This month I’ve been hoarding all my notes and together it makes for a particularly good read.
       
Our kids have been a real hoot. Jeremy has fallen in love with hot dogs and he’ll just sit down at the table and demand one chirping “HOT DAWG”. Or you can see his face get all excited if he walks outside and smells a BBQ. Once in a while you get your thanks. We were in the airport and I changed his diaper and then he just gave me a big kiss. He plants real smoochers all over your lips..... Elizabeth was walking around the woods in Vermont on what I said was a nature walk to a waterfall and she proclaimed “I don’t see any nature.” Then she saw some leaves on the ground and said “Now I found some nature.” I guess they told her in school that leaves were nature. She wanted to go to soccer camp for a week after school ended; I offered her a camp with air conditioning indoors but she wanted to be outside. Well, I told her, at least there will be arts and crafts so she won’t be running around all the time. “I don’t want arts and crafts” she said. “All the soccer camps have arts and crafts,” I told her. “Well, OK,” she said, “but I just want to play soccer.”

This past weekend, she wanted to be pushed in the stroller and I told her she was getting too heavy for that. I said that when she gets married, her husband can push her around in a stroller. “What if he has a bad back?” she queried, referring to my bad back. Ouch!

Elizabeth does the monkey bars on her own and has been stressing out as the victim of unrequited love with her cousins; a maternal being, she counsels Jeremy to watch out so as not to fall down steps like he did a month before on our trip to Canada.  Jeremy now asks for directions before going left or right at a fork in the road, waits at street curbs, and eats his food very nicely with a fork and spoon. Like to wiggle people’s ears and give raspberry kisses. He refers to his grandma in Australia when he sees a picture of the Sydney Harbor bridge and picks up every public phone we pass in order to call his grandma. If we say we will have a skype call at home with her, he runs to the computer. He's also rather creative; takes off his clothes in bed at night -- just came back from dressing him. He also seems to enjoy playing with his poop; his last creative burst required the bringing in of an industrial cleaner. Needless to say, his nanny was not amused.

Today is Tisha B’av, the Jewish commemoration of the worst of Jewish history and the day that religious Jews are supposed to wish to return to the days of old. I keep wondering what are we nostalgic for? I can’t imagine that anything in our historical past was preferable to our present existence. If the Jews today haven’t rebuilt the holy temple in Jerusalem, it’s because they don’t want it. Most Jews, I should add, don’t observe Tisha B’Av and simply don’t find it relevant.

Here’s an interesting story from one of our company employees worthy of a Dale Carnegie “How to Win Friends and Influence People” book anecdote. She was stuck at an airport in Denver on her way to a wedding. Holding her bridesmaid dress she was at the gate with 500 stranded passengers in a thunderstorm. She realized she couldn’t get anywhere with the gate agent. So she asked the agent “What can I do for you?” The agent said I’m hungry and could sure use a ham and cheese sandwich. “What would you like to drink with it?” “A latte. So she ran and got her the sandwich and latte. When she returned with it, the agent had a boarding pass for her in her hand. Turned out that flight also got cancelled and she had to overnight. She went back to the agent and the agent booked her on another airline’s flight to get out. Doesn’t this show management potential? The client turned the vendor into her client in order to get where she needed to go. So many people just get all snooty and aggravated because they can’t get beyond the fact that they are the paying customer – and wind up getting nowhere, especially these days when a delay can leave you really stranded since there are fewer empty seats to rebook passengers on.
       
It seems a new study confirms what you thought – Unemployment benefits encourage unemployment....I think I told you a few months ago in Global Thoughts what has just come out in public – the Americans gave a 100 million dollar contract to a company called XE to do stuff in Afghanistan. The company was formerly known as Blackwater. New bottle, old wine....Speaking of Afghanistan, ousted General McChrystal was unlucky with the wrong reporter. He was saying what others all say and which the usual reporters don’t write about. This reporter wasn’t worried about burning his bridges by printing the story....The Economist has a seminal survey article about Debt. Says it will be the defining struggle of the next generation. Debt is bad and most countries are finding out they can’t keep trying to provide social goods financed through debt. The US is one of the few countries that can because it has young people taking roles in the work force that will provide tax money to support others – Europe, China and Japan have more elders taking out than youngsters putting in. A month ago I wrote about this and cited another article that discussed the same theme.
                           
I didn’t sell or buy on the market gyrations of the past month or so. I think the general economy is on an uptick. I did tweak my portfolio and get rid of expensive items such as Goldman Sachs in favor of cheapies such as Citibank and Ford. This rather persuasive article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal blogs online gives 7 good reasons to doubt a double dip recession is in the offing. It basically says that yes, some indexes are down, but they were down from unsustainably high jumps in the spring and made sense in a broader economic context. The general picture is improving, he writes. http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/07/19/guest-contribution-double-dip-seven-reasons-why-not/

In Israel, I wonder how long Netanyahu will keep Lieberman as foreign minister in the coalition. The guy is a real liability to Israel’s image. The problem is that even his political enemies admit he is a serious player who is intelligent. He is also a straight shooter which makes him preferable to many of the others. He is also a stable coalition partner for Bibi. Bibi and him will snipe at each other but neither will leave the other except as a last resort.... Mubarak is clearly on his last legs and newspapers are reporting he is terminal with cancer..... Saudi Arabia will likely have a change in kings sooner than later and perhaps they will skip a generation and get a king who is likely to last longer than a few years. ...In the UK, my friend who did some political work for the Conservatives said he is pretty happy with the new team and that the finance minister knows his stuff.

A few thoughts about the Jewish story and its place in the world....The new budget director of the US is an orthodox Jew who held this position under Clinton; he ran up a big surplus at the time. Only time in the last generation it’s happened. Maybe he can figure it out again but now the deficit is even greater. .....I was in Toronto and overheard a bunch of Arabs talking about Jews at an outdoor cafe. One said, “You know why they succeed? Cause they look out for each other.”... My wife noticed that in the NY Times society section, whenever they announce a Jewish fundraiser it tells you how much money was raised. Often several million dollars at a shot. Whenever it’s a Christian event, it doesn’t say and if it does it’s a few hundred thousand dollars....I’m reading Start Up Nation, a book about why so many startups exist in Israel. Someone noticed though that many of these startups become large companies in other countries. I’ll let you know what I think after I finish the book....Some Jewish guy set up a website called lendforpeace.org, designed to raise small amounts of money for Arab entrepreneurial projects in the West Bank. Cute idea, but hardly any money was raised over the past 18 months since the projects were first posted to the site. $10,000 could have funded virtually every project on that site. I wonder why nobody contributed. I guess people just don’t think anything is viable in that space.

There is this YouTube video produced in Jordan called Birds of Paradise of Palestinian children singing that they want to be martyrs and that there is no childhood without Palestine. They stage mock suicides. Then an adult tells them they have fulfilled their obligations of manhood and they say a prayer together calling for Allah to take revenge. I understand that this video is very popular all over the Arab world, as well as among Arab youth in Western countries.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illF1vt5g1Q   

Here are some pictures from Cliveden House including the Lady Astor suite which they allowed me to photograph:

Here is a link to the other article posted this month on Global Thoughts for your convenience: On Middle Age, Posterity and Self-Importance.