Len Zwelling

I must be getting old. Wait! That’s not true. I am old. It has been weighing on me.

But what is so disappointing is that I am so out of touch as well. I really don’t understand culture any more.

BATNA: Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement.

What’s BATNA? It’s the point in a negotiation when one party to the talks determines that doing nothing is a better choice than any likely agreement.

Obviously, from President Biden’s behavior on June 16, he has not reached his BATNA with Putin, even if Putin has reached his with America.

The surest way of guaranteeing that we have not seen the last of Donald Trump on the national political scene is to have a failed Biden Presidency. Mitch McConnell thinks so and so does Kevin McCarthy. They are doing everything in their power to just say no to everything proposed by the White House.

William A. Galston makes a stunning series of observations in The Wall Street Journal on June 9. In a piece called “What Drives GOP Resistance to Vaccines?” he notes that the typical demographic of a Republican voter ought to predict that that voter would be vaccinated. It does not.

The first one hundred days went pretty well. President Biden was able to get a covid relief package through the Congress and the economy is picking up as unemployment is dropping. But is it dropping quickly enough?

I don’t understand why the federal government, and particularly the president, is so calm about the ransom ware attacks on American industry. First, the Colonial Pipeline’s software was hijacked and now a large meatpacker JBS was hacked and forced to shutdown operations for a day or two. Hospitals have been targets and so have many other businesses in the U.S.

I moved from an early age. A lot.

Home movies of me right after I learned to walk show me running. I ran for 65 years. I ran a marathon and many shorter races. I loved running, but I can’t run any more.

I also chased things. Gold stars mainly.

She flies.

In the most amazing arena show I have ever seen, Alecia Beth Moore soars high above basketball courts and sites of ice hockey games to the adulation of tens of thousands of fans who know her better as P!nk.`

P!nk has now made a documentary film about her Beautiful Trauma Tour with stops all over the world leading to two sold out shows at Wembley Stadium in London. Each London show had 80,00 attendees. The film, All I Know So Far, has two important points to make.

Our elected representatives have not represented us in quite a while. Despite the emphasis on the rights of the minority in America, the majority still ought to rule and I cannot believe that a majority of Americans even care about having a gun and certainly don’t care about having an assault-style weapon or illicit high capacity magazines for legal handguns. The latter did the damage in San Jose last week.

When George Will came to the Jewish Community Center on Braeswood during the annual Book Fair a few years ago, he started his talk by saying, “ I understand that a few of you here are Jewish.” It got a great laugh.

To readers of this blog, it will come as no surprise that this blog writer is Jewish. I am also a staunch proponent of Israel. The point for today is that the two are not the same as both Bret Stephens and Michelle Goldberg discuss in The New York Times of May 25.