Personal Account of Journalist or Professor – education and deconstruction.com

Newsroom Confidential / An Atheist in the FOXhole

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The First Book of the Week is “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life” by Margaret Sullivan, published in 2022.

The author survived a decades-long career as a journalist and editor. Ironically, her writing was slightly less than perfect. The word “being” was used awkwardly in the middle of sentences throughout the book. Also, she spent a bunch of pages describing the problems with “anonymous sources” but her (presumably nonfiction) book lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography and an index (!) She did say some of her information was taken from articles she wrote for her employers. This, from a seasoned journalist.

Born in 1957, Sullivan grew up in Lackawanna, a suburb of Buffalo, in northwestern New York State. By her early thirties, she was supervising six journalists in the politics and government division of the Buffalo Evening News newspaper. In autumn 2012, as an ombudsman, she began penning articles critiquing her employer, the New York Times. Her position was that of watchdog– she helped with quality control of its product.

The author described her take on how journalism has changed over the decades with respect to truth, trust and objectivity. As is well known, technology now allows the world to communicate at the speed of light. Especially during political campaigns, many journalists have begun to behave the same way as political workers: workaholics who act like extremely self-absorbed, socially manipulative teenagers who think they’re starring in their own reality show; and they are– it’s called social media.

They feel obligated to interact with their readers by inviting their comments and responding to them; the author included. Inevitably, haters express their opinions offensively and meanly. Everyone wastes untold amounts of time dealing with them, instead of changing the world for the better.

AND, people in the media and political realms aren’t as influential as they’d like to believe they are. Ordinary Americans who don’t work in the media or politics, cannot possibly affix their eyes to all of the infinite writings, photos and videos “out there” in entertainment land 24/7. Some have to work, and others are actually engaged in other activities.

Anyway, in 2017, as a columnist for the Washington Post, the author considered herself an “independent-minded journalist” but came to the rude awakening that, when she asked people from all-walks-of-life about politics, she could no longer find common ground with them on basic issues.

Although the author discussed the legal issues of “anonymous sources” and “equal time” she didn’t cite any legal cases. She did write that in three different instances, media outlets courageously chose to give more time to the truth than to falsity in their 2020 election coverage– by not giving equal time to people who were screaming voter fraud and that Trump had won the election. She hopes there will be more media space devoted to the truth in the future. Good luck with that, all.

Read the book to learn a boatload more about the author’s career trials, tribulations and triumphs, and her recommendations for helping to reverse the current awful trends in journalism so as to save modern civilization.

The Second Book of the Week is “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media” by Joe Muto, published in 2013.

The author was born in early 1982 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His first job out of college was at Fox News. He detailed the working conditions there from summer 2004 into spring 2012. In October 2004, a story broke about a sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill O’Reilly. The main source of evidence consisted of O’Reilly’s voice on audio recordings.

Thereafter, Fox News gave its employees sensitivity training in order to stave off more lawsuits. The two lawyers teaching the classes said that the Fox bosses could legally tell on-air talent what to wear– even mini-skirts and strappy, cleavage-revealing blouses(!)– because they had a right to creatively control their “product.”

As time went on, the author’s employer’s product became more and more inflammatory, cringeworthy, and offensive. As is well known, Fox has toned down its rhetoric due to lawsuits. The number of parties who have the clout and money to sue have finally reached critical mass on the sexual harassment and defamation fronts.

In connection therewith, in the last decade, several obnoxious public figures have disappeared from the American-influence scene. This has help foster a kinder social environment. Nevertheless, hate-spewers and laws favoring them wax and wane in history.

Too, in the last few decades, the entertainment industry has seen a trend of lazy (or untalented) creators, evinced by a boatload of unnecessarily juvenile, expletive-laden, disgusting content. Controversy over free speech has also been ignited by people on each extreme: those who feel they should have the right to say anything they want, and those who take offense at everything that is said, with accusations of discrimination or inappropriateness.

Anyway, read the book to learn about the author’s employment experiences and his fate at the time of the book’s writing.

The Declassification Engine

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The Book of the Week is “The Declassification Engine, What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets” by Matthew Connelly, published in 2023.

The author recounted the American government’s history (beginning with FDR) of generating bureaucratic “classified” documents that presumably describe clandestine activities. This excessive avalanche of papers and electronic files (which are growing by the day) allegedly contain State secrets or personal information, that, if revealed, might be a risk to national security or an invasion of people’s privacy.

The United States monitors worldwide communications through its eighteen different spying agencies, staffed by James Bond wannabes. The comprehensive maintenance of this secret society the author called the “dark state” costs taxpayers an estimated trillion dollars a year. Its rate of declassifying documents is getting slower and slower, due to: a) the overwhelming amount of documents, which leads to the high expenses of having human eyes’ poring over every page, or machine-learning’s identifying patterns showing how confidential the contents are; and b) the humans’ deeming everything and anything “top secret” for the purpose of maintaining the status quo in profiteering, power acquisition and confidentiality itself (which leads to more power acquisition).

In connection therewith, the Pentagon has led a never-ending quest to increase its budget by arguing that national security is at stake. The 2017 cost-estimate of keeping the aforementioned secrets-maintaining– er, uh, declassification system going, was $18.39 billion, with which a thousand schools could have been constructed instead.

A large percentage of the costs are for public relations, and a tiny fraction is allocated to declassification– so that American citizens can find out the embarrassing actions their government took fifty or more years ago; at which time institutional memory has been lost and the alpha males with hubris syndrome in top leadership positions repeat the stupid mistakes of the past.

The American government’s oversight and regulation of itself has waxed and waned through the decades, but it has recently reached an all-time low. The author believed that unless the government begins to improve its transparency record by declassifying its activities at a faster rate, the country will head toward oblivion.

In 2015, the author (a history professor) and his scholarly and technologically experienced colleagues (who created the aforementioned software for declassifying documents) met with a few federal agencies to offer to assist in improving this out-of-control system.

The State Department suggested awarding student-interns with college credit for helping determine the secrecy-status of the documents. The National Archives said it was required to license the author’s team’s software through their own approved vendor. The CIA told the team, the software could be hosted through Amazon’s cloud computing.

The Public Interest Declassification Board referred the author to Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose work overlapped with the National Archives. But regardless of the methods used and compensation arrangements, the author identified why the declassifying of documents was so problematic: “We cannot assign a dollar value to democratic accountability.”

One small indication that shows government hegemony, is that three major “news” outlets, the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal have online paywalls– they charge their users money for significant access to their websites. Most other such websites don’t. Readers who are unwilling to pay for “news” these days perceive that they’re not missing much by not reading those three newspapers. They might be right. BUT the author commented that “The publications can monetize the privileged access to national security information for personal and political advantage.”

Anyway, read the book to learn a boatload more about American presidential administrations’ policies on disclosure (and lack thereof!) of their intelligence activities.

Stella

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The Book of the Week is “Stella, One Woman’s True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler’s Germany” by Peter Wyde, published in 1992.

Stella Goldschlag was born in the early 1930’s. She grew up in the wealthy, arrogant, snobbish, German Jewish social set. That set owned the major department stores and garment makers in Berlin, published the major newspapers, and dominated the theater-critic scene. Stella’s father supervised the making of globally distributed newsreels in the Berlin office of the Paris-based Gaumont; until it didn’t, when the Nazis took it over in the second half of the 1930’s.

In autumn 1935, new restrictions on the Jews meant Stella was forced to attend a high school for Jews only. The book’s author was in her class. The school was run by a Jewish teacher whose aspiration was to prepare the students to study abroad. She taught them the English language.

A set of untoward circumstances converged in bringing about the Holocaust. The nation of Germany was experiencing economic devastation from the Great Depression and from the crushing debt load of the reparations it was supposed to pay for its activities stemming from WWI. Its traditionally jingoistic people were stung and angry from losing that war. Germany’s lack of strong leadership at the top allowed a genocidal maniac bent on world domination, to come to power.

Amid the economic, political and social chaos, the number of bitter and ostracized German males coming of age from dysfunctional households, reached critical mass. Those males were easily brainwashed into believing they could enjoy a “glorious career in the service of the master race.” Or, as the 1960’s “Chicago Seven” member Jerry Rubin commented, a Nazi was a “love-starved, father-seeking fairy who had to compensate for hurried toilet training.”

The Nazis employed social contagion techniques to scapegoat the Jews– a minority ethnic group that had a history of allowing themselves to be oppressed and victimized. Other groups who were perceived as having weak genes, were also targeted for torture and elimination. In that time and place, most Germans caved in to the societal pressure, fear and force.

As is well known, as time went on, Hitler ranted and raved on the radio, placing more and more extreme punishments on the Jews. Initially, the Jewish veterans of WWI who had risked their lives for the Kaiser’s Army were left alone, but eventually, even they were spat upon and killed.

One technique the Nazis used in pursuing their goal of eliminating the Jews, was to divide and conquer– sow hostility among them. After the Anschluss began in March 1938, Adolf Eichmann recruited Jewish medical doctor Richard Lowenherz to exhaustively plan the logistics of how the Jews were to be persecuted and deported to concentration camps. In places other than Vienna, Nazis drafted Jewish rebellious youths (who expected to escape their oppressors’ abuses) to help control their fellow religionists. Those who sold out were deported anyway, but perhaps a little later on.

In Geneva, Switzerland in mid-July 1938, a conference similar to that of Davos (the annual economic forum in Switzerland, where the super-wealthy of the world go to see and be seen) took place. But instead of discussing getting richer, the representatives from industrialized nations paid lip service to tens of Jewish organizations imploring that their hosts take in Jewish refugees from Germany.

This Evian Conference was about economics, though. Everyone was still suffering the effects of the Great Depression, so they couldn’t afford to take in refugees. In their defense, at that time, they weren’t privy to Hitler’s true plans to loot the Jews of their wealth, commit atrocities and genocide, and take over the world. Most people still naively saw him as a clown.

In the early 1940’s, Stella’s family was told by the American consulate in Germany that they might get a visa to the United States two years hence (even though they had an American relative who was selflessly spending a vast amount of time and effort to help them), as more than fifty thousand refugees were ahead of them in line. “The racket in fake promises kept growing. More and more frustrated travelers forked over more and more cash for nonexistent documents whose sellers then disappeared.”

The author (who obviously lived to tell his and Stella’s stories) wrote that he learned English by reading the New York Times, which cost three cents per day. In the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he was assigned to a propaganda-distribution unit consisting of mostly Jewish refugees. In 1942, he and his cohorts weren’t aware of the scale of the Nazis’ war crimes. In late 1942, even when the BBC told the world about the gas chambers, they didn’t want to believe it.

Read the book to learn all the details of how Stella became a tattletale against her fellow Jews (Hint: she was a brilliant actress– a drama queen, who could turn her charm or hostility on and off at will), what became of her, and biographical info on the huge cast of characters with whom the author and she came into contact.

Shadows and Whispers

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“When I analyzed what passed for his domestic initiatives, it became clear that all of them were rehashings of earlier schemes and none addressed the fundamental problems of the country.”

-the author’s take on Konstantin Chernenko’s rule in 1984

The Book of the Week is “Shadows and Whispers, Power Politics Inside the Kremlin From Brezhnev to Gorbachev” by Dusko Doder, published in 1986 (prior to the historical revisionism and 20/20 hindsight of the collapse of Communism).

As is well known, Soviet leadership in the 1970’s consisted of sick, old men desperately clinging to power. Leonid Brezhnev turned 75 in December 1981. He ordered that school textbooks on twentieth-century Soviet history be rewritten to omit mentions of Stalin and Khrushchev. His own name was featured prominently. He passed away in November 1982. Two possible successors competed to take the vacant top spot. Konstantin Chernenko (a powerful figure in the Communist Party) and Yuri Andropov.

Prior to becoming the Soviet Union’s leader by the end of 1982, Andropov headed the KGB. The KGB’s tentacles consisted of about a half a million James-Bond wannabes– er, uh– operatives, worldwide. They purported to be journalists, diplomats or bureaucrats. Andropov was a reformer who purged the Soviet government of Brezhnev’s corrupt clique. However, he was ill too, and died in February 1984. Then Chernenko got his chance to exercise ultimate power, beating out Mikhail Gorbachev. The latter represented the younger generation, but had to bide his time, as he hadn’t paid his dues.

It wasn’t long– 1985, to be exact– before Gorbachev put his ambitious plans into effect, going further than Andropov to eliminate the “dead wood” from the ranks of Soviet leadership. The Old Guard was incensed at his radical plans.

Read the book to learn much more about the power struggles and personalities that shaped the Soviet Union from the mid-1970’s up until the book’s writing.

Portrait of the Scientist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trail Fever – BONUS POST

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“He’s only secondarily interested in having his views written into the Republican Party platform: the moment that happens he’ll have lost his purpose in life. That purpose is to remain an outsider, an agitator, a sore loser.”

At the time this book was going to print, the author wrote the above about Patrick Buchanan. However, about three years later, Buchanan turned against Donald Trump (!) Buchanan was simply ahead of his time.

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Trail Fever” by Michael Lewis, published in 1997. This paperback described the personalities, styles and activities of the 1996 Republican presidential candidates during primary season beginning in New Hampshire and Iowa.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked an extensive list of detailed sources, and an index), Morry Taylor, a businessman, was a candidate other than the aforementioned Buchanan. He had two great ideas to help improve the United States: 1. Close the law schools for a decade. 2. Elect only females for a decade.

Read the book to learn of the many other idiosyncratic, entertaining pieces of information gleaned by the author as he interviewed the candidates, attended their events, and personally traveled in their campaign vehicles.

A Primate’s Memoir

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

No, not American political workers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO ONE WILL EVER

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

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

America, I love. About you I really care.

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

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

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

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

No one will ever bring me to my knees.

Kudos to me. Kudos to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one will ever bring me to my knees.

Kudos to me. Most excellent, MAGA.

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

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

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

No one will ever bring me to my knees.

Kudos to me. Most excellent, MAGA. Whoa.

Disoriented

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The Book of the Week is “Disoriented, Two Strange Years in China as Unexpected Expats” by Howard Goodman and Ellen Goodman, published in 2014.

In the autumn of 2009, Howard, a journalist, moved to Shanghai to work for the newspaper, Shanghai Daily. His wife Ellen went with him. They weren’t allowed access to social media, but as foreigners, they were able to get satellite TV channels HBO, CNN and BBC Worldwide Service. Ordinary Chinese people weren’t allowed access to any idiot-box information unsupervised by their government.

Anyway, unpredictably, channels were occasionally blacked-out due to censorship. Further, Howard was continually frustrated by government censorship of his employer’s product. Nevertheless, they were floored by Shanghai’s super-fast completion of construction on buildings and infrastructure that began in the late 1990’s.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography and an index), in a few short years, an efficient, shiny high-speed rail line graced the skyline.

BUT, “It didn’t take long for one of the two new bullet trains to crash in Zhejiang Province, killing forty people and injuring nearly two hundred. In the aftermath, the Railway Ministry was revealed to be a pit of kickbacks, corruption, construction shortcuts, and debt, skimming profits and shortchanging safety.” Americans like to think the United States, unlike China, is NOT as greedy, power-hungry and lawless as all that.

Americans also like to think that their own country WOULDN’T ban all of its media from revealing ugly truths about itself in the interest of image-management (also called “optics”) the way China’s government did. In 2010, China didn’t televise the Nobel Peace Prize awards-ceremony because a then-imprisoned Chinese dissident was the winner. Howard’s newspaper did a workaround– reporting that the Foreign Ministry: was livid about awarding a prize to a dissident, and blasted Norway as the venue of the ceremony.

The United States government is currently grappling with Big Tech’s ability to control free speech. There is great difficulty in deciding where to draw the line when a man as provocative as a “Father Coughlin” type comes along and his power surpasses that of just national radio commentator. Obviously, there are worldwide repercussions if he is a world leader.

Along these lines, here’s a song most ordinary Americans are singing right now:

WOULDN’T IT BE NICE
sung to the tune of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” with apologies to the Beach Boys.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our-courts-were nonpartisan,
then respect for justice would be strong.

And why don’t we apPLY the law-for-all,
then we’d have a better world ‘ere long.

Resolving conflicts makes us that much better.
We can’t possibly let violence stay, unfettered.

Wouldn’t it be nice if officials could take up,
all the issues IMportant to you,
and we’d get to have a say together, in our town halls,
we CAN see matters through.

But in recent decades we’ve seen hating.
We should ditch the rallies, and demand, real-debating.

Oh wouldn’t it be nice?

Maybe if, we lose the patronage and corruption,
we wouldn’t have to SUE.

Maybe then, we’d be rid of dangerous loudmouths, whose time should be through.

Please ignore THEIR rants. Please ignore THEIR rants.
Reform campaign FI-nance! Reform campaign FI-nance!

Oh, wouldn’t it be nice?

You know it seems the more we read world history,
the less the current situA-tion’s a mystery. So let’s READ world history.

Wouldn’t it be nice?
Bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah bop, bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah bop,
bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah bop, bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah bop…

***

Anyway, read the book to learn a wealth of information on what daily life was like for American expats in Shanghai and Hong Kong at the start of the 2010’s, and about the authors’ employment adventures, too.

Shell Games / The Snoring Bird – BONUS POST

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“But he remained unwilling to engage in self reflection, apparently reserving the worst deceptions for himself. Perhaps his half-truths had just become part of him.”

So, so many lawbreakers fit the description above, but this happened to be written about Doug Tobin, master geoduck (pronounced “gooey-duck”) poacher.

The first Bonus Book of the Week is “Shell Games, A True Story of Cops, Con Men, and the Smuggling of America’s Strangest Wildlife” by Craig Welch, published in 2010.

A major reason seafood-eaters the world over should be concerned that illegally harvested sea creatures are bought by restaurants and then served to them is: health documents can be forged by poachers who pretend to comply with local laws that would otherwise ban sales of catches from polluted waters. Neurotoxins in shellfish can kill humans, or at best, make them very sick.

Up to the book’s writing, however, the greed and lawlessness had been excessive in the region around Puget Sound off the northern coast of the state of Washington. Its fishing industry was worth about a billion U.S. dollars. Additionally, “Resulting illnesses would be untraceable, and much of the catch ended up on the far side of the world [Asia].”

Read the book to learn of the stories of the Puget Sound area’s federal, state and local and law enforcement agencies’ mostly inadequate attempts to stem the wrongdoers who sold their catches for food (rather than as pets, trophies or medicine.) and a few peripheral topics, that show how criminals endanger people and the environment, largely in the name of money and power.

The second Bonus Book of the Week is “The Snoring Bird, My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology” by Bernd Heinrich, published in 2007.

The author lamented that, as is well known, human beings are destroying themselves and the earth:

“We now know that letting nature take its course is cheaper, safer, more effective, and also more dependable than dropping pesticides from the sky… Like bombing, which chalks up a huge body count, spraying indiscriminately kills the good guys, too, and it keeps the infestation going much longer.”

And yet, local politicians are still endangering people and the environment, largely in the name of money and power, such as those in New York City, for instance, who spray for West Nile virus.

Anyway, the author’s father was steeped in the German mentality, having been convinced that serving his country in WWI was what everyone did. There were extremely few independent thinkers in his place and generation (West Prussia in the early 1900’s). To him, in America (to which the family eventually moved in the 1940’s) democracy was an “experiment” that owed its existence to abundant resources. The Germans suffered deprivations that forced them, for survival’s sake, to blindly obey a take-charge leader who (falsely) promised to solve all of their problems. In Germany, freedom (and scarce resources) would lead to chaos– the people needed to be controlled.

In the 1960’s, the goal of studying biology in graduate school was to make new discoveries. But all five of the author’s projects at UCLA went awry. One of them involved experimenting with honeybees, which escaped from the box the author made himself from some scrap wood. He wasn’t upset, but other students were, as the bees flew around the hallways of the laboratory building. At that time, the only discoveries recognized by the science community were those appearing in peer-reviewed articles in scientific publications.

Read the book to learn: about the academic history and fate of the author, about his and his father’s childhoods and both of their careers, including the extreme hardships they faced during WWII, and about the author’s adventures in Maine and Vermont.

Yellow Bird – BONUS POST

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“There was widespread ‘fear of retaliation if one speaks up to address injustice, fraud or corruption,’ according to the report… fear… for one’s entire family.”

The above was the reason for lack of accountability and lack of punishment for criminals (and in the case of politicians’ failure to speak up– fear of NOT getting reelected!). The aforesaid referred to a 2010 report written by a council on a Native American reservation in North Dakota.

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Yellow Bird, Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country” by Sierra Crane Murdoch, published in 2020.

This disorganized and redundant story centered on Lissa, whose family was originally from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in western North Dakota. Patterns of dysfunction plagued Lissa’s life as it did those of her older relatives: poverty, absent father, teen pregnancy, drugs, domestic violence, etc.

Most of the reservation’s population of approximately sixteen thousand, did not reside on the land. In 2007, the oil company called Dakota-3 approached the Native American landowners to lease their mineral rights. There followed the formation of a ginormously complicated web of incestuous (highly-lucrative) relationships of oil companies, tribal leaders (and their families) and politicians. Not only were people raped, but land, too. The crime rate soared. White and tribal law-enforcement engaged in inter-agency rivalry.

In 2012, an oilfield-services worker, Kristopher Clarke, went missing and many people strongly suspected he was murdered. Lissa became obsessed with investigating his case.

Read the book to learn the rest of the story– about Lissa’s family, activities, and about the reservation’s trials and tribulations when its existence was turned upside-down by oil.