Career Memoir – education and deconstruction.com

one THOUSAND wells (sic)

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The Book of the Week is “one THOUSAND wells (sic), How an Audacious Goal Taught Me to Love the World Instead of Save It” by Jena Lee Nardella, published in 2015.

Born in the early 1980’s, the American author– raised in a strict Christian household– became an idealist, passionate about helping the downtrodden. By her teens, she was volunteering at a Colorado Springs homeless shelter. She worked at an orphanage in Tijuana. In college, she got to meet and work with the Christian music-band, Jars of Clay.

Together with other groups over the course of a decade, the do-gooders who formed a humanitarian organization in 2005 called Blood: Water Mission, would bring uncontaminated blood (for medical purposes) and water (for basic drinking and cleaning) to various underprivileged communities in Kenya, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Uganda, and other African countries. They would help them with the three major components of improving Africans’ health: clean water, hygiene and sanitation.

One of the first of many, many things the author learned in her quest to save lives, was that most Americans’ first impulse is to throw money at a complex problem to solve it. They mean well, but their white-savior-complex is a wrong-headed approach. As she gained experience in providing international aid to poverty-stricken, poorly-educated rural communities, the author saw how villagers were initially skeptical about aid workers’ promises; in the past, so many aid workers had failed to follow up or do anything.

The author’s group eventually elicited a grateful, cooperative response because an educator involved the villagers in raising their own standards of living. A few different aid groups who handled various aspects of a water project, did what they said they would do.

If their projects succeeded, women and children (before school– if they were lucky enough to attend) wouldn’t have to spend hours every day trekking on foot to a water-well or river (which might be used by hundreds of households, and was usually polluted with germs and who knows what else) located many kilometers from their living areas. Blood: Water completed one specific project in Rwanda that allowed eighteen hundred villagers to partake of clean water. Such a basic victory produced a great ripple effect in the community. School attendance soared because:

kids were neither fatigued by water-fetching nor plagued by water-borne illnesses (and all the people by other illnesses, for that matter) anymore;
villagers were neither sickened by, nor dying from the water they used; and
villagers had more time on their hands.

However, the author had rude awakenings on various fronts– a water project that failed, fund-raising struggles, and an episode of corruption by a local male aid-coordinator. She was also forced to do some soul-searching on her religious beliefs. She finally had to accept that it is better to have unanswered questions than unquestioned answers.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details about all of the above.

Settle For More

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The Book of the Week is “Settle For More” by Megyn Kelly, published in 2016.

Born in November 1970, Kelly was raised Catholic in the suburbs of Syracuse and Albany in New York State. She conveyed a few simple principles on life. One is, “The only place ‘success’ comes before ‘work’ is in the dictionary.”

The late, great college basketball coach John Wooden said one should be worried about one’s character, not one’s reputation. The true test of one’s character is: how you treat people who can do nothing for you. Like so many others, Kelly got caught up in worrying about her reputation when Trump and his followers smeared and lied about her.

Anyway, Kelly wrote that there occurred an egregious breach of journalistic ethics during 2016, leading up to election day. It was this: some idiot-box interviewers of Donald Trump told him prior to airtime, the critical things they would be saying about him, so they would appear to be “fair and balanced” in their reporting. Trump knew to behave himself and didn’t react with hostility to those questions or comments. Scripting and rehearsals are the new unethical normal in “journalism” nowadays.

Unsurprisingly, Kelly was the victim of a misogynistic Tweet by Trump. He knew this Tweet would become the subject of a 2015 post-debate news story, rather than her debate questions and his non-answers. He is, after all, the master manipulator of distracting messaging. His distractions are analogous to the scene shown during the closing credits of the movie Animal House: While a parade is passing through the college town, a frat boy says to a guy, “Look at my thumb.” The guy does and the frat boy sucker-punches him and says, “Gee, you’re dumb!” the same way Trump makes outrageously offensive comments for shock value, and then watches the fireworks.

In 2016, Kelly was forced to confront an ethical dilemma in connection with sexual harassment in her workplace– Fox News. Having succeeded in two male-dominated fields, she advised her female readers to get some advice on how they sound, and the clothing and makeup they wear so that they will be taken seriously by their male coworkers and bosses.

That said, it is unclear whether Kelly had the authority to choose the photo (in which she is wearing skimpy clothing) appearing on the front cover of the hardcover version of her book. The question is, would a male TV-news-show host wear a sexy shirt in the cover-photo of his book? Resounding no.

Kelly’s choice in that photo could have been an act of rebellion, or an act of naivete and poor self-awareness, on her part. With it, she hurt her cause of telling female readers to behave in ways that even the playing field with their male counterparts. If Kelly couldn’t control the photo on the cover, one might suspect her publisher was engaging in political retaliation.

Nevertheless, read the book to learn about how Kelly became super-successful as an attorney and as a TV “news” anchor, and how she was also able to have a family life in her time and place in the United States, despite the fact that her society gives males advantages over females.

We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders

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The Book of the Week is “We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders, A Memoir of Love and Resistance” by Linda Sarsour, published in 2020.

First off, the author explained that jihad means “to strive.” When using this word, the vast majority of people who practice the religion of Islam are not extremists and therefore do not take it to mean “religious war.”

Of course, propagandists (haters, predatory stalkers, bullies, doxers and their ilk) twist a word such as “jihad” so that all Muslims are branded as extremists and the one-word description most often used in the United States– “terrorists.” The propagandists know how to whip up a frenzy of fear, and get satisfaction from: seeing their victims sustain psychological damage, as much as egging on their followers who do physical damage.

Anyway, the author, the oldest of seven siblings of Palestinian extraction, was born in May 1980 in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York State. She grew up in the nearby Sunset Park section– the multi-ethnic, immigrant community in which “…neighbors looked out for each other and disciplined one another’s children…”

At the author’s high school, John Jay, there were only three guidance counselors for more than three thousand students, but every day, tens of police officers arrested students whose punishments were outsized, for the minor offenses committed. After 9/11, across the country, numerous culturally and linguistically disadvantaged young rule-breakers (who were targeted because they were Muslim) were detained and deported without due process. Other Muslims left of their own accord, as they saw that the United States was becoming a hostile residential environment for them.

The author helped found an organization that assisted Islamic women and children in New York City. She and her colleagues practiced local political activism and community organizing. They realized they needed to ally with other minority groups to acquire sufficient power to change education policies for their own group. They also knew they needed to become partisan, so they formed the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, before the 2013 mayoral election.

In December 2014, the author and her fellow activists protested the handling of two different incidents the previous summer; the deaths of two (non-Caucasian) men resulting from law enforcement’s extremely inappropriate conduct in Staten Island in New York State, and in Ferguson, Missouri. The protestors got together with pop cultural influencers and social justice advocates including Jay-Z and Lebron James to stage a “die-in” at a New York Nets basketball game in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. This, on a night when there was high attendance because the royal couple William and Kate were there.

Read the book to learn many other details about the author’s: family, and her trials and tribulations as a Muslim and an activist.

The Price of Empire

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The Book of the Week is “The Price of Empire” by J. William Fulbright, with Seth P. Tillman, published in 1989. In this volume, given his time and place as a Democratic senator (and boastful alpha male, at that) from Arkansas from 1945 to 1974, Fulbright expressed his views on the Cold War in terms of major historical events and hot wars.

Fulbright’s narratives deserve special scrutiny because they were written before the fall of the Berlin Wall– before historical revisionism and 20/20 hindsight. He also expounded some, on the main reason he appeared to be racist: In the Postwar Era, government leaders from Southern States wouldn’t have a long political career if they favored civil rights for African-Americans (case in point– Carl Elliott, Representative from Alabama).

The author presciently asserted that in waging its anti-Communist campaigns, the United States had as its goal, because it knew it had superior technology: to bankrupt the Soviets via attrition in an arms race. But in so doing, the U.S. has damn near bankrupted itself!

Fulbright wrote, “The winners, present and prospective are the bystanders, in Europe and Asia, whose resources are committed to making their societies work.” He contended that the detente school of thought (in which the U.S. and Russia agreed to coexisting peacefully rather than fomenting hatred against the other; crowded out by greedy politicians) turned out to be superior economically, not to mention societally.

The United States is now paying the price for that. As is well known, politics cannot be divorced from economics. That is why top government leaders desirous of getting reelected have always harped on job growth— bragging about their own, and smearing their opponents’ lack thereof.

In 20/20 hindsight, workers who were making expensive war toys (many of which were wasted one way or another) for the military-industrial complex in the Postwar Era, could have been engaging in more constructive, productive, progressive endeavors in the areas of education and environmentally-friendly vehicles and infrastructure. Oh, well.

Be that as it may, (according to the book, which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References and Bibliography), in 1946, in connection with trying to counter the adverse effects of the nation’s war-making, Fulbright made lemons from lemonade. He established a scholarship program for Americans to study abroad in barter transactions. War-impoverished countries would supply education because they could not pay (in the form of currency, due to crushing war debt) for the American military supplies such as blankets, food, drugs and trucks they used on their respective battlefields during WWII.

Read the book to learn a boatload of additional history which the author made, witnessed, and by which he was shaped.

My American Journey

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“I would never, for example say anything for domestic consumption and ignore its impact on Iraq, or vice versa. I knew we had won the battle for public opinion… I criticized the pseudo policy of establishing a U.S. ‘presence’ without a defined mission in trouble spots.”

-Colin Powell, writing about his military leadership in connection with the First Gulf War; after which he was criticized for not removing Saddam Hussein as Iraq’s leader. The reasons he cited were:

Iraq was a stabilizing force in the Middle East against Iran.
Prolonging the war was not worth the additional American casualties that would result.
The U.S. was leading an international coalition through the UN.
Prolonging the war would result in another Vietnam; and
America had already achieved its mission of forcing Iraqi troops to leave Kuwait.

The Book of the Week is “My American Journey” by Colin L. Powell with Joseph E. Persico, published in 1995. This large volume was released at a time when Powell was still a highly regarded war hero of the First Gulf War, prior to historical revisionism and 20/20 hindsight on America’s post-9/11 policy on Iraq.

Born in April 1937 in West Harlem in New York City, the dark-skinned Powell, whose ancestors were multi-ethnic (Jamaican, English, Scottish, African, and probably Arawak Indian), grew up in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. His parents worked in the garment industry.

Powell began his military career in the late 1950’s. He was stationed in Germany, where there was no segregation between dark-skinned and light-skinned people, as Western Europeans were thankful that the Americans were defending them from the Soviets.

In 1962, the U.S. government’s propaganda led ordinary Americans (including Powell) to believe that the United States had to stop Communism– which was evil– from spreading to all the freedom-loving, good countries of the world. Powell eventually did two tours of Vietnam as a military adviser and officer; he learned that the presence of both “enforcers” and “chaplains” was necessary in order to achieve the best outcome. The enforcers disciplined the troops so that they stayed focused on the vision of their mission, while the chaplains attended to the troops’ psychological needs. In all the military actions the U.S. was considered to have bungled– through the decades after WWII– the enforcers were lacking.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, and Bibliography), Caspar Weinberger, a secretary of defense who served during the Reagan Era, theorized that there were certain conditions to be met if America expected to have successful military involvement in conflicts. If the country (this includes the American people and Congress) feels a cause is vital to its welfare, it should (but only as a last resort!) dedicate troops and resources sufficient to achieve clear political and military objectives— which need to be flexible with changing situations.

In 1981, Powell learned from an experiment, that better leadership of commanding officers (rather than whether troops practiced with real or simulated ammunition) led to military victory more often. As is well known, ordinary Americans and foreign countries viewed the American military (and the U.S. government) as imperialist after the Vietnam Era.

After the Iran-Contra scandal, the American government (which many still viewed as imperialist) reorganized its national-security hierarchy through a bill passed by Congress called Goldwater-Nichols. Powell was named National Security Advisor in 1988. But he was an active-duty officer, so there was kind of a conflict with his new job. His bosses at the Pentagon controlled his promotions, but the president was a civilian whose interests might clash with theirs. Powell would be advising them both. In autumn 1989, Powell was named chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that job, the new law meant that the advice Powell gave to the president and Secretary of Defense, received top priority over all others in national-security related jobs.

Theoretically, the American president, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, has ultimate authority to decide on military deployment. However, if the president has sole control over the military and it obeys only him, is loyal only to him, including in connection with all top-secret foreign policy matters– THERE IS POTENTIAL FOR THE PRESIDENT TO BECOME A DICTATOR.

However, Powell contended that Reagan’s pro-military attitude restored the proud reputation of America’s armed services. He quoted Michael Korda on how the president became so popular: “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand…” Be that as it may, times have changed, and the Internet has shown the dangers of such activity from everyone who wants to be a great leader: oversimplification and the absence of sound argument, debate and doubt. There might exist solutions (to the country’s complex problems) everybody can understand, but they’re never simple.

And yet, Powell naively wrote, “The SDI [Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative; aka Star Wars] ‘umbrella’ was intended to make nuclear weapons obsolete.” The surrounding text indicated that he truly believed the arms race would magically cease when the U.S. was done constructing this fantastical war toy. It was in the military’s best budgetary interest to convince the (by then-senile president) that the U.S.S.R.’s nuclear weapons would be useless because SDI would protect the earth from detonation of the weapons altogether (similar to the myth that 1950’s schoolchildren who hid under their desks with their hands over their heads would survive a nuclear attack).

Anyway, in early 1988, Powell met with Anatoly Dobrynin, who was heartened that because Mikhail Gorbachev had a law degree, he was able to introduce rule of law to his country. The Soviet leader wanted to end the arms race and stop the international adventures of his military.

Powell gave a detailed history of the shenanigans (misnamed “Operation Just Cause”) through which the U.S. ousted Panama strongman Manuel Noriega: “Twenty-four Americans gave their lives in Panama to achieve this victory for democracy.”

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional information on Powell’s involvement in the above, and his many other adventures.

Gynecologist Reflections

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The Book of the Week is “Gynecologist Reflections” by Robert A. Siegel, published in 2017. As is well known, until about the 1970’s, an American medical doctor was a trusted family friend, a generalist. The author started medical school at the dawn of that decade, and ultimately chose obstetrics and gynecology as his specialty. In this poorly edited volume, the author detailed his memorable patient-cases inside America’s changing medical industry amid changing cultural and economic times.

During his training, the author was required to perform abortions; if he didn’t, he’d be fired. Another medical institution wouldn’t accept him and he wouldn’t become a physician. He acknowledged the very emotionally charged, controversial nature of the procedure, and controversial nature of not only when life begins, but when it ends.

The author’s generation of medical interns was still male-dominated. According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, Bibliography and an index), most of the interns were brainwashed into thinking that working around the clock, saving lives on eight hours of sleep a week, was a macho thing to do. Of course, in the next few decades, American medicine became an increasingly litigious line of work and its trainees rebelled against the abusive hierarchy.

After about a decade, the author was able to make a living as a solo practitioner treating private patients. But his dedication to his work (which often involved emergencies) still left him severely sleep-deprived and very stressed. He admitted to coming quite close to making a medical mistake that would have resulted in a patient’s kidney failure. Fortunately, his assistant asked him a simple question about the task at hand.

In another instance, the doctor bragged about saving the lives of a woman and her later prematurely-delivered baby who were in a serious car accident. He got all the kudos, but explained that the surgical team, the technology and the hospital were just as responsible for the positive outcome.

The doctor also recounted a legal case of an acquaintance of his (who was also a doctor). The acquaintance gave verbal instructions, which the mother of the patient (a young child who apparently died through no fault of the doctor’s) failed to follow. He wrote, “You should have seen this lady. She was reeking of alcohol but we weren’t allowed to say that in court…” The initial jury-award unexpectedly, outrageously exceeded his malpractice insurance coverage.

Read the book to learn about: hemorrhages, caesarean sections, hysterectomies, OB-GYN screening tools, etc., plus the sociological aspects of the doctor’s practice, and biographical info on him– including how he almost died at a young age (hint: he led an unhealthy lifestyle to say the least– “Two days before my double by-pass was scheduled, I signed myself out [of the hospital] against medical advice.” Exhibiting arrogance and a feeling of invincibility, no doubt.).

Portrait of the Scientist

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The Book of the Week is “Portrait of the Scientist As A Young Woman” by Lindy Elkins-Tanton, published in 2022. This memoir described the arduous but ultimately successful career journey of a scientist who is female; arduous because as is well known, science is still a male-dominated field in which there is discrimination against females. But despite all the indignities she suffered, she reached the pinnacle of academic leadership in subjects related to her field.

Elkins-Tanton studied geology in college in the mid-1980’s. Over a number of years, in 2008 and later, with other scientists (which included a geochronologist, a geophysicist, and igneous petrologists), she made several trips to Siberia to collect and test volcanic rocks to determine whether they “sent climate-changing gases high enough into the atmosphere to affect the whole globe.”

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, Bibliography and an index), that event happened at the end of the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era, about 300 million years ago. Around that time, there were mass extinctions. Such research was relevant to the argument that humans’ release of similar, toxic substances accounts for climate change.

The author related various anecdotes of childish behavior in her academic working-life in science. It is common sense that more and better scientific knowledge can be acquired through cooperation and information-sharing, but unfortunately, in the United States: vicious political goings-on in schools and the government, and competition for funding of projects and research, hinder progress.

In recent decades, space exploration around Mars has become the new “Space Race” for hegemonic nations with egotistical leaders (i.e., China, Russia and the United States). That last nation approved funding for its space-exploration agency, NASA, during president Trump’s tenure. Trump was anti-science all the way– except for rocket science– because it is about national pride, and of course, it’s a distraction from domestic troubles.

Over years of blood, sweat and tears, in a competition against other groups, the author led a team of multi-disciplinary experts in producing a proposal for a spacecraft that would travel around Mars and Jupiter and provide data about the Big Bang. In another leadership role, the author helped plan an unconventional curriculum for a college class.

Read the book to learn whose proposal won the competition, and much more about how the author dealt with professional and personal challenges.

Nice Guys Finish Last

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The Book of the Week is “Nice Guys Finish Last” by Leo Durocher with Ed Linn, published in 1975.

Durocher was born in 1906 in West Springfield, Massachusetts. He began his baseball career playing utility infielder for the New York Yankees in 1925. He developed a reputation as a contentious alpha male. Branch Rickey, one of his bosses through the decades, said he was a “… man with infinite capacity for immediately making a bad situation worse.”

Durocher squandered his initial $5,000 annual salary on clothing, food and nightclubs in New York City. Always in debt, he was a pool-hall hustler, too. But everyone wanted to be seen with him, as his social set consisted of celebrities who lived life in the fast lane.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, and Bibliography) professional baseball culture for most of the twentieth century was mean-of-spirit, with alcohol-fueled violence. Team personnel such as Durocher were always thinking of new dirty tricks to win games.

Durocher admitted to trash-talking to batters to psych them out so his team’s pitcher would strike them out. Players suffered injuries galore due to lack of protective gear that would minimize or prevent injuries; batters especially suffered, as team-managers told their pitchers to deliberately hit batters with their pitching.

If hit, the batter was awarded the equivalent of a single as compensation. Durocher wrote, “I once saw Diz [pitcher Dizzy Dean] hit seven straight Giants [the baseball team players] in Miami early in the exhibition season, because the Giants had the nerve to score seven runs off him in one inning.” Finally, in 1940 (!), team-executive Larry MacPhail of the Brooklyn Dodgers ordered his players to wear plastic batting-helmets. This, after batter Joe Medwick was knocked out by a pitch by Bob Bowman of the Saint Louis Cardinals.

Durocher claimed that during the time he managed the Dodgers, MacPhail “fired” him zillions of times in the mid-1930’s, but most of the time, didn’t really mean it, until a tipping point was reached. As is well known, from the 1970’s into the 1980’s, the “You’re fired” situation became a running joke between Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and team manager Billy Martin, in order to entertain baseball fans.

Read the book to learn of other similar episodes, and trials and tribulations Durocher faced in his career (hint– major issues included his own newspaper column; the ongoing hostilities between the Yankees and the Dodgers; the media’s anti-Durocher lies and smears in its baseball reporting; punishments imposed by a few baseball commissioners over the years for alleged libel committed by, and gambling among, members of the ball clubs managed by Durocher; and a few of the colorful characters whom Durocher recruited and managed) and more. Curiously, Durocher failed to mention performance-enhancing drugs.

Anyway, speaking of contentious alpha males, here’s some advice for voters in this ditty concerning the 2024 candidates.

SHOW, NOT TELL

sung to the tune of “Express Yourself” (Official Video) with apologies to Madonna.

[spoken] C’mon America, do you want to see substance and quality in 2024? Of course you have something to SAY about it. That is how we roll.

Ignore the candidates’ bragfest, people.
Feel FREE to put them to the test.
You know, you know you’ve got to make them disPENSE with their spiel.
We want to KNOW their positions for REAL.

Politicians PULL the strings and THEY reap all the gold.

Their eight-year plan is way too vast.

You know, that never lasts, no, no.

What we need is a maTURE public-servant whose policies are smart and sound.
What we usually GET is a king on a throne, who’s abOVE the law and brings us down.

Ignore the candidates’ bragfest, people.
Feel FREE to put them to the test.
You know, you know you’ve got to make them disPENSE with their spiel.
We want to KNOW their positions for REAL.

Deep tax cuts are the way to your heart, but they treat you like an airHEAD. No, budget plans are NOT romantic. We’re hypoCRITically in the red.

Well, there’s no FREE lunch in life, it is TIME for the nation to move ON. Govern-ment should give you chances, but you’ve got to CRE-ate wealth on-your-OWN.

Ignore the candidates’ bragfest, people.
Feel FREE to put them to the test.
You know, you know you’ve got to make them disPENSE with their spiel.
We want to KNOW their positions for REAL.

De-STRESS yourselves. You’ve got to make them SHOW, not tell. Hey, hey, hey, hey.
To distinguish the greats, make them have the debates.
Show what they’ve GOT. We’ll see the best of the lot.

After all, you won’t reGRET it. Think about how much support they deserve.
If they don’t deserve it, they shouldn’t get it.
It’s YOU they should serve. So please

Show themselves. Show themselves. Hey, hey.

What we need is a maTURE public servant whose policies are smart and sound.
What we usually GET is a king on a throne, who’s above the law and brings us down.

After all, you won’t reGRET it. Think about how much support they deserve.
If they don’t deserve it, they shouldn’t get it.
It’s YOU they should serve. So please

Ignore the candidates’ bragfest, people.
Feel FREE to put them to the test.
You know, you know you’ve got to make them disPENSE with their spiel.
We want to KNOW their positions for REAL.

De-STRESS yourselves. You’ve got to make them SHOW, not tell. Hey, hey, hey, hey.
To distinguish the greats, make them have the debates.
Show what they’ve GOT. We’ll see the best of the lot.

SHOW themselves. SHOW themselves. Hey, hey.

To distinguish the greats, make them have the debates.
Show what they’ve GOT. We’ll see the best of the lot.

De-STRESS yourselves. ReSPECT yourselves…

A Primate’s Memoir

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“Hearty, strong, large people who ate like hogs and worked like mad and filled their few leisure hours with hexes and witchcraft and clan feuds and revenge curses.”

No, not American political workers.

The above described the tribes such as Masai and Kisii– born in British East Africa. According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked an extensive list of detailed sources, and an index), the warrior-tribes fought against each other, and on behalf of Britain during the world wars and against other tribes in Tanzania, Somalia and Uganda, near the Kenya borders, into the late twentieth century.

The Book of the Week is “A Primate’s Memoir, A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons” by Robert M. Sapolsky, published in 2001.

Starting in 1979, on and off, over the course of fifteen years, the author began observing a 63-member troop of baboons in Kenya. He learned about every aspect of their lifestyles. He made many errors in attempting to acquire experience anesthetizing them in order to test their bodily fluids and excretions. He finally learned how to shoot a tranquilizer dart from a blowgun, but even that had its complications.

The author also gathered a vast quantity of knowledge about the Masai tribe in the village. The women there were voicing their opinion that their children should receive a formal education. However, at that time, there were no supplies, no teachers, and most school buildings could be tens of miles away from villages. Even when progress was made on that front, the Masai men used their children’s school fees to buy alcohol.

The men felt entitled to be leaders in their communities, where they did almost no work. Herding cows and goats and deriving food from the animals was the mainstay of the Masai economy. The women did the housework and childcare; the boys did the herding until they became men, and in their late twenties, they were considered village-elders deserving of respect.

The Masai associated the author– a white male in his twenties– with someone who was knowledgeable about providing medical treatment to their people. He looked all official, with a box of bandages and a stethoscope. So he was pressured into dispensing the few drugs he had for a few different maladies, such as chloroquine for malaria and antibiotics for eye infections.

After a couple of years of graduate-school fieldwork, the author noted that there was no clear-cut “second banana” to the alpha male of the baboon troop. In fighting, the males bit each other using their sharp canine teeth in addition to pummeling each other with their fists.

As the years went by, two lower-level males– afraid of the top leader– formed alliances, but the leader was still sufficiently physically powerful to dominate them. The two allied with a third male, but all three were still too weak to stand up to the top baboon. They partnered with an old-timer male. It took a little longer for the boss to put them down. Finally, six males banded together and defeated the alpha male.

Read the book to learn much, much more about the lifestyles of the baboons, the Masai, and about how powerful-people were never caught and punished for knowingly spreading a plague among some baboons (Hint: “The meat was dutifully sold [by the Masai to the butcher], everyone became sick. The police came to investigate…”)

As can be seen from the aforementioned, the baboons have a social system largely similar to humans’. Here’s a little ditty one alpha male (Donald Trump) is singing now.

NO ONE WILL EVER

sung to the tune of “Nobody Told Me” with apologies to the Estate of John Lennon.

My foes are always talking. What they say is absurd.

America, I love. About you I really care.

There’s Socialists in the White House. Now we have Wall Street bears.

The IRS is out to get me. But my campaign is going on.

I always have something cooking. I foil all their evil plots.

They sent us disease from China. I started the Wall we’ve got.

No one will ever bring me to my knees.

Kudos to me. Kudos to me.

In ’24 I’m runnin’. No one else has made a move.

I’LL be the winner. I’ve still got lots to prove.

I’m a big super hero to all who are good and true.

Everybody’s on a witch hunt, and hauling me into court.

I’m a privileged leader. That’s my retort.

I belong in a million movies. But too bad. Life is short.

No one will ever bring me to my knees.

Kudos to me. Most excellent, MAGA.

The economy’s doing poorly. Prices are getting HIGH.

The liberals are crying. They’re eating humble pie.

All of them are liars, and I ain’t too surprised.

No one will ever bring me to my knees.

Kudos to me. Most excellent, MAGA. Whoa.

The Education of A Speculator

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “The Education of A Speculator” by Victor Niederhoffer, published in 1997.

Born in 1943 in Brooklyn in New York City, the author sorted “market advisers and investment newsletter writers” into eight different categories, providing a brief description of their behaviors or personality traits. He classified himself as “The Other World Person” because he ignored the overpaid noisemakers and distractions of conventional media outlets that purported to convey information on which securities to buy, sell, or avoid.

The author’s two data sources for his commodities, currency trading and investing ideas consisted of the National Enquirer and his research results from testing all kinds of variables in statistics-calculations of past securities-market data using software. No other sources.

The mid-1990’s saw great advances in statistics software modeling that could process scads and scads of data; hence, market players could erroneously use past performance of investment vehicles faster than ever before for predictive purposes to help themselves and others lose their money faster than ever before. And those advances might have played a part in the scandals and financial crashes that have occurred with alarmingly increasing frequency in the last thirty years. Big Tech’s and Big Media’s incestuous oligopolies (fraught with political donations) just keep getting more hegemonic, so that power and money keep feeding on themselves ad infinitum. Globalization is yet another wrench in the works.

At the book’s writing, global trade had been maturing for decades, but capitalism was still in its infancy in many territories of the world; particularly in ones that were becoming politically democratic again, or for the first time in their histories. Many European countries were in the process of adopting cooperation rather than competition in their financial and economic dealings. A large proportion of them even voted to use one currency among them. The United States kept to itself, but more and more people around the world were starting to trade or invest in foreign securities, currencies and governmental financial entities, so chain reactions occurred more and more.

The Federal Reserve (aka Fed) has always been a major influence on America’s financial markets. The author contended that the Fed was just as clueless as the rest of the country about what effects its making of rate-adjustments would have on the nation’s economy. It is currently just as clueless. But its announcements are made with such confidence and arrogance, that a large number of their listeners are brainwashed into believing they are receiving valuable information.

The incumbents– known names pre-Internet–became the most influential voices in the financial sphere. The wiliest ones use propaganda techniques to paper over their wrong predictions. They never apologize for the losses stemming from their pronouncements. The walls of the author’s business office were lined with portraits of ones who had disastrous losses.

To be fair, the author himself told various anecdotes of his own failures. In 1992, he bought IBM stock for his own kids. That was an embarrassing mistake. He learned to cut his losses at a certain level of the total money he reinvested. And, he didn’t let his greed get out of control when he was winning.

The author was a champion squash player. One similarity between squash and speculating is externalities–opponents’ actions determine players’ actions in the game. So, for instance, in ten-pin bowling, there are no externalities. In squash, there are. In one college finals-match, the author moved his body in a way that tricked his opponent into thinking the ball was going to go in a certain direction, but it went the opposite way. Traders and investors play similar tricks in their communications in the financial markets. Conditions change rapidly so even the market propagandists’ winning streaks don’t last long.

The reason is:

First, independent thinkers make observations or find obscure data that works in making them money. Then software detects their trading tricks. So word gets around, and everyone else jumps on the bandwagon so that the advantage is lost.

Human beings want so badly— to believe they can predict the future, and love to fantasize about getting rich quick– that they tend to look for patterns and order where none exist. The author did provide one vast generalization that might be valuable, though. His statistical analysis between the years 1870 and 1995 inclusive showed that years ending in the digit 5 were good years, and those ending in 7 were bad, for the American stock markets. He didn’t speculate as to why.

However, politics is one major mover of markets, and the collective mood of the United States specifically, might be a bit more upbeat in years when political uncertainty is at a minimum. Presidents and other politicians begin or continue their terms during years ending in 5. The public might be unclear about their future policy directions, or weary of them by the years that end in 7.

Anyway, read the book to learn a boatload more about the author’s philosophy, his trials, tribulations and triumphs in the markets, his research results and comparisons between financial markets and: ecology, games and sports.