Hodgepodge – Wordy, Redundant, Disorganized – education and deconstruction.com

Morgenthau

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WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Morgenthau, Power, Privilege and the Rise of an American Dynasty” by Andrew Meier, published in 2022.

In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author recounted many of the historical events to which one family tree’s four generations of male Morgenthaus were witness in their lifetimes. Given the tenor of the times, there was probably less documentation on the females, so the author wrote much more about the men.

The story started in the 1860s, when the Morgenthaus began arriving in America. The fifty-five-year-old Lazarus, the family patriarch, along with his forty-one-year-old wife and most of their thirteen children had come from Bavaria. Due to the imposition of tariffs, Lazarus had been forced to close his businesses there.

The family, who considered themselves Jewish but weren’t religious, initially resided in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. Through the decades, Lazarus sold various products with checkered success. His son Henry became an attorney and a securities-industry businessman. Henry’s survival skills allowed him to emerge from a 1905 white-collar crime-scandal with his reputation unsullied. Corruption hearings resulted in new regulations to prohibit conflicts of interest… until the next financial crisis, no doubt.

Anyway, Henry was an opportunist who preached progressive reform but at the same time, was raking in big bucks for himself. He pressured president Woodrow Wilson to appoint him ambassador to Turkey so he could protect the Jews– who were in the minority– in the then-Ottoman Empire, which included Palestine. In spring 1914, Henry was impressed by the Jews’ industriousness there, but felt that if the Jews were all concentrated in one place, they’d be more vulnerable to genocide all at once at the hands of their enemies.

Russia, Britain and Germany all had their eyes on acquiring the territory of Palestine. A few Jews who had fled crushing oppression in their birthplaces were purchasing land from Arabs around Tel Aviv. But at the start of WWI, importation of food was interrupted and the Jews couldn’t afford to buy food. Wealthy German Jews of New York City rushed financial aid to them so that they wouldn’t starve.

Henry naively believed Turkey could be convinced to stop supporting Germany, and become neutral like the United States. But already, the Turks had committed genocide and atrocities agains the Armenians, Christians and minorities, and had launched attacks in the Black Sea on behalf of the Germans. All Turkish men between the ages of twenty and forty-five were recruited by the military.

Unfortunately, Henry had no control over military leaders and war criminals, or over anyone, for that matter. But Henry enjoyed playing “James Bond” before the fictional spy character was even created. Henry’s son, Henry, Jr., considered himself a farmer, and worked on one in Dutchess County in upstate New York. Conveniently, his neighbor was FDR.

As is well known, geopolitics is a complicated business, and president FDR conducted all kinds of secret dealings in his 1940 and 1944 reelection campaigns.

As an aside, in the 2016 and 2024 elections, voters chose a profiteering, sexist man-child over well-educated, politically experienced women with law degrees.

Described that way, the women sound awfully threatening to men, don’t they?

Women who take charge are perceived as bossy while men who take charge are perceived as strong leaders.

True, Donald Trump inherited the mentoring and all the resources required to continue his father’s lucrative business over the course of decades, during which he skillfully arranged sufficient profiteering and patronage jobs for his cronies, and name-recognition everywhere he needed votes.

Arguably, the women had a few disadvantages other than their gender.

Both women had long political histories– all the more opportunities for smearing by the opposition.

The odds were against Kamala Harris specifically because in the last seventy years, only three out of six vice presidents first became president by winning an election rather than by inheriting the presidency via death or resignation: Richard Nixon (1968), George H. W. Bush (1988), and Joe Biden (2020).

Additionally, Harris’ candidacy was doomed due to its extremely late start. Until mid-summer 2024, incumbent Joe Biden refused to withdraw from the race in order to retaliate against his own party, furious that he didn’t get his full eight years. All three aforementioned vice-presidents did a full eight years as such before running for president.

Americans are now hyper-aware of gender issues, and discrimination against women– given the current political climate.

Anyway, early 1922 found Henry, Jr. running a farming-newspaper and making valuable political contacts for his father and himself.

During WWII, Henry, Jr. served as Treasury Secretary in FDR’s administration. In August 1944, General Eisenhower perceived that the German people were as much to blame as their leaders for attempting world domination through evil means, as they spread the hatred, too; they should be punished with economic hardship when the war was over.

The following month, in Quebec, Churchill met with FDR, who invited Henry, Jr. (even though he was Treasury Secretary) to discuss what to do with postwar Germany. Churchill’s preliminary thought was to simply prevent Germany from re-arming, by shutting down her operations in the Ruhr and the Saar. But he didn’t want her to become too debilitated, as in the future, she might help protect Europe against Russian aggression. Russia, which had helped win the war, was gaining a reputation for military strength, and so would have to be allowed to have a say in world affairs.

Henry, Jr. wanted to completely infantilize Germany by forcing her to feed her people via small farms only, with no importing of resources. Her heavy machinery and factory parts should be distributed to European nations (including Russia) whose infrastructure had been destroyed or damaged by her. In that case, since international trade is largely a zero-sum game, England would revive her decimated economy, getting more coal and steel. Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, felt the plan to punish Germany was way too harsh, and was merely retaliation. Germany would be so resentful that her people would find a way to make war again.

In October 1944, Henry, Jr.’s aggressive attitude was leaked to the press. He got slammed and FDR’s opponent in the presidential election said Henry, Jr. had put American lives at risk; revealing America’s future plans would incite the Germans to continue fighting instead of surrendering.

Robert Morgenthau was born in July 1919. He became the U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York in 1961. He worked closely with Robert F. Kennedy, U.S. Attorney General, who advised him to let J. Edgar Hoover (head of the FBI) take over an organized-crime case of his, so that the FBI would be forced to acknowledge that the Mafia existed, and it would start to investigate it.

Decades later, Morgenthau took over cases of violations of international banking laws, when at least $700 million was illegally wire-transferred from Iran to U.S. and British banks, with information omitted from the transactions. Morgenthau’s bigger concern that Iran was sucking up to Western banks in order to learn how to build nuclear weapons, more than the financial wrongdoing. In summer 2009, the Israelis and Americans cooperated to use malware (the details of which are still classified) to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.

“Once again, to Morgenthau’s surprise, Washington stonewalled. The more he demanded that someone go to jail, the more the attorneys from Justice and Treasury spoke of a ‘deferred pros’ — legal shorthand for a deferred prosecution agreement.”

Read the book to learn much, much more about the Morgenthaus and their times.

Martin Van Buren

WARNING: VERY LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Martin Van Buren, America’s First Politician” by James M. Bradley, published in 2024.

In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author recounted many of the historical events to which Van Buren was witness in his lifetime. Throughout, the reader can see the evolution of American politics, and how some bad situations have become reversed, and others have stayed the same or gotten worse.

Van Buren was born in December 1782 in Kinderhook, New York State, now a part of Columbia county, a couple of hours’ drive north of New York City. For most of his teenage years, he was apprenticed to an attorney. His preliminary training was spent in a version of “night court” in a tavern– the courthouse of his generation.

Republicans were the “bleeding heart liberals” of the 1800’s, while the Federalists were the free-market capitalists who believed the country should be governed by a centralized authority. Van Buren began his political career as a Republican. Nevertheless, he accumulated great wealth while practicing law. There were wealthy politicians who bought the votes of the lawmakers to make themselves richer. He became one of them through the decades. Back in the day, there were no campaign finance laws, so no one was required to disclose any information on campaign donations.

Van Buren was elected New York State senator, and began his first term in November 1812. The governor of New York State appointed him to be that state’s attorney general in early 1815. Politics were fickle, so his job security was poor. At the same time, he was allowed to finish his term as senator before starting the attorney general job. By December 1821, the Republicans were the only political party in the United States.

In the last half of the 1820’s, Congress frequently succeeded in opposing president John Quincy Adams’ initiatives. For months, senator Van Buren and his cronies fought against one initiative Adams managed to push through: funding for a diplomatic trip to Panama, to make nice with various countries in South America. Adams and his vice president Henry Clay (of the Whig party he founded in the mid-1830’s) had wasted resources on this project that ended up a bust anyway, because a few of the key diplomats passed away. Meanwhile, Van Buren had been building a bipartisan coalition to oppose his political enemies on hot-button issues such as race and slavery.

In the early 1800’s, ninety percent of federal revenue came from tariffs, as a federal income tax wouldn’t be levied until 1913. Various parties were hurt or helped by those tariffs. New York City’s business stakeholders, as did the southern states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama, mostly agricultural, were hurt. Commercial entities located around the Erie Canal, and states in New England began to favor tariffs as they built new factories. At the dawn of the 1830’s, the federal government was able to purchase its own Treasury bills and pay off its debt entirely.

At the same time, President Andrew Jackson, claiming it was an anti-corruption measure, imposed a policy of mandatory turnover of federal office holders every four years. Only about ten percent of the workforce was affected, but drawbacks included: disruption of corporate culture and loss of institutional memory in the workplace, so that new hires had to re-invent the wheel, and the replacement-workers would likely be inexperienced. Jackson later named his party the Democrats.

In 1836, Van Buren ran for president as a Democrat. He was the only candidate on the ballot at the Convention in Baltimore. Separate states were allowed to push various Whig-party candidates, and they did, so they all became spoilers of one another.

Then then-philosophy had been to leave the economy alone, and not grant bailouts. President Jackson’s Democrats blamed the banks on hard times. But after the president himself enacted banking legislation, that wouldn’t fly. A financial crisis hit the fan in 1837. Van Buren’s presidency was the first in which ordinary Americans blamed the bad economy on the federal government.

President Van Buren proposed an Independent Treasury– a federal entity that would simply be a conduit for collecting federal revenue and paying bills. It should be unconnected to commercial and savings banks, which were proft-seeking and had to answer to shareholders. It should not be subjected to political meddling.

Nonetheless, the politicians were greedy hypocrites all, of both parties. Ordinary Americans of course, were brainwashed by propaganda, and didn’t know the half of it. The legislation for the Independent Treasury was finally passed in June 1840.

By the late 1830’s, America’s government consisted of a two-party system. The party that was out of power trashed the one in power. But, presidential candidates didn’t travel around campaigning. They promoted themselves by writing letters that got published in various newspapers (which were partisan). Whig candidate William Henry Harrison broke tradition by traveling around the country, smearing Democrat Van Buren.

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about Van Buren’s life and times.

Between Two Fires

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.

Where Tyranny Begins

WARNING: VERY LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Where Tyranny Begins, The Justice Department, the FBI and the War on Democracy” by David Rohde, published in 2024.

In this hodgepodge of a volume (which frequently contains the word “being” in the middle of sentences– awkward writing), the author described president Trump’s first-term shenanigans, that completely bucked established democratic order through making a mockery of the American justice system. The consequence has been that people now have total distrust of their government. On the other hand, there has been “creative destruction” that might be cause for optimism.

Interestingly, American voters have shifted from electing war-hero presidents (the last was George H.W. Bush in 1988) to electing draft-dodger presidents (except for Obama). And although the internet spreads disinformation of politicians’ cover-ups and denials, it also allows the sharing of stories among families and friends who experience genocide and atrocities.

There is actually more free speech than ever, as anyone can put in their two cents on the internet, in all different ways. The Nixon administration was suppressing free speech through the FCC’s power to license all kinds of broadcasting outlets, before cable TV was widespread. Yes, there were many more newspapers and magazines then, but ordinary Americans had to write “letters to the editor” and get them published, or call in to a radio or television show, if they wanted their voices to be heard.

In nations that have free and fair elections, initially, disinformation helps get a leader elected. Eventually, if he becomes a dictator, dissatisfaction among the people will reach critical mass, and the pendulum will swing the other way.

Many people think they’re learning history from sound bites and trivia awkwardly written by AI. But the library’s history section contains entire books that are likely to be more contextually comprehensive, written by actual people (yes, some of whom are myth-makers). And yes, depressingly, so much of substantive human history has been about war. It’s still worth reading lots of books on all kinds of history to understand the big picture, even though there might currently be doom and gloom, and one might feel powerless to stop it.

Obviously, no matter how much people learn how devastating and expensive war is, a few people keep instigating it!

So how are these instigators (recently consisting of the unbloodied elite, chicken-hawks and profiteers) allowed to make war, considering there’s a majority against the war?

This is how the cycle goes, in the United States:

Careers in media, entertainment, sports, the licensed professions and academia have been politicized. Nowadays, it seems most jobs might be highly lucrative in the short term, but they’re fiercely competitive and stressful. Job security is uncertain, given cancel culture and an uncertain economy.

Young job-seekers who can’t afford an education, or whose prospects are poor for other reasons, join a federal-law enforcement outfit, or the military– where they are ordered by the instigators to go to war.

Bottom line: There are sufficient people who owe their jobs to the instigators of war!

Trump has not yet not sent American troops in great numbers to foreign shores, but he has exacerbated home-grown hostility, in terms of hyper-partisanship, conspiracy theories and mistrust and distrust of American institutions.

A number of cliches apply to the second half of the twentieth century, into the first quarter of the twenty-first; among them, “The people gets the government it deserves” and “There is nothing new under the sun.” It might be recalled that the 1960’s were a tumultuous decade. There was violence in the streets of certain cities and on college campuses. Journalist P.J. O’Rourke wrote, “The Baby Boomers threw a decade-long temper tantrum.”

Over decades, that rebellion has actually resulted in more societal tolerance for divorce, re-marriages, interfaith marriages, and various arrangements of people of different sexual orientations. Societal pressure has eased on getting married and having children.

Now Americans can stay single, live together, give birth to or adopt children, or not– and not be socially ostracized. Interestingly, Trump’s daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism upon marrying, for the purpose of increasing her family’s power in their social circles. Even she had to conform to the tenor of the times.

At the dawn of the 1970’s, Americans were gob-smacked by the crimes of the Nixon administration. Part of the wrongdoing was war crimes. Nixon finished what LBJ started: contamination and devastation of the countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And Nixon’s secrecy only exacerbated the mistrust and distrust of Americans in their government.

The Nixon Era ushered in a whole host of cultural changes. Since then, two generations of the social manipulative boys who entered politics have learned that if they stick together, they can evade punishment (or even be rewarded!) for behaving disrespectfully toward people of different walks of life. At the very least, they immediately have a leg up in society having been born white and male.

This trend began with younger male Baby Boomers who didn’t serve in the military. A few circumstances have contributed to their continued domination. They:

didn’t have their lives interrupted or willingly risk their lives while the government supervised their every move for two or more years.
missed the life-or-death situations in war zones and the exposure to different cultures, religions and class differences that military service would have imposed on them.
came of age among their own kind; at private school, boarding school, and fraternities, but have still be been able to take advantage of the “old boy network” to advance their careers because they still experienced the military-service environment of the abusive hierarchy which leads to male bonding.

The 1990’s saw various franchises (TV and movies) featuring two fictional male friends who exhibited some aspects of this teenage boy culture; among them: Beavis and Butthead, Wayne’s World, Bill and Ted’s, and Clerks.

Donald Trump has taken this trend to its logical extreme, to run the country. This nation has been brainwashed into saying, “Boys will be boys.” Now, the boys have nowhere to go but down.

The author briefly described how independent counsel Ken Starr launched an overzealous witch hunt into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s activities. The sordid episode began in 1995, when their enemies investigated a land-deal called Whitewater. The Clintons themselves were deemed not to have broken the law, so their enemies desperately sought additional sources of dirt.

As is well known, Bill Clinton was eventually caught lying under oath about having an extra-marital affair on company time. BUT, that affair was with a consenting adult.

Which is the worst:

war crimes,
financial crimes, such as tax evasion, accounting fraud, bribery or racketeering (that are NOT victimless; they hurt society by [excuse the cliche] making the rich richer and the poor, poorer), or
lying under oath about having committed adultery???

So, Americans entertained or disgusted by Bill Clinton’s story might have concluded that the investigators were extremely incompetent, desperate for blood, or that there was a backroom deal not to break the story until after Clinton was reelected. When someone is dishonest about one thing, there is trust erosion in other things they might say or do. Regardless of real motives, this stupidity is one more reason to mistrust and distrust the American government.

As an aside, an inconceivably large amount of taxpayer dollars was wasted on frivolous investigations on the Clintons. Not coincidentally, people who pay little or no income tax, also don’t have their money wasted on that kind of nonsense.

At least Clinton complied with the rule of law. Trump dictatorially broke tradition by bypassing the Justice Department entirely when he signed an Executive Order to impose a travel ban on all Muslims from several countries. His philosophy was (pursuant to Moses’ line in the movie, The Ten Commandments): “So it shall be written, so it shall be done.” His thinking was, why should he need to fool around with pesky rule of law? He was the new sheriff (or rather, outlaw) in town, and his whole life, had always got his own way by bullying his opponents into submission.

Going into the 2024 presidential election, American voters knew what they were getting into. Obviously, they would rather have a brain-dead male dictator, than a woman president.

In any case, read the book to learn about Trump’s trials and tribulations in his first term, and the characters involved, such as Bill Barr– who became a hyper-partisan cheerleader for Trump, and a hypocritical crybaby to the media.

ENDNOTE: Speaking of politicization of employers, here’s a little ditty that explains the situation.

POLITICAL BOSS

sung to the tune of “Party Doll” with apologies to the Estate of Buddy Knox and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Everyone has got to have a political boss,

to punish you when he’s feeling cross,

to be involved in honest graft,

to run sweetheart contracts, like for aircraft.

No one wants a political boss,

no one wants a political boss,

but if you’re loyal, he’ll support you, help you.

If you’re loyal, he’ll help you.

Everyone’s got to have a political boss,

to choose candidates,

make you pay his costs,

to use media to spread-smears unfair,

to have lawyers on hand with tactics that scare.

No one wants a political boss,

no one wants a political boss,

but if you’re loyal, he’ll support you, help you.

If you’re loyal, he’ll help you.

Everyone’s got to have a political boss,

so when scandal hits,

you’ll take the loss,

to hand out jobs and to raise funds,

to add to his base, train daughters and sons,

train daughters and sons.

No one wants a political boss,

no one wants a political boss,

but if you’re loyal, he’ll support you, help you.

If you’re loyal, he’ll help you.

No one wants a political boss,

no one wants a political boss,

but if you’re loyal, he’ll support you, help you.

If you’re loyal, he’ll help you.

The Crazies

This blogger skimmed “The Crazies, The Cattleman, The Wind Prospector, and A War Out West” by Amy Gamerman, published in 2025. The author made a very bad editorial decision not to include an index in this volume. With an index, it could have been a reference book, but instead, was a mishmash of the history of a family of ranchers in the Crazy Mountains, and brief biographical descriptions of the stakeholders and their activities in a decades-long fight over a renewable-energy project in Montana.

As an aside, in the past decade or so, journalists who publish books are getting sloppier and lazier than ever. It appears that they slap together the articles on a specific topic that they’ve written over a number of years, and fail to edit and organize those articles in a coherent way. And the book gets published, as is.

Anyway, in June 2004, a wind-farm entrepreneur named Marty Wilde oversaw the construction of a wind tower on a Montana ranch owned by the Jarrett family, on behalf of the company named Crazy Mountain Cattle. That tower took all kinds of measurements of the copious wind in the area, for more than a year. Then a wind map was made. Wilde had to front all expenses until the wind-farm was actually built before he could collect a developer’s fee and royalties– which could take years, decades, or not happen at all.

Building a wind farm involves an extremely complicated set of steps involving the law, politics, economics and the environment. In the mid-single-digit 2000’s, part of the wind-farm was to be built on land where lived the Blackfeet Tribe, Native Americans. Thanks to a grant Wilde secured from the US Department of Energy, the Tribe’s community college had most of its 100-kilowatt electricity bill (charged by the Glacier Electric Cooperative) paid for using a wind turbine donated by a California company called Vestas. The school’s students were employed to erect that turbine on its campus. That was still one of the early steps in terms of a full-fledged wind farm.

In 2008, the original plans called for eighty megawatts to deliver electricity to twenty-six thousand homes. But Marty Wilde and Rick Jarrett needed buy-in from Jarrett’s neighbors.

Read the book to learn how Wilde and Jarrett fared– their triumphs and setbacks, in connection with laws, legal rulings, and actions from all the numerous people and parties up until the book’s writing, that basically involved redistribution of wealth among the wealthy lawyers and their clients (excepting Rick Jarrett, who found he couldn’t make a living ranching). As usual, curious things will happen when there’s dishonor among thieves.

Crazy Town

The Book of the Week is “Crazy Town, The Rob Ford Story” by Robyn Doolittle, published in 2014.

In this volume, the author described political shenanigans before, during and after a mayor of a major world-class city was caught: on video committing a shocking act, behaving badly, spouting inflammatory nonsense, and palling around with criminals. Canadian-style.

These cobbled-together writings of Doolittle, an investigative journalist, were chronologically disorganized and thus became redundant, but she did take a lot of trouble to fact-check and make the story suspenseful.

Rob Ford was born into a wealth family in May 1969 in a Toronto suburb. He and his siblings spent their own money to get him elected to the city council in 2000. For more than a decade, he amassed a grass-roots base of supporters whom he helped personally. Ford remained a “loose cannon” even after he and his siblings hired political consultants to advise him on how to get elected mayor of Toronto in 2010. He promised voters he would minimize taxes, cut the budget on subsidies of events and programs of a cultural nature, and cancel an already-in-progress, above-ground, light-railway project to plan and build a subway project instead.

In early 2011, Ford could brag that he had balanced Toronto’s budget without service reductions or tax increases. However, he got away with that only because he was coasting on surpluses from his predecessor’s prior years. By autumn, he was forced to propose budget cuts. As of spring 2012, “According to three former staff members and a close confidant, senior staff had been trying to get Ford into rehab for more than a year. They believed his drinking was affecting his job.”

The author considered the aforementioned video, “the scoop of the century.” Really?? Political wrongdoing has become a cliche in the past couple of centuries, even for world leaders, not just mayors. It has become trivial in recent decades because people have become desensitized to it. The scoop of the century really ought to be breaking news of a truly world-changing event that is, for instance, associated with large-scale genocide and / or atrocities, such as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the dropping of the atom bombs, or 9/11.

There are always going to be celebrity scandals, but global game-changers merit mention in the history books. They have big ideas behind them– although tabloid trivia is entertaining and a welcome distraction from infuriating and depressing politics.

Anyway, read the book to learn Ford’s entertaining story.

Children of Radium

The Book of the Week is “Children of Radium, A Buried Inheritance” by Joe Dunthorne, published in 2025. The morbidly curious author wrote this book after engaging in “roots tourism” to learn about his (Jewish) great-grandfather’s and grandmother’s lives in Germany and Ankara in Turkey before, during and after WWII.

In the 1930’s, the author’s grandmother grew up in Oranienburg in Germany, the most radioactive town in the country. There was a chemical weapons factory there, at which her father (named Seigfried) worked as a creator and tester into the mid-1930’s. Just around that time, German schoolchildren were supplied with gas masks and taught how to protect themselves from wartime air-contaminants. The chemicals from the factory were disposed of through burying, burning or pouring into a river. One of the chemicals was phosgene, which smells like a freshly mowed lawn. In 1935, Siegfried’s family moved to Ankara, but he continued to test gas masks there.

In 1937, the Turkish government purchased chemical weapons from Germany to ethnically cleanse residents in Dersim in the mountains in eastern Turkey. Over the course of two years, the roughly thirteen thousand people who died presumably served as the Nazis’ preliminary test-case of the mass murder of the Jews a few years later. Toward the end of the war, in August 1944, it seemed Turkey had an attack of conscience (or else its strategic interests changed!)– because it broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and detained a couple of hundred non-Jewish refugees, but granted continued liberty to war-refugees whose passports said they were Jewish.

From the 1990’s into the dawn of the twenty-first century, the author read his family’s documents archive, met with some neighbors of his ancestors, and went to see whether his family members’ homes still existed. Most didn’t. The Russians destroyed the aforesaid factory after the war. But decades later, an entrepreneur bought the site (which was still a toxic waste dump, consisting of 26,000 tons of poisons), and built a nightclub and swimming pool on it, complete with imported controlled substances.

In the 1990’s(!), there were still homes getting destroyed and people getting killed by unexploded bombs, and homes getting built on radioactive sand dating back to WWII.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s adventures in learning about Seigfried’s state of mind as a Jew who was (possibly initially unwittingly) aiding in the German war effort, his activities, and those of his other family members.

Let There Be Water

The Book of the Week is “Let There Be Water, Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World” by Seth M. Siegel, published in 2015. For this redundant, wordy volume, the author obviously simply slapped together all his past articles on the subject, without regard to organizing them. His main message was: Hire Israel to provide expertise on water management– to save time, energy, and the earth!

Anyway, in Israel, all water ownership and usage is controlled by the government. Its socialist philosophy is: do the greatest good for the greatest number. Water is an essential resource for humans. Israel’s tiny geography and population allow its government to more or less dictate policies that minimize damage done by selfish, greedy people who hoard essential resources– much more easily than can a nation like the U.S.

In 1937, Levi Eshkol, Simcha Blass and their cronies co-founded and launched a water company called Mekorot. It became a capitalist entity in bed with Israel’s government, but profit can be a good motivator for spurring innovation, and improving people’s lives. Financial conflicts of interest can be forgiven in this case, as the water-entrepreneurs made significant positive contributions to the physical and economic health of the young nation, developing the best water-distribution method for farming.

Conservative Republican Americans would actually scream SOCIALIST!!! at such a system. It works in Israel. As is well known, such a system does not work in the United States because it encourages citizens to start entrepreneurial ventures via financial assistance while also taxing the super-rich on the back-end for having taken advantage of existing infrastructure and front-end incentives. In America, there is little to no taxing on the back-end for the super-rich.

Anyway, in 1949, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion struck a deal with Germany for the latter to pay WWII reparations for lost and stolen property of the Jews. Those funds, and donations by American Jews, through the next few decades, were spent on constructing water infrastructure, such as fault-tolerant water pipelines, environmentally friendly waterways, and waterfront tourist-attractions.

In the 1950’s, the Knesset began passing laws regulating the country’s water system. Israel’s geography, topography and meteorology are diverse from north to south, and present challenging desert-related conditions, so it’s complicated and expensive to deliver safe, reliable, available water to its citizens. The water experts found that recycling sewage by filtering it three different times and ways, made it potable. In 2008, the Israeli government began to make its people pay for the real cost of delivering their water.

Read the book to learn much more about Israel’s water expertise, and how it is changing the world.

His Majesty’s Airship

“The New York Post wrote, ‘No more funds of American taxpayers [should] be squandered on these useless gasbags.’ “

The above is NOT a comment about the 2025 New York City mayoral candidates, but is a 1935 comment in reaction to the series of American airship crashes that killed hundreds of people.

The Book of the Week is “His Majesty’s Airship, The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine” by S.C. Gwynne, published in 2023. In this sloppily edited, chronologically disordered, wordy, redundant (but suspenseful) volume, the author recounts the history of airships through the late 1930’s.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Germans racked up significant construction- and flying-expertise with regard to airships with rigid frames. However, they had an abysmal safety record. They papered that over with jingoistic propaganda. The 1910’s saw a few conditions established to make airship flights less risky: flying only in summer and in clear weather with only light winds.

There was a high risk of fire because the hydrogen that filled the airships is easily combustible with just one spark. Helium is less so, but was expensive and difficult to obtain or make, and the Americans controlled the small quantity that was easily accessible.

The German government got the idea that in the event of a war, it could destroy cities at night via airships much more efficiently than it could with ground troops. In WWI, its submarines were actually more effective, because Britain wised up quickly– training searchlights on the airships, and shooting them into fireballs. By 1917, warplanes had become superior to airships, even with their mechanical problems.

Anyway, the author went off on a tangent, detailing the life-histories of a few different royal family members– main characters in the airships story. One such character was Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson. Beginning in spring 1924, he persuaded the British government to execute his big idea of contracting with a company to make airships a fun, efficient form of global, public transportation.

The author tossed around the term “socialism” but did not elaborate. He described two competing British airship projects; one as capitalist, and the other as socialist. Here is a clarification (more details of which can be found in this blog’s post, “The Last Idealist” about Norman Thomas, in the “Politics – Systems” category):

With SOCIALISM, the people collectively own entities, and share and share alike. These can be profit-seeking businesses; or the government can own entities that provide essential services– health, education, welfare and large public transportation entities– that should not be profit-seeking (but some of their subcontractors are, anyway).

With COMMUNISM, the government owns profit-seeking entities (businesses) in whole or in part (as in the former Soviet Union and China). So yes, these include public-private partnerships in which there are clearly outrageous conflicts of interest that result in patronage and profiteering. So, arguably, the former Soviet Union and China have both Socialism and Communism to a large degree. The U.S. is not far behind anymore.

Furthermore, in America, the super-rich who pay no income tax, salve their consciences through philanthropy, which allows them to propagandize that they’re helping the poor. BUT income tax revenues are pooled so that they could end up getting spent on anything in the political budget. The super-rich specifically choose where to donate their money– whom to help, and it is a tiny percentage of poor people who are helped, compared with the number who are helped if money is provided through income tax!

Anyway, read the book to learn the outcome of the flight of R101 (hint: a large, expensive project run by alpha males with hubris syndrome– in which Darwin award candidates partake– rarely ends well) plus lots more historical background that explains why rigid airships are a thing of the past.

As is well known, the American government has been a large, expensive project run mostly by alpha males with hubris syndrome. Given the current overwhelming influences of money and sophisticated messaging via global, sophisticated communications technology, individuals need not even be physically present anymore to run the government. Like Elon Musk, they can be a mastermind of national policies in absentia. Here’s what Musk is singing now.

AMERICA

sung to the tune of “Africa” with apologies to Toto and to whomever else the rights may concern.

See my influence echoing on the Right.

These are the results of our secret conversations.

I and Trump pretended to have a fight.

Withdrawal from D.C. has let me discreetly plot to save my nation.

I learned from my old man along the way,

looking to amass resources to impose my brand of supremacy.

I turn to forceful people for-pay.

Scan the whole world, is I all have to DO.

It won’t take a lot to make my dreams come true.

My money has such power, I can lord it over you.

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

Trump’s taking this time to do the things we always pla-a-a-anned. ooh ooh

We reach out to our friends on the Right,

and we’ve grown prosperous, assisted by our hegemonic companies.

I know I’m doing what is right, sure as I am aiming to gradually rid the White House of democracy.

I need world conquest, deep inside.

Priming the pump for the great times to come.

It won’t take a lot to make my dreams come true.

My money has such power, I can lord it over you.

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

Trump’s taking this time to do the things we always pla-a-a-anned. ooh ooh

Scan the world is all I have to DO.

It won’t take a lot to make my dreams come true.

My money has such power, I can lord it over you.

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

(I act behind-the-scenes)

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

(I act behind-the-scenes)

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

(Trump’s taking this time)

Trump’s taking this time to do the things we always pla-a-a-anned. ooh ooh

Wild Chocolate

The Book of the Week is “Wild Chocolate, Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul” by Rowan Jacobsen, published in 2024. in this wordy, redundant volume, the author described in great detail, the single-digits 2000’s trend:

In fragmented and complex ways, individuals and families have become the stewards of cacao trees and in environmentally friendly ways, have harvested their beans that are made into high-quality, expensive chocolate sold worldwide. The trend has been comparable to that of microbreweries of the 1990’s. The takeaway was that no one can corner the cacao-bean market anymore.

The author listed just a few different source-countries of cacao trees– Belize, Guatemala, Trinidad, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Ghana, and Ivory Coast. He also described just a few of the risks and dangers associated with the numerous steps of the complicated process of how chocolate products are made. Among them:

lack of access to cacao trees (when the kingpins of the cocaine trade are occupying the remote areas of the Amazon rain forest, or Mexico, where the trees grow);
the flooding of a river around the cacao trees;
lack of fermentation and drying sheds to accommodate the amount of beans harvested;
ruination of an entire batch of beans due to mishaps in connection with food chemistry; and
problems caused by animals’ (electric eels, anacondas, crocodiles, and tucanderas, etc.) sharing the same habitat as the cacao trees.

The author visited the Bolivian Amazon rain forest where the Indigenous tribes do slash-and-burn agriculture, growing rice and herding cattle. By the 1990’s, urbanites were deforesting the region for farming. In 1991, Volker Lehmann, a member of the German Volunteer Service (the equivalent of America’s Peace Corps) sought to re-forest the region via the wild cacao tree. He had to talk to the Chiname tribe.

In June 1991 in Bolivia, the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States raided the cocaine labs in Santa Ana de Yucuma, but the cocaine trade continued, because growing coca plants (and poppies for the heroin trade) was still more lucrative than the alternative crops of bananas, pineapple or hearts of palm, offered by the German Volunteer Service.

Read the book to learn much more about how much time, effort and expense goes into making chocolate products.

ENDNOTE: The author interchangeably used the terms “jungle” and “rainforest” but they are different.