Highlights this month are notes from the World Business Forum in New York, and notes from a trip to Israel and Switzerland. The trip to Israel was to celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of Morningside, the company where I work, where we made a party for our Jerusalem office and flew over all the partners.

Out of the mouth of babes – we were on a holiday in Palm Beach, Florida and Karen asks for a kiss from Jeremy. “No kissie today; I’m on holiday.” Union regulations...He’s a rather clever mite. He let himself out of the hotel room, went down a flight of stairs to the concierge floor (there was an open stairway near our room) and got himself breakfast and then asked me for the “room key” to get back in the room.... He had his tonsols shaved down since they were blocking half his throat. After a few hours in the hospital recovery room, he said “I home now” and got up off the bed and walked out....This week he kept walking out of a family party which was very loud due to a DJ and rap music. All of us were holding our ears and couldn’t wait to get the hell out. Mom kept asking him why he kept walking out? He said, “Mom, want quiet.” ....There is a book about Olivia going through Italy and eating gelato all the time. Every time he knows the word gelato is coming up, he laughs a ton. We have some of the best gelato in the world downstairs from Grom, as good as anything in Italy.

In Manhattan, prices for groceries are about 40% higher than just a few miles away in Brooklyn. The local supermarket in my neighborhood has had a quasi-monopoly for about 75 years and last month a Trader Joe’s opened up a few blocks away. Trader Joe’s sells mostly its own house brands but it is like half the price. A few days after it opened, I went to take a look and I saw housewives gawking at the prices. “I’ve been paying $5.29 for this and now it’s $2.89!” I wouldn’t want to have been the manager at Fairways Grocery that week – we’ve noticed that the crowds there have thinned since Trader Joe’s opened....I went to open a checking account at Chase Bank. They offered me $150 cash to open it. Whilst there, the guy opening the account keeps telling me to open a savings account. I said it was a worthless waste of time since it pays no interest and I am not putting money into it. He kept bugging me and finally said it was really important to him that I open the account. After I agreed, he told me that he knew it was worthless but that he gets a lot of points in his favor if he gets me to open it and he was so nervous that day because the auditor was at the branch and watching his every move.....

Manhattan can be fun. One recent Sunday we went to brunch in Central Park at a restaurant called the Boathouse on a lake, a playground, an architectural competition of Sukkah booths in Union Square in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot (Tabernacles), passed up a kite festival and a school picnic and then went instead to an outdoor Dixieland Jazz concert 3 blocks from our house. That was besides the haircut, grocery and other stuff you do on Sunday. Definitely not doing the Sunday birthday party thing. We are very sure we would be bored to tears in the suburbs.
               
Today is Election Day and guess what, I don’t vote anymore. I pay tons of taxes, I live in NY, but the elections here are totally fixed. The Democrat always wins, and in the Electoral College, your vote doesn’t count once the state vote is decided. When I moved to my new address, my party registration was suddenly changed from Republican to Democrat. So basically, voting here is a complete waste of time, and besides, they all suck. I don’t think I saw a single campaign ad cause I don’t watch TV either. I can’t tell you whose running for most races and I’ve decided that it really doesn’t matter to me. Just make money, pay the bills I have to pay, and do the things I like to do and let the losers in Washington fight it out. Either way, my taxes always go up and nobody ever does anything that helps either me or my business.

Change is Coming!!!! Late night comics get ready....we are going to have a new leader of the congress named “Bohner.”
 
So let’s talk about the world. As you know, the Democrats got their butts kicked as we all knew and it pretty much happened according to script. I think the tax cuts should expire in 2013 when the economy starts to recover and that they should then redo the entire tax code which is a horror. I would get rid of the home mortgage interest deduction and raise the retirement age, as examples, to balance the budget. Reduce the tax brackets and set a top rate of about 25% and a limit for state and local taxes as well. Give a huge tax holiday to bring foreign investment back into the US for startup companies and to make people stop going abroad to do R&D. The whole debate about the expiration of the Bush tax cuts is bullcrap; the Alternative Minimum Tax is what matters to anyone earning over $40,000 a year because it replaces the tax bracket you are in with that amount of tax. It is amazing that nobody seems to realize this and that all this attention is being given to a debate about something that is totally meaningless to the bottom line of what people actually pay in taxes.

The tea party is a real problem for America. They have no clue what to do and its leaders are by and large idiots. The movement is being funded by huge corporate contributions from companies with vested interests, such as anyone who stands to lose by investments or regulations to prevent global warming. The people in this movement hate corporations and vested interests and have no idea how they are being manipulated. Peggy Noonan, a columnist who writes weekly in the Wall Street Journal, notes that this party is a rebellion against the two parties (Democrat and Republican) who want to split the difference (ie: 28 vs 36 and settle at 32). The tea party people want to say “6" and settle for “8" and they don’t care if their leaders are idiots. They just want someone to stand there and say no and to heck with the consequences. They want lots of defense and no immigrants and no taxes and no federal government. It’s all very cute but useless. They are not going to solve any problems this way. They want everything for nothing. I look forward to some real third party movement coming along next year; both parties are bankrupt and key people know it. Reading an investigation by the Wall Street Journal that members of Congress and their staff are exempt from insider trader regulations when they have advance knowledge of companies affected by regulations they are drafting makes you wonder what kind of institutionalized corruption exists in this country at the top.

Fortunately, there was a NY Times oped piece about the ultimate value of all this money being contributed to political campaigns. The article says that big money ultimately has not affected many races; that at a certain point the market is saturated with information and the law of diminishing returns goes to work. I think to some extent that came to haunt Mike Bloomberg of New York City this year. He spent so much money buying up everything that it seemed to bring people out just to vote against him because he had been a good mayor worth re-electing; it was just that he seemed to be stuffing himself down people’s throats.

You know those bombs put on those cargo flights that rode on passenger flights? Shortly after 9/11 I wrote about the fact that cargo goes on most passenger flights and that nobody is looking at the cargo. This is completely known for years and still nobody is really attacking this as if it matters. One reason I am so cynical about all these security checks at the airports. Passengers are just part of the story. Suicide bombers are just one way to bring down an airplane. Remember Lockerbie?

A word about global warming. Al Gore spoke at the World Business Forum which I attended. For the first 10 minutes, he is a wooden figure on the stage and you want to laugh at him. But he gets into his speech and once he gets wound up, he is good. He has a lot of facts in his arguments. Whether or not you buy into his argument, it is indisputable that he has a vision about the future, has arguments to back it up, and is no idiot. You have to remember that on both sides of this global climate issue are vested interests and there are certain facts out there – the climate is becoming more extreme and countries are being affected by it. There are investments that could be made that would be less destructive of the earth’s atmosphere and that might be financially viable. The real question is not whether or not the science is real but whether or not we care to try and deal with any of this or just leave it to the next generation since it won’t affect most of us in a position to do anything about it anyway. We live in a world where people are more interested in the next quarter’s bottom line and the here and now than in investing for the future. That is absolutely true, irrespective of what you think of Al Gore or global warming. His point is that America is so caught up in here and now that it is losing its primacy in the world because other players are thinking about the future and how to deal with it. It is something I keep saying.

I played a federal budget simulation game at http://crfb.org/stabilizethedebt/ . It took about 15 minutes and the choices are somewhat limited but I got the deficit down to 58% of GDP by  cutting both taxes and expenditures and benefits. The target as set by game’s organizers is 60% and the present budget is about 75%. So it is definitely possible to do what the Republicans say ought to be done if they would just do it. Obama is not getting corporate donations this year; corporate America hates him. I’ll bet the gay community doesn’t like him either – he could have let “Don’t ask don’t tell” in the military die in the courts but instead actually is filing motions opposing repeal. This is a group that really backed him and counted on him to keep his promise on this issue. Hell hath no fury like a lover scorned.

Some other issues – Chinese lies and statistics. Now we know why they produce so many scientific papers – so many of them are fraudulent. This jibes with what I was told last year about their universities – pretty low quality. Frankly, I’m less scared of these guys every time I see that so much of their reported mass is hype and hollow....I think that hyping China is partly a bogeyman put up by people in the US trying to get support for whatever position they want to take.

Middle East – I was just in Israel this week and it’s amazing how built up Tel Aviv is becoming when you go north past the center of the city which itself is slowly beginning to change. All sorts of new pretty high-rise buildings are going up and it’s real. Everyone there says that the lack of affordable housing is the biggest problem in the country today so the demand is definitely there, unlike Dubai which overbuilt on speculation of future demand. It is clear to me that if the Iranians think they are going to destroy Tel Aviv, they better not think that Teheran will be anything other than annihilated as a result. If they don’t get it and the other Arabs out there don’t get it, it’s because they really don’t realize how built up all this has become. Tel Aviv is basically becoming a European capital and it’s reaching Top 10 Lists up there with Barcelona for places people wanna be hanging out. Lonely Planet just placed it as #3 on its list of great cities. This month, for example, I was at Radio City in New York and the Opera House in Tel Aviv. At Radio City, the seats are close together, you can’t see the stage well, the bathrooms are old, there are no paper towels, the water from the water fountain is yucky and the food on offer is mediocre. In Tel Aviv, the seats are great, the view of the stage is great, the bathrooms are new, there are nice paper towels, the water from the water fountain is great, and the food on offer is first class. All kinds of excellent roads are being built all over the country; a light rail system is in the testing stage in Jerusalem, the country’s central banker was voted one of the best in the world by two organizations this month, its banks and economy never took a beating in the last recession, and the country is clearly on the right path. Can’t say so for the USA and that’s why people in the USA are so angry. They know the US is fighting against itself and demonizing capitalism while the rest of the world is beginning to do exactly what the US has been preaching for generations. You notice that with the Asian countries fighting with their currencies, they are more interested in what each other thinks than what America thinks. It used to be that they all used to react to a consensus formed in Washington. America is becoming less relevant in this area.

Based on what I am being told, I think the peace talks are a bunch of talks about talks and that neither Bibi nor Abbas are really interested in any outcomes. It is quite amazing how little of substance they are actually discussing and you can be sure that Dennis Ross coordinating from the White House assures that nothing is coming of anything. I still think that it is more likely than not that the Israelis will move militarily against Iran, perhaps in the next year or beyond. An attack on the Natanz facility is the most likely move in my estimation.

There are some more travel notes from this month’s visit to Israel and Switzerland below.

My oped piece on Jewish Leadership was published this month. Click here to see it.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial_opinion/opinion/filling_leadership_void_proposal

Travel – Palm Beach, Florida – We had a family weekend at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. In early October, it is still warm in South Florida and the beach is great. The hotel costs less than half of what it costs a month later and it is a famous family resort just a 10 minute taxi ride from the West Palm Beach airport. We hardly left the property during the 5 day trip except for two dinners at Café Bouloud in the Brazilian Court Hotel about a mile away (it was so good we ate there two nights in a row). I was a bit disappointed with the Breakers hotel; it used to be a more exclusive destination and it has become a lot more spread out and crowded. At the pool, they sell local memberships, there are 5 pools and it has become a real scene. It can take 10 minutes to get back to your room from the hotel. There is a concierge floor and this makes for a hotel within a hotel and I totally recommend that. The food and beverage at the hotel is OK but not great; there are not so many tourist attractions to go to off property so if the weather sucks so does your trip. Breakfast in the circular dining room is a treat; it looks like anything grand in Italy. There is a day camp but it is not very useful; it is not drop in and drop off – you have to reserve in advance for a period of hours. Problem is that there are not so many competitors to choose from. I still prefer Fisher Island in Miami to this hotel because it is much more of a hideaway, but at least this hotel has a kiddie pool and a zero-entry pool while Fisher Island only has an adult pool. As our kids learn to swim, this is becoming less of a factor to us. We are planning to go to the One and Only Ocean Club in Nassau in February and that is as close to a perfect family warm weather resort as I’ve seen anywhere having previewed it earlier this year.

World Business Forum – This was held in New York’s Radio City with about 4,000 people in attendance from almost 1,000 companies from around the world. It is the domestic version of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Over the two day event, I heard a lot of wisdom from a lot of business leaders and thinkers. It was much more interesting than I anticipated; the networking could have been better but they are changing venues next year and making some big improvements to facilitate that part of the event. Here are some of my notes from the conference:

What makes CEO’s and companies great? Jim Collins, management guru: Pick the right people. Face brutal facts. Turn off electronic devices and take time to think. More questions, fewer statements. To lead, you need followers. Don’t be a dictator, be a mench. To get someone to do something by force is not leading. It’s not about you (the CEO), it’s about the company (meaning the people in the company)... Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric: Obama is anti-business and worse than he expected. Never saw a profitable industry that was dominated by unions; only giveaway Obama did with industry was to give GM to the unions and screw everyone else. Corporations are sitting on mounds of cash but won’t invest because the government isn’t creating an investment friendly environment but rather keeps coming up with new regulations, changing its mind and keeps talking about new taxes....Charlene Li, social networks guru: Social networks are no longer a curiosity but a vital tool for businesses that want to connect with their customers and stay in front of trouble. I know that sounds trite but it was an informative hour. Martin Lindstrom, behavioral scientist: People act irrationally even for matters they think are rational. So many people pick up the second newspaper from the top of a stack thinking it is cleaner but don’t realize that everyone else does it too (and that they put it back in the same place). The local newsstand guy confirmed this except said that black people take from the top because they are not thinking about whether the paper is clean. The high majority of people in a blind taste test preferred Pepsi but then when told so, changed their mind and said that it cannot be so, that they know Coca Cola tastes better.  Companies need to “smash their logo” and get people to recognize their company by utilizing at least 3 elements of recognition (ie: sensory, color, shape) so that even if they didn’t see the logo, they would realize who you are. A billboard with the look of Marlboro without the logo was 50% more effective than one with the logo. People cannot multi-task more than 1.3 tasks at a time. Even kids who appear to be doing so cannot do more than 1.3.  Bang & Olufsen added aluminum to their remote controls because people thought that a light remote was cheap....Joseph Grenny, business thinker: To influence people, they need to be trained how to do what you want them to do and be given good reasons to do it. For instance, show them how it affects the greater good. Great ideas without influence never get anywhere. His son’s school project showed that willpower and delayed gratification can be taught and that good willpower is a good indicator of future performance.  50% of kids responded to coaching when taught how to avoid eating a marshmallow put in front of them. 95% of dieters can’t stick with their diets...David Gergen, PR advisor to US presidents: Hard to run a country these days with all these blogs and 24 hour news cycles going on. Everyone is reacting to every little thing and getting caught up in it....Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics: An IRS employee got nothing for saving $20 billion from 10% of taxpayers claiming phony dependents (ie: pet dogs – the name Fluffy kept showing up). He solved this by having the social security number of dependents get put on tax forms. It took 3 years for the IRS to take his suggestion and then they gave him nothing for it. Run experiments to see if something works; don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know” in the corporate world. Look to see if the data really means what it shows; cause and effect are not always what they appear to be....Al Gore: 80% of corporate CEO’s surveyed said they would forgo a good long term hypothetical investment opportunity that had good Return on Investment targets and strengthen their companies long term if the consequence was missing their next quarterly profit target by a material amount. He said that while we debate global warming in this country, Europe and Asia are investing substantial amounts toward dealing with it. How could they all be suckers in some stupid scheme, he asks? Because America is not willing to invest in its future and its business leaders are increasingly people who are CEO’s for a few years at a time and move on to different companies, their whole focus in their own future and not the future of their companies. Taken together, America and the current state of capitalism is not on the right track in a world where the incentive to invest is so skewed in favor of hitting current performance targets as set by short-term investors. Interesting thought – how much innovation have you seen in the US in the past 10 years? Not much, as far as I can see...Al Gore cited an African tribal saying: To go somewhere quickly, go alone. To go far, go with People. ...Renee Mauborgne: “Blue Ocean” is where companies need to be in order to grow. Low cost plus new territory, not just competing in Red Ocean. Nando Parrado (survivor of Chilean air crash): Love and family is what matters most. You find this in depths of despair. All the other stuff doesn’t matter...Joseph Stiglitz, economist: China’s balance sheet is much healthier than the US. Somebody mentioned that the US exempted auto loans from the new predatory lending practices that everyone else is subject to, even though auto loans is the second largest area of lending in the US. Clearly it was a gimme to the auto industry and showed how Obama really doesn’t believe in change. I also recall how the excise taxes on “cadillac” health insurance policies exempted unions which is nuts since they are the largest beneficiary of these types of policies. Somebody mentioned that a person will pay about $100 to get to the head of the line to get a new Apple product that he doesn’t already have, but that a person who already has the product will not give it up for less than $1,000 even if he knows that he can come back a few days later and get the same thing without standing in line.

The CEO of Hasbro spoke. I liked what he said about how they were revitalizing the company’s brand and it looked like a winning strategy. Profits keep coming consistently in that company over 10 years and it looks recession proof. I bought some stock.

I thought about what was the unfair sustainable competitive advantage of my company and I decided it was our superb employees and the fact that we compensate them more than other companies would be willing to do.

Kindle – Ta Da! The best new piece of technology since the cellphone and the DVR. I got a New Generation Kindle. Weighs hardly anything and you can put a bunch of books on it just like that over the wireless internet. No tax or shipping charges and in a minute you’ve downloaded a book and paid for it just by pushing a few buttons and standing wherever you are (which also means it pays for itself after about a dozen books given that I paid about $150 for it). It’s not a perfect tool – a bit hard to jump around from chapter to chapter or to go to a Table of Contents sometimes and you cannot use it on the Sabbath if you are sabbath observant. But otherwise, you can take it on a plane or in a suitcase and not have to walk around with a bunch of books. Kindle Hu Akbar!

Travel -- Israel – This visit was for 72 hours. I saw a roomful of Asians at passport control, which I’ve never seen before here. My cousin says that throwing out illegal aliens is the #1 reason housing has become so expensive and unaffordable. The cost of building became so high that nobody wants to build except for rich people who can afford it. This is the #1 issue today facing real people – the lack of affordable housing. I stayed at the new and innovative Mamilla Hotel in Jerusalem. It is getting a lot of international attention and awards for design. It is done well; distinctive food and beverage (although my curmudgeonly Israeli friend said he could see no difference) and a nice underground pool and gym (although the gym is open to the public and didn’t feel private as an upscale hotel gym should). There is a nice restaurant rooftop and certain tables get old city wall views. Some design flaws include open showers in a bathroom where the water goes right onto the floor wetting most of the bathroom floor and light switches controlling the bedroom all the way at the front door of a suite (meaning nowhere near the bedroom). The rooms are dark at night and at turndown they make it all dark and creepy. The staff at the lounge and the front seem more concerned with keeping out the riff-raff than welcoming you. The lounge puts out very little food and charges if you bring in a guest which to me defeats its purpose which is to allow you to entertain guests at your hotel. It is a nice hotel but the King David is much more of a home away from home. The hotel adjoins the Mamilla Mall, an outdoor promenade along what used to be Mamilla Street, a no-man’s land until 1967. Today it is a happy thriving place and probably one of the most happening outdoor shopping malls in the Middle East. It has eclipsed the downtown area but maybe after the light rail goes online next year it will revitalize that area.

The purpose of my visit was, as mentioned in the beginning, a tenth anniversary party for our company with the Jerusalem office and all the company’s partners flown in to attend. The party was at Spoons, a private party enclave in a mansion in the Ein Kerem district of Jerusalem. It is an old Arab house, with a beautiful garden and views over the valley and of a Russian Orthodox church. The party was at night and there were gas lights all over the backyard, a beautifully set table and some musicians playing jazz. The menu promised the world and delivered from appetizers such as fig stuffed with chicken to lamb chops and pistachio halvah and Cuban cigars. The proprietoress is Hilla Solomon, an Australian immigrant who is chef and host. I understand that her landlord is giving her bendover terms on her lease and that she plans to move her base to Tel Aviv. But this is definitely a place to remember and to throw the lunch or dinner party of the decade.

Conversation with Mohammed – Arab outreach to Russians is important because these immigrants can’t even speak Hebrew and want to throw out all the Arabs though they don’t know any of them....He thinks that if Iran gets the bomb, the Arab countries will draw closer to Israel. They didn’t appreciate it when Ahmadenijad showed up in Lebanon with Farsi signs welcoming him instead of Arabic or English signs. The Iranians read the Koran in Arabic so they know the language. Arabs are proud of their language and the visit looked like that of an occupier.

I spent an evening at the Dan Accadia hotel in Herzliyah, a coastal town just north of Tel Aviv that is Israel’s playground of the rich and famous. Somebody with money was having a big bar mitzvah with one of the country’s top rock bands with lights, fog, etc. It was loud until midnight at this 4 star hotel and I’m sure the guests didn’t appreciate it. The hotel itself is dated by about 20 years sorta like the Sheraton Mirage in Port Douglas, Australia. Food was mediocre, one night was enough. Couldn’t get a burger at the pool and the soda bottles from the night before were still on the ground by the swing in the pool area the next morning. I saw an old school Brit screaming at the manager about the lack of cleanliness in the hotel and the staff just standing around being lazy, in his opinion. I was kicked out of the gym here because I didn’t have sneakers; I don’t travel with heavy shoes and my rubber shoes have soles that are just like sneakers. Didn’t matter to this guy; never happened to me before.  In this hotel, just like the Mamilla, when you come to your suite, nobody walks you in and the lights are all off leaving you to fumble around in the dark trying to get into your room. It took 20 minutes to check in with just one person at the front desk at 6:30pm. Shower ran all over the bathroom floor here too. Concierges here and at the Mamilla didn’t really know the insider’s stuff and I seemed to know more as a tourist reading the current airline magazine than they did. At this point, you wouldn’t mind if some of these existing hotels made investments to upgrade, especially since they are operating at close to 100% occupancy and the prices are high. It is not like the old days of Intifadah or 9/11 where they were close to empty and you could excuse the lack of investment. The hotels are really full; the King David and Mamilla in Jerusalem, Hilton, Montefiore and Dan in Tel Aviv, and the Dan in Herzliyah were all sold out the week I was there.  Fox News is big in Israel and it appears in lobbies and in bars; BBC World is almost non grata in that country. It was 95 degrees at the shore and the fish swim right up to the beach. No need to heat the pools. The one good thing about the hotel being dated was that I didn’t have to sleep with a duvet at night! Finally a hotel with sheets and blankets... Went to the Opera House in Tel Aviv to a Max Raabe concert; a German performing German and American cabaret music from the 20s and 30s with a big band who was doing a few shows that week in Israel. He has a sardonic style to him which is actually rather amusing and he was extremely well received with numerous ovations. “The German waltz is not as elegant as the Viennese waltz...but it is much louder.” Israelis make for good audiences and do not cough and make as much noise as Americans do. And they don’t keep showing up as much as 30 minutes late like so many people do in New York City.

State of the Country -- Israel is a place that you have to see in order to understand and you cannot understand the world today or the Middle East without understanding how this country fits into the puzzle. During July I shared a flight back from London with a very worldly Kuwaiti who seemed to know a lot about lots of things – he was on his way from a TED forum where he spoke and was part of the World Economic Forum young leadership – but he had never been to Israel and it was evident that he just didn’t realize what the country was like in 2010. It is growing by leaps and bounds far out of proportion to countries around it and even many developed countries, it is on the right track with infrastructural investment such as great roads, streets, an airport that works, new boutique hotels and buildings, museums, shopping malls and all sorts of inventions (this week I read of something for the iphone that blocks 98.5% of cellphone radiation). There is a tour company called startupnationtours.com that has tours of Israeli startup companies running every other month and I wouldn’t mind going on one of those except for the fact that my calendar already full for the dates they’ve listed in the near future. It’s a not a perfect place; taxi drivers never seem to know where they are going (perhaps because more immigrants are becoming drivers) but that’s also true in New York City. But it is a place that is working, and it is becoming less Middle East and more Europe in its cities. Its banks are forcing American clients to close hidden accounts and to get with the program. The country plays ball. Less than 1% of its budget comes from American foreign aid. If you think it is a country that lives precariously and only because it is the 51st state, think again. Lots of people talk publicly against it, but quietly do business with it. It is amazing how busy that airport is compared to everything around it. And by the way, if you fly any airline out of Israel, the food is kosher. I asked the Swiss crew upon departure and they confirmed this.

I’m thinking of a trip in 2012 with wife and kids but I have to tell you that as a tourist, I’m not sure what I would do there with little kids. There still is no real upscale resort in the Galilee (except one that doesn’t allow children) and the other resorts are mainly by the sea, such as Tel Aviv, Herzliyah and Eilat. For bigger kids, it’s a great playground. For a beach, I don’t need to go all the way to Israel and what I’ve seen is pretty mediocre so far. I assume that many Israelis on the upscale market go to Europe with their families – it is only a few hours away and I always see Israelis there. Family tourism for people with small kids is an area that needs an upgrade in this country, both for Israelis and for foreign tourists if they want the upmarket traffic beyond people who will take their families there irrespective of whether there is anything there beyond a kosher meal or the fact that they want to be there even if what they tend to do is go to a shopping mall each day and they just don’t care about all the other stuff. But that is a small fry issue; they are obviously having no problem filling all their hotels with the ones who like what they have.

The main picture of Israel I want to transmit today is that it is a rather confident country. Their attitude seems to be “if you like us, fine...if you don’t, screw you.” BBC World is out; Fox News is in. It explains how Bibi is running his government and why Lieberman is foreign minister telling the world what it can do with itself. He recently had the Spanish and French foreign ministers over and told them that when they solve their own problems of Cyprus, Serbia, Belgium and the rest inside Europe, they can then tell Israel how to solve its problems. They have decided they are going to do without illegal foreign labor and they are not using Arab labor either, even if it means they have to pay more for it. They are running their own show and actually the results show that they are coming out of it OK. I keep saying that it would be smarter for Israel’s adversaries to come to terms with it rather than keep thinking that time is on their side and that Israel will eventually implode. Thinking that a demographic time bomb will do the job for them is folly; these demographic projections are usually not borne out and there are curve balls you can’t expect, such as an influx of a million Russians that came from nowhere and changed the face of the country. I can’t tell if they think they can handle Iran but the ultimate deterrence to Iran is the knowledge that the Israelis have too much to lose and therefore will not allow Iran to have its way either directly or via proxies. The Americans do not have as much to lose and can afford to be more tolerant. My sources tell me that the probability of action by Israel exceeds 50%. Time will tell of course.

Zurich & Basel – Excellent Italian restaurant in Zurich is Bindella, just off the Bahnhofstrasse. Their truffle risotto is famous and this is a restaurant for serious but not formal eating. The hotel Baur au Lac is one of the city’s finest and it is a bit of an old world hotel although some of its rooms are very modern and the bathroom was palatial. Tons of TV channels and a nice gym at the top of the hotel with a nice view of the city and the lake. Worst TV channel awards: TV channel Saudi 1 is really nuts – there was a 30 minute long program of the king kissing kids and receiving people and pictures of things in Saudi Arabia; the pictures keep repeating themselves every 5 minutes and it’s just music and pictures. I can’t believe anyone watches this. The US has the Voice of America TV Station – looks worse than many community cable channels. No news and basically shows about black music, fashion, diseases, and people speaking in strange languages broadcasting to countries that don’t speak those languages. I can’t believe our tax money pays for this and that anybody is watching. Most of the rooms do not have a lake view as the hotel is across the road from the lake. I prefer the Widder because it is more central; the Eden Au Lac on the lake might be interesting and the Savoy which is right on the Paradaplatz (and owned by the same owner as Bauer au Lac)  might be interesting as well but the Widder is a more special kind of place, having stayed there twice before. Happiness for me is sitting on a Swiss train riding with sandwiches and pastries by Sprungli with beautiful scenery rolling by. And so I did for 50 minutes from Zurich toward Basel. Basel has a pretty old town section and you can pretty much walk around town in an hour. Dinner at Stucki’s restaurant, listed in the book of 1,000 places to see before you die. I found the dinner sorta like Jean Georges in New York – too weird for me although certainly high quality. Too many odd combinations of food that made me feel ill that evening. It is also close to a 15 minute taxi ride from the city center. You might be better off eating dinner at the hotel’s restaurant – the Les Tres Rois (3 Kings) is probably the best hotel in town and in the top 20% anywhere. Around town they were setting up for the Basel Fair and I was getting out of town just in time. The city is on the Rhine River just near France and Germany. The hotel has river views although the view itself is not much to see. It may not have been that much different than it was 100 years ago when Theodore Herzl stayed just below me in room 117. I was in room 217 and I wanted to see the Herzl Suite but alas it was occupied, though there was a book in the hotel showing me a picture of the suite as it was and how it is today – pretty nondescript today with no sign on the front door. As I walked around the very quiet streets of Basel at night, I thought of how Herzl must have walked those same streets thinking about things as he prepared for the Zionist Congresses that were his brainchild in Basel. And I was here on the way back from a worth-the-airline-ticket party in Israel celebrating a company that now employed a dozen people in Israel, 4 of whom moved there from our New York office to live in that country. And how we sent our partners and key employees there, such as our Puerto Rican director of sales, to a country that was considered a normal place to be for a company and all kinds of people Jewish or not. I could not help but feel that we were living out his dream.

I’m in the middle of a book called The Prime Ministers, a memoir by Yehudah Avner who was a British immigrant who became note-taker to several Israeli prime ministers and definitely on the inside of many events of the past few decades. You read about how the country was founded and how precarious it was. Today you get upset if you stand in the passport line for over 10 minutes. You read about how rows of British soldiers stood at the shore to prevent people traveling in steerage (not exactly economy section these days) from getting off the boats when they were trying to escape concentration camps and death. I was on a small road to Tel Aviv trying to beat the rush hour traffic on the main highway and the driver was telling me about how this road was the only route to Jerusalem in 1948. Then you read the book about how it took days to get onto a convoy and that you were risking sniper fire just to get across the road. I’ll let you know about the book after I’m done with it but so far it looks like one of the best insider books about the founding of Israel and its leaders anyone has written and it is impossible to get through it with dry eyes. My wife was up past midnight for a week reading it and it’s rather long at over 700 pages. Which is why I got the Kindle.

Like Israel, Switzerland is also sold out all around. Swiss Airlines flight to NY was also sold out. There may be a recession but I can’t find it; the prices are high and everybody wants in. At Zurich airport, there is no lounge in Terminal E which is where the long haul flights actually depart from; you have to go rather far to get there and it would make more sense to have the lounge there than back at the main building. I always love hearing the silly Swiss sounds aboard the monorail ride to Terminal E, especially when the cow moos. One reason I like this country a lot is that people here really do think and not just do, despite their reputation. The security guy at the airport let me take on a jar of jelly and chocolate spread and took my word for it even without going through the suitcase to find the second jar. The railroad guy let me go with my rail ticket even though it was issued for same day return and I had no idea that it was invalid for the next day when it was first issued. Swiss economy was really awful the month before with my family so I went Business this time by myself to see if the airline was really that bad – of course it was much better. The A330 is 1:2:1 configuration and it was very private and very pleasant. But the vege entree still sucked; the fish item was the better choice. Doesn’t matter whether you go business or coach in one crucial respect – my back still goes out of whack even on a lie-flat seat.