Benjamin Netanyahu, January 2024. Photo: UK Government via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

On Tuesday, Haaretz reported that ten days before October 7, 2023, the president of the United Arab Emirates called Benjamin Netanyahu to warn him that Hamas was preparing something major. According to the report, Netanyahu never passed that warning to his own security chiefs. His office called the story an absolute lie and said the call never took place.

It is not the first claim of this kind. Israeli outlets have previously reported that Shin Bet was told in mid September of 2023 about an earthquake being planned. Egypt's intelligence chief reportedly phoned around the same stretch to describe something unusual coming. Every one of those has been reported, disputed, and left roughly where it started.

Here is the part that matters more than any single phone call. Almost three years on, Israel still has no state commission of inquiry into October 7. A state commission is the highest form of investigation the country has. It is appointed by the president of the Supreme Court and it can compel testimony and assign blame to named people. Israel ran one after the 1973 war and another after the 1982 killings at Sabra and Shatila, when a Lebanese militia murdered hundreds of Palestinian civilians in a Beirut camp that Israeli troops had sealed off. That commission found Israel indirectly responsible and cost the defense minister his job. Netanyahu has resisted one from the beginning and has pushed instead for a committee whose members politicians would help choose. The Israel Democracy Institute found that more than 55% of Israelis want one.

All of this is landing in an election year. Opposition leaders answered the Haaretz report within hours by promising that a state commission would be the first act of any government they form. That is the shape of it now. The investigation into the worst day in the country's history has itself become a campaign issue.

There is a second charge sitting underneath the first one. Critics say Netanyahu pushed the offensive in Gaza harder and kept it running longer than the war needed because being at war kept him in the job. The mechanics of that are not really in dispute. Ending the fighting without what Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich want would break up his coalition. A broken coalition means elections. Elections mean a commission with the power to put him under oath. A six month New York Times investigation concluded he made wartime decisions to protect his own position. President Biden said out loud that there was every reason to think so. Israelis have been in the streets over it for years. He denies all of it.

That is the bigger story and it is not about one phone call. The warning was one morning. What came after it has been three years.

Photo: Pexels.

Testosterone clinics are everywhere now. Most of them will treat a twenty-six year old who fills out a form saying he feels tired and a little flat. That is the business model. It is worth knowing what you are signing up for before you sign it.

Your body makes testosterone on a loop. Your brain sends a signal down, your testicles make the hormone, and the hormone tells your brain to ease off. Inject testosterone from the outside and your brain reads the level as high and stops sending the signal. Your testicles have nothing left to do. They shrink. That is not a rare side effect. That is the system working exactly the way it was built to work.

Sperm production goes with it. Testosterone therapy shuts down the process that makes sperm and fertility doctors list it as a cause of infertility in men who never knew that was a risk. Most men recover after they stop. Recovery can take six months to two years and for some it never comes all the way back. You are twenty-seven and still deciding whether you want kids. That is a strange thing to gamble.

Here is the part the clinics leave out. Almost every safety study on testosterone therapy was run on older men with clinically low levels. Men under thirty were not in those trials. When someone tells you it is safe, they are quoting research that was never done on men like you.

Most young men with the symptoms do not have a testosterone problem. They have a sleep problem, a drinking problem, a body fat problem, or a training problem. Fix those first and a lot of men watch the number move on its own. Fix them second and you will never find out what your own body was capable of.

None of this means testosterone therapy is never the right call. Real hypogonadism exists and men who have it deserve treatment. It should come from a doctor who ran your bloodwork twice on separate mornings, not from a website that sold you a subscription. Starting is the easy part. Stopping is the part nobody warns you about.

Most advice about protecting an inheritance is written for rich people. Here is the version for everyone else.

The federal estate tax is not coming for you. It does not start until fifteen million dollars per person. Fewer than one in a hundred estates ever pay it. You can stop reading about trusts built to dodge a tax you were never going to owe.

Two things will actually cost your family money. The first is your state. Twelve states and Washington DC tax estates on their own and their limits are far lower. Oregon starts at one million. Massachusetts starts at two. Where your parents live matters more than what Congress does.

The second is retirement accounts. If you inherit a parent's IRA or 401(k) and you are not their spouse, you have ten years to take every dollar out. Money pulled from a traditional account counts as income that year. Inherit four hundred thousand during your best earning years and you can push yourself into a higher tax bracket for a decade.

One rule works in your favor and almost nobody knows about it. It is called the step up in basis. Say your dad bought a house for eighty thousand in 1994 and it is worth six hundred thousand the day he dies. You inherit it at six hundred thousand. All that gain disappears and you owe close to nothing if you sell. But if he puts your name on the house while he is still alive, you inherit his eighty thousand instead and the tax bill attached to it. Parents do this all the time trying to help and hand their kids a bill for tens of thousands.

None of the fixes are complicated. A will. A named beneficiary on every account because that beats whatever the will says. One awkward ten minute conversation with your parents. Families lose more by never having that conversation than they ever lose to the government.

The point of a first date is to find out whether the two of you can talk. That is the whole job. Everything else is set design. Most men pick the wrong setting because they are trying to impress somebody instead of trying to find something out.

Dinner is the default and the default is bad. A sit down dinner locks you into two hours across a table from a stranger. If it is going well, two hours is a gift. If it is not, you both knew by minute twenty and there are still entrees coming. The bill is also big enough to mess with your head. Spend that kind of money on a stranger and you start talking yourself into liking her.

Pick something with an exit and room to grow. Drinks at a bar quiet enough to hear each other. Coffee and a walk somewhere with things to look at. A museum on a weekday. A farmers market. A bowling alley. A driving range if she is up for it. Plan an hour. If it is going well you say let us go find a drink somewhere. Now the night is twice as long because both of you wanted it to be.

Skip the movie because you cannot talk during a movie. Skip anything with her friends there unless she tells you she would feel more comfortable that way. Some women will and that is worth respecting. Skip your apartment if this is someone you can actually see yourself with. The expensive restaurant is not a mistake either. It is just the wrong night for it. Save that one for when you already know you want her there.

Two small things left. Pick the place yourself. A man who asks where do you want to go thinks he is being accommodating and he is actually handing her a decision she did not ask for. Have a plan and offer it. Then pay and do not make a moment out of it. Even if the night goes nowhere, you do not want to be the guy she tells her friends about. Word gets around and it will cost you dates you never knew you had.

None of this is a trick. A good first date is a short one where you both talked longer than you planned to and left wanting the rest of the conversation.

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers patrol boat heading toward Lower Manhattan, September 11, 2001. Photo: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers via Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty-five years ago today, 2,977 people were killed in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. That number is the part everyone carries. Here is a part of the same morning that far fewer people know about.

By mid morning, Lower Manhattan had no way out. The bridges were closed. The tunnels were closed. The subway had stopped running. Several hundred thousand people were standing on the southern tip of an island with the water at their backs and no way to leave on foot.

A little after nine, the Coast Guard put a call out over marine radio asking for all available boats. There was no plan for this and no drill anyone had ever run. Within minutes ferries, tugboats, dinner cruise boats, fishing charters, and private craft started turning toward the seawall.

By the end of the day roughly a hundred and fifty vessels and more than eight hundred mariners had carried about five hundred thousand people off the island. It took under nine hours. It is still the largest maritime evacuation in history. Dunkirk moved around three hundred and forty thousand men and that took nine days.

Nobody who steered toward Manhattan that morning had been ordered to. The radio call told them they could come. It did not tell them they had to. They went anyway and headed toward the part of the city everyone else was trying to leave. Then they turned around and went back for more.

That is the part worth keeping. On a day this heavy it is easy to forget that the same morning produced the largest rescue of its kind that has ever happened. It was carried out by people who were simply nearby and had a boat.