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Totally Unofficial

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The Book of the Week is “Totally Unofficial, the Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin” edited by Donna-Lee Frieze, published in 2013.

Born in 1900 in territory that was alternately Lithuania and eastern Poland, Lemkin was raised among four peasant-farming families who grew clover and rye, and herded sheep and goats. He enjoyed an idyllic early childhood of nature and horseback-riding.

After earning a law degree, he worked for the government in Poland, obtaining higher and higher fancy titles. Even so, he was strangely obedient when, in early September, 1939, the (German occupied) government ordered all able-bodied men to leave Warsaw immediately. He got on a train, which was bombed. He walked to the forest in the countryside.

Later on, Lemkin did use his connections, however, to emigrate to a less dangerous place. In Vilnius in Lithuania, in autumn 1939, he spoke with a Russian soldier whose mentality was: The Western (Britain and France) Allies would fight the German military until they destroyed one another. Then the Russians would come and take over. Americans would sell arms to the Allies so that the Allies would have more resources than the Germans.

The German mentality was: Only the land of any territory Germany occupied, not the people, could be Germanized. So in October 1939, it (along with Russia) proceeded to deport all the Poles from Poland. This plan was written in Hitler’s 1924 book, Mein Kampf. The reason it took so long for the civil Europeans and Americans with sufficient power to head off the danger, was that they didn’t believe anyone could be so barbaric.

Earlier international agreements set out rules of engagement with regard to war. In general, destroying enemies’ military and fighting-infrastructure was believed to be justified. Nevertheless, the documents failed to mention persecuting and killing of civilians of a specific group. Lemkin felt this instance which he called genocide, needed to be codified, because early in the war, he had witnessed it in his native land. In summer 1942, he was unable to convince FDR of the urgency of making genocide an international crime.

Finally, in November 1946, Lemkin spoke with all kinds of diplomats when the world was ready to sit down at the bargaining table and form the United Nations. Panama, Cuba, India and global women’s organizations initially agreed to sign his resolution, by then called the Genocide Convention.

Still, there were years of arguments over every word, resistance and the usual political shenanigans. For, postwar, some arrogant government officials (such as French intellectuals and the British attorney general) were angry that their country had been taken down a notch in world status, so they argued that a Genocide Convention wasn’t necessary. The Nuremberg judgment had already outlawed war crimes, during times of war.

Lemkin explained that even in peacetime, human nature would dictate that a handful of evil people would acquire significant power to hate on others; thus, the need for a reminder in writing that the international community should put the kibosh on such behavior.

Read the book to learn much more about the trials and tribulations Lemkin experienced in trying to get the world to understand and commit to his ideology.

Putin

WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Putin” by Philip Short, published in 2022.

In this hodgepodge of a slightly sloppily edited volume, the author recounted many of the historical events in which Russian leader Vladimir Putin played a role. The history portion was too broad to be covered in one volume. It could have been detailed better in three or four separate books.

Putin was born in October 1952 in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union. Beginning in his youth, he studied a martial-arts discipline similar to judo, and later on, judo, and read the classic Russian novels. In the mid-1960’s, after Nikita Khrushchev was ousted, the country regressed politically and culturally. The new dictator, Leonid Brezhnev, forced the people to study Marxism and Leninism and cracked down on dissidents, whom he felt were unduly influenced by the evil West. Corruption skyrocketed.

In the USSR, ironically, there were TV shows glorifying the (British, Western) “James Bond” character: “…which related the exploits of Soviet agents in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, depicted intelligence officers as selfless patriots and heroes, defending their homeland at the risk of their lives.” In late summer 1968, such shows made Putin want to join the KGB.

Yuri Andropov happened to have begun actively recruiting new members to the spying agency. Putin’s application had various disadvantages for acceptance: He came from a working-class family, had yet to complete his military service, and hadn’t studied law at university. Other disqualifying conditions included Jewishness of oneself or relatives, having family overseas or having a criminal record.

In autumn 1970, Putin began his legal education. In that time and place, students were rote-learning robots of Stalinist ideology. They were allowed neither critical thinking, nor original thoughts. Still, a few of the rigorous KGB hiring requirements were waived for Putin. It was always possible bribery was a factor in his getting the job, but he did have one special connection. His grandfather had worked as a cook for the Communist Party elite. The KGB officially became Putin’s employer in spring 1975. Putin’s career in a nutshell: He sucked up to father figures in his workplace. That is how he moved up through the ranks quickly, even though his performance was mediocre.

Putin’s job was to try to get various expatriates in academic and communications social-circles in Leningrad to defect to the Soviets. He had little, if any success. Nonetheless, he was an ideal spy because his appearance and behavior were forgettable. His activities the next several years will never be known. Anyway, by the late 1980’s, he had a wife and daughter. He had been “kicked upstairs” to Dresden (a city out in “the sticks”). From seeing the capitalist conditions there, Putin began to realize that the competition of free markets (even black markets!) were superior to Communism.

As is well known, the tail end of the 1980’s saw tumultuous world events. The new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, let the people read authors such as Pasternak, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. There were various power struggles occurring between and among alpha males in the former Soviet satellites and within the USSR’s political bodies. A vast number of Eastern European refugees fleeing their newly discovered crushing oppression, poured into Western Europe.

Ironically, in the 1990’s, it was Soviet satellites that fell like dominoes to Western political, economic, social and cultural influences. Not (as it was propagandized during the Cold War) entire countries whose citizens’ hearts and minds were exposed to Soviet ideology. In 1992, Boris Yeltsin became the newest leader of the people of Russia. He naively followed American consultant Jeffrey Sachs’ financial advice, and crashed its economy with “shock capitalism.”

In the early 1990’s, Putin served as the right-hand man to Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of Leningrad. The latter ingratiated himself with world leaders in order to get himself invited to social events and broker peace deals. He was bored by the monitoring of day-to-day operations of paper-pushing and interactions with citizens he was supposed to be leading. Putin threw a rare temper tantrum when Estonia expressed a desire to become independent. For, his goal was to keep as many territories under the Soviet umbrella as he possibly could.

In spring 1996, Putin bought himself a graduate degree– an academic credential useful for obtaining a high-level political position in Moscow. It proved useful. By the late 1990’s, Russia was dealing with privatization of real property among oligarchs, and then a financial crisis due to plummeting oil and gas prices, and certain natural resources– its biggest exports.

By 2003, Russia was becoming Communist all over again. The author related the propaganda put out by stakeholders in the Ukraine war about why Russia was claiming sovereignty over Ukraine again, but failed to mention that Ukraine’s land contains certain kinds of rare and valuable substances that are used in specific industries; grabbing them can result in blood-for-oil type conflicts.

Anyway, read the book to learn: how, in 2004, when he ran for reelection or was appointed (in fear-and-force oriented and unfair “elections”) again and again and again as a candidate for “president” or “prime minister,” Putin didn’t let pesky provisions in his country’s Constitution prevent him from staying in power; of the staged and scripted political shenanigans including but not limited to those involving Pussy Riot, dissident Aleksei Navalny, the Magnitsky Act, the Ed Snowden affair, unrest in Syria, Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, etc., etc., etc.

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.

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.

All the Worst Humans

The Book of the Week is “All the Worst Humans, How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians” by Phil Elwood, published in 2024. This short volume was authored by an alcoholic adrenaline-junkie and occasional drug addict who was happiest when he was afforded opportunities to use his creativity to help his clients weasel out of image-trouble, burnish their image, or launch a smear campaign.

Born around 1980, Elwood began to acquire valuable contacts in Washington, D.C. when he did a summer internship in the U.S. Senate. Elwood was pleasantly surprised that, after ruining his own reputation, one such contact wrote a recommendation letter on his behalf to help him get accepted to a different college.

Most of the time, the following publications are the major influencers on breaking news: Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, Politico, Axios, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The last three have a paywall– users must subscribe to them, and pay to read their articles. As is well known, in the last several decades, elected officials and their staffs in Washington, D.C., the media, the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley, professional sports and Wall Street have all incestuously melded together to create one big gossip circle. Readers who are no longer willing to pay for news, miss out on the gossip.

The author commented that there are currently a few tens of thousands of people who call themselves “journalists” while there are a few hundreds of thousands of people employed in the public relations industry. Very nearly all (except for this blog!) global communications are now sponsored-opinions, after so many decades of changes to information-sharing. Four of many milestones that set shameful precedents include:

In 1963, a journalist broke the taboo against prying into the personal lives of professional athletes when he revealed that Sandy Koufax was adopted. After that, privacy invasion became the norm.
In 1982, the New York Times eliminated the firewall between its editorial and advertising departments. Sports Illustrated did the same in the late 1980’s.
The year 1984 saw Republicans launch a fishing expedition of, and vicious smear campaign against Democrat vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro’s husband. Even for modern times, the high level of nastiness was extreme– and Republicans have continued such behavior to date, more than the Democrats.
Beginning in the 1980’s, the FCC relaxed its antitrust laws, allowing Rupert Murdoch to create a monster-sized multimedia empire (by purchasing the New York Post newspaper, Twentieth Century Fox, HarperCollins and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few propaganda outlets) with its attendant extremely large concentration of resources that allowed for infinite conflicts of interest that afforded him and his cronies the kinds of growth opportunities that free-market competitors couldn’t possibly hope to match.

To get additional information on how money, power and political hacks have corrupted every aspect of how people find out what’s going on in the world, feel free to read all the posts in this blog’s category “Publishing Industry Including Newspapering.”

Anyway, the author planted the following naive passage in his writing: “Salaries in some newsrooms are going up. Private equity is buying up media companies left and right. Foreign nations are investing heavily, too. Lines of ethics are blurring.” Newsflash: all these trends are decades-old!

Nonetheless, read the book to learn of the author’s adventures in image-management.

Along these lines, here’s a song about yet another downfall of someone once-rich and powerful (brought to you by Elwood-style PR.). This is what the Democrats are singing to the American president, whose name rhymes with “rump” and “dump.”

MIDTERMS-KARMA

sung to the tune of “Instant Karma” (1970 version) with apologies to the Estate of John Lennon and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Midterms-karma is gonna get you.

Gonna flip the states that are Red.

You’ll try to give yourself a pardon.

No one will shut up and take your bread.

All the world has had enough,

laughing behind your back,

all over the earth you’re a TACO.

They know you go low, yeah, low.

Midterms-karma is gonna get you.

A man like you is once-and-always.

Even the “new” Nixon wasn’t the “new” Nixon.

Yours is an open and shut case.

Your sins, the whole world is gonna see.

You’ll be blasting the fools in your GOP.

Everyone on earth knows who you are. A has-been tsar.

Far Right you are.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on. Everyone. Come on.

Midterms-karma is gonna get you.

You lay down with dogs, you got fleas.

You know a man is known by,

the company he keeps.

Everyone knows you’re outa here.

You’ve made so many live in pain and fear.

Why are you there, when you should be nowhere?

You got more than your share.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Gone and gone and gone, gone and gone.

Yeah, yeah, alright, uh-huh, uh.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Gone and gone and gone, gone and gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone.

Well, we all pile on.

Very soon you and your suck-ups will be gone…

Trotsky in New York 1917

The Book of the Week is “Trotsky in New York 1917, A Radical on the Eve of Revolution” by Kenneth D. Ackerman, published in 2016. This volume had a misleading title, in that it described not only Trotsky’s activities, but those of his contemporaries and their times. There were backstories and flashbacks– insulting the intelligence of a reader who desired to read the book from cover to cover, rather than use it as a reference book. It repeated itself as history does; “When war [WWI] hysteria hit, people began to look for scapegoats, traitors, and spies. And the first accused of disloyalty were always the same: immigrants and socialists.”

Anyway, in January 1917, the man latterly known as Leon Trotsky, his second wife and their two sons arrived in New York City by boat. He and his wife confidently lied to immigration officials who had visited them personally in their cabin. They were able to bypass the Ellis Island third-degree inquisition because they were first-class passengers. The Spanish government paid the extra cost of upgrading them from second class because it was so eager to exile them.

Trotsky worked in the East Village office of Novy Mir (“New World”), a Russian socialist newspaper with a circulation of eight thousand. He had numerous intellectual and political friends in high places. Trotsky was a spellbinding speaker and prolific writer on socialist ideology. He doubted the elitist president Woodrow Wilson could help make peace in Europe because America was capitalist and ruled by its moneyed class. That class wanted to maintain the status quo of the gravy train of great profits derived from weapons contractors. Trotsky thought similiarly of the American Socialist Party leader– Morris Hillquit, who, as a lawyer, charged big bucks to represent labor and radical political activists and wasn’t opposed to using violence to get candidates elected.

In March 1917, after the tsar in Russia was deposed, Trotsky was on the move again, as he was a member of the Russian revolutionary organization. He and his family acquired proper identity papers and booked passage on a boat back to Russia. However, he was detained in a prison west of Halifax by Canadian authorities (ultimately ruled by Britain) for fear his native Russia would ally with Germany to defeat the French and British. He prepared several telegrams to inform various parties of what was happening with him; one of which was actually sent. This spawned letters, demonstrations, telegrams and newspaper articles in America, Canada, Britain and Russia that put pressure on officials to allow him to return to Russia.

By late 1917, Trotsky and the gang were well on their way to forming a dictatorship in Russia– breaking their previous campaign promises. Via violence, they eliminated free speech and all political activity except their own. Trotsky made the excuse that such measures were necessary to head off a French-Revolution-style peasant-uprising. However, in order to stay in power as the top leader, Vladimir Lenin scaled back the brutality by instituting the New Economic Policy. Because the common people were starving, he actually allowed them to engage in capitalist initiatives in agriculture. Of course there was corruption. Hilarity did NOT ensue.

As is well known, hilarity is associated with the American sitcom, a bygone era. Trotsky’s scene was more like a modern-day reality show– whose viewers vicariously release their rage along with the overpaid noisemakers on the idiot box. Here are the sentiments of some other Americans.

TRIPE

sung to the tune of “Escape” with apologies to Rupert Holmes and whomever else the rights may concern.

I’m tired of the president.
He’s been in office too long.
He’s a worn out recording of a boatload of wrongs.
So while he’s hiding and golfing, he’s trying to clear his head.
And his personal consultants, keep the media fed.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
All the negative emotions, and the race to defame.
I don’t like his fluff night AFTER night, the views, and the hype.
It’s not fluff I voted for.
I TUNE out the tripe.

I don’t think about the president.
He’s always so mean.
He and his media slaves,
require a staged and scripted routine.
It should be in all the papers– his mind is going bad.
GOP doesn’t want to SHOW it. GOP is power-mad.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
I don’t like the xenophobia, the greed campaign.
I hope Vance steps up soon,
and cuts through all this red tape, via the 25th Amendment,
and changes the leadership landscape.

The prez can’t TALK off the cuff.
He’s in an embarrassing place.
It’s another Reagan instance.
Billionaire boys set the pace.

Vance MUST be less shady.
He’s a Millennial coup.
You can laugh for a moment.
But he’s dangerous, too.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
I’m into sane healthcare, NOT the greed campaign.
I don’t like his fluff night AFTER night, the views, and the hype.
It’s not fluff I voted for.
I TUNE out the tripe.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains…

==================

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Trotsky’s life and political career.

Ivan’s War

The Book of the Week is “Ivan’s War, Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945” by Catherine Merridale, published in 2006.

As is well known, by the mid-1920’s, Stalin had taken over Russia, in which there had been a revolution to turn the country Communist. Beginning in 1929, Stalin forced peasant-farmers to merge their land into collectives and adopt wrong-headed agricultural methods, resulting in millions and millions of deaths from famine. Elite schools in the cities were training the upper class (and a few poor boys) for leadership.

In spring 1937, Stalin ordered many top leaders in his government and military to be fired or tortured or killed, or a combination thereof. The younger soldiers had been brainwashed from birth to be anti-Fascist and therefore to hate the Germans, so they were confused when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. Nevertheless, when WWII came, the Russian military incited the educated young men to lead the fight to protect mother Russia. Back home, their families were still starving.

In June 1940, the Soviet military was unpleasantly surprised by an attack on their Slavic lands by the German Luftwaffe. The now-enemy had knocked out a lot of military resources and Soviet troops had been disorganized and poorly equipped previously. Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, used the occasion to inspire patriotism and incite additional hatred against the Germans.

Propaganda literally flew back and forth hot and heavy. German planes flying over Ukraine dropped leaflets that said Moscow had fallen and Stalin was dead. Turnover in the Red Army was extremely high due to: desertions, deaths from NKVD executions for desertions, and deaths from disease and enemy fire and bombardments.

In spring 1944, Soviet soldiers invaded Romania. They began to see peasants there and in Germany, Poland, France, Holland, Belgium and other capitalist places, who were living way better than they themselves had been, in their civilian lives. The young Soviet military men began to question how Communism was so great if they had been so economically poor.

Instead of setting fire to Romanian villages as they and the Germans had done to so many other battlegrounds as they were leaving, they looted corpses and appropriated farm animals, alcohol and material possessions for themselves. Black markets flourished.

When they finally marched into East Prussia and Budapest, the Soviets’ frenzy of hatred involved raping females, too. Peer pressure caused otherwise ethical men to become barbarians, and drunkenness made it easier to misbehave the way they did.

The Russian propaganda outlet “Pravda” portrayed the Soviets as victims of the Nazis, and called for revenge and reparations. It conveniently neglected to mention the atrocities they committed.

Stalin deflected blame from himself for millions and millions of Soviet deaths through the decades of his rule, by claiming he was suffering along with his people. He believed that Western capitalist cultures were a bad influence, so he demobilized the Russian Army from Germany in 1945– making them sign nondisclosure agreements. He also appeased them with a monetary bonus and (low quality) consumer goods. However, they were spied on by his intelligence service 24/7.

Stalin cast aspersions on the Jews during and after the war. One of numerous myths spread was that during the war, Jews held office jobs instead of fighting on the front lines. In 1945, Ukrainians in Kiev launched a pogrom.

The ravages of the war gave rise to adrenaline junkies with PTSD. After the war, they didn’t know what to do with themselves, and they continued to lead violent, empty lives. “Instead of aspiring to freedom, patriots would henceforth– wittingly or not– become complicit in the repression of the minorities, large-scale arrests, and a bleak and deadly dogma that had almost nothing in common with the libertarian promises that had drawn such crowds to Palace Square in the revolutionary months of 1917.”

After official histories of the war were published, Soviet censors prohibited the publishing of any additional war-related information. No one was allowed to see the archives. They were classified. Top secret.

Read the book to learn much more on the history of the Soviets’ experiences before, during and after WWII.

ENDNOTE: Speaking of non-disclosure and keeping up appearances, here’s a little ditty that describes Trump’s latest marital status.

FIRST LADY MELANIA

sung to the tune of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” with apologies to The Beatles, their estates and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Donald had a victory in the political race.

Melania is, standing by her man.

Donald said to Melania,

“You’ll help me save face. We’ll sign an agreement to maintain the Trump brand.”

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

Donald has a radical agenda in store.

Melania, must obey her king.

She’s stiff and aloof and doesn’t care anymore.

She knows she’s not allowed to say a thing.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For all of their years, their marriage is a BUS-iness act.

With previous kids, their family’re reality show stars…

of Donald’s and Melania’s contracts.

Donald’s the big winner in the transactional race.

Donald lets the children lend a hand.

Melania stays at home and does her pretty face,

and at events she’s loyally standing by her man.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For all of their years, their marriage is a BUS-iness act.

With previous kids, their family’re reality show stars…

of Donald’s and Melania’s contracts.

Donald’s the big winner in the transactional race.

Donald lets the children lend a hand.

Melania stays at home and does her pretty face,

and at events she’s loyally standing by her man.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For Donald it’s FUN.

But for Melania, it’s NOT!

Merkel’s Law

The Book of the Week is “Merkel’s Law, Widsom From the Woman Who Led the Free World” by Melissa Eddy, published in 2024.

This short, sloppily edited, chronologically disorganized, redundant volume described the highlights of the decades-long (beginning at the dawn of the 1990’s) political career of Angela Merkel in Germany.

As much as the capitalist Americans scream “socialist!” at many aspects of the culture of Europeans, the latter are superior in gender equality! In approximately the last fifty years, several females have served as world leaders; Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir among them. But the United States has yet to elect a female president.

Interestingly, East Germany had a bigger selection of daycare centers than did West Germany at the time of this book’s writing. This meant a larger percentage of eastern German women (on whom the burden still largely falls to raise children and do housework) than otherwise, could have a career if they chose. It is still a myth that women can have it all, even in industrialized countries.

Additionally, the media pestered Merkel about various issues they wouldn’t dare have raised if she had been a male. They criticized her fashion choices. They treated her public appearances as a beauty contest. But Merkel did have a unique perspective, having grown up in East Germany under the yoke of Communism. She witnessed poor talent deployment under the crushingly oppressive system. Everyone was guaranteed a job, but there was wasted talent galore.

One behavior Merkel exhibited, for which a few male politicians have become known, was delaying making decisions until the last possible moment. There might have been various time-sensitive factors at work when she finally announced she was going to run for a fourth term as chancellor of Germany, that would begin in 2017. One factor included waiting to see whether American voters elected Donald Trump for president in 2016. Another was the possible influence outgoing American president Barack Obama had on her to run again.

On the other hand, making people wait is a control-issue. There is power in keeping information to oneself. The media has to monitor when an announcement is going to be made, and keeping viewers in suspense generates ratings.

Two major crises Merkel faced during her chancellorship, for which her reactions were lambasted– consisted of the overwhelming number of Syrian refugees coming into Germany beginning in the 2010’s, and the oversight of energy sources for Germany. Regarding the latter, Merkel chose to purchase more natural gas and stopped the use of nuclear energy after Japan became a cancer cluster from radiation. Japan suffered a meltdown of its nuclear plants from an earthquake and tsunami in spring 2011.

Many Germans thought Merkel sold her soul to the Russians on the energy front. However, all world leaders must make wrenching decisions for their nations in connection with goods and services (especially energy!), environmental friendliness (or not), economics, and diplomatic relations, because all kinds of issues are all interrelated and cannot be divorced from one another.

Nevertheless, the decisions of elected public servants tend to be selfish, as they always have their eye on reelection or their legacy. In a democratic country, the one exception is when a dictatorial leader’s decisions are all selfish– if they are in their last term due to term limits and they don’t care about their legacy.

Read the book to learn about Merkel’s career trials and tribulations, her strengths and weaknesses, and her legacy.

Kissinger

The Book of the Week is “Kissinger, A Biography” by Walter Isaacson, published in 2005.

Kissinger was born in May 1923 in an eastern suburb of Nuremberg. His ancestors came from Bavaria. When he was in his teens, his family arrived in America. Toward the end of WWII, Kissinger served in the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence division, engaging in diplomacy to de-Nazify a whole region of suburbs in Germany.

In 1951, Kissinger recruited tens of foreign-nationals and licensed-professionals for the Harvard International Seminar– a summer multi-disciplinary program featuring lectures and field trips that was later revealed to be a front for the CIA. Kissinger amassed a vast social network from the program. He had superior social-climbing skills, appealing to his betters (who were just as egotistical as he was) with flattery, but fiercely competing with colleagues of status equal to his own.

Kissinger always argued that injustice and order (a benign dictator) was preferable to justice and disorder (a revolutionary environment or anarchy) in a nation. He felt the purpose of a summit wasn’t to get a monstrously brutal leader to change his ways, but rather, to: reassure allies, get on the good side of neutral nations and show the world one’s own civility. Yet he was always listening to all sides in a debate in order to get them to agree with him.

Kissinger achieved full tenure at Harvard University in 1962. Less than a decade later, he served as a very close aide to president Richard Nixon. Just as parties are thrown to annoy those who aren’t invited, at the dawn of the 1970’s, the Nixon White House consisted of socially manipulative cliques who kept one another out of the loop of their own furtive meetings, memos and covert operations. The Nixon camp loved secrecy and tried to stop information from leaking to the press with their “plumbers.”

The president ordered that a total of seventeen secret FBI wiretaps be placed on the home telephones of high-level employees of his administration for as long as nearly two years for some, beginning in 1969. In 1973, when the media exposed this spying operation, Nixon claimed he alone authorized it. But Kissinger– a drama queen– had incited the emotional environment that led Nixon and his subordinates to commit the crimes they did.

In 1971, Kissinger participated in clandestine meetings with the Chinese government to invite trade with the United States, and change China’s mind on its claim on Taiwan. The U.S. was reducing its military presence in Vietnam, and saw that the Chinese and Soviets weren’t getting along. Thus, extending an olive branch to China was a supposedly geopolitically brilliant move on Nixon’s part.

If America got friendly with the Chinese (contradicting Nixon’s previously vicious anti-Communist stance), and negotiated arms reductions with the Soviets– America would stave off nuclear war with them, further weaken the alliance between China and the U.S.S.R., and get an economic boost.

China’s officials began the talks by requesting that the Americans tell them the issues thought to be deal-breakers. This saved a lot of time, as the Chinese considered Taiwan a minor issue and weren’t going to budge on it. They both secretly used Pakistan as an intermediate messenger. As a result, the Soviets got friendly with India. That turned into a cluster screw-up.

Kissinger could dish it out but he couldn’t take it. He became infuriated when Nixon’s aide, John Ehrlichman told him that a spy ring had been stealing documents from his office and leaking them to the press. Kissinger’s self-delusion was most cringeworthy on Vietnam. He rationalized the war’s aims, attempting to persuade ordinary Americans that the decade-long colossal human waste wasn’t the result of several alpha males’ stubborn insistence on America’s involvement (plus in Cambodia and Laos). In other words, Kissinger couldn’t admit that at least hundreds of thousands of people died for nothing.

One Bertrand Russell quote in connection therewith bears repeating:

“There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.”

There is nothing new under the sun. The media flip-flopped insofar as their stories on Kissinger brought them ratings and sold newspapers. In mid-October 1972, less than a month before Nixon’s reelection day, the New York Times and Newsweek celebrated Kissinger as he claimed to have achieved agreement on a peace treaty with North Vietnam from his confidential peace talks in Paris. He himself reveled in the glory of saving the world.

In December 1972, the seasoned propagandists turned around and labeled Kissinger a war criminal (which they should have been doing all along!) after he was found to have completely excluded the South Vietnamese leader from the agreement-announcement. Kissinger pretended to be outraged that Nguyen Van Thieu refused to sign the treaty. But the treaty’s wording hadn’t said what Van Thieu had agreed to.

Kissinger used the emotionally-charged, last-minute discord as an excuse to urge Nixon to order the resumption of America’s bombing of the North Vietnam capital Hanoi, and Nixon did. More than a thousand additional U.S. servicemen and civilians lost to history, died needlessly. Not unbelievably, given the fallibility and gullibility of human beings, in autumn 1973, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Peace prize.

In sum, Henry Kissinger achieved name-recognition in numerous communities of American life, in the following order: academia, presidential politics, foreign affairs, Hollywood, big business, and jet-set society.

As an aside, Donald Trump achieved name-recognition in the following, in the following order: big business (as a matter of inheritance), jet-set society, Hollywood, and then presidential politics. He hasn’t been all that competent in foreign affairs and academia, though.

Additionally, Trump bears many similarities to Nixon. Trump:

has a sidekick in Elon Musk as Nixon had a sidekick in Kissinger.
alternates between deep insecurities and megalomania.
appoints largely white alpha males in the White House (with a few white females thrown in).
was directly or indirectly responsible for sending to jail– almost every legally-troubled individual with whom he associated.
has a major goal of wreaking vengeance on his political enemies, using hush money when necessary.
claims attorney-client relationship and executive-privilege to weasel out of legal trouble.
projects the image of the outsider, and excessively exhibited mean-of-spirit, obnoxious behavior, but adjusted his image to become somewhat like the “new” Nixon in order to make a comeback.

It seems that Trump’s inauguration is going to be like the 1945 Yalta and 2024 Davos conferences. On steroids. Here’s a little song about the situation.

INAUGURATION

sung to the tune of “Revolution” with apologies to the members of The Beatles, and their estates, and whomever else the rights may concern.

Trump’s gonna have an in-au-gu-RA-tion,
well, you know,
in 2017 he insulted the world.

It’s a see-and-be-seen cel-e-BRA-tion,
well, you know,
his frat boys will rule the WO-ORLD.

And if he goes through with DE-portations,
he’d have to kick his own family OUT.

You know he used to be,
all-fight, all-fight, all fight.

He says he’s got resolutions,
well, you know,
it’s called Project 2025.

Billionaires make contributions,
well, you know,
they’re keeping Trump’s image a-LIVE.

Big tech and media have money for people
who SPREAD around hate.
For a grown-up Vance,
we’ll just have to WAIT.

And you know he used to be,
all-fight, all-fight, all-fight.

Trump gets to interpret the Consti-TU-tion,
well, you know,
he owns most of the Supreme-COURT.

It WAS a respected insti-TU-tion,
well, you know,
He’ll pardon THEM as a last resort.

He’s getting friendlier with the world’s tyrants NOW.
Don’t worry,
he’s losing his mind, anyHOW.

And you know he used to be,
all-fight, all fight, all fight,
all-fight, all fight, all fight,
all-fight, all fight, all fight,
all-fight, all FIGHT!

Anyway, read the book to learn much, much more about how Kissinger prolonged his name in history due to his self-absorbed attention whoredom; about how his dishonesty shaped America’s never-ending, extremely complex political, ideological, cultural and economic controversies over its “detente” versus “might-makes right” mentality with regard to the Soviet Union, Soviet Jewry, Israel, global trade, human rights, weapons stocks, neocons (the description of which was murky), the Portugal/Angola mess, etc.

Unleashed

The Book of the Week is “Unleashed” by Boris Johnson, published in 2024. This large volume was a bragfest, but it also explained the author’s opinions and his government’s policies for laypeople.

Johnson was born in 1964. “Disaster” was his favorite word. As London’s mayor starting in May 2008, he began implementing some of the same crime-fighting and environmental initiatives taken by former New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

Beginning in June 2016, after 52% of the UK’s 17.4 million population voted in favor of Brexit, heated discussions were had by everyone, including Lord Chief Justice, Master of the Rolls, and President of the Queen’s Bench Division. In 2019, Johnson was elected UK prime minister, and he became the nation’s biggest Brexit booster. The nation’s moneyed classes, and those who were pro-immigrant, wanted to remain in the EU.

The EU leadership in Brussels controlled many aspects of the economies of member-countries because it set the terms and conditions on trade unions, customs fees, currencies, factories, distribution of goods, national-border policies, etc. Johnson felt the UK was hamstrung by all the petty rules. He claimed that Canada was able to export its goods to EU’s markets absent the regulations to which the UK was subject.

In April 2020, when the prime minister ended up in the intensive care unit with a bad case of COVID, “Outside in the corridors of the hospital, though I never saw them, were representatives of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, despatched by Donald Trump to revive me with drugs not licensed or approved in the UK.”

The COVID pandemic in 2020 was a game-changer. Johnson contended that because the UK was no longer a member of the EU, certain forward-looking, skilled members of his administration were able to secure a vaccination program that was more widespread and implemented sooner than EU members’ programs. Harm done to the UK’s people and its economy was therefore significantly less than that done to comparable countries.

Nevertheless, the line graph of COVID deaths followed a largely similar pattern for each nation where COVID’s effects on the population was tracked– regardless of the actions leaders took. Sweden’s policies on quarantining were optional, while China’s were draconian, but both of their graphs showed two peaks during which the death toll went up and down during the course of the pandemic.

Another political issue shared by all major governments of the world, is immigration. Johnson heard how Australia supposedly deterred uninvited people fleeing their homelands, from arriving on its shores. Its federal immigration agency transported those people– to have their asylum claims processed to– not the nicest destination, to put it mildly, 4,500 miles to the island of Nauru. Perhaps the U.S. could look into such a policy, given that it too, is overwhelmed with asylum-seekers who have arrived on its soil illegally.

Read the book to learn much more about Johnson’s political life and times.