Hodgepodge – Wordy, Redundant, Disorganized – Page 4

The Loom of Time

[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 Loom of Time, Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China” by Robert S. Kaplan, published in 2023. This redundant volume contained a hodgepodge of articles on the author’s observations, information and opinions gleaned from interviews, of his travels all over the Middle East over the course of decades, through wars, regime changes and anarchy.

Kaplan provided only a brief overview; for, all through the Post-WWII Era to date, America’s foreign policy has involved providing a lot of CIA-related (non-Congress-approved!) financial, military and / or humanitarian aid to its allies-of-the-moment, a lot of whose details have been kept top-secret, and are still classified.

Kaplan made generalizations on the evolution, advances and declines of Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations. He wrote that a nation whose military takes over its leadership, is one in decline. The author briefly described Egypt’s past leaders, including Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, and Egypt’s “Arab Spring” between 2011 and 2013.

During Mubarak’s ousting, ordinary Egyptians were traumatized by the street violence. They simply wanted quiet and economic security. Even after the regime change, free speech was banned, and dissidents were tortured and killed. Yes, the chaos had dissipated, but the people were still forced to live under crushing oppression.

The author contradicted himself in saying that the Obama administration chose not to aid ordinary Egyptians in ousting the dictatorial Mubarak, but later, Kaplan implied that the American government was somehow involved in the ousting. No more details were provided. Military man al Sisi became the new top Egyptian leader, while the extremist Muslim Brotherhood also gained significant political power.

The American Republican Party viciously smeared Obama for making Egyptians worse off. They say it was all his fault. Nevertheless, Egyptians varied in their views on whether the political situation had improved or worsened, depending on their own circumstances. A big hindrance to developing democracy in a country is educating the peasants, of which Egypt has a large number, who are easily brainwashed by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Geopolitically, one thing leads to another. Egypt’s political instability was related to its inability to fulfill its water needs, as Ethiopia appropriated a portion of the Nile river in its own territory– building infrastructure to meet its own electricity needs.

The author commented naively, that “Quietly, methodically, in a strange way” China is becoming financially intertwined with Egypt. China has a controlling interest in a Suez Canal infrastructure project– a major international trading conduit– and urban construction projects. Perhaps Kaplan is unaware that for decades, China has been contracting with numerous countries to build infrastructure for them. It has significant financial stakes in many large American corporations.

The author goes on to describe how China signed on to pave streets, build new housing and transportation, skyscrapers and parks in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. China has already begun assembling highways and byways in the Soviet “Stans” territories, and is planning to ultimately build a paved trade-route beginning in China that runs through Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Eurasia.

The author visited Sulaymaniyah in Kurdistan in northern Iraq. American-taxpayer dollars kick-started the multi-religious political arrangement that has allowed the Kurds to live relatively peacefully since the Second Gulf War. The younger generation has technology, but the older generation is corruption-entrenched. Their uni-ethnic society (two factions of Kurds) is thus vulnerable to unrest from haters. There are free elections but the politicians go unregulated. (Sounds familiar!) Armed men run the country.

Read the book to learn a bit about the ancient history and recent geopolitics of various lands of Middle East and Central Asia; however, in order to connect the dots, the reader must pore over the entire book from cover to cover. Or already have gleaned context and background through the most efficient way to read history– personal accounts of politicians and leaders with historical backdrop, or “life and times” biographies.

The Spirit Catches You…

The Book of the Week is “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures” by Anne Fadiman, published in 1997. This volume alternately told the story of every last detail of the medical history (too much information!) of a child of the Hmong tribe from the country of Laos, and how the child’s fate was determined by the clash between American and Hmong cultures.

The history of Laos from the 1960’s onward is an infuriating and depressing one. Via their war-orders, American presidents destroyed Laos’ populated areas with land mines, bombs, napalm and agent orange in order to cut off a major North-Vietnam supply route called the Ho Chi Minh trail.

To start with, JFK violated an international agreement that Laos (neighboring Vietnam and Thailand) remain neutral in the event of war in the region; this, by secretly ordering, via the CIA– the recruitment, training and arming of a Hmong guerrilla army (even child-soldiers); at its peak thirty-thousand strong. This militia (consisting of the “Royal Lao”) continued fighting the (Communist) Pathet Lao (who behaved genocidally toward the Hmong), through the LBJ and Nixon administrations. Previously, the Hmongs had been farmers, growing opium-poppies and rice. This expertise of the Hmong, provided “Quiet War” funding.

The Americans’ delivery of rice (terminated in June 1974) kept the peasants from starving to death. When the Vietnam war “ended” in spring 1975, about 150,000 Laotians flooded refugee camps in Thailand (the nearest country that would take them due to funding from the United States and other “democratic” nations).

Long story short, the American government destroyed the Hmongs’ peaceful way of life of agriculture and herding in the mountains of Laos. Thus, some politicians sought to salve their consciences by allowing a few Hmong refugees to come to the United States beginning in May 1975.

Preference was obviously given to the few thousand Laotian military members who had aided the Americans, and thereafter, about 25,000 Hmong arrived through 1980. The Hmong felt a sense of entitlement in collecting American public assistance, because: the CIA broke its promises to aid the Hmong in exchange for their risking their lives to help Americans fight the Vietnam war; and the United States military wrecked their country.

In 1980, the Lee family arrived. Born in July 1982 in California, Lia was the fourteenth child born to the Lees. As a baby, Lia was diagnosed with epilepsy. Even by the late 1980’s, not one tribal member who lived in their community– Merced, CA– spoke the English language. The language barrier plus lots of other cultural differences the Lees had with Merced Community Medical Center, led to many misunderstandings and serious physical consequences for Lia through the years.

The Hmong people perform rituals based on superstitions, beliefs and customs; for, they believe in honoring their ancestors, shamanism and alternative medicine in the form of herbalism and acupuncture. Their humungous families have multi-generational households, and their priorities consist of taking care of their families, then their clan, then their own tribe.

They stick together and their mentality is one of cooperation rather than competition. Here’s an example: “Then Jonas [who speaks five languages and works long hours; an anomalous member of the Hmong tribe in that he was educated and had jobs] drove home [of one residence] to his wife, his three children, his brothers, his brothers’ wives, his brothers’ ten children, and his ringing telephone.”

Read the book to learn much, much more about the cultural clash between the Lees and their American community, some history of Laos, and how, as is typical for war-refugees coming to America, the younger generation of the Hmong tribe is becoming assimilated in this country.

From That Place and Time

The Book of the Week is “From That Place and Time, A Memoir 1938-1947” by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, published in 1989. In this slightly sloppily edited, completely chronogically disorganized volume, the author detailed her: experiences during a time of anti-Semitism and war, and then 20/20 hindsight.

Born in 1915 in New York City, the author was sent to Hebrew school, but was only “culturally Jewish.” This, to American Jews, means celebrating the major annual holidays, but neither going to services nor observing the vast majority of religious laws on a daily basis.

The author’s parents came to the United States from Poland around 1908. They thought the Yiddish language would be the common element that would unify the Jewish community. Around the 1910’s, an American Jew, Chaim Zhitlowsky tried to popularize that idea. The author therefore was fluent in Yiddish.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, there were four different educational Jewish factions (contentious with one another) in New York City that taught Yiddish: Zionist and socialist, socialist and anti-Zionist, Communist-affiliated, and non-political but culturally Jewish (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.). The author fell into the last group.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the author perceived that American Jews didn’t have the same fears of getting bullied and victimized by discrimination as their European counterparts did. The Americans weren’t “wandering Jews.” Of course, she was always among her own kind of people, so she wasn’t exposed or subjected to hatred against her group.

In 1935, there existed a group named the Freeland League who were searching for a homeland for the Jews, other than Palestine. One place they looked at, was Kimberley in Australia. It seems the current territorial disputes between Jews and Palestinians are focused on lands they claim their ancestors occupied for centuries, and no substitute territories will do.

Anyway, Dawidowicz’s father instilled in her a hostility toward the religious aspects of Judaism, as well as toward Zionism. “Furthermore, [in the mid-1930’s] in Palestine, the Zionists denigrated Yiddish and demanded that Hebrew alone be the national language of the Palestinian settlement.”

In March 1935, in rearming for world conquest, Hitler tore up the Versailles Treaty. Stalin felt he needed to make nice with the West in order to gain security for Russia. So in August 1935, the Soviet leadership announced a new policy that pivoted away from Marxism. It was the new Stalinism: collectively fighting against the Nazis and Japanese militarism.

In spring 1938, the Polish government hated its own Jews, and was looking for an excuse to refuse to accept Jewish refugees from Germany. Nevertheless, that autumn, the author went to study and do research at the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Poland. In August 1939, Stalin reversed himself and allied with Hitler so the two could take over Poland.

Read the book to learn of the author’s anguish at the historical events of the next decade, and how they affected her generation.

The Playbook

The Book of the Week is “The Playbook, A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War” by James Shapiro, published in 2024.

In the 1930’s, American president FDR implemented programs to help the unemployed during the Great Depression. One was the Works Progress Administration, a sub-program of which, Federal Theater (hereinafter referred to as “FT”), put thousands of people to work. However, there were numerous complications every time the group wanted to put on a play, because there were a dozen unions with whom to negotiate.

FT produced thought-provoking shows that starkly portrayed the dangers and immorality of fascism, totalitarianism, slavery, racism, etc. It risked having its funding cut for its political correctness. In autumn 1936, FT was able to stage the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here because MGM had decided not to make a movie of it.

FT opened the inflammatory play in eighteen big cities across America. In Seattle the cast was inter-racial. New York City performed the play in Yiddish. The traveling version lasted 133 performances. Fortunately, audiences interpreted the play all different ways politically.

In September 1937, FDR signed affordable-housing (what activists for the downtrodden would call “gentrification”) legislation that was diluted due to fears of:

government competition with the private sector;
over-regulation;
budgetary excesses;
and Southern states’ getting short shrift because they were more rural than urban.

In response to the above, in 1938, FT staged One Third of a Nation. That theatrical production demonstrated how stakeholders treated America’s slums, which accounted for where one third of the nation’s population resided, according to FDR, as of early 1937.

The movie version was Hollywoodized– its funders were purchasers of distressed assets and profiteers. They made it a story about poor whites with a romantic subplot involving a “kindly capitalist” (the absentee landlord, or in the real world– a slumlord). A suicidal arsonist prompted the landlord to rebuild the place with trees and a playground. Everyone lived happily ever after.

Anyway, FT’s most vicious enemy turned out to be Martin Dies, a U.S. Congressman from eastern Texas, first elected in 1930. He had the KKK mentality, with xenophobia and misogyny thrown in. In 1935, he got himself on the Rules Committee, the most powerful committee in the House.

Dies also fast-tracked his power accumulation with his endless persistence. In 1938, he finally got himself appointed the head of a special committee that investigated a hot-button political issue; this, by chance, through teaming up with the exact right person who could help him– Samuel Dickstein, a Congressman from New York City who was equally driven to amass power and attention. They secretly allied with vice president John Nance Garner, who was on their side.

By spring 1938, their committee was claiming it was trying to root out subversives, Fascists and Communists, and prevent violence at Nazi rallies in America’s streets. But they had questioned a politically active Nazi who stayed right under their noses, and they failed to investigate him further!

Their real motive was to execute a smear campaign against FDR himself, in addition to his New Deal, and unions. So FT became an easy target, too. Ironically, “He [Dies] envisioned the hearings touring nationally, moving from city to city, beginning on the West coast and ending back East.”

One of Dies’ star investigators, Hazel Huffman, ignorantly equated Progressivism, racial integration, anti-capitalism and anti-fascism with Communism in her testimony. She recited verbatim lines from the FT’s scripts, out of context as evidence of Communist propaganda. Dies backed her up. They were so entertaining– newspapers, magazines and radio broadcasters presented her nasty, biased utterances about the FT, as fact. Dies realized he needed to keeping directing fresh accusations at FT and the WPA to keep the media in his back pocket.

Read the book to learn yet again, that there is nothing new under the sun, in terms of demagogues who use age-old propaganda techniques to amass sufficient power to commit crimes, oppress their fellow citizens, and spread hatred far and wide with total impunity.

And So To America

The Book of the Week is “And So To America” by Cecil Roberts, published in 1947. Clearly, the author (who was an established British writer born in May 1892) had 20/20 hindsight of WWII at this book’s writing. He threw in the kitchen sink at intervals, of the history of specific people, places and things, of all different centuries.

In October 1939, Roberts began public-speaking tours in the United States to try to alert ordinary Americans to the dangers of taking no action against the Germans, who had already invaded Poland. In 1935, FDR sign the Neutrality Act that took effect in 1937. The Act denied America’s allies any military help in the event they felt they were in need of it. After the horrors of WWI, America had no interest in entering another war, and thought the Atlantic Ocean would offer geographic protection from the violence going on in Europe.

The author claimed the British government initially declined his offer of assistance on the public-relations front, but he did admit that it compensated him for certain services he performed for the British Embassy in America, and the British Ministry of Information.

Roberts also participated in a program that allowed about four thousand children and some of their mothers to move to the U.S. during the time that Britain was getting bombed via warplanes. Generous American families hosted them. Those Britishers’ families had assets in the U.S. that had been frozen by the Treasury. For, Great Britain had yet to pay America back for its WWI debt.

Beginning in September 1939, Republicans in the American federal government voted against three different pieces of legislation (that passed at FDR’s urging anyway) that would prepare the United States for war, through: military spending to rearm, reinstating the draft and repealing an arms embargo (which kind of negated the Neutrality Act).

In 1940, there were two major groups of Republicans, one of which opposed FDR in the presidential election– isolationists and the anti-New Dealers. They viewed his running for a third term, as dictatorial. Besides that, they were also thinking Germany would win the war, so they were preparing to reap the spoils when that happened. They were viciously vengeful against FDR, spouting the meanest, nastiest smears again him.

As is well known, in mid-August 1945, on the world’s various continents, people were homeless, still dying in frightful numbers from disease and starvation, from having participated in the war gone by, occupying the wrong place at the wrong time as an innocent bystander, or from just plain bad luck in not having been born a royal-family member!

Meanwhile, in Newport Rhode Island, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt threw a dinner party for some two hundred guests in lavish surroundings that included fresh pink flowers, two orchestras, and caviar and champagne. The author was there, rubbing shoulders with the elitists, a little disturbed about this cosmic injustice, but not enough to do anything about it.

Roberts also wrote, “In the following years [after WWII] one was very conscious of the India and Palestine questions. It would appear that large sections of the American people were perturbed about the reputed tyranny of Britain in these two places.” Read the book to learn a boatload more history and of the author’s adventures in the lap of luxury in America.

Eighty years later, the overall status of humanity in the world has improved a little, but not much.

For the last 45 years, Republicans in America have:

enjoyed their pet programs (military and security that kick out, keep out, or possibly trample on, the civil rights of, foreigners and poor people) while

been trying to justify eliminating what they consider government handouts (the social safety net that assists older or unlucky people, or those who have made bad life-choices).

Beginning with the George W. Bush era, the Republicans have become hypocrites because they ruined their own reputation for fiscal responsibility– they went on a spending spree that caused the deficit to skyrocket!

Here’s a little song that describes the current political situation in the United States– what the budget-busting Republicans are singing.

SLASH SLASH

sung to the tune of “Splish Splash” with apologies to the Estate of Bobby Darin and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Slash, slash, we’re doing the math,

long about a budget-bill fight. yeah

Snub, snub, just taxing-the Democrats’ club,

favoring everyTHING far-Right.

Well, jack up the deficit. It’s all Biden’s fault.

Open wounds around us, and we rub in the salt.

Well, slash, slash, we went back to the math, well, how were we to know Biden’s brain was all gone?

We’re Biden-bashing, healthcare-slashing,

wheeling and dealing, Dems are stewing and a-suing,

we’re complying with Trump’s lying. Yeah.

Bang, bang, we smear the Liberal gang,

dancing on the Democrats’ graves.

Yeah, no cops, pulling out all the stops.

This bill has the pork we crave.

Well there’s, big MON-ey, for ICE.

Forget the EARTH.

We Reagan wannaBES put America FIRST.

Well- a, we can’t forget about the math. We have to put our fancy PR on. Yay.

We’re polling and steam-rolling, wheeling and dealing,

Dems are stewing and a-suing. Slashing and slashing. Yeah.

Yes, we’re Biden-bashing, we’re polling and steam-rolling.

Yeah, Dems are stewing and a-suing. We’re wheeling and dealing.

We’re polling and steam-rolling. We’re complying with Trump’s lying. Slash slash yeah

mm slashing and slashing, all-time we’re Biden-bashing, whoo-wee, Dems are stewing and a-suing, we’re slashing and slashing…

The Warburgs

The Book of the Week is “The Warburgs, The 20th-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family” by Ron Chernow, published in 1993. This ginormous, slightly: chronologically disorganized and redundant volume, recounted mostly, the life-stories of four males born to a German Jewish family in the mid to late 1800’s, and the life-stories of their descendants.

Through the decades, different family branches traveled or moved from Germany to other countries, such as England, Sweden and Italy, due to discrimination against Jews, and world wars. Some became fully assimilated in their adopted countries and married outside the faith. Some moved to the United States.

In September 1922, “Paul [Warburg] saw America sunk in an intellectual coma and warned Washington that ‘we are surrounding ourselves with a wall and moat of cynicism and selfish materialism…’ ” As ought to be well known, there’s nothing new under the sun.

The Warburgs were “international bankers”– Hitler’s anti-Semitic code language for Jews, whom he claimed were the cause of all of Germany’s problems in approximately the two decades leading up to, and during WWII.

Aby was the black sheep of the family. He had a brilliant career in art history. The other Warburg brothers, Max, Paul and Felix became financiers, philanthropists and activists. In the 1920’s, the German government began to persecute its Jews more than was historically usual, but until the late 1930’s, the brothers evaded the brunt of the Nazis’ human-rights abuses.

The Warburgs had special influence with government officials because they had substantial assets, and their businesses’ financial transactions had a major impact on the German economy, and worldwide.

In late winter 1936, the Warburgs struck a secret deal with Heinrich Himmler that allowed them to continue doing business. However, later that year, they lost their connections to power when the Nazis forced corporate boards’ directors who were deemed Jewish, to resign. The brothers had been on dozens of boards.

The culture of the German people in their place and time was characterized by blind obedience to authority and passionate love for one’s homeland. Even after September 1937 when the brothers’ bank in Hamburg was ejected from the Reich Loan Consortium, they still clung to the hope that the Nazis’ amassing of power and menace was only temporary.

Hermann Goering scotched free trade when he formed his five-hundred employee fiefdom– the Office of Raw and Synthetic Materials. It allowed Germany to prepare for war. The Nazis needed funding for re-arming Germany, and the eventual theft of Jews’ assets would come in due time. The Jews were pawns in Hitler’s evil plan of Aryan world conquest.

A minor action symbolizing this, was the hanging of a gigantic oil painting of Hitler in the newly seized Warburg brothers’ Hamburg branch-office in May 1938. The Warburgs were allowed to choose two Aryans to run the bank indefinitely; of course, it was then unclear when or if the family would be able to reclaim their business.

In the twentieth century, the Warburgs wore the label “Jewish” that the world had thrust on them, whether observant or not, assimilated or not, for having a Jewish last name, or for having “Jewish” relatives (at the time Europe was ruled by Hitler), or having been raised by family members in this identity they felt was immutable.

“It wasn’t their [the Jews’] alien quality so much as their familiarity, their uncomfortable resemblance to other Germans, that enabled Hitler to tap fears of ‘racial pollution.’ “

Post-Holocaust, the discomfort about Jews has continued. Could it be that women who dye their hair blond, don’t want to look Jewish? And then– could it be that the Jews started the “dumb blond” jokes?

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about the histories of Warburg family members, and their times.

Bad Jew

The Book of the Week is “Bad Jew, A Family’s Quest From the Minsk Ghetto to Netanyahu’s Israel” by Piotr Smolar, translated from the French by Anthony Roberts, published in 2024. This sloppily edited volume with confusing descriptions of the author, his father and grandfather– contained a brief overview of the mentality of Eastern European Jews and Arabs. As is well known, these peoples have had a long, intertwined and inter-tribally violent history in Palestine (currently Israel). American-English language would say, “self-hating Jew” not “bad Jew.”

Born in 1974, the author grew up in Normandy in France. As an adolescent, he asserted his identity by practicing Catholicism with his aunt and uncle in Warsaw, Poland. He never did receive a formal education in Judaism.

The year 1967 saw an anti-Semitic Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Polish government’s first secretary, denounce the author’s Polish grandfather for his Judeo-Communist views. The grandfather wrote op-ed pieces for his newspaper with a pro-Zionist, pro-Israel bent (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.). Gomulka also spread propaganda that the Jews were the ones who committed Stalin’s crimes.

In 1968, the Polish government allowed Jews to leave with the clothes on their backs, with the condition that they never return. Many went to Israel. Although he didn’t explicitly say so, the author was trying to convey the idea that, even in the late 1960’s, there was such rife anti-Semitism in the world that Israel was still relevant as a homeland for the “wandering Jew.” Israel has certainly been an exceptional sovereign territory. During its short existence of only three quarters of a century, with American financial aid, it has:

established agricultural collectives in the desert;
developed salinization and irrigation technologies;
built a military-industrial complex; and
founded numerous Big-Tech startups.

Given all the historical hostilities in Israel, one would think that the only people who still live there are ideologically dogmatic Darwin-award candidates. The author spoke with some residents who gave that impression. They are willing to risk their lives to defend what they consider their own respective tribe’s property which their ancestors owned for centuries. On the other side, the Palestinians have the same mentality.

Read the book to learn about several other reasons why the Palestinians (and Arabs) and Jews can’t work out their differences, and more about the author’s and others’ family backgrounds.

The Oracle of Oil

The Book of the Week is “The Oracle of Oil, A Maverick Geologist’s Quest For A Sustainable Future” by Mason Inman, published in 2016.

The author– a journalist rather than a historian or academic– described redundantly in great detail, certain issues and historical events (perhaps those from sources to which he had easy access), and omitted or provided scant coverage on a bunch of others that were equally important.

The text was like Swiss cheese. He failed to mention the geopolitical issues of oil refining, oil spills, mergers of oil companies, nuclear disasters, and lawsuits and scandals that were game-changers in the energy arena.

If this volume was meant to be a career biography, the author should have simply said there were numerous issues and historical events that affected the subject’s career, but they were beyond the scope of the book. He could have simply named them without giving extensive depth to some and omitting others altogether.

Anyway, King Hubbert was born in 1903 in central Texas. He attended the University of Chicago, a focal point of intellectual ferment back in the day. He became a geologist and began working in the oil industry, which was in its infancy. He alternately worked and returned to school to earn higher academic degrees, during which he met theorists such as himself.

One was Howard Scott, whose early 1920’s vision consisted of a Communist society (all industries would be government-owned) which, through certificates rather than currency, would fulfill all of its citizens’ basic needs; food, clothing, housing, etc., pursuant to the amount of energy required to manufacture those goods. The people would work only sixteen hours a week, and have lots of leisure time.

By the early twentieth century, academics were spending untold amounts of time debating the merits of political, social and cultural systems– their own, and other nations’. In the 1920’s, they despaired that automation was putting people out of work, and monster-sized corporations manufactured their durable goods with “planned obsolescence” in mind. Propaganda even then, was persuading consumers to throw out old cars, machines and material goods (instead of repairing them), and buy new ones. In 1930, the nation was gobsmacked by the Great Depression.

In early 1932, Hubbert, Howard, and a few other engineers and scientists, included their aforementioned utopian fantasy in the theory of Technocracy, generating a report. Hubbert wrote the portion covering chemistry and physics. Engineers and scientists, rather than greedy capitalists, would direct their economy.

Two of their ideas have somewhat come to pass in modern society (a century later!):

Scientists and engineers (who are also greedy capitalists, from Silicon Valley) are controlling the world’s communications systems (and the U.S. government and economy); and
money has not altogether been eliminated, but two kinds of Socialistic means of exchange have been introduced in recent decades– the Euro and electronic currencies.

On the other hand, capitalism and consumerism have produced an abundance of material goods in the United States–to which other nations have aspired– lifting worldwide living standards. Yet, there is still extreme poverty, even in the United States. The overall cause of this paradox, is human nature– greed, guilt, fear and exclusivity.

Back in the 1940’s and for the next few decades, Hubbert and others made projections as to the amount of the earth’s fossil fuels still to be exploited by humans for their energy needs. His predictions were the most cautious. He truly cared about accurately analyzing data to publicize the truth.

In the early 1960’s, the newly elected president John F. Kennedy tasked committees with doing studies. There was interagency rivalry between the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Academy of Sciences. There were conflicts of interest, of course. Federal agency employees were clinging to their jobs and therefore trying to maximize their budgets. Oil-industry employees were hoping to get the government to pass legislation favorable to themselves.

The Atomic Energy Council (AEC) was a federal agency that approved the sites on which nuclear power plants were built. In 1966, the AEC refused to release a report critical of its nuclear waste disposal practices in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, salt mines in Kansas, Hanford in Washington state, and the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station in Idaho. Written by Hubbert’s committee, that report basically stated that the sites were cancer clusters. Nevertheless, by the mid-1980’s, approximately ninety nuclear power plants had become operational in the United States.

The author did mention that fracking is extremely damaging to the earth but didn’t mention how extremely damaging it is to people. Besides, it is extremely expensive, so shale gas drillers must take on crushing debt load.

In sum, there are no easy, simple solutions to the current fragmented, complex energy crises that plague the world. At the dawn of the 1970’s, Hubbert was proven correct in his assessments, but unsurprisingly, all the energy stakeholders in America clouded the issues with excessive propaganda. Read the book anyhow, to learn of Hubbert’s trials and tribulations in his trying to tell people what they didn’t want to hear.

No Better Time

The Book of the Week is “No Better Time– The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet” by Molly Knight Raskin, published in 2013. This short, slightly sloppily edited volume whose title exaggerates, described the brief life of a dot-com startup genius.

Danny Lewin was born in May 1970 in a suburb of Denver, Colorado. His family moved to Israel when he was fourteen. He enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, and then he moved back to the United States to attend school at MIT.

While in school, with a friend, Lewin helped develop a technological innovation within the big-picture innovation of the whole Internet. Initially, his dot-com business, named Akamai Technologies, provided the service of preventing of the crashing of the browser when: a video went viral or a website got overwhelmed with traffic, or a denial-of-service attack was launched against a website. Through algorithms, obviously, eventually, computer scientists discovered the required optimal number of servers communicating among themselves to maximize computing power to minimize latency and downtime.

In the second half of the 1990’s, worldwide usage of the Internet, a decentralized network of potentially infinite networks, was in its infancy. This meant, for ordinary users, downloading of data was extremely slow. Impatience was growing in leaps and bounds as time-saving devices (like office software) were, too; resulting in “irrational exuberance” over securities sold to the public that funded dot-com startups. The likely reason Akamai still exists today while so many other tech startups failed, is that there was an actual, valuable service behind it!

By spring 2000, after receiving ginormous funding from its IPO, Akamai’s customers’ servers collectively numbered more than 2,750 in more than one hundred fifty networks in forty-five nations. At the book’s writing, Akamai controlled between fifteen and thirty percent of the world’s Internet traffic.

Read the book to learn much more about Lewin, the people who helped him, and his startup.

The Taft Story

The Book of the Week is “The Taft Story” by William S. White, published in 1954. This volume was a chronologically disorganized hodgepodge that described the various facets of conservative Republican Robert A. Taft’s ideology and candidacies for U.S. senator from Ohio and for U.S. president from the 1940’s into the 1950’s.

Born in September 1880 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Taft was a son of the late William Howard Taft, a U.S. president and then chief U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Senator Robert Taft, who had earned an Ivy-League law degree, believed that the following order should prevail in terms of federal power: Congress (pursuant to the Constitution), the courts, and then the president (of course, he was a member of Congress). He believed that only Congress could pass a Constitutional amendment, but he also interpreted the Constitution literally.

Yet Taft was a political hack– would say or do anything to get elected or reelected. After WII, he made bold statements (which would be viewed as sociopathic and politically incorrect nowadays) reasoning that since America was biased (as a winner of the war), individuals accused of war-crimes (such as Nazis) wouldn’t be able to get a fair trial in the international tribunal at Nuremberg, and that punishment wouldn’t be a deterrent to future war crimes, anyway. He opined that the trials were held simply for the purpose of political revenge.

Taft and some of his fellow American Republican politicians were resistant to change, but valued liberty, fiscal restraint and patriotism. For his staff, he hired loyalty over competence, and surrounded himself with intellectual inferiors. He was, in short, an isolationist, hyper-partisan, hater. Democrats, on the other hand, thought free trade would help achieve liberty and peace.

Taft and his ilk (Republicans from the Midwest) had “…bitter and undying hostility toward those Eastern, internationalist Republicans typified by Henry L. Stimson– FDR’s secretary of war– who were not only interventionist, but unforgivingly pro-British.” Taft’s Republican counterparts were flexible and willing to identify aspects of the New Deal and Fair Deal that could benefit their own party. In addition to Stimson, they included Wendell Willkie, Dwight Eisenhower and Thomas E. Dewey.

When Taft ran for president in 1948, in the primaries, Dewey’s people kept repeating the slogan, “Taft can’t win” in order to demoralize him. It worked. Read the book to learn of additional “deja vu all over again” kinds of goings-on in Taft’s political arena.

Speaking of history’s repeating itself, it appears that Trump shares some political ideology with Taft, but here’s a little ditty that states Trump’s ultimate goal– what he’s telling his claques, flacks and sycophants.

Immortalize Me

sung to the tune of “Let It Be” with apologies to the Beatles, their estates, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

I rescue America in times of trouble.
My expert team comes to me, finding all the ways, to immortalize me.
All the Democrats brought darkness.
My saintliness is surrounding me.
I’m making America great again. Immortalize me.

Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Using all my wisdom.
Immortalize me.

And all the suffering American people, living in the world agree,
I’m the perfect answer.
Immortalize me.

The process I have started.
I’m better than past statesmen, YOU will see.
I’m the perfect answer. Immortalize me.

Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
I’m the perfect answer.
Immortalize me.

Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Using all my wisdom.
Immortalize me.

When the fight gets bloody,
I’m the light that shines on thee.
Shines forever and ever. Immortalize me.
I’m shaking up the ground-of-the Democrats.
My saintliness surrounding me.
Using all my wisdom. Immortalize me.

Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Using all my wisdom.
Immortalize me.

Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
I’m the perfect answer.
Immortalize me.

Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Immortalize me.
Using all my wisdom.
Immortalize me.