attempt, when she rounded up 200 high level officials of the CIA and other security agencies and jailed them (without trial, apparently) as co-conspirators who wanted her dead, and a series of bizarre occurrences that she blamed on Russian operatives, but that her opponents blamed on her.

Because Section 4 of the 25th Amendment has not yet been used to remove a President, and because the Supreme Court has not ruled on any cases involving this section of the Amendment, there is some uncertainty as to how it would actually be used. In Homeland, it worked as follows: (1) a majority of President Keane’s Cabinet members and the Vice President signed a document certifying to her inability to “discharge the powers and duties of [her] office” (the language of the Amendment uses “his”), (2) the Vice President told the President that he was now in charge, and she was no longer the President, and (3)  President Keane announced the document had no effect because she had fired most of her Cabinet, and that she  had gone directly to the Supreme Court to argue that those who signed the declaration had no basis to claim that she was “unable” to perform her duties, that they simply did not like the way she was performing her duties, and that the 25th Amendment was not written to be used for such blatantly political purposes (and, of course, that in any event, she had fired her Cabinet before they had fired her).

The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision, quickly ruled against the President, although we (mere viewers of a TV series) do not know the basis of the Court’s ruling.

In real life, where there is now some talk about the eventual use of the 25th Amendment to end the presidency of Donald Trump, things probably would not play out as they did in Homeland.

We would have the real life question of what “inability” means and, assuming that it doesn’t mean what it meant in Homeland where it was a question of whether the President was simply acting in a way that was politically not acceptable to the signers of the declaration, there would have to be some determination (presumably a judicial determination) of what “inability” does mean, and there would have to be evidence that the President did indeed suffer from the form of inability to carry out his or her duties that would be acceptable to the Supreme Court (the Supreme Court we have today, conservative as it is).

Secondly, we would have the question of who is entitled to sign such a declaration. The Amendment itself does not use the word “Cabinet”. It uses “the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide”. There is legislative history from the debates leading to the ratification of the amendment that this refers to the President’s Cabinet, but clearly we have something else here that the Supreme Court could focus on. As Congress has not designated any other body by law, we are left to determine what the “executive departments” are and who are their “principal officers”.

There are 17 government departments whose leaders have the title Secretary and whose appointment must be ratified by the Senate. Traditionally, these individuals have comprised a President’s Cabinet. But is, say, the Secretary of State the only “principal officer” of the Department of State? Another question to be answered.

And, if you look at President Trump’s listing of his Cabinet members, you find 24 names, not 17. The others are the heads of the EPA, OMB, SBA, CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the President’s Chief of Staff. Each of these appointments, with the exception of the Chief of Staff, has also been ratified by the Senate.

So here the Court would have a number of questions posed to it. Do the 17 members of the Cabinet constitute the “principal officers of the executive departments”, does the President have the right to appoint anyone he or she wants to the Cabinet, and so on, and so on.

In addition, the Amendment does not mention anything about the authority of the Supreme Court to review any of this, so the Court’s jurisdiction may also be in question. The Court found itself in trouble after ruling in Bush v. Gore as to what was required in Florida to determine the certifiable result of the election, a result which would in fact (and did) decide that election. It would have led to a true constitutional crisis had not Al Gore conceded the election just to avoid such a crisis.

Since then, in some instances, the Court has carefully (and in my mind unfortunately) tried to avoid some political questions, namely most visibly in its determination not to get involved in decisions where gerrymandering has been alleged. Perhaps the Court would simply say: we have no jurisdiction. This is for the other two branches of government to straighten out.

What the Amendment does say is that if the President disputes the decision of her or his Cabinet and refuses to leave office, it becomes a question for Congress to decide. And, in order for the Vice President to replace the President, a “two thirds vote of both Houses” is required to remove the President. As we know, in the case of a presidential impeachment, two thirds of the Senate must vote to convict and this super majority has never been achieved (although it came very close to be achieved in the Andrew Johnson trial). Here, you need a “two third vote of both Houses”. [I am not going to assume that there is a difference between the language of the Amendment and an alternative phrase “a two thirds vote of each House”, although it does set itself up for another potential argument.

My conclusion? Don’t think that it would be easy to remove King Donald from his throne, even in the unlikely event that the votes of his Cabinet (however defined) would be there. Do not unbuckle your seat belts. Do not take you eyes off the road.

I woke up this morning with the news that Jesse Jackson had passed away.  He had been ill for almost ten years with what was originally diagnosed as Parkinson’s Disease, but later described as a different and rarer neurodegenerative disease. His last decade was pretty rough.

I liked Jesse Jackson and felt sorry for him when he became, in my opinion, one of the first victims of a social media disinformation campaign. As an activist civil rights leader, Jackson obviously attracted a significant number of enemies. His enemies, today, would of course largely be supporters of Donald Trump, although President Trump issued a surprisingly warm and accurate message of condolence today.

Forty-two years ago, in a conversation with a Washington Post reporter, Jackson referred to Jews in New York as Hymies, as New York City as Hymietown. When added to some previous incidents where Jackson expressed some solidarity with occupied Palestinians, this was enough to create a strong reaction from much of the Jewish community. Jackson apologized for his use of the term (which may or may not have been purposely disparaging), but the damage was done. He could never live it down.

For about a decade, in the 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a fair amount of time representing a Southern California organization which was heavily involved with the acquisition, renovation, and management of affordable housing properties across the country. Virtually everyone involved in the company was Jewish. Bring together the officers, directors, lawyers and accountants, and you would easily have a minyan. Even if a bunch of the invitees were absent. Jesse Jackson acted as an informal advisor to the company, and, yes, some of the principals gave him financial support for his political and social  endeavors. Their relationship was close.

One of the properties redeveloped by my clients was a large (50 building, 575 unit), federally subsidized, garden apartment community in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which had quite a checkered history and reputation. It was conveniently located just at an entrance to the Washington Beltway. This made it convenient not only for the residents, but for drug dealers who liked to hang out in the parking areas. Ending the location as a drug market, as well as rehabilitating the basically attractive apartments, was my clients’ focus.

It was a lengthy process, especially, as I remember, because the attempt was to kerp residents in place, so as to avoid as much disruption as possible. When the work was finally completed, there was a celebration, primarily for the residents (who included a large number of children), with food, a moon bounce or two, balloons, and…..Jesse Jackson.

Jackson actually arrived via a helicopter. You can imagine the excitement, the adults excited by Jackson, the children by the helicopter.

Jackson was warm, friendly, and engaging. His speech was memorable. I recall 40 plus years later that he talked about the renovation work, and how nice everything looked. But then he put the responsibility on the residents, probably all African-American. He told them, very matter-of-factly, that a family can turn a palace into a slum, just as they can live in a slum and make it a palace.

Again, as I recall, my clients held on to the property for a number of years. 10? 15? They kept it well maintained and then sold it. Affordable housing can be a tough business. The property did not do well under new ownership. The old problems returned. Eventually, HUD foreclosed on its mortgage and the entire property was  demolished in 2014.

From my one brief connection with Jesse Jackson, and hearing about him over the years from my client, I became convinced that he was falsely deemed antisemitic, but that the charge once made could never be fully erased. I am far from alone thinking this.

May his memory be a blessing.

I just watched the first episode of a Turkish series, The Museum of Innocence, on Netflix. It’s based on a novel by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk, who is still writing, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. He published The Museum of Innocence in 2008. The book, or at least the first part of it, is set in Istanbul in the early 1970s.

Until its defeat in World War I, Istanbul was the heart of the Ottoman Empire, and the center of the Ottoman Caliphate, presumed to be the most important part of the Muslim world. Its political and spiritual center. All that ended after the war, when the Ottoman Empire was no more, and a smaller geographic area, today’s Turkiye, came under the control of Kemal Ataturk, a strong secularist, who ended any Muslim influence over the government and who tried to eradicate it as much as he could as an influence over Turkish society, largely replacing religious control by the authority of the military.

In the 1970s, when The Museum of Innocence‘s story line began, Turkiye, and especially Istanbul and its suburbs (no longer the capital, but still the cultural center of the country), remained a secular metropolis. In 2008, when the book was written, things were beginning to change, and it was unclear how far the changes would extend. Current Turkish president Recep Erdogan was then the country’s prime minister and the former mayor of Istanbul (he was to become president in 2014, a position he still holds). Erdogan was not a secularist, although in order to advance politically in secularist Turkiye, he had to keep much of his opinion to himself.

2008 was an important year in Turkiye not only because of the publication of Pamuk’s book, but also because it was the year that Edie and I visited the country, spending about a week in Istanbul, and a week exploring the western, formerly Greek, coast. For reasons that would take too long to outline here, I loved Turkiye and I loved Istanbul. I wasn’t expecting to, but I did.

What we saw in Turkiye was a country divided between religious Muslims, and anti-religious secularists. I remember having long discussions with our guide, an atheist, and I remember her snide remarks about women who were hiding their hair or wearing various types of religious garb. I also remember that we saw few obviously religious women in Istanbul, which looked very up to date and cosmopolitan, but many more as we explored the countryside. And I remember being surprised when we visited the Grand Green Mosque in Bursa, a large, industrial city of several million on the south side of the Sea of Marmara, to see that it appeared that the majority of that city’s residents seemed observant. I also remember, as we went through small villages, each had its new mosque (some still under construction), all of similar design, clearly evidence of a change in the attitude of the government.

After Erdogan became president in 2014, the religious aspect of the country began to dramatically increase and the secularists, the focus of every policy of Ataturk and his military government, began to see their power shrinking away.

The Turkiye of 1970 was not the Turkiye of 2008, and the Turkiye of 2008 is not the Turkiye of 2026. What seemed like an unchangeable advance from a religious to a modern, Western society, was reversed, and the life of Turks changed.

Of course, this has happened not only in Turkiye. When I was driving older residents to their medical appointments for Northwest Neighborhood Village, one of my regulars was a very nice and elegant woman who had grown up in Christian Beirut, but now lived in Washington with her German born diplomat/husband. Her tale of a secular childhood and adolescence in the Lebanon after World War II and through the early 1960s was a tale of a city undoubtedly very different from today’s Beirut. Similar stories can be told by a friend of mine who served in the Peace Corps in the 1960s in Kabul, a friend who grew up in the 1950s in Baghdad, and by any number of people who were raised in Tehran.

So you don’t have to go back to Hitler’s Germany to see a society turned inside-out and upside-down as a liberal government gives way to something else.

Places can change, and they can change slowly, or they can change rapidly. And sometimes, they can change slowly until they change rapidly. We all know that intellectually. And we all (and probably everyone else everywhere in the world) really doubt that such drastic changes can happen where we live, and where we have grown up and been educated.

We saw a very weird and, to us, a totally unnsatisfying play yesterday at DC’s Woolly Mammmoth Theatre. Called The World to Come, it told the story of four residents of a senior facility in a world in the process of being destroyed. The residents were kept isolated from a world wracked by war and deprivation, where people reaching 65 are forced to stop working and, at 75, rounded up and placed in senior homes, without contact with anyone on the outside, except for those who work at the facility but are not allowed to communicate. One nurse who did communicate a little was shot by the authorities.

Okay, this was a bit over the top. And I hope the play does not turn out to be memorable, as I would like to forget it. But point taken. Things can change.

I will say this. The play ended at 5:30. We walked the block up 7th Street, past several trendy restaurants, each of which were packed. We went into Jose Andres’ Jaleo. It looked like maybe there were two empty tables and a few empty bar seats in the entire place. The mood was festive, the food delicious. Some things have not really changed at all. Yet.

FOR THOSE INTERESTED, PAGE A4 OF TODAY’S NEW YORK TIMES HAS A FULL PAGE STORY ABOUT THE PAMUK SERIES. THEY MUST HAVE READ MY POST.

(1) Several years ago, Edie made a chicken and vegetable dish that looked so good that I took a picture.

Then I sent that picture to a company that turns photos into 500 piece jigsaw puzzles. The puzzle arrived a few weeks later and I set the box aside, not being ready to put the puzzle together. I just let the box sit there…..until Friday.

Friday, with help of Hannah and with one spot missing we put together the perimeter of the puzzle.

Yesterday, I set the pieces on the table next to the puzzle, not yet assorting them in any way.

We are now at the stage where the puzzle clearly looks unmanageable.

We may never get beyond this stage.

(2) I had another memorable dream last night. I was a lawyer on a business trip with two clients. We were in New York City, staying an adjoining two floor suites in a midtown hotel. My suite had shabby furniture. My clients’ was the height of luxury. We had killed someone. I don’t know what we did with the body, but there were yellow stains on a throw rug (why yellow, I am not sure) that we were afraid would give us away. We rolled the rug up and hid it behind the refrigerator, hoping it would never be found. Then, we went out and had a nice dinner.

(3) SPOILER ALERT. We finished Season 6 of Homeland. That means we have watched 72 episodes, with 24 to go. The United States now has its first woman president, Elizabeth Keane, and things are getting nasty. The premise is simple. The plot is complicated.

The United States and Iran are several years into a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear bomb research, and whether Iran is cheating is a big question. The new president won on a campaign promise to open up friendlier relations with Iran. The CIA is filled with people who are 100% against her policy and determined to undermine it and to undermine her.

The head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, however, is a controlled American asset, blackmailed into his position by the CIA’s Saul Berenson. It turns out that he was also a Mossad asset, not through blackmail, but through a $45 million payment. You can’t serve two masters, as he will rudely find out.

CIA operatives, along with a popular media figure who looks and acts like Steve Bannon, try to assassinate Keane, and discredit her, before her inauguration. She survives, has a closed door inauguration ceremony, and starts her revenge. When Series 6 aired in 2016, it all still seemed like fantasy. Today…..

(4) After yesterday’s kiddush at Adas Israel, Rabbi Alexander led an interesting session on how the Orthdox Jewish establishment in Berlin coped with modernity in the pre-war German Empire, when Jews were no longer an insular community, but part of mainstream Berlin life. He discussed decisions relating to intermarriage, conversion, and identifying who was, and who was not considered Jewish, and compared them to decisions American rabbis must make today. His focus was on the writings of Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann, a respected source during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I had never heard of him. Interesting. Had nothing to do with Nazis or the Holocaust.

John Henry was a steel driving man. John Henry was a Luddite, and also an enslaved man, who outperformed a mechanical drill in digging through rock during the construction of the cross country railroad tracks in the 19th century. He outperformed the steam drill, yes, but he also died “with his hammer in his hand” when he finished.

A digression: A Luddite is a sedentary John Henry. Ned Ludd was the John Henry of the English weaving trade, when machines were introduced into the English textile world. Ned Ludd did not die competing against the machines. He simply destroyed the machines.

I am sitting here this morning, watching the finals of the men’s snowboarding half-pipe, where all of the competitors look like John Henrys, but so far none of them have died. For those who don’t know what this event entails (that would have included me 15 minutes ago), imagine a very large (very, very large) hollow pipe with the top half cut off, covered in deep snow. Then imagine starting at the head of the half pipe, your feet attached to a snow board, and starting to go down hill (yes, the half pipe slopes downward), and four times on your speedy journey, you turn to board up the sides of the half pipe. As you get to the top, you wind up in the air, when you hit the half pipe’s rim and, while there, you do a bunch of tricks, which involve spinning and turning and rotating sideways and upside down, and then you land, still standing (hopefully) on your board to continue your way down to the finish line.

As a human endeavor, this seems absolutely impossible to me, but clearly there are those who can do this with relative ease (maybe), although falling seems to be something you expect to happen now and then and, for some reason, you never seem to be hurt when you fall.

There is no possible competition with a steam drill here, to be sure, but how about this? When I first turned this on this morning, it seemed to me unreal. I thought I was watching Japanese anime, an artificially constructed sport. And then I thought of the competition. Real life half pipers vs. AI. Who would win? I must admit that the fact that two of the medals (gold and bronze) went to Japanese competitors seemed appropriate. As I would imagine that the animators would be Japanese as well, I can see it now. Man vs. machine once more. Anything the techies could come up with (there would have to be rules, of course, and limits to ingenuity), man can do better.

The winter sports are more interesting to me than the summer sports. Not that I enjoy watching them more (I don’t), but they seem more unreal to me. To perform in the summer Olympics, I would just have to be much younger and better than I am. To perform in most of the winter competitions, I would have to be of an entirely different species.

But then, maybe I could have competed in the luge. As I see it, the skills needed for that sport are the same that are needed to get an MRI. You lie down on your back, close your eyes, don’t move, and minutes pass until you are told you are through and you can get up. Yes, the luge is both colder and breezier than an MRI, but that just means you have to be dressed appropriately.

And what about curling? Curling is a sport that appears every four years when the winter Olympics happen. During the time between winter Olympics, I never hear anything about people spending their weekends curling (except perhaps in beauty salons, something that I know nothing about and whose events are rarely televised). But curling has one advantage to it. You are told to push (or curl) the “stone”, keeping it straight for your target, and making sure you don’t push it too hard so that it does not go too far. That sounds better to me than a sport where you push it as hard as you can. I would be much better at “restraint” than “excess”, I am sure.

I just read (because I just looked it up) and saw that the curling stone is typically made of granite (like a tombstone, I guess), and that it weighs about 42 pounds. In Britain, of course, a stone is a weight measure meant equivalent to 14 pounds. This means that, in Britain (at least), a curling stone is three stones in one stone. Now, I weigh about 10 stones, and that means if you weighed me and a curling stone, we would weigh about 13 stones, which would probably be unlucky, so I will give up my plans on becoming a senior stoner.

I am now watching women’s team speed skating. This is another sport I would have a hard time competing in. Not only would I find the skating hard, the speed impossible, and the coordination with my two speed skating teammates confusing, but I would be accused of being a man competing in a women’s sport and would probably be disqualified.

All of this made me wonder if I should compete in the 2026 Senior Olympics, and I decided that I would. But much to my disappointment, I have now learned that there are no 2026 Senior Olympics, and that I will have to wait until 2027. But, it seems to me, by then I will be much too old to have a chance of being selected on a team that could qualify. There are about 30 sports featured in the Senior Olympics. I might have a go at shuffleboard (that is one of them) or cornhole (another). Or maybe Senior Beach Volleyball? Why not?

See you in 2027 in (believe it or not) Tulsa.

Usually, when I am on a Zoom call, I am sitting at my desk and the view behind me that of a bookcase. The books on that bookcase are about as random as possible. I can not begin to tell you why these particular books are there. It’s a mystery.

For example, from thr top shelf:

This is not everything on that one shelf. You will also find The Jew and His Duties by Hyman Goldin, The two volume The Jews in the Soviet Union by Nora Levin,  The Old Teatament Speaks by Samuel Schultz (3rd edition), Ancient Israel by Roland de Vaux, three volumes of Festival Prayer books published by Joseph Schlesinger in Vienna in 1900, Life in a Haitian Valley by Melville Hershkovitz (1937), Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism edited by Herschel Shanks, The American Story, edited and signed by David Rubinstein, The Westminster Atlas of the Bible, Dali, Dali, Dali (that is one picture book), and yes, even more.

I am not going to try to explain or understand why these books, some never opened by me, have such a prominent place.

I don’t know how many of you saw all or part of the House oversight hearing featuring Attorney General Pam Bondi as the Bad Bunny of the event. Yes, she spoke in English, not Spanish, but what she said made about as much sense to me, someone who understands English but not Spanish, as did the Spanish rapped by Bad Bunny on Sunday. And yes, in response to nothing, Pam Bondi did say that the Dow, the Nasdaq, the S & P, and yesterday’s job report should have been the subject of yesterday’s hearings, not the performance of the Department of Justice, and certainly not any perceived negative performance of His Royal Highness Donald the First (did you ever realize that Donald the First rhymes with Donald the Worst?).

I guess that Cabinet members testifying before Congress often bring briefing books with them, so that they can refer to statistics, to facts they might otherwise be able to keep in mind, and various reference points related to questions that members of Congress have told them they would probably be asking. But the briefing books that normally sit next to testifying officials are nothing like the “burn book” accompanying Pam the Ham. Everybody else might be familiar with the term “burn book”, which I heard several times last night on news reports, but it isn’t a term that I had ever focused on before. So, I went to Google AI (or it came to me when I Googled “burn book”) and here is what it said: “A burn book is a notebook used to compile rumors, secrets, insults, and derogatory comments about people, originally popularized by the 2004 movie Mean Girls.” I am pretty sure I never watched the film, or any of the clones that were made of it more recently. Do you know that Tina Fey wrote the screenplay?

At any rate, a burn book is exactly what Pam the Ham brought to the hearing, and referred to constantly. In fact, when Democratic representatives were asking her questions, she tended not to look in their direction, but rather to be leafing through and studying her burn book. This is because she had no interest in what the questions were. If you watched, you know that she didn’t answer any of their questions, but went off on different subjects. There were two reasons for this. First, she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of any answer. Second, she had no idea what their questions even were.

This is not a quote, but will give you an idea of what I mean. If a question was asked like “Have you or anyone in your department met with any of the Epstein survivors sitting in this room?”, her answer would be something like “What about Ronaldo Garcia Lopez, an undocumented alien from Honduras, who brutally raped and murdered a 19 year old girl in your Congressional district, and about which you have never said anything?”

That’s the way it went all day. Okay, not exactly. She would interrupt answers like that to tell Jamie Raskin he was a failed lawyer, to tell Jerrold Nadler that all he did was trade stocks, to tell Thomas Massie he was a failed politician, to tell Pramile Jayapal that she (Pam the Ham) would not get down in the gutter with her when Jayapal suggested that Pam should apologize to the Epstein victims. Throughout the day, she would insult the Democrats, talk over them, and claim the right to answer questions in her own way (i.e., by ignoring the question and saying whatever she wanted, such as reporting the latest Dow Jones figures). And, to Republicans’ questions, she would politely answer “yes” or “no” and sit there waiting for the next question.

Well, enough of that. This morning, a prominent Democratic leader spoke to our morning breakfast group about the first year of the Trump administration. He gave a good synopsis of most of the irregular things that Trump has done, and how he has been packed up equally irregularly by rulings of the Supreme Court. He thinks that it will be almost impossible for the president following Trump, even if he or she is a Democrat, to undo and reverse what Trump has done over terms of four or eight years, that the damage would take much longer to reverse, even if there was consistent agreement on reversals. He also said that there is sufficient disunity within the Democratic party that consistency is probably impossible, unless the Democrats can put together a program to enable them to rise above their 29% (his figure, as I recall it) approval rate, and that focusing on progressives like AOC will not do the trick.

And, he said, even if the Democrats score major electoral victories, they are going to have to put up with a Supreme Court which has given Trump major victories, both as to its substantive rulings, and as to its use of its “emergency calendar” to make rulings without following normal procedures. (With regard to the Supreme Court’s delayed rulings on the presidential authority to set and change tariff rates without Congressional action, however, he expects that the Court will rule against Trump, and that the delay in the expected ruling, he understands is related to Justice Alito’s request to delay it so he can write a lengthy dissent. Whether this true, we will see. Perhaps.)

His final words were that his list of Trump’s harmful actions, which obviously was very extensive, would be meaningless to the great majority of Americans, who are only interested in their own economics, and that voting in 2028 may depend on the price of eggs and other essentials, and the jobs reports, irrespective of anything else.

As one commentator said, “thanks so much for putting all of this together so well and ruining my day”.

It was a busy morning, and I have just sat down to grab lunch at about 1 p.m., having just finished looking at the toilet choices at Lowes. They have about 20 models on display from 5 manufacturers and what I can report is this: they all look the same.

I have something else to report: Pam Bondi is a nasty person, and sadly, my guess is, if there is a rapture, she will be left behind.

In case you wonder what she is saying at today’s House oversight hearing, how about her telling Jamie Raskin that he is just a “washed up loser lawyer”?

And where am I having lunch? I am at a small Indian Cafe in the same section as Lowes in Kentlands, 19 miles from home. Yes, I could have gone to a closer Home Depot, but I boycott Home Depot for fear that any money I spend there will wind up in Donald Trump’s pocket. I don’t even know the name of this restaurant, but I know what the ceiling looks like.

A display on my table advertises Rupee Beer. As you can see, Rupee Beer is named “best beer for world food”. No idea who the namer was, but I bet it wasn’t Pam Bondi.

And look at the two varieties: one is an IPA (a bit unexpected in that India Pale Ales were British brews designed for export to India, able to withstand the long trip, not brewed in India (you learned that here), and the other a “basmati rice lager”, which I don’t really want even to think about. I just looked at a review of the lager: “a bit odd, but not unpleasant”. Hmm.

Well, almost done (ate about half). Looking forward to more Bondi on the way home.

The menu is expansive, and I decided on “Indo- Chinese” fried rice. It was the winner in a tense inner conflict, edging out a spicy chicken dosa at the last minute.

He is called Bad Bunny because as a child he once was forced to wear a bunny costume and he hated it and got very angry. Doesn’t seem like a good reason to me, in fact. I was forced to dress up in an army uniform when I was in my twenties and I didn’t like that at all. No one calls me Bad Soldier. But, come to think of it…….

At any rate, I thought that his Super Bowl half time show was extraordinary. Of course, after having watched it, I still don’t know if he can carry a tune, and I couldn’t understand a word of it, but so what? After all, when I saw Rigoletto in Hungarian, I couldn’t understand a word of that either. And when I listen to the Torah being read.

But what amazed me was the showmanship. The number of people involved. The choreography and general design of the show. How many different sets could be created on a football field, and how quickly it could be installed and taken down. The surprise (to me) appearances of Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. An actual wedding! A nail bar and a snack bar. 14 different songs and scenes. And, to top it off and I don’t really know what this means, 9,852 theatrical pyrotechnics. All in fewer than 14 minutes.

The general message, as I understand it, was love over hate, and treating the countries of the western hemisphere as all being part of America. I understand that some of the songs when performed outside of the Super Bowl context have some words and phrases that many would object to, but that these were toned down on Sunday or omitted altogether. I have not seen a translation of the entire show, although I have seen some segments translated.

Up until yesterday, I could not have told you even what state Rep. Andy Ogles represents. Now, I know it is Tennessee. Ogles claims to have been outraged at this degenerate performance and wants Congress to immediately investigate Bad Bunny and the NFL. In a classic line, Ogles (showing his true colors, undoubtedly) said that the show was “conclusive proof that Puerto Rico should never be a state”. I guess that says it all.

Of course, Donald J.T. didn’t like it any better than Ogles did. He thought it an affront to American culture, and said that nobody understood a word of it. Many of course did not (I don’t understand a lot of what is said by performers in English, either, of course), but I have read that of the 350 million or so living in the United States, Spanish is the first language for 50 million of them. And, in one of his lines, Bad Bunny said that while he understood that Spanish wasn’t the first language of the land that constitutes the United States, English wasn’t either.

Trump also spoke out against American Olympian Hunter Hess, who in Milan said that there were things about today’s America that he did not support, particularly those involving ICE (Bad Bunny mentioned ICE, too), causing Trump to immediately call Hess a “loser”. Republican Congressman Byron Donalds told Hess to pack his bags and go home. There is a question as to whether the Olympics should be a politics-free zone, and so as to whether or not Hess’ remarks were appropriate. But the reaction, as you might expect, was stronger than their cause, and makes you wonder if free speech ends when you cross an ocean. It also makes you wonder if it would have been okay for Hess, if he were a fan of ICE, to show support for ICE while in Milan and to bad-mouth Biden or Obama or other Democrats the way Trump does, not matter where he is. This would not put him in the category of criticizing the United States, but certainly would put him in the category of being political at the Olympics.

I am watching the Olympics when I can, but I must say that I am not one of those whose view of the Olympics is to root, root, root for the Americans. I don’t seem to care who wins particular events and, of course, the United States never dominates the winter games as it is often able to in the summer. I just get amazed at the athleticism and the lack of apparent fear in so many Olympians, no matter where they come from. In fact, usually my sympathy goes with the representatives of smaller countries, the Latvians or the Slovaks. I remember the funeral of my late friend, Rabbi Bill Rudolph, when one of his daughters talked about his seemingly irrational pick of teams to support, since he did not seem to favor Washington teams or teams from Buffalo, his home town. The she realized that he always supported the teams that he thought were best, that he liked to see the best athletes he could. Isn’t that what the Olympics should really be about? Isn’t that the ultimate way to take politics out?

(I realize that in talking about the Super Bowl, I didn’t mention the football game. Seattle’s defensive ability was amazing, and it makes a stunning contrast when compared to the poor Washington Commanders. And, while we are talking about Washington teams, sort of, how do the Nationals plan on getting through the season without any first rate starting pitchers or relievers? What is the plan?)

We often have military helicopters fly over our house in a line that, to me, runs from the Pentagon, or the White House, to Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda. They fly quite low and make a lot of noise. This can happen at any time, but generally not before noon or after 11 o’clock at night.

But this morning, at about 6 a.m., three or four flew past, waking me up, and much less pleasant than a Muslim call to prayers. I wondered if someone important had taken ill in the middle of the night. Either no one did, it seems, or…..you heard it here first.

I did fall back asleep, waking up about 8, but I didn’t enjoy those two hours. It seems I was a lawyer again, practicing in a small office in Washington. I was a junior lawyer, not the boss. We were involved with a company in the suburbs called Murch. Murch was both a landscape company and a funeral home and there were some questions of improper dealings involving two of their employees.  They had agreed to sit for a deposition in our office. It was to be the next day.

A senior partner told me I should pick them up in the morning for the deposition and drive them back after.  I told him that made no sense, since they were 45 minutes away. It meant I would spend three hours in the car with them. Finally, he agreed.

The next morning, at home, I decided I should wear a coat and tie for this important event. My shirt was almost a neon blue, and I couldn’t find a tie that worked. I tried on several, and finally chose a red one.

My daughter (whoever she was in this dream) told me she would drive me down to my office, that she was going that way. I said “ok”, and we had a nice conversation in the car, until I realized that we were on Connecticut Avenue near W Street, and my office was on C Street. It was already late. I jumped out of the car and decided to walk. It was not only the 20 something blocks from W to C, but we were another 20 blocks or so across town. I was in trouble.

I rushed down Connecticut towards Dupont Circle, but decided I should go  east as well as south, so I turned left and found myself in a neighborhood that looked more like the Moorlands in Clayton MO than anything in Washington.

For some reason, I went into a building and an empty apartment and started to take off my clothes. I realized that was a mistake, put them back on, left through a back door of the building, and I was lost. I looked for a street sign and saw I was on V Street. I had only gone one block since I got out of the car.

I saw a taxi and got in. There were two other passengers. I sat in the front seat next to another passenger. I don’t know where the driver was, but he was there.

I told the driver I was going to the Federal Court House. I don’t know if I said that because I was confused, or because that was near my office.

While we were driving, I told my fellow passenger my sad story. It was now almost noon. I told him that I hadn’t told anyone I was running late and I did not know if they were waiting for me or  if someone else was asking the questions. I told him I was afraid to look at my phone to see any messages.

That is when I realized that no one else in the office knew details of the case, but that I had no ideas what questions we wanted to ask.

The taxi pulled into a nondescript parking lot in a rough looking neighborhood. I did not know where I was. The driver told me that new security regulations made it impossible for a cab to drive closer to the Court House. He pointed in a direction and said “It’s that way.”

I think that is when I woke up.

Let’s see if I can do this so that it makes sense. I would also like it to be accurate, but perhaps that is less important if it makes sense. The subject is liberalism versus its opposite. Here goes:

When I read Timothy Snyder’s eyeopening book, Bloodlands, about 15 years ago, I learned a bit about the philosophy behind Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The philosophy was one of extreme nationalism, a view of the world in which national groups occupied particular parcels of land, competing against each other for territory, with stronger groups winning and weaker groups losing and perhaps becoming extinct in the process. As Hitler viewed the German people as ubermenschen, or supermen, they would come out ahead, eventually extinguishing or diminishing the Slavs to the east (the Poles, the Russians, the Ukrainians, and so on). As for the Jews, who had no territory they called their own, they had no place in Hitler’s world at all. They just didn’t fit his model. Not only that, their very existence, at least in Europe, belied his model; they all lived in land rightfully belonging to other national groups, and through their contacts and close ties with each other, irrespective of national boundaries, they were “cosmopolitans”, whose very existence were an extreme danger to Hitler’s view of the world not only as it was, but as it had to be, and as it should be. Hence, the need for their extermination.

Now, of course, there are over 7 million Jews living in Israel, a country that did not exist while Hitler ruled Germany, and one can argue (as some do) that the Zionist view of human society is akin (obviously not identical) to the Hitlerian view of national groups competing against one another for land, in part based on views that some nationalities are superior to others. (I understand that I am exaggerating here, but you know what I mean.) Thus, while you might strongly disagree with a conclusion that Israel is a Fascist or, worse, a Nazi state, you can at least see where the argument might come from.

Now, clearly not all Jews view the world that way, not even in Israel, just as not all Germans, even living in the heart of Germany or Austria during the Hitler years, did not agree with the Nazi’s description of the world. And if the Israel government moves leftward from the right, just as if the Weimar liberals had been able to hang on to Germany in the 1930s, the world’s view of Germans or Israelis would be very different.

American Jews, another 6 million or so, by and large, do not agree with the view of human society as a constant, necessary, and welcome battle between different national groupings, even if they are very supportive of Israel. Hence, for example, the prominence of J Street in the United States, where its equivalent in Israel is not nearly as widely followed. J Street firmly believes that Israel and its neighbors should and can make a long lasting peace with each other. Hitler would view that view as nonsense.

We all know that American society, at least at the political level, is in crisis today. And that is the case even without considering the extreme right (which in places is very extreme) and the left wing of American thinking (which, as the world goes, is really not very far to the left at all). We call the two less extreme visions of American society “conservative” and “liberal”, although neither term is anywhere near accurate. So let’s call them “left” and “right”, keeping the quotation marks, so that we know that these, too, are artificial terms.

The “left” in the United States is the equivalent of the Weimer liberals, the “cosmopolitan” Jews, and other groups that talk about one world and one human race, and who believe that, somehow, as the human world matures, cooperation and interchangeability should become the norm, and wars and ethnic disputes should become a thing of the past. The “right” believes that, even if the vision of the left might be desirable, it is a pipe dream, that humans are humans, that jealousies are jealousies, that power is an aphrodisiac, and that the world will never change.

For this reason, the “right” follows a political philosophy which is centered on American nationalism, and for this reason, many on the “left” might consider the American “right” to be Fascist. After all, in order to keep any country fully nationalist, you need certain rules and standards that must be met, and in every such case a strong leader is required. The American “left”, on the other hand, believes in a cosmopolitan America which requires everyone to have an equal say, and which cannot abide a the type of strong leader welcomed by the “right”.

This brings me to Israeli-American thinker, writer, philosopher, Yoram Hazony, someone that I don’t think I had ever heard of until the day before yesterday when I saw a reference to him in an article in The Atlantic. Hazony is, as it turns out, a very active and respected conservative thinker, influential in the American “right”‘s intellectual movements. He is Israeli born, but raised in the United States and educated at Princeton. He lives in Jerusalem with his American wife and their nine children. He is an Orthodox Jew.

He believes that liberalism, the kind of liberalism promoted by the American “left” and other cosmopolitan movements, which believes that every individual has the right to determine his or her own course in life, with no national standards or enforced limits, (and this is how he defines American liberalism) should not be promoted simply because it can’t exist other than for a very short time. Liberals, he says, will never be satisfied with the extent of freedom granted to individuals, will always press for more, and will always be faced with a backlash, and every so called liberal or “left” society will always be unstable and lead to self destruction. Only a conservative society, based on enforced national principles, can be long lasting.

Thus, in his mind, Israel as an avowed “Jewish” state, is appropriate. I don’t think he ever talks about the superiority of one ethnic group over another, like a Hitler would, but he clearly believes (or at least I think it is clear) that an Israel where non-Jews have a secondary role in society, is appropriate. Religion is clearly a part of Hazony’s definition of nationalism, but it is not the only part; he does not seem to be favoring a purely theocratic society.

In the United States, Hazony discounts any positive role played by the “left”, or the Democrats. This is not surprising. He also divides the Republicans into three categories, only one of which he finds acceptable. He disses the extreme right wingers, but also disses those who he considers liberal Republicans (I don’t consider any of his liberal Republicans liberal). His favored Republicans are the old-line conservatives, who he believes constitute the majority of the Republican party. And he would generally support their views of American nationalism (I assume he would support tight border controls, and extensive deportations, although I don’t really know this), and even their bringing Christian principles into their definition of nationalism.

Where does that leave American Jews? Because his thinking is not based on eugenics, he recognizes that Jews are a part of nationalistic America. And he believes that the most secure future for Jews in America is to align themselves with Republican conservative American nationalists, to ensure that Jews remain part of the mainstream. Aligning themselves with American liberals is a road to destruction (as he believes that liberal thinking in general is a road to destruction), and aligning themselves with either “left” or “right” extremes (as he views them) is simply trying to make make peace with the devil, as he views both “extremes” as necessarily antisemitic.

Okay, you can disagree with Hazony from start to finish, as I do. But, having read about him and read some of his writing yesterday, I have a better understanding of a bunch of things.