have we been hearing Putin's going to die any minute? I don't know. Maybe Zelensky knows something we don't, but I wouldn't count on that. I don't think I'd make any policy on it.

Now let me tell you the least surprising news of the day, people. You're never going to believe this, I say jokingly. This is the most predictable news that you've ever heard. Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of breaking the terms of a ceasefire on their energy infrastructure. All right, I told you that's exactly what's going to happen, right? I told you. How can you have a ceasefire on your energy infrastructure when both sides are going to say the other one violated it, and then they're just going to keep shooting? And that's exactly what happened, apparently. Now I don't know if both sides did violate it. The prediction is not that they would violate it but they would definitely claim the other side violated it, and then they would act accordingly, which is what's happening. How in the world do you ever reach a peace deal with the two least reliable, honest countries in the world? I mean Ukraine is the least reliable, honest country that isn't Russia. So it doesn't feel like you could even make a deal because you need both sides to be at least honorable. You know, like I feel like we can make a deal with a lot of countries and they'd say, ah, we don't want to be that country that doesn't keep a deal. The United States has broken some deals too, so we're not clean on this. But who's going to trust either Russia or Ukraine for anything? So I don't know how they get a deal there.

And I was listening—in other news I was listening to Jeffrey Sachs talk about the Middle East, and he's sort of, you know, stay out of the Middle East. It's none of our business. We're just making permanent war. But he says there will never be peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians have their own country, basically. But that's not possible because Israel has so many settlements now there's no place that country could even be. And if you said okay, you can take the entire West Bank and Gaza, do you think that would stop the extremists from trying to take Israel proper? Why would it? I don't see why that would stop them. So I don't see any possibility that you can make peace by giving Palestinians a country unless that country included Israel and all the Israelis decided to move somewhere else, which is not going to happen. So there's no actual real-world situation in which you could do peace in the Middle East, which means permanent war.

And then Sachs suggests that Israel essentially controls US policy and military, at least in terms of the Middle East, and will keep