Compilation of Articles, Anecdotes and / or Interviews

The Snowball

[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 Snowball, Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” by Alice Schroeder, published in 2008. This authorized biography described how one of the world’s richest men, accumulated his wealth.

Born at the end of August 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, Buffett was obsessed with making money. He became the general partner of the eventual conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, an initially money-losing textile company.

In August 1991, a financial scandal broke at the bond brokerage, Salomon Brothers. One representative, on various occasions, had broken the law to corner a specific government-securities market in auctions. His indiscretions, about which his bosses knew and took no disciplinary action for months, cost Salomon’s competition $100 million.

Buffett was tasked with restoring Salomon’s reputation and his own, as he was a major investor in the firm. “Everything at Salomon was turned topsy-turvy as the new culture of openness went into effect.”

BUT, the late college basketball coach John Wooden always said– one should worry about one’s character, not one’s reputation. One’s character is indicated by the following cliche: “When you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.” In other words, if you associate with people of bad character– stooping to their level, your own bad character will be exhibited.

Buffett helped punish the former executives at fault, by refusing to pay their legal fees and severance pay. The main perpetrator went to arbitration to restore his severance pay. The arbitrators ruled against him; he didn’t get a penny. The book’s author commented it was unclear why he was perceived to have been punished so severely.

As securities-industry insiders, those arbitrators were wisely trying to hold up the perpetrator as an example– to deter future bad behavior. Clearly, unmitigated hubris and unconscionable greed was “in the air” and was not going to stop anytime soon.

Numerous monster-sized financial scandals caused havoc in markets worldwide from the late 1980’s onward. Countless innocent people were fired– who had nothing to do with the scandals! The author omitted the inconvenient fact that in 1993, an unsupervised, rogue bond-department trader at Kidder Peabody caused that firm to go belly-up.

Buffett was a strong believer in pay-for performance. He drastically slashed Salomon’s employee bonuses because they didn’t perform– make money for Salomon’s shareholders, who were the real owners of the firm. Unsurprisingly, the employees were mad as hell, and thought the billionaire Buffett was a hypocrite. By the mid-1990’s, prosecutors would act aggressively to indict financial law-breakers unless they showed “extreme contrition and cooperation” when caught. How times have changed.

The leadership of the United States has been reduced to a small group of alpha males with hubris syndrome and their lawyers, running the country like a corrupt Wall Street brokerage. Economic decline is inevitable, unless the next president behaves the way Buffett did– legally requiring transparency and competence rather than loyalty. He or she must bring adult supervision to the major drains on the nation’s treasury: war / military spending, tax cuts, space exploration, and in the most recent twelve years– litigation.

Anyway, read the book to learn much, much more about Buffett, his family, and his times.

How to Save the Amazon

The Book of the Week is “How to Save the Amazon, A Journalist’s Quest for Answers” by Dom Phillips and various authors, published in 2025. This hodgepodge of a volume listed various issues related to the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, which spans eight different countries. Nevertheless, the title was misleading in that all the articles except for one about Cost Rica– were about the Amazon region in Brazil.

Over the decades, there has been a tug of war between monetizing of, and attempting to enforce laws to protect the Amazon region, involving:

changing politics
supply and demand for real estate
supply and demand for products such as fossil fuels, fish, fruits and nuts.

Anyway, simply enacting laws, and then underfunding and understaffing the laws’ enforcement NEVER works in such an environmentally delicate, resource-rich region where the people born there have a simple lifestyle, and aren’t sufficiently powerful to defend their way of life against exploitation of their land.

For decades, business people have worked around the Amazon river in gold mining, commercial fishing, logging, rubber tapping, farming, oil wildcatting, and cattle ranching (beef production).

On and off, Brazil’s government agencies, and the Pastoral Land Commission (a Catholic organization) have assisted the Indigenous people who have small farms in the region. There had been programs similar to those implemented in the western United States in the 1800’s, of homesteading and sharecropping. BUT, more than half of the population of Brazil consists of Amazon-region residents (Indigenous peoples) whose dark skin makes them subject to discrimination.

There are tens of different Indigenous peoples who choose to live in the region, isolating themselves from the rest of the world. Their mentality is described in the song, “Colors of the Wind” from the Disney movie soundtrack Pocahontas. One Indigenous individual interviewed by one of the authors wrote, “That land could be owned by a single person is unthinkable to us because everyone’s survival depends on it.”

The Indigenous peoples and NGOs are the only people who should be stewards of the land, because they live and work there, on the ground. Outsiders are mostly bureaucrats and exploiters.

One can get a bank to finance cattle-ranching, as beef production is a major way to make the land productive. So the government encourages homesteaders to go into cattle-ranching. However, it deforests the land.

The entrepreneurs behave like organized crime syndicates– ruthlessly killing people who obstruct their illegal profiteering, and donating big bucks to political candidates to perpetuate their lawlessness.

In addition, ironically, the Indigenous people aid and abet the entrepreneurs! They serve as slave labor in the entrepreneurs’ businesses because their education and skills are insufficient to make a living otherwise.

Bottom line: the Amazon rain forest is one of the few remaining resource-rich regions on earth that has yet to be completely looted– that could still be used for more good than evil.

Read the book to learn about: the annual Davos-like conference called COP where the (mostly greedy, power-hungry) attendees pretend to wring their hands over the destruction of the Amazon rain forest; the entrepreneurs who do agroforestry; the dreamers who want to turn their land into environmentally friendly utopias; and the one small cause for optimism that can improve the situation (hint: high-technology satellite images can measure deforestation).

We Came We Saw We Left [sic]

The Book of the Week is “We Came We Saw We Left [sic; no punctuation], A Family Gap Year” by Charles Wheelan, published in 2021.

Beginning in September 2016, two American parents and their three teenagers (two daughters and younger son) went on an eight-and-a-half-month world tour to obscure, and even dangerous places. The family’s travel nurse advised them about which vaccines and drugs to get, so as to keep them healthy. Even so, one of the daughters contracted leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating parasite.

While they were in Colombia, citizens were getting ready to vote on a referendum whether to reward FARC (the political group) with cash and seats in their country’s Congress, rather than punish them with long prison sentences– to get them to stop their decades-long kidnappings, killings and drug trafficking.

The parents home-schooled their kids on the trip. The rebellious, deadline-missing daughter behaved thusly: “Sophie spent the subsequent twenty-four hours [before an academic deadline] texting, posting on Facebook, watching Netflix– everything but sending the thank-you note…”

As with any long, multi-cultural trip, the family had adventures. Two of the family members took a twelve-hour round-trip via taxi to the consulate in Mandalay to get visas to enter India, because they saw that the initial consulate they visited in Myanmar (formerly Burma) was going to give them the bureaucratic run-around, even if they were to offer the clerk ample bribes. Further, they needed to have all of their fingerprints taken to get the visas to enter India. One daughter had lost a finger at a young age. The software in the fingerprint-taking machine could not deal with that.

Read the book to learn of the family’s many other adventures, on an obviously life-threatening but eye-opening, uniquely educational kind of trip that is not for everyone.

Incognito

The Book of the Week is “Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain” by David Eagleman, published in 2011. This hodgepodge of a volume jumped from one subject to another on brain function in connection with: legal issues, technological advances in brain-screening, materialism and reductionism. The author argued that those last two ideologies will never fully explain the world’s most complicated neurological problems because humans are just too complicated.

The term “cognitive reserve” means multiple redundancies of brain power. One who seeks brain challenges throughout his or her life, possesses more of it than someone who doesn’t. An autopsy of the former kind of person might show physical manifestations of senility, but he or she might have had no behavioral symptoms of senility when they were alive.

Someone with “anosognosia” has delusional thinking. He truly believes he’s doing what he’s doing. As is well known, a world leader who has anosognosia can be dangerous.

AI statistics-software (hereinafter referred to as “AI”) in any subject-area of life (including brain-related ones) can generate credible evidence that there is a physical cause for a suspect’s behavior. In the future, this will result in more creative legal arguments to defend criminal-suspects. Physical causes can include genetic mutation, stroke, tumor, or chemical imbalance in the brain, or combination thereof.

Traditionally, elected officials in law enforcement had meted out punishment or ordered rehabilitation for a perpetrator, pursuant to the views of political donors. BUT, the predictive power of AI is ushering in a new era of sentencing-guidelines (that proves what works in reducing recidivism) based on numerical data rather than on the biased, unduly-influenced opinions of psychiatrists and parole-board members.

However, there is the danger that a hacker, or disgruntled or unduly-influenced employee could still lie with statistics, for their own selfish purposes.

Read the book to learn more about brain function (and dysfunction).

Nothing Random / In the Ring – BONUS POST

WARNING: VERY, VERY LONG POST

The first Bonus Book of the Week is “Nothing Random, Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built” by Gayle Feldman, published in 2026. Ironically, the writing in this tome was awkward and contained bad grammar in certain spots. Anyway, the author recounted the U.S. book industry of a bygone era– a decades-long saga typical for a business run by alpha males with clashing egos.

The reader might recall that prior to the internet, publishing a physical book required months and months of advance preparation, involving what would now be considered a bloated staff. The publishing personnel took pride in their work, and truly cared about doing quality work. It wasn’t all about the big dollar sign as it is nowadays.

In summer 1963, author Ayn Rand, on contract with publisher Random House, was writing a book of essays, one of which was super-controversial. Rand contended that JFK was fascistic, supporting her arguments by quoting the president, showing how he sounded like Hitler and Goering. She truly believed that the most prosperous nation would have purely capitalistic economics, and completely libertarian politics. She felt capitalism is a meritocratic system.

But to start with, capitalism requires a government that provides and maintains the systems of a healthy, well-educated workforce. When private entities provide essential services such as healthcare and education, there occurs corruption– because profit-seeking entities favor money over people. Therefore, the government needs to have some socialistic systems in the forms of: financial assistance for certain of its citizens, locally run public schools, public libraries and public transportation, to name a few.

Capitalism is a meritocracy only insofar as there’s no cronyism between the government and business leaders. Pure meritocracy is a fantasy. There is always a certain level of corruption in government, that waxes and wanes with the tenor of the times. This is inevitable due to the greed of human nature. Public-private partnerships are a necessary evil in a democratic society.

So arguably, Rand’s political and economic systems are a recipe for the eventual formation of an oligopolistic oligarchy, run by fighting warlords. Sounds familiar.

One bright spot in today’s sorry state of affairs in America, can be seen in today’s communications environment: This is the Golden Age of Free Speech. The internet has allowed anyone and everyone to have their say if they want to– on social media, or if they get their own website– with no censorship. And no one needs to have great wealth or power anymore, in order to do so.

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about Bennett Cerf’s life and times.

The second Bonus Book of the Week is “In the Ring, The Trials of A Washington Lawyer” by Robert S. Bennett, published in 2008. This wordy volume contained awkward phrasing and bad grammar in certain spots. But it showed how tolerance for criminality in the United States government has skyrocketed.

The huge surge in the demand for white-collar criminal-defense attorneys in recent decades, is one indication. Bennett thought the attorney’s job is to do everything possible short of illegal or unethical behavior, to help save his client’s reputation and freedom. He recounted several legal cases he handled.

One, in 1981, involved U.S. Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr., who– after indisputable evidence of corruption surfaced– was convicted in the ABSCAM scandal. The investigating committee was truly nonpartisan. After the trial, Williams’ fellow senators felt his continued presence compromised the dignity of their government body, and therefore, they were obligated to expel him. Williams eventually resigned. HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED.

Unethical behavior and criminality have reached such a screaming crescendo that this country’s TOP leader (not simply a senator!) and his cronies are staying in power. And Congress is letting them.

The Democrats are letting the GOP have their way, thinking voters will blame the GOP– as the GOP has a majority in Congress; Democrats think they will win back a lot of seats in the midterm elections. But some voters are angry at the Democrats for looking weak, and not fighting back.

The concentration of power among the billionaires has gotten so extreme, that in the near future, the United States must return to the 1950’s era mentality of: (like the healthcare company ChenMed’s culture) Americans’ expecting to be treated by medical doctors who are trusted family friends; and taxing the rich as the standard, acceptable way of life.

Or else, the United States will continue to devolve into the kleptocracy of a Third World country.

Bennett showed how, when an international incident occurs, there are complicated, incestuous global relationships that require delicate negotiations. In the case of a 1997 Soviet-Georgian diplomat’s drunken-driving accident in Washington, D.C. in which someone died, controversy ensued as to whether the diplomat should have immunity from jail-time or fining. The U.S. could have instead cut off financial aid to Soviet Georgia as punishment. However, retaliatory action could be taken against American diplomats at embassies around the world.

The author wrote, “I have always felt that there was more business for criminal lawyers representing companies when the Republicans were in power rather than the Democrats.”

Anyway, read the book to learn of several additional situations which Bennett felt he handled skillfully, despite his having to deal with alpha males with hubris syndrome, James Bond wannabes, black ops and CIA operatives.

Regarding the aforementioned issues, here’s a song that answers the question: Why are the billionaires keeping Trump in office? It’s what Trump is singing to the few people still working for him.

U.S. of A.

sung to the tune of “Y.M.C.A.” [the album version] with apologies to The Village People and to whomever else the rights may concern.

My men, there’s no need to feel shame. I say, my men, immortalize my name. I say my men, ’cause I rule this great game. There’s no need to ask, am I stopping?

My men, I love making dough. I say my men, here is where you can go. You can stay here. I’ll rule the world for all time, all on the American taxpayers’ dime.