Aug 26, 2025
I have been thinking a lot about “what if”’ scenarios. I also have been thinking about how precarious things are at the moment. The last time I felt this way was August, 2001. I had just started a new job in Riyadh. All my financial problems were over. I knew something was going to happen. I didn’t know what. I thought that maybe Saudi Arabia might reset or even break off diplomatic relations. Something was in the air, but no one expected 9/11.
There will be no peace in Gaza. Netanyahu is not a peacemaker. His father was a historian who hadn’t gotten over the treatment of Sephardis in Spain in 1492. Netanyahu lost a brother to the PLO in Uganda. October 7, comparatively was yesterday. There will be peace only after an unconditional surrender and he does not understand why the global community pressures him but doesn’t pressure Putin, who started a war.
There will be no peace in Ukraine, either. Zelensky sees the support of Europe and believes there is no reason to give in. Putin will wait. There will be minor shifts on the battlefield, but he gains nothing by making peace. He has already recognized that his initial objectives were not made. Territorial concessions were only half of what the war was about. If Trump pressures Ukraine, so much the better. Putin is in no rush.
There has been a lot talk about America’s vigorous president, who has his 80th birthday this year. Biology cannot be ignored. Trump has never had a healthy diet. Assuming he has the best physicians American has to offer, there is a long history of good doctors being afraid to treat their leader patients.
His doctors will be overly cautious, afraid that aggressive treatments will fail leaving the patient in a worse state than before. If Trump’s physical condition is as bad as some suspect, the country my find itself with a caretaker president.
Trump is incapacitated and Vance takes over. Or Vance hangs back because Trump’s inner circle keep him at arm’s length. It happened with Biden. China and Russia will feel out the new leader. Israel will hit Gaza harder than ever before.
Vance then serves out the rest of Trump’s term and wins a new term easily. But there’s a missing piece. I don’t know exactly what it is or what it will mean. All I know is that there is a missing piece.
Aug 26, 2025
I have been thinking a lot about “what if”’ scenarios. I also have been thinking about how precarious things are at the moment. The last time I felt this way was August, 2001. I had just started a new job in Riyadh. All my financial problems were over. I knew something was going to happen. I didn’t know what. I thought that maybe Saudi Arabia might reset or even break off diplomatic relations. Something was in the air, but no one expected 9/11.
There will be no peace in Gaza. Netanyahu is not a peacemaker. His father was a historian who hadn’t gotten over the treatment of Sephardis in Spain in 1492. Netanyahu lost a brother to the PLO in Uganda. October 7, comparatively was yesterday. There will be peace only after an unconditional surrender and he does not understand why the global community pressures him but doesn’t pressure Putin, who started a war.
There will be no peace in Ukraine, either. Zelensky sees the support of Europe and believes there is no reason to give in. Putin will wait. There will be minor shifts on the battlefield, but he gains nothing by making peace. He has already recognized that his initial objectives were not made. Territorial concessions were only half of what the war was about. If Trump pressures Ukraine, so much the better. Putin is in no rush.
There has been a lot talk about America’s vigorous president, who has his 80th birthday this year. Biology cannot be ignored. Trump has never had a healthy diet. Assuming he has the best physicians American has to offer, there is a long history of good doctors being afraid to treat their leader patients.
His doctors will be overly cautious, afraid that aggressive treatments will fail leaving the patient in a worse state than before. If Trump’s physical condition is as bad as some suspect, the country my find itself with a caretaker president.
Trump is incapacitated and Vance takes over. Or Vance hangs back because Trump’s inner circle keep him at arm’s length. It happened with Biden. China and Russia will feel out the new leader. Israel will hit Gaza harder than ever before.
Vance then serves out the rest of Trump’s term and wins a new term easily. But there’s a missing piece. I don’t know exactly what it is or what it will mean. All I know is that there is a missing piece.
Aug 25, 2025
Law school will not teach you how to survive an assassination attempt. That is a skill you will have to learn on your own.
Aug 24, 2025
In travel news, Trump wants to send Abrego Garcia to Uganda and federal troops to Chicago. Anna Delvey (Inventing Anna) remains in the US because the Nine Sages of the Supreme Court haven’t dealt with the appeal of her criminal case. With so much Trump-related litigation taking up the court’s attention on both its regular and “shadow” dockets, perhaps there is little time to devote to Anna’s case. It shouldn’t take long for the Nine Sages to issue their “cert.denied” order, but the rules for celebrity justice are different. Like it or not, Delvey is a celebrity, appearing in the pages of Vogue, Page Six and wherever else celebrities hang out these days.
Though not a matter (yet) for the Nine Sages, Delvey may be a candidate for African deportation. Delvey came to the US from Germany, where she was not a citizen, but a resident. Germany is unlikely to accept for residency an individual who has committed felonies in the United States. This leaves the Russian Federation, where Delvey was born and may be able to get a Russian passport. Whether Russia takes her back depends on whether the US is holding anyone Russia wants. Or whether Russia is holding anyone we want. Involving Russia in a prisoner swap is like three-dimensional chess: Russia will insist that an individual in another country be part of the exchange, while the US gripes that any exchange should only be a bilateral arrangement. While all this squabbling goes on, Delvey gets to stay in New York. I wonder if she even still speaks Russian–she left at a young age and grew up in Germany.
If the US deports Abrego Garcia to Uganda or its other favorite, South Sudan, it will only be a question of time before he shows up at the Southern border in search of a coyote to take him across. Don’t expect him to avoid legal entanglements by moving his family back to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia wrongly believes, as do all upon whom the attention spotlight falls, that the reason a US senator traveled to El Salvador was due to a genuine interest in Abego Garcia’s case and well-being. Nothing could be further from the truth. Interest in his case exists only because it’s an effective way to criticize Donald Trump. Once Trump is taken out of the equation, no one will care.
If Abrego Garcia can get to Dubai or Istanbul, he can get a flight to South America. Once in Colombia, he can join others crossing the Darien on foot and then it’s an arduous–arduous but doable–bus ride north to and through Mexico. Financial help will arrive from “supporters” who would love to see this Salvadoran thorn prick Trump’s side again. Stories of the trip through the jungle, being threatened by smugglers with a cameo by the colorful Kuna Indian tribe of Panama–for whom the names “Wilson” and “Woodrow” are commonplace–will enrage those who blame all these hardships on his nemesis, Donald Trump.
In the old days–that is before the FBI put a stop to senators selling immigration relief through expensive private bills, special legislation would go through Congress regularizing Abrego Garcia’s immigration situation. I wonder why so little is said about his American-citizen wife. It is understandable why she may not be keen on moving to Uganda and the idea of a Darien jungle trek doesn’t really sound like a fun vacation.
Meanwhile, Anna Delvey appears in a multi-page Vogue spread and you can almost ignore the black “electronic monitoring device” affixed to her ankle. It is just a question of time before these become a “must have” fashion item and the market is flooded with cheap–albeit, tariff-paid, non-functioning copies to complete the look.
Soon, everyone will have one.
Aug 21, 2025
I spent the better part of the day trying to get access to a Windows 11 laptop. I hadn’t used the laptop for two months. There is a Windows setting that forces you to change your password periodically. I don’t know where this setting is found. I don’t even want a password; it’s an unnecessary inconvenience. If Iranian Intelligence steals the laptop, I have no doubt they will know how to get in, password or not.
I assume that because I hadn’t changed the password—the laptop was sitting in a drawer for two months—is the reason Windows decided to lock me out of my account. I spent a few hours with ChatGPT trying to unlock this puzzle box, but no joy. So I decided to bite the bullet and buy PCUnlocker. I created a boot disk on a USB, plugged it in and found that you needed a UEFI boot disk.
Fine. So I created that. Still no BIOS boot menu. Why? Because my PCUnlocker boot disk wasn’t signed, so no luck. Maybe some day I’ll be able to use PCUnlocker. But not today.
So I downloaded a 5 gb Windows iso file. This was a mistake. Then I downloaded the Windows installation media creator and ran it. The Windows media installation media creator assumes that you haven’t already downloaded the necessary iso file and there is no way to tell it that you already have downloaded a perfectly usable iso file. So the media creator…downloads another 5 gb.
This time, the finicky BIOS recognized the USB drive and let me boot from it. I needed a command prompt. That’s ctrl-F10 but good luck finding it in the documentation. Where “the” documentation resides, I have no idea. Now with the command prompt, I substituted cmd.exe for utilman.exe in \Windows\System32 Exit out of that and reboot. Now when your name appears on the login screen, a command prompt will also appear (if it doesn’t, it’s in the Accessibility options). You’ll get
X:\Windows\System32 Type in C: and now you’re at the C: prompt. This assumes your Windows installation is at C: and not some other bizarre location.
Now, all you do is type net user USERNAME NEWPASSWORD
I recommend a password you will not forget, or if you do, you might stumble upon, like 1234 or password.
Hit <Enter>
Your PC will return a message along the Ines of, command completed successfully.
Type exit or reboot or turn off the power. Remove the installation media. When you reboot, enter the new password. Abracadabra, the gates to paradise will open with all your files, all your settings.
Now, back-up that installation. Por favor.
I’m leaving cmd.exe where it is. This could happen again.
Aug 21, 2025
Gerry Spence, the famous trial lawyer, died yesterday. Here’s my Gerry Spence story.In 1990, I wanted to be among the top ten criminal defense lawyers in Miami. That was my goal. Not the best–there were already some very good lawyers practicing. But reaching the top ten was possible.
This meant looking at trials not as a mere rote procedure described in Thomas Wolfe’s The Right Stuff–first I do this, then I do that. First I wait my turn at the podium and then I stay behind the podium to ask a question. Then I ask to approach. Then I stand up to speak. Then I sit down. Etc., etc., etc.
Bo Hitchcock–they made a movie about him when he eschewed conventional treatment for his throat cancer and sought a cure in Leticia, where Colombia, Peru and Brazil meet. His chosen cure was ayahuasca. They made a movie about his quest. The cure was ineffective. But before all that, Bo was one of the few who viewed trial as craft. He wanted to be better too.
Bo and I had an idea. We would travel to Wyoming, sit at the feet of the master and learn from him. Bo made the call, telling Spence that we knew that he was the best and could we learn from him for a week or two?
Spence was a humble man. He thanked Bo and said that he was not the best. If we wanted to learn from the best, we should contact James Shellow in Milwaukee. Shellow was willing to let us learn and invited us to Wisconsin. He also refused to accept the compliment. The best, Shellow said, is a lawyer named Frank Oliver. He’s retired and lives in South Florida.
The journey that started in Miami, reached to Wyoming and then Wisconsin had doubled back to a place called Kendall, part of the urban sprawl that is Miami, maybe a fifteen minute drive from my house, traffic and the Florida Highway Patrol permitting. We told Oliver what Shellow had told us, that he was the best criminal defense lawyer in the country.
“Well, I am” Frank said.
There’s much more to be said about Frank, but that’s my one interaction with Gerry Spence.
Aug 12, 2025
What is more American than the grift?
George Santos “embellished” his resumé, not worrying about the fact that identity politics trumps even outright lies. Santos claimed to be Jewish, biracial, and finding one box unchecked, gay. He is Latino enough and there are Holocaust survivors, albeit imaginary ones, in his family tree. A claimed 9/11 death in the family makes up for a lack of military service, and when the New York Times finally looked into his background and uncovered his failure to graduate from college only means the fact that he is a high-school dropout was lost in the noise. Shilling for sympathy, Santos had his mother die twice. He started a charity for animals and pocketed the cash, knowing that dogs and cats can’t file fraud complaints. He is an accomplished shameless liar, as any good grifter must be.
None of this prevented his election to the 117th Congress.
If anything, he is the perfect candidate.
Aug 6, 2025
The Hotel Arbez was selected as a debriefing site. The border between France and Switzerland cuts through the dining room and a staircase. During WWII the Germans respected Swiss neutrality and respected the border. It is said that even the SS did not go up the Hotel’s stairs in search of enemies of the regime.
Tarek wasn’t supposed to leave Switzerland; USDoJ attorneys had no authority to operate in France. So he was going to sit on the Swiss side of the table while USDoJ sat on the other side. What is called “Queen for a Day” immunity would be granted; that is, use immunity for anything discussed at the table.
The debriefing never happened. Goaded by British lawyers who were unfamiliar with American plea bargaining, Tarek asked for assurances, assurances that could not be given without knowing what he had to trade. And that could only be gleaned during a debriefing. I sent him an email a week ago commenting on the Ghislaine Maxwell meeting with the DoJ. The immunity grant given to her was exactly what they had offered Tarek, who changed lawyers, gave up on a deal with DoJ, went to trial in Switzerland and got eight years.
Aug 5, 2025
My first exposure to the shadow puppets was their display in the film The Year of Living Dangerously, starring transgender Linda Hunt, except that she wasn’t transgender, the term was not in use then, she merely played a man, a photographer. A pre-antisemitic Mel Gibson also starred. Based on a novel by C.J. Koch. Journos in Jakarta, all of them hearing the siren call of Vietnam. We forget that Indonesia was the Dutch East Indies, that Bali was the only Hindu territory outside of the subcontinent and that once women there normally went bare-breasted. Suharto replaced Sukarno and their names were similar enough that no one paid attention. I thought the word for those “puppets” was wayang (as in wayang on the left) but I could be wrong. Of bhasa Indonesia I know nothing.
Pablo Neruda’s first wife was from the Dutch East Indies (not the girl of Veinte poemas), she returned to the Netherlands just in time to see the country overrun by Panzer Divisions. Now Indonesia is the world’s largest–by population–Muslim country, but theirs is a tolerant Islam, alcohol is permitted and restrictions imposed by the Prophet (pbuh) are interpreted in a generous fashion.
Gil Williams, who wrote Man on a String (as Michael Wolfe) loved Vietnam, not so much the American War, but the combination of French and Chinese food that gave rise to Vietnamese cuisine. On Panama Canal transits he sought out ships that offered French Basque cuisine which he judged superior to almost all others. He would be happy to learn that Vietnam today follows not the Khmer Rouge but Deng Xiao Ping.
When I was in Phnom Penh I saw the ads for buses to Vietnam, Sài gòn only four hours away, Miami to Tampa, I had to go. Crossing the border it suddenly became possible to read the signs, though I didn’t know what they meant. English widely spoken, French not so much. But Orangina avec sandwich jambon beurre, bread like France. Even a French bookstore! Rhodia legal pads!
I was never arrested by Colombia’s DAS, merely detained briefly once for bad language. I got the equivalent of a “time out” at the airport. They decided that my Spanish wasn’t good enough to sustain an accusation of improper use of the language. Lesson learned. I used to have a cédula de extranjería. I don’t have that brown booklet anymore and I assume that the records were lost when M-19 stormed the Supreme Court in Bogotá and burned the files. It would be nice to get it back.
Aug 4, 2025
On the day I was stopped by police for possible involvement in an attempt to assassinate Jacques Chirac, I went to a saloon in Paris and brought a puppet I had purchased as a gift for my son. At first the puppet stayed in its backpack, but then he insisted on being brought out.
How was I to know that he had a foul mouth? A French-speaking English woman drinking with a group from work popped in to translate now and then because the puppet had little fluency in French. This did not stop him from buying rounds and of course, I had to apologize to everyone for the puppet’s generally rude behavior. On my left (puppet’s right) were two French guys, intrigued, commenting from time to time on the puppet’s behavior and largesse. They say, “you know how Americans are” but I tell you, puppets are worse. They really are.