Category: Compilation of Articles, Anecdotes and / or Interviews

The Lords of Strategy

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The Book of the Week is “The Lords of Strategy, The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World” by Walter Kiechel III, published in 2010. This wordy, redundant volume showed how: times have changed; capitalism has become leaner and meaner; and in one way, American society has stayed the same since the Era after WWII.

In the 1950’s, the major reasons American companies began to acquire other companies included:

  • Dividends paid by public companies were highly taxed, so instead of paying dividends to shareholders, a growing company that was sitting on a pile of cash would reinvest it by acquiring other companies.
  • There were antitrust laws prohibiting companies from acquiring others in their same industry, so the companies bought others in industries unrelated to their core competencies, or snapped up companies in their supply chain.

By the end of the 1960’s, companies were going bust because, blinded by greed and ego, the stupid corporate executives had no experience in industries unrelated to their own.

In the early 1970’s, management-consultants began to counsel their clients (who mostly manufactured physical products) on strategy. Also, Boston Consulting Group began to advise their consumer-goods clients to engage in deficit financing to grow their businesses. Corporate executives began to adopt an even more greedy mentality. Maximizing shareholder value became their main goal.

The author listed four game-changers of recent decades:

  • deregulation;
  • new technologies including computers, the internet, the maximization of computing power and simultaneous minimization of costs in connection therewith;
  • the way target-companies wised up after the hostile takeover-mania of the 1980’s; and
  • globalization.

As America has switched to a service-oriented economy in the last fifty years or so, the consultants have been forced to pivot to advise clients on human-resources, public-relations and technology. In the early 1980’s, a Harvard Business School professor did a study of senior executives at major U.S. corporations, and found that their game-changing stemmed not from bossing people around or speechifying, but rather, from infinite interactions with their social networks whose relationships they’d been developing over the course of years.

The author commented that when internet use was becoming widespread, there was a brief flirtation with socialistic entities arising from the open-source movement, including but not limited to: the Linux operating system, wikis, BitTorrent, and Napster. But the inclination of the American powers-that-be, to monetize everything, has largely put the kibosh on those.

Generation X and the Millennials have picked up the cudgel of capitalism and it remains to be seen how Gen Z is going to make a living. Having evolved rapidly in the last thirty years, the internet is currently plagued by creative destruction. But not to worry. There will be jobs in national healthcare, geriatrics, building charging-stations for hybrid vehicles, and harnessing renewable energy. Lying politicians (a redundant phrase) will say they “created” those jobs. Don’t vote for those politicians.

On the other hand, it’s deja vu all over again in American society. Nowadays, AI software is replacing consultants because: American management-consultants were mostly elitist, sexist, racist alpha-males in the “old boy network,” and AI software is created mostly by elitist, sexist, racist greedy alpha-males, still in the “old boy network” (but that network is slowly shrinking).

And the stereotypes about the consultants (and now AI software creators) are still true: They’re like seagulls– the fly in, leave a mess, and fly out; they show their clients a line graph that looks like a hockey-stick– that represents how their services will do financial miracles for the clients’ business, but the line graph has no correlation with reality.

Read the book to learn the details.

A Flower Traveled in My Blood

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The Book of the Week is “A Flower Traveled in My Blood, The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children” by Haley Cohen Gilliland, published in 2025.

In 1966, General Juan Carlos Ongania became the military dictator of Argentina. He oppressed hippies– arresting, torturing and killing them pursuant to their unacceptable clothing, hair and music. He imposed anti-capitalist economic reforms that caused inflation to soar. Unrest erupted on the streets of Buenos Aires.

People who wanted to become revolutionaries, joined one of the “alphabet soup” of political groups; mostly they were students or jobless youths. One such group was the Montonero, which got combat-operations training in Cuba. The most extreme groups attacked government forces, detonated bombs and effected kidnappings. They were mostly James Bond wannabes.

In the mid-1970’s, military leader Jorge Rafael Videla came to power. His police-force allegedly investigated fraud, but in the second half of the 1970’s alone, that force abducted, tortured and killed or “disappeared” an estimated thirty thousand people, including children.

One woman got so frustrated going around to law enforcement and government offices looking for her disappeared son that, in late April 1977, she staged a “sit-in” with other women in the main public square in Buenos Aires. They were risking their lives, as Argentina’s dictator banned assembly of three or more people.

The group marched weekly, and were eventually named “Madres de Plaza de Mayo.” Their mothers and mothers-in-law began a letter-writing campaign to all different parties– the Pope, ambassadors, journalists, the UN, Red Cross, human rights organizations, etc.– who might help them find their grown-children and grandchildren who had been taken as newborns or toddlers and adopted mostly by military couples who wanted children.

In October 1983, Argentina was to hold its first democratic election for its top leader in forty years. The military thus signed the National Pacification Law– pardoning itself for all of its past crimes. Further, the giant cover-up regarding the disappeared, continued. Even so, the aforementioned mothers and grandmothers were beginning to track down adoptees– proving their blood relations through genetic testing.

Read the book to learn about Argentina’s decades of: political gyrations (and those of other South American countries due to an actual conspiracy), and complications experienced by, associated with and progress made by, the movement begun by those intent on finding their disappeared loved ones.

The Picnic

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The Book of the Week is “The Picnic, A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain” by Matthew Longo, published in 2024. This volume, whose language is awkward in spots, detailed some of the changes– especially in Hungary– that led to major transformations of balances of power in the world.

In sum, thousands of people acting together (rather than one dissident here and there) whose dissatisfaction reached critical mass, are what forced Eastern Europe to radically change politically, culturally, and socially, starting in the late 1980’s. Or, as the American 1960’s counter-culture expressed it: “United we stand. Divided they catch us one by one.”

The author called people who fled East Germany at the tail end of the 1980’s, refugees. They were actually immigrants. Refugees are fleeing from war, anarchy or starvation where their lives are in danger 24/7. Immigrants move to a different country because their own country dooms them to a life of crushing oppression, but no immediate life-threatening danger.

Anyway, by the late 1980’s, there appeared signs that the Soviet yoke of Communism in Hungary was becoming frayed, as its leaders sensed the people were approaching the point at which beheadings or a firing squad of themselves was in the offing.

In 1988,

  • “Moscow” (the authority that ruled all Soviet satellites, which included Hungary) allowed Hungarians to form non-Communist parties, although the new parties had only advisory power;
  • Moscow restored the freedom of assembly;
  • Hungary’s economy was tanking, so its Communist functionaries appointed as its prime minister, a young economist– Miklos Nemeth, a believer in free markets and democratic elections– who had studied in the US;
  • Moscow began to allow the issuance of special travel visas for families to drive into Austria to shop for Western consumer goods with a $350 government subsidy.

And in 1989,

  • The Hungarian minister of state delivered a radio address, shocking listeners (who had been brainwashed by Soviet propaganda for decades) with the truth about the 1956 uprising and incredibly, he wasn’t shot or hanged by his comrades;
  • In Budapest, police allowed a public protestor’s recitation of a poem about tyranny;
  • The Hungarian prime minister asked Mikhail Gorbachev to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary, and the latter agreed to withdraw a few, as a public relations gesture;
  • Through Gorbachev’s permissive policy that each Soviet satellite’s leader could take whatever political actions he deemed necessary to keep the peasants from revolting, Nemeth ordered the dismantling of electrified barbed wire at Hungary’s borders with Austria and Czechoslovakia;
  • Some of the Stasi (the ubiquitous, brutal [Soviet] East German spying agency– the new breed of “Nazis” after WII), actually directed East Germans toward a border-crossing location, or stood by and let Hungarians and West Germans help the East Germans run through the gap in the barbed wire, in order to cross the border to Austria or Czechoslovakia.

There were countless other societal changes taking place in Eastern Europe. In June 1989, a few Hungarian dissidents who were forming a new political party, planned a picnic as a symbol of friendship among Hungarians, East Germans and Austrians.

In October 1989, the GDR turned forty years old. “There were lavish parties, honoring years of Soviet-East German cooperation.” Small wonder why the peasants were revolting. By November 1989, the Soviets had secretly moved all their nuclear weapons located in Hungary, to Ukraine. By the dawn of the 1990’s, the Hungarian Communist Party had ultimately renamed itself the “Hungarian Republic.” BUT a one-party State is not a democracy!

The former Stasi spies who got new jobs after the USSR dissolved, felt right at home helping Western businesses seek new markets in Eastern Europe. For, skills required for the jobs included exploitation, expropriation, and data collection.

The author wrote that a compromise between capitalism and socialism is possible. In 2009, he had a reunion with an East German couple who had fled to West Germany. They were very anti-Communist, but also shunned using crassly commercial, modern technology such as mobile phones and email. They didn’t care that they weren’t keeping up with the Joneses. Their experience in the East taught them to be grateful for the material possessions they did have.

But it’s actually not that simple. If everyone disengaged completely from their automated lifestyles and electronic communications, the world economy would crash.

Read the book to learn about various East Germans who left their homeland for what they perceived to be a better life after seeing how the non-Communist world lived, and about some of the historical changes wrought in their region of the globe.

The Rebels

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The Book of the Week is “The Rebels, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (hereinafter referred to as “AOC”) and the Struggle for a New American Politics” by Joshua Green, published in 2024. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author described some practices of the U.S. government that has led to its currently precarious economic state of affairs.

As of early 1978, president Jimmy Carter had failed to keep three economics-related campaign promises with which he tried to incite the hard-working American masses: income-tax reform (angry at the rich’s business tax-deductions); a stimulus (because stagflation was dogging everyone’s pocketbook); and an energy bill (due to rising oil prices). June 1978 saw California’s voters approve a huge reduction in property tax.

In October 1978, the Carter administration passed a tax-bill– the Revenue Act– that actually favored the rich and Wall Street. The bill cut capital gains taxes; funds were shifted from investing in factories and equipment to gambling in the securities markets. The president could have vetoed the bill, but instead, he sold out because his party would benefit with mere weeks to go before midterm election-day. Ironically, Ralph Nader, who was known for advocating for consumers, urged the government to deregulate airlines and trucking. It turned out that deregulation of these exceptional industries was to hurt consumers (and their employees!) in a few short years.

There also occurred the privatizing of retirement funds in the form of 401(k). As is well known, it was touted as a tax shelter, but it gave Wall Street more control over Americans’ hard-earned money.

After Carter lost his bid for reelection, Democrats such as Paul Tsongas, Mike Dukakis, Bill Bradley and Bill Clinton pivoted toward neoliberalism– appeasing the corporate community with anti-union legislation, deregulation, and allowing monopolistic practices.

Unsurprisingly, the above, and the implementation of a bunch of other unwise economic policies, led to the 2008 financial crash. The American people were understandably very angry to learn that the government bailed out the crash’s institutional perpetrators (whose obscenely paid executives had jobs that weren’t pay-for-performance, and who still got their bonuses); never mind helping hard-working ordinary Americans.

According to the author, the bailout cost U.S. taxpayers $32 billion instead of between $700 billion and $1.5 trillion. It is impossible for laypeople to believe that “experts” can accurately estimate those kinds of numbers, given the pressure on “experts” to propagandize. Ever since, there is almost total disbelief of all economics numbers spouted by those “experts.” It is actually the age-old activity of lying with statistics.

The author wrote that, as a newly elected U.S. senator from New York State, Hillary Clinton paid her dues by playing well with others, making friends with strange bedfellows, while U.S. senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, nearly a decade later, behaved in a confrontational manner that garnered applause from the little people– grassroots supporters.

The author contended that the aforementioned Warren paved the way for the Independent Bernie Sanders’ surprising popularity among the young voters in the 2016 Democrat primary election for president. His presence in the primary affected the choices of voters in the general election, adversely affecting Hillary’s chance to win.

The author explained why AOC achieved what most politicos thought was going to be impossible. “Running as a Democratic Socialist, she [AOC] drew a large, multiracial progressive coalition that overwhelmed an incumbent, in [Joseph] Crowley, who personified the Wall Street-friendly Democrat uninterested in local concerns but assumed to be too powerful to be held to account.”

Read the book to learn much more about how the individuals named in the book’s title have influenced American politics in a major way in the last fifteen years.

ENDNOTE: In sum, American voters would like to see their government return to rule of law, civility and transparency! They would also like to see political workers and candidates: answer the questions asked of them, and clarify what they mean. Various terms of late have been given emotionally-charged interpretations to incite people who easily get upset at political news. For example, climate change and woke mean different things to different people. Instantaneous communication among Americans has made them hyper-aware of shenanigans in the staged and scripted reality show that is currently American politics.

Breakneck

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WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Breakneck, China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang, published in 2025. In this hodgepodge of a volume whose language is awkward in spots, the author made vast generalizations in comparing China to the United States, sometimes oversimplifying things.

The author contended that China’s economy has grown in leaps and bounds economically in the last few decades because its government has thrown vast resources into engineering.

The author argued that the United States is in political and economic decline: due to its obstructionist legal system, and for failing to stop the offshoring of its factories to lower-cost facilities in China.

Capitalism involves profit-seeking. Communism involves a government that steals the economic surplus of the profit-seekers. Socialism is a collective, non-profit-seeking effort to provide essential services that fulfill basic human needs such as food and shelter. Some believe that the government is obligated to provide these essential services to the people.

Historically, business start-ups in the capitalist economic system have been forced to rely on mostly private funding. In the United States, when a business becomes monster-sized and politically entrenched, it gets government assistance in terms of tax breaks and legislative favoritism. The United States government sometimes makes taxpayers pay for a corporate bailout after executives have bankrupted their employer.

China’s Communist system grants a revolving credit facility to all businesses that start to show profitability, taking a financial interest in them. Some businesses still go bankrupt later on, due to a proliferation of fierce competitors engaged in price wars, because they jump into making products unrelated to their core competencies. Those failed companies don’t get bailed out. There is creative destruction.

Economics 101 says a nation needs to have a healthy, well-educated workforce to stay in good economic shape. Both China and the United States sabotage themselves in this regard in different ways.

China has become capitalistic of late– rewarding entrepreneurs who build hospitals rather than their staffs who dispense their medical expertise, resulting in engineers with robust financial health, and patients with poor physical health.

In the United States, whenever the government tries to be socialistic– say, by passing laws that financially benefit consumers who are patients, students or tenants– the medical providers, schools and landlords whose bottom lines are adversely affected, simply pass the extra costs onto those consumers by raising prices!

The bright spot in America’s selling out its manufacturing is: worldwide economic incestuousness has given rise to co-dependence, and thus forced cooperation among rivalrous nations. All the countries heavily involved on the world stage must sit down at the bargaining table now, or their own people will face severe economic hardships.

Of course, there have been world leaders in the recent past whose heartlessness sparked peasant revolts. The current leaders know that, and in order to stay in power, they keep their populations just fat and happy enough, amid their saber-rattling at their (phony) enemies.

The author commented that Boeing lost its way. It used to have a knowledge base– had a reputation for institutional memory– learning from mistakes. Its products inevitably would improve because it paid attention to process. Now China is the country obsessed with process rather than product.

A stupid employer has workers meet to discuss a recently failed project, but whose list of suggestions of how to do better in the future is shoved in a drawer, never to be seen again. A wise employer will add the list to its knowledge-base so no one has to reinvent the wheel. China currently has the latter bent.

Other factors at play in the current situation include: China has one-Party rule while America’s two political parties are in a constant tug-of-war over how to deal with its fragmented and complex economic issues. True, America’s production of consumer goods has drastically declined in recent decades, while all kinds of services now drive its economy. Its attorneys are obstructionist; however, the glacial pace of construction of infrastructure is also due to the politicians’ goal to stay in power.

No voters want politicians to raise taxes to pay for infrastructure. So the politicians don’t raise taxes; so, no infrastructure. Besides, ground-breaking ceremonies are long forgotten at re-election time. Politicians know that campaigns are more likely to succeed through mudslinging rather than through (usually empty) bragging about accomplishments.

The author asks a question for the ages: “Should it [the United States] really go all in on artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and other things that the Communist Party mocks as fictitious economy?”

Read the book to learn about additional issues facing China and America, their histories, and about their quest to dominate the world while they have been reversing their roles of late, politically and economically.

One last telling quote: “His reign was characterized by regulatory forbearance, perhaps because he was a personal beneficiary of the sector’s growth.” – written about Lu Wei, director of the Cyberspace Administration in China, the chief internet regulator prior to 2018. Sounds familiar.

ENDNOTE: The author failed to mention that, prior to this writing, the United States had illegal immigrants making significant contributions to its GDP, while China’s sex industry makes significant contributions to its GDP. Sexual issues in China are linked to its “underground” economy, while sexual issues in the United States are a whole different ball of wax.

Speaking of such issues in the United States, two assumptions apply in connection with unwanted sexual advances.

  1. The crimes were more evil when the victims were under eighteen years of age.
  2. If the alleged perpetrator was punished through jail time, job loss or fining, he was guilty.

That is not to say the alleged perpetrator wasn’t guilty if he wasn’t punished, but mere accusations are less conclusive indicators of guilt than actual punishment. And yes, lack of punishment can also indicate how powerful the alleged perpetrator was when the allegations surfaced.

Here’s an alphabetical list of the most famous American alleged perpetrators of unwanted sexual advances:

Roger Ailes, Woody Allen, Mario Batali, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Louis C.K., John Conyers, Jr., P. Diddy, Jeffrey Epstein, Mark Foley, Al Franken, Matt Gaetz, Dennis Hastert, Michael Jackson, Brett Kavanaugh, R. Kelly, Matt Lauer, Roy Moore, Larry Nassar, Billy O’Reilly, Bob Packwood, Kevin Spacey, Jerry Sandusky, Clarence Thomas, Strom Thurmond, John Tower, Donald Trump, George Tyndall, Mike Tyson, Anthony Weiner, Harvey Weinstein.

In the United States, the causes of sex crimes are of course, complex and fraught with political, cultural and social hysteria.

The ongoing hysteria is more lucrative than prevention. Sex crimes create business for: lawyers, therapists, the media (including social media), the medical industry, the justice system, law enforcement, and politicians. Also, who is still largely in charge of these parties? And what is the gender of all of the alleged perpetrators listed above? Arguably, preventing sex crimes threatens America’s paternalistic society.

A German Generation

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The Book of the Week is “A German Generation, An Experimental History of the Twentieth Century” by Thomas A. Kohut, published in 2012. This hodgepodge of a volume alternated essays with personal stories of Germans coming of age during the Nazi Era.

After WWI, the German government brainwashed people into thinking the Versailles Treat was outrageously unfair to Germany. The government pushed extreme nationalism to make Germany (the “fatherland”) great again by trying to take back the territories (in Denmark, Czechoslovakia and Poland) it had occupied during the war. The Weimar Republic (1919 – early 1933) was chaotic, with lack of strong leadership to quell rioting and appease striking workers in Berlin amid sky-high inflation in 1923.

The Third Reich (early 1933 – May 1945)– father figures– encouraged kids, and former soldiers who were politically right-wing, rabidly anti-union and anti-socialist to join youth and social groups in which ability to withstand hardships would prove their masculinity.

All through the 1920’s, and 1930’s, both boys and girls in those groups, mostly middle class, went hiking and camping together, but shunned sex, alcohol and tobacco. The groups sang mostly military and hunting songs, played games and danced. Every couple of years, numerous groups got together, marching in uniforms, flying flags. They thought of themselves as self-starters, but nonpartisan. However, in 1932, all bets were off, as the Hitler Youth swallowed up all the other youth groups. Some people quit their group, as they recognized what a power-hungry megalomaniac Hitler really was, and didn’t like him.

There were various political factions, each with a different ideology: the two major factions wore brown (Nazis) or red (Communists). The National Socialist (Nazi) Party initially encouraged the cooperation of economic classes, and rewarded people pursuant to their accomplishments rather than pursuant to their good luck when they were “to the manor born.”

People volunteered to live communally, doing farm or household chores at work collectives in the countryside for a few months at a time. Teenage boys who had completed apprenticeships but couldn’t find work were sent there to keep them off the streets and out of trouble. Eventually, a stint in a collective became mandatory for everyone until 1933, when the collectives were disbanded. The Hitler Youth encouraged fierce competition in sports, music and work, and demanded blind obedience to rigid rules in a tattle-tale environment. There was extreme societal pressure to join the Hitler Youth, and when one got older, the Nazi Party.

In the first half of the twentieth century, there were paradoxes with regard to females’ roles in German society. They got the vote in 1919. In the mid-1930’s, they took on domestic responsibilities of the men who were drafted into the military. But the women were still expected to do housework and child-rearing. Through the 1930’s, the Nazi Party gave monetary incentives to encourage Aryan Germans to get married and have children, to help perpetuate the “master race.”

“The Gestapo strategy of focusing on target groups and leaving ordinary Germans alone continued during the war, although the pressure on ‘enemies of the people’ and on ‘community aliens,’ especially Jews, was increased.” Sounds familiar.

Read the book to learn many more details about: the experiences and mentalities of the Germans from the 1920’s onward; the yawning generation gap after the war; how the Germans were brainwashed by propaganda into cooperating among themselves while behaving fiercely competitively toward their perceived enemies (which included specific individuals in their own communities!), to coming together again, while rationalizing away their lack of courage in communication and action to stem the hatreds in their society.

The Fifties

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The Book of the Week is “The Fifties” by David Halberstam, published in 1993. This slightly sloppily edited hodgepodge of a volume consisted of a compilation of the author’s journalism entries. As usual, there is nothing new under the sun. The decade was characterized by alpha males with hubris syndrome, egos pushing and shoving, in all areas of American life.

“He delighted in control of the political apparatus, and he started each day by meeting with a trusted aide from the secret police, who brought him up to date on gossip gathered from wiretaps.”

Actually, the above was written about Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista. For most of the 1950’s, he was the CIA’s friend. Until he wasn’t.

In connection with the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur exhibited “arrogance, foolishness, and vainglory… taking a small war that was already winding down and expanding it” to fight against Communist superpower China, so the war dragged on for two additional years; “he was to damage profoundly America’s relations with China…”

Matthew Ridgway helped save a few American soldiers’ lives by personally visiting all of them in South Korea to boost their morale, while MacArthur stayed in Tokyo, thinking of himself as king of the world. MacArthur thought it was Truman who was irrational. As is well known, about twenty years later, president Richard Nixon repaired America’s relationship with China, but prolonged the Vietnam War.

By the mid-1950’s, the evolution of the American labor movement had taken an ironic, hypocritical turn: Unions allowed Wall Street to invest their pension funds in the securities markets on their behalf.

In December 1955, the arrest of Rosa Parks was the last straw– prompting the Montgomery bus boycott. A bunch of factors came together, one thing led to another, spurring great political changes. Just a few included:

  • Parks was so emotionally tired of the oppression she and her fellow dark-skinned people suffered, she felt she had nothing to lose by rebelling.
  • Parks had friends in high places in the Civil Rights Movement.
  • Approximately three-quarters of Montgomery, Alabama public-bus riders were black, and of those, most were women who took buses across town to get to their jobs as servants in the white community.
  • The white community refused to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.
  • The articulate Martin Luther King, Jr. became the public-relations leader of the Movement, which was nonviolent, and his religious crowd had more money than other groups in the black community.

The blacks outsmarted the whites in an end-run around taking public buses, by carpooling. Donations allowed the purchasing of new vehicles. White Montgomery officials had no clue about how fed up the blacks were with the conditions of apartheid, voter suppression, etc., so they didn’t know what to do when dissatisfaction reached critical mass.

In January 1956, police began arresting carpool drivers. The blacks shed their fears that they themselves would suffer retaliation for protesting, and owned their fighting-back as a point of pride. The Montgomery Advertiser newspaper was used as the local white politicians’ disinformation outlet. Nevertheless, after a while, the whole world was watching, as the boycott story spread like wildfire among hundreds of media outlets– mostly newspapers and TV stations.

The major influencers of the initial incident– Rosa Parks, MLK, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy– continued to behave in a mature manner, so the media sympathized with them. MLK Jr., remained a thorn in the side of the white community because he took a licking and kept on ticking. He was the recipient of a ton of hate mail, doxxing, death threats, fire-bombing of his residence, etc.

Anyway, another pivotal historical event occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Governor Orval Faubus refused to allow segregation of a high school there in order to ensure his reelection. The orgy of hatred he unleashed, taught Southern politicians– George Wallace especially, “how to manipulate the anger with the South, how to divide a state by class and race, and how to make the enemy seem to be the media.”

Just as legislation is a tool that can be used to spread hatred, technology is a tool that can be used for nefarious purposes, too.

“Do you get the funny sort of sense that, so far, at least, there are no human candidates in this campaign?”

The above was written by Dean Acheson, addressing Harry Truman, about the 1960 presidential race, packaged by consultants. JFK won because he had the nicer-looking TV image. Nowadays, the candidates can be replaced by AI software, created by consultants.

Read the book to learn much more about both disturbing and progressive, seminal historical events, and the people who made them happen.

Between Two Fires

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The Book of the Week is “Between Two Fires, Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia” by Joshua Yaffa, published in 2020.

In this volume, the author described various workers in entertainment, tourism, war, religion and humanitarian aid– under Vladimir Putin’s reign. In order to avoid getting arrested or worse, the subjects needed to play well with the government, which funded a large percentage of their activities. Each of their stories was chronologically disorganized, wordy and redundant, but the author clearly conveyed their plights and mentalities.

Putin came to power when Boris Yeltsin resigned at the beginning of the year 2000. Shortly thereafter, Putin’s government took over the media, forcing a mogul (whose TV channel could reach as much as 98% of Russian households which had a TV set) to sell his media empire to the State (the Russian government).

In the late 1990’s, the site of a closed Russian prison called Perm-36 was turned into a museum whose curators tried to inform the public about crushing oppression suffered by Cold-War Era Soviet dissidents there. After Putin had come to power, German university students who believed in the cause of democratic freedoms, volunteered to do maintenance work on the site.

However, they got offended when a former prisoner was forgiving and even behaved in a friendly manner toward a former guard, who had become a security officer at the museum. The German’s were “bound by strict, categorical norms, an ethical prism born [sic] of Germany’s admirable– if often inflexible– attitude toward totalitarianism and those who serve it. A political prisoner and his guard should not shake hands, and from that flows a whole way of seeing the world.”

The former prisoner explained: The guard had been young and therefore impressionable, easily brainwashed into rationalizing that he was simply following orders as a messenger, putting prisoners into solitary confinement. The guard didn’t directly kill anyone; he was subjected to the same drab environment and fed the same food as the prisoners.

On the immorality / morality spectrum, no one’s perfect. Nevertheless, it appears that, in human history, the kinds of people who are evil– on the extremely immoral end– have become dictatorial world leaders in disproportionate numbers.

The author spoke with a local “fixer” in the war in Chechnya in the 2010’s. She served as messenger, bailed dissidents (anti-government rebels) out of jail, and aided journalists covering the war. She had adopted a kind of pragmatism– cooperating with the administration of the Soviet-appointed leader of Chechnya– even though he and his ilk brought genocide, atrocities and crushing oppression to her people.

For approximately the first decade of Putin’s dictatorship, ordinary Russians’ living standards improved due to modernization, plentiful oil, and an increase in consumer goods in the stores. They also enjoyed religious liberalization (except for Western Christian and Catholic worshipers– those denominations competed too much for congregants with the Russian Orthodox Church). Freedom rang until it didn’t, as Putin’s hunger for, and amassing of power got him “reelected” as supreme leader in 2012. From then on, under Putin– Russia’s, Crimea’s and Ukraine’s leadership became Stalinist all over again.

At any rate, like the United States media, the Russian media has its trivial distractions. A scandal, which the State investigated for two years, erupted when a contemporary art museum’s curator allowed an Azeri exhibit to feature children’s dolls in gruesome positions.

After a while, employees in many workplaces, couldn’t guess what would spark an inquiry from the authorities. There were neither written nor spoken rules on acceptable behavior. Of course, spies were everywhere, ready to arbitrarily wield power.

Read the book to learn much more about various workers in the Putin years.