Daniel Lubetzky

Thomas Friedman wrote an interesting article on the Cold War between the US and Iran.  He writes: When you have leverage, talk. When you don’t have leverage, get some — by creating economic, diplomatic or military incentives and pressures that the other side finds too tempting or frightening to ignore. That is where the Bush [...]

Al-Akhbar in Lebanon (which favors the Hezbollah opposition coalition) reports that the weakness of the Hariri Movement will create a void that will be filled by Salafi groups intent on waging Jihad to defend Sunni Islam against Shiia infidels.  While the source is suspect, it evinces a real trend towards further destabilization and tribalism, which [...]

When returning a rental car on my last trip to LA, I noticed a car packed to the ream with bags and random stuff.  I wondered what it was.   It turns out it was a repossessed car. Many relate to the sub-prime mortgage implosion as a financial disaster.  Some Wall Street traders may lose [...]

Ben Smith highlights some excerpts from an excellent article by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. Smith explains about Obama: He’s trying to do something hard, and unusual: Associate himself with a strong pro-Israel line, but also refuse to be associated with the hardest line on everything, calling settlements "unhelpful" and, elsewhere, distancing himself from a [...]

I saw this at a cash register in a local deli…

Here is an article that gives you hope that a lot of our interconnected environmental, climate-change, waste disposal, energy and resource scarcity, pollution and geo-political threats can be tackled through technology before our world implodes: Floyd Butterfield and Thomas Quinn launched E-Fuel Corporation.  Their product allows you to create ethanol in your backyard. The holy [...]

Look at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and [...]

The film-maker Jehane Noujaim dreamt a day when people across the world would see the same films, images and messages on the same day, at the same time: Pangea Day.  She dreamt and, thanks to a partnership with TED, she acted on her dream and pulled it off amazingly.  Witnessed across the world by a [...]

I was struck when I saw the initial cut of this film at how the Director, Adam Hootnick, was able to be objective and empathetic about every subject it covered, avoiding caricatured stereotypes, and helping us understand the perspective and motivations of those involved during the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.  I highly recommend it for [...]

Related to an issue I had blogged about 6 weeks ago, Daniel Henninger writes in the WSJ that Obama’s real vulnerability is not his past connection to the Reverend Wright but his simplistic formulas on Iran: Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, collector of centrifuges, makes Jeremiah Wright look like Little Bo Peep. Yet this Tuesday Barack Obama [...]