#1,018: Pardon Me!

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                              Emilie Todd and Benjamin Hardin Helm, 1857. 

   President Joseph R. Biden, Jr’s. recent pardon of his son Hunter has a lot of people talking. According to recent polling done by the now-80 year old Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago, only about 2 in 10 Americans approve of the President’s decision to pardon his son after earlier promising he would do no such thing.  The survey found that a relatively small share of Americans “strongly” or “somewhat” approve of the pardon, which came after the younger Biden was convicted on gun and tax charges. About half said they “strongly” or “somewhat” disapprove, and about 2 in 10 neither approve nor disapprove.  Unsurprisingly, a higher percentage of Republicans - both office-holders and everyday voters - found fault with Biden’s act than Democrats. As soon as the pardon was announced, the President-Elect took to Truth Social, slamming Biden for what he called "an abuse and miscarriage of Justice! Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?" he wrote. Steven Cheung, the President-Elect’s communications director, told Newsweek, "The failed witch hunts against President Trump have proven that the Democrat-controlled DOJ and other radical prosecutors are guilty of weaponizing the justice system."

   Political commentator Ben Shapiro slammed the president for his decision to issue the pardon, saying that Biden "has always been a venal liar who utilized his political power to pursue familial gain. So of course he's pardoning Hunter. He was always going to pardon Hunter. Hunter was the bagman." Shapiro and many other voices on the right have seized on the timeframe of Hunter's pardon to note that it starts before he joined Ukrainian gas company Burisma's board of directors. Shapiro later posted a video trying to connect the dots on this narrative.

Ezra Klein, a popular New York Times opinion columnist, acknowledged that "it's terrible politics and precedent," but argued that "the Trump team has been brutally clear they want revenge on their enemies, they are obsessed with Hunter in particular, and that would weigh like hell on me if I were his father and could protect him." Klein also joked about the "Dark Brandon" memes and endorsed the suggestion that Hunter Biden should appear on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Political pollster Nate Silver had harsh words for the president, writing on X that he "voted for Harris despite feeling like Democrats indulged in a lot of bad behavior that voters were rational to publish. After the White House lying about the Hunter pardon I'm not sure how much more I can tolerate."  Silver also called for voters to reject "any Democrat in 2028 who doesn't repudiate the pardon within 48 hours." He also accused the White House of "consistently" lying about Biden's plan to abide by the court's decision on Hunter Biden's cases and called Biden "a selfish and senile old man."

Many Republicans, including members of both the House and Senate appear to believe that Biden’s pardon of son Hunter was, historically speaking, absolutely nonpareil; that no other POTUS had ever pardoned a member of his own family.  If they really, truly believe this  (which I doubt) when the lights go down and they put their heads on the pillow, then they had best go back and relearn high school-level American history.  For not only did their once-and-future leader pardon his מַחֲטוּנִים* billionaire real estate mogul Charles Kushner in December 2020; he recently announced that he was nominating him to become America’s next Ambassador to France.  (*Pronounced mechute’n), this is a basically untranslatable Yiddish term, meaning something like “your child’s father-in-law” which, in the eyes of Jewish custom, makes Jared’s father a flesh-and-blood member of the Trump family).  And to make sure we’re all on the same page, remember that In 2005, Charles Kushner was convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering. After learning that his brother-in-law was cooperating with federal investigators, Charles Kushner hired a sex worker to lure him into a hotel room with a hidden camera and then sent the recording of the encounter to his sister.  The senior Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts, including tax evasion and witness tampering. He was sentenced to two years in prison and was ordered to pay $508,900 to the Federal Election Commission. After his release - and before he received his pardon -  he returned to the real estate business.

So we can add IT to Biden as presidents who have pardoned family members.  But we’re not even halfway there.  In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln  issued a posthumous pardon to Confederate General Benjamin Hardin  Helm, who was the late husband of Emilie Todd Helm, (that’s them in the picture above). Emilie Todd was the half-sister of Lincoln’s wife, thereby making the general Lincoln’s brother-in-law. General Helm was the last commander of the “Orphan Brigade”* and was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga. Lincoln had originally offered Emilie Todd's husband a position in the Union Army, but he chose to raise a regiment for the Confederacy.  (*The “Orphan Brigade was made up of Kentucky regiments that were "orphans" because Kentucky's secession movement failed, leaving them without a "home state" in the Confederacy.)  Nonetheless, Lincoln pardoned him, thus permitting his widow (who after his death moved to the White House), to sell her homestead and Kentucky-grown tobacco on the open market.  

Ironically, Abraham Lincoln also pardoned Joseph Robinette Biden’s Great Great Grandfather, Moses Robinette on September 1, 1864.  In 1861, Robinette, who was working as a veterinary surgeon for the Army of the Potomac’s reserve artillery had been convicted of a number of offenses including attempted murder. Found guilty in 1864, he was sent to the Dry Tortugas islands of Florida to serve out his 2-year sentence. When the attempted murder charge was overturned, Robinette’s case was brought to Lincoln’s attention.  Within a matter of weeks, the nation’s 16th POTUS pardoned “Doc” Robinette.

Rounding out the list of presidents who have pardoned family members is Bill Clinton, our 42nd Commander-in-Chief. On one of his last days in office, he issued a pardon for his half-brother Roger Clinton, Jr., who, in 1985, had been tried, convicted and served federal time for possession and drug-trafficking. The conviction came on the heels of a sting operation operation looking into conspiracy to distribute cocaine. During the time his brother served as POTUS, Roger’s Secret Service code name was “Headache,” due to his unpredictable behavior.

   I for one am a bit torn about Joe Biden pardoning Hunter.  On the one hand, this man has lived through more family tragedy than perhaps anyone in public life: those of a certain age well remember the president’s shared anguish over his two sons, after the boys survived a car crash that killed Biden's first wife and a daughter more than a half-century ago. Or to those who heard the president regularly lament the death of his older son, Beau, from cancer, or voice concerns — largely in private — about Hunter’s sobriety and health after years of deep addiction. But on the other, for months prior to the November election President Biden said he would not, under any circumstance, pardon his remaining son: “No one is above the law.”  His stunning reversal is hard for a majority of Americans to swallow, myself included.  But this pardon is not the sum total of everything one need to know about Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.  For Republicans, this reversal gives them license to self-righteously proclaim to anyone and everyone who will listen and agree, that this pardon will, when all is said and done, be the only thing history will remember about Joe Biden.  This is stuff and nonsense.  American history is replete with presidents who have granted pardons that are far more questionable and downright dishonest:

• In 1869, President Andrew Johnson pardoned Dr. Samuel Mudd, who had been sentenced for assisting Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth.  It is likely that Mudd earned his pardon from Ft. Jefferson n part because of his efforts to halt the spread of an outbreak of deadly yellow fever at the prison.  (In 1936, 20th Century Fox produced a film loosely based on Mudd’s life. The Prisoner of Shark Island, directed by John Ford, and starring Warner Baxter. 

• In 1922, President Calvin Coolidge granted an unconditional pardon to Lothar Witzke, a citizen of the Weimar Republic who had been imprisoned in the United States for his involvement in a 1916 bombing attack on New York Harbor that left seven dead. After being Coolidge’s pardon, Witzke was deported to Germany where he received a hero’s welcome. 

• In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant effectively pardoned most members of the Confederacy when he signed the Amnesty Act. This allowed former Confederacy members to once again vote and hold office. Tensions were still high across the United States and Grant viewed the act as a way to promote unity.  Believe it or not, the incoming administration has used this act in defense of their stated goal of pardoning all the jailed or arrested January 6 perpetrators.

• On September 8, 1974, President Gerald R. Ford signed what is hands down, the most controversial pardon in American history: that of Richard Nixon. The former president received a full, unconditional pardon for his role in the Watergate Scandal, which resulted in his resignation. Nixon is the only former president to receive a pardon.

• IT’s mass pardons of such convicted loyalists as Roger Stone, Paul Manifort, Michael Flynn and former Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff Joe Arpaio The last of these was perhaps IT’s most controversial pardon. Arpaio was convicted of contempt of court for illegally detaining people without reasonable evidence after being ordered to cease these practices. Civil rights groups protested the pardon as they viewed Arpaio's actions as unconstitutional attacks on immigrants. to name but a few.

Those who believe that Joe Biden’s pardoning of his son (despite his earlier statements to the contrary) will be all that history remembers him for are delusional. Historians (presidential and otherwise) tend to have a far broader and more all-encompassing view of our nation’s chief executives than political operatives, staunch loyalists and the so-called “partisan base.”  I’ve got to believe that Joe Biden doesn’t sleep as well at night as the man who will replace him come January 20, 2025.  Biden, when all is said and done, is a man of heart, faith, inherent kindness and conscience.  He is, in the words of Mark Twain, “. . . the sort of man who speaks a language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”t A perfect man?  No, of course not.  But within his soul he is at least a man who cares about doing for others, rather than mostly - if not strictly - for himself.  His successor, on the other hand, sleeps well and does not worry a farthing about what history’s  . . . let alone G-d’s . . . judgement of him will be.  In his mind it really doesn’t matter, for he will be dead and all those mansions, towers and golf courses bearing his name will be the only legacy that matters.  However much he will ultimately eviscerate democracy while enriching both himself and his billionaire backers is of no concern to him, for he lives only in the moment, only for himself. 

   Will IT ever get his comeuppance?  Will it ever dawn on a majority of the American voting public that the man they elected with precisely 49.78% of the popular vote is a grifter, a conman, what British humorist Sir P.G. Wodehouse would have called a “gumboil of a human being”?  I hope so.  2026 is going to be as crucial - if not more so - than 2024.  Already, Democrats are raising money and seeking candidates in order to take back both the House and the Senate in the next mid-term elections . . . assuming there will be elections. 

If I sound a bit harried and pessimistic, please, PARDON ME!

 Copyright024 Kurt Franklin Stone        

#1,017: Farewell, Dr. al-Assad?

The past 48 hours have marked a tectonic shift in the political plates and fates of the Middle East. The fall of Damascus at the hands of Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS: Arabic for either “Organization for the Liberation of the Levant” or “Levant Liberation Committee”) and the fleeing of murderous Syrian President Bashir al-Assad and his family to Moscow, have left tens of million in the region - and indeed, around the world - cheering and fearing the future. Already, thousands upon thousands of Syrian refugees are making the trek back to their homeland from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the U.K. and Germany  . . . to name but 4 countries where they have been living in exile.

                      Abu Muhammad al-Jolani

At this early juncture, it would appear that the biggest losers are Iran and Russia, who have been largely responsible for supplying the Assad regime with arms and weaponry. It is, of course, far too early to say with any certainty what the toppling of Dr. al-Assad (he’s a board-certified ophthalmologist who did his post-graduate training at London’s Western Eye Hospital) will have on the future of the country he and his father ruled with an iron fist for more than half a century. Abu Muhammad al-Julani is the nom de guerre of the leader of Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham, which eventually toppled al-Assad and forced him to flee.  As of today, al-Jolani is the titular Syrian Prime Minister. Born Ahmed Hussein al-Shar'a in 1982, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to a family whose historic roots were the Golan Heights (hence the nisba* “al-Julani” [roughly translated as “the Golanite”]), his life over the past two decades has been a roadmap of Islamist militancy in Iraq and Syria. He battled U.S. forces in Iraq and was jailed by the Americans for several years. He rose through the ranks of the group then known as the Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI, and then with help from ISI’s successor, ISIS, Jolani founded an Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, which has been designated a terrorist by the United States since 2013.  

(* nisba: نسبة “attribution” . . . an adjectival surname indicating the person's place of origin, ancestral tribe, or ancestry, used at the end of the name).

In 2021, al-Jolani (who, since this past Thursday has dropped his nom de guerre in favor of his birth name) emerged from the shadows and sat down for his first interview with Frontline correspondent Martin Smith. Much was to be learned:

Jolani's journey as a jihadist began in Iraq, linked to al-Qaeda through the Islamic State (IS) group's precursor - al-Qaeda in Iraq and, later, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). After the 2003 US-led invasion, he joined other foreign fighters in Iraq and, in 2005, was imprisoned at Camp Bucca, a forward operating base that housed a theater internment facility maintained by the United States military in the vicinity of Umm Qasr, in extreme southeastern Iraq, where he enhanced his jihadist affiliations and later on was introduced to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the quiet scholar who would later go on to lead IS.

In 2011, Baghdadi sent Jolani to Syria with funding to establish the al-Nusra Front, a covert faction tied to ISI. By 2012, al-Nusra had become a prominent Syrian fighting force, hiding its IS and al-Qaeda ties. Tensions arose in 2013 when Baghdadi's group in Iraq unilaterally declared the merger of the two groups (ISI and al-Nusra), declaring the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), and publicly revealing for the first time the links between them. Jolani resisted, as he wanted to distance his group from ISI's violent tactics, thus leading to a split. To get out of that sticky situation, Jolani pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, making the al-Nusra Front its Syrian branch.

From the start, he prioritized winning Syrian support, distancing himself from IS's brutality and emphasizing a more pragmatic approach to jihad. Despite the public split from al-Qaeda and name changes, HTS continued to be designated by the UN, US, UK and other countries as a terrorist organization, and the US maintained a $10m reward for information about Jolani's whereabouts. Western powers considered the break-up to be a façade.

Under Jolani, HTS became the dominant force in Idlib, north-west Syria's largest rebel stronghold, and home to about four million people, many of whom were displaced from other Syrian provinces. To address concerns about a militant group governing the area, HTS established a civilian front, the so-called "Syrian Salvation Government" (SG) in 2017 as its political and administrative arm. The SG functioned like a state, with a prime minister, ministries and local departments overseeing sectors such as education, health, taxes and reconstruction, while maintaining a religious council guided by Sharia, or Islamic law.  Although the new government did not mandate the wearing of the hajib (head-covering) for women, many women in the province began donning them in public. Since the beginning of 2024, a former engineer, Muhammed al-Bashir was the chief administrator of the SG.

                                    Interim Syrian P.M. al-Bashir

Earlier today (Tuesday, Dec. 11)  al-Bashir has been appointed post-Assad Syria’s interim prime minister.  The decision came after Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader met with the outgoing Syrian Prime Minister and Vice President Faisal Mekdad to discuss a transitional government just yesterday.  "The general command has tasked us with running the transitional government until 1 March," Bashir said on Tuesday, according to state media.  

So what happens next? Anyone got a crystal ball they truly trust? al-Assad’s downfall evokes memories of the 2011 uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen, each of which brought about either civil war or authoritarian rule. Global responses, both rhetorical and real, are pretty much what one would expect: we are truly glad the Assad regime is on history’s ash-heap, pray that the rebels will turn their spears into pruning hooks, but beyond that, who knows?

In Washington, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East Daniel Shapiro said, “No one should shed any tears over the end of the Assad regime.” He said that the U.S. would maintain a presence in Eastern Syria “to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS,” and would take all necessary measures to defend its forces in the area.

IT proclaimed on his social media site that the United States should stay out of Syria: “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT,” he declared in his ALL CAPS style.

Turkey: Hakan Fidan, the Turkish foreign minister said, “Syria has reached a stage where the Syrian people will shape the future of their own country. Today there is hope.” Turkey is obvious glad that Assad is gone; perhaps now Turkey can see the more than 3 million Syrians living within their borders return home.

France: President Emmanuel Macron wrote that “the barbaric state has fallen . . . In this moment of uncertainty, I send them my wishes for peace, freedom and unity. France will remain committed to the security of all in the Middle East.”

Iran: Although the country has long been among Dr. Assad’s staunchest supporters, its foreign ministry wrote in a post that “determining Syria’s future and making decisions about its destiny are solely the responsibility of the Syrian people, without any destructive interference or external imposition.”

Israel: P.M. Netanyahu took a victory lap, proclaiming that Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon had caused a “chain reaction”  that helped precipitate the collapse of the Assad regime, which he called “ . . . a key cell in Iran’s axis.  This [is] the direct result of the blows we dealt Iran and Hezbollah.” Earlier today, Israel said that it had destroyed Syria’s navy in overnight airstrikes, as it continued to pound targets in Syria despite warnings that its operations there could ignite new conflict and jeopardize the transition of power to an interim government.

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said that the Israeli military had “destroyed Syria’s navy overnight, and with great success.” His remarks appeared to confirm Israel’s responsibility for the destruction documented in the Syrian port city of Latakia, where photos showed the smoldering remains of ships sunk at their dock.

Britain: “It’s too early to remove Syrian rebels from the terror list. 

In boning up on, and familiarizing myself with, Ahmed Hussein al-Shara’a, I find myself convinced of 3 things:

1. He is sharp as a tack;

2. He possesses the inscrutability of the truly unknowable;

3. He is an utter pragmatist.

   This last point could be, when all is said and done, the most important and telling of all. History teaches that once the shooting stops, leaders of successful rebellions and/or revolutions are frequently failures when it comes to governing. Take the Hasmoneans (Maccabees) as an early example; they were uncanny guerilla fighters who, though totally unskilled as warriors and going up against what was perhaps the very first professional army in the history of the world (the Greco-Assyrians of King Antiochus Epiphanes) they managed to pull off a miraculous victory. However, when it came to leading a state at peace, they were utter failures at governance and had to ‘invite in” a group to help them (the Romans), who would eventually be responsible for destroying all they had created. They lacked both vision and an understanding of pragmatism.

Ahmed Hussein al-Shara’a appears to be a pragmatist. Once he and HTS conquered Idlib, he and his lieutenants removed their headpieces, trimmed their beards, put on western clothing and began creating a civil government. They also jettisoned their early sponsors’ notion of worldwide jihad and began proclaiming themselves to be interested in remaking Syria. Period.  Just how much religious fanaticism will be on display in the new Syria is anyone’s guess; however, there is always their first test case in Idlib. There, they created a civil administration which, if not favorable to all (I mean, who likes paying increased taxes?), at least they had the support of enough people to not have the problem of counter-revolution hounding them every hour of the day. And within hours of getting Dr. al-Assad to flee, began the process of governmental transition which, as we in the U.S. have learned of late, is not always a given.

What tomorrow will bring to Syria and the rest of the Middle East is anyone’s guess.  But at least for now, Iran and Russia seem to have lost a supportive conduit, which is a good start.  Let’s hope that Tevya’s rabbi’s blessing for the Tzar will be the same for Dr. al-Assad . . . that “G-d bless and keep him . . . far away from us.”

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

Trying to Put the Genie Back in the Bottle (#1,016)

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The apposite expressions “Letting the genie out of the bottle” and “Putting the genie back into the bottle” come from One Thousand and One Nights,” a massive collection of medieval folktales composed in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age (c. 8th - 13th Century, C.E.). The main storyteller in these tales is Scheherazade, wife to the sultan, who saves her life by telling him a different story for one thousand and one nights. Many of the stories deal with genies who are either trapped in . . . or escaping from . . . a bottle. Over centuries, the parallel expressions about “letting the genie out of the bottle, and “putting the genie back in” have come to mean, respectively, doing something that cannot be undone and reverting a situation; putting things back as they were before something became a reality.

One of the most obvious examples of letting the genie out of the bottle would be August 6, 1945 . . . the dropping of an atomic bomb (nicknamed “Little Boy”) on Hiroshima, and 3 days later, the second atomic bomb (nicknamed “Fat Man”) on Nagasaki. In dropping these two bombs, the “genie” of nuclear destruction was let out of the “bottle” of human warfare; forever more, the nightmare of nuclear destruction engulfed all humanity. And despite the signing, sealing and delivering of various treaties over the past several decades, the genie has never been successfully returned to the bottle.

More recently, the genie of “Artificial Intelligence”(A.I.) has escaped from the bottle, thus unleashing incalculable problems, possibilities and challenges within the realms of academia, political campaigning and what used to be known as “the truth.” (See my January 29, 2023 piece entitled A Pandora’s Box of Existential Fears.)  Because of such innovations as ChatGPT, it has become next to impossible to know who wrote what and/or whether there is any such thing as the “objectively verifiable.” For that generation now known as “Mind Children,” (as the Harvard roboticist Hans Moravec dubbed them more than 30 years ago) the source of knowledge is no longer to be searched out in the classroom or a cavernous library, but rather by turning attention to that which one can easily hold in the palm of one’s hand.

Which leads us to the fastest growing and most omnipresent genie of them all . . . SOCIAL MEDIA.

The first true social media networking site - SixDegrees.com -  was launched in 1997, allowing users to create profiles, connect with friends, and share content. It marked the beginning of the social networking era, enabling users to see connections between friends and expand their social circles through a concept known as 'six degrees of separation.' 6 years later, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, co-founded My Space, the first social network to reach a global audience.  (Although still active today, My Space has become a ghost of its past. With no new content added since early 2022 and a disabled media player, the site's functionality is severely limited.  Nonetheless, it still occupies a spot in the “Social Networking Hall of Fame” [if indeed, there were any such thing.])  

2 years after My Space (2004), Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg started up Facebook (originally called Thefacebook). Its initial purpose was to connect Harvard students with one another. Facebook's popularity exploded; by the end of 2004, it already  had over 1 million users.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  At the end of 2024, Facebook, which is now owned by “Meta,” a publicly owned company (of which Mr. Zuckerberg owns approximately 13.5% of its 350 million outstanding shares [worth c. $120 billion to young Mr. Z.]) it has 3.27 billion daily active people (DAPs)  who access Meta-owned products including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.  Additionally:

• Facebook, as a stand-alone platform, gets 2.11 billion daily active users, which may have accounts on other family products

• Last quarter’s investors’ report shows a 6.51% increase in daily active people year-over-year

• 80.15% of the monthly people will log in daily to one of these family-owned services

• 60.56% of the world’s active internet users access Meta-owned services daily.

• India has more Facebook users (350 million) than any other country in the world; the USA comes in second with 194 million.

There are, of course, many, many highly successful social media platforms in today’s world.  Interestingly, the younger one is, the greater the chance will be that he/she are signed up with - and make daily use of -  a greater array of platforms than one’s elders. This is to say that Baby Boomers (whom I would imagine make up the majority of this blog’s readers) are familiar with - and make use of - Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and perhaps Linkedin, while members of younger generations make use of platforms that are largely unknown to those who are now pretirees (my term for those of retirement age who are still gainfully employed).  Like you, I have vaguely heard of "Tik Tok,” "WhatsApp,”  “Tumblr,” “Snapchat” and “Telegram.”   

These, and other platforms are where a vast majority of young people get their news and views (whether it be true, false or sheer twaddle), “meet” new people and share thoughts, feelings and fears they might never share face-to-face with family, teachers, classmates or non-cyberspace inhabitants.  You can see them all over the place using their iPhones, Androids or occasionally Tablets, in classrooms, malls, gyms, sporting events and restaurants (both fast and slow food); walking down the street, texting, chatting, listening to music, connecting with the rest of the planet. I have yet to get over seeing a table filled with teens at Dunkin Donuts, Wendy’s or some other public place, each one caught up in their own world despite the fact there may be 4, 5, 6 or more people sitting with them.  To my way of thinking, overreliance on social media has become an addiction for many.  Moreover, it represents a clear and present danger to mental health of those - especially teens - for whom it is a way of life.  

Over the past decade, numerous peer-reviewed academic studies have found a strong link between heavy social media and an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts. Social media may promote negative experiences such as: Inadequacy about one’s  life or appearance, as a skewed view of the world itself . . . which can lead to feelings of doom.  In May of last year, United States Surgeon General (U.S.S.G.)  Dr. Vivek Murthy released a new Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health - PDF. In it, Dr. Murthy and his research colleagues noted in the reports introductory paragraph: While social media may offer some benefits, there are ample indicators that social media can also pose a risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents. Social media use by young people is nearly universal, with up to 95% of young people ages 13-17 reporting using a social media platform and more than a third saying they use social media “almost constantly.”

Dr. Murthy and his colleagues further noted “Children are exposed to harmful content on social media, ranging from violent and sexual content, to bullying and harassment. And for too many children, social media use is compromising their sleep and valuable in-person time with family and friends. We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis – one that we must urgently address.”  In other words, the Genie has escaped from the bottle. 

The question becomes: is there anything currently being done to put the Genie back in the bottle? Attempts to do so are in their early stages here in the United States. According to the Age Verification Providers Association website: As of June 2024, 10 states have passed laws requiring children’s access to social media be restricted or parental consent gained. 3 more are currently injuncted (e.g. restrained by a court order). Here in Florida, H.B. 3 goes into effect on July 1, 2025. The bill, the Online Protections for Minors Act, requires social media platforms to verify users’ ages, obtain parental consent for users under 18, protect minors’ personal data, and limit their exposure to harmful content.

Doing things on a state-by-state or city-by-city basis does not do away with the Genie; it merely creates a series of different sized bottles . . . most of which will be too small to hold a gigantic Genie. To date, one country (which happens to be a continent) has done something on a national basis: Australia.

Less than a week ago, Australia, the “Land Down Under,” imposed a sweeping ban on social media for children under 16. After sailing through Parliament’s lower house on Wednesday, November 27, the bill passed the Senate the very next day with bipartisan support. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that it puts Australia at the vanguard of efforts to protect the mental health and well-being of children from detrimental effects of social media, such as online hate or bullying. Not every “Down Under” agrees with the legislation: some claim it will stifle freedom of thought and expression; others are of the opinion that it does not go far enough. I find nothing surprising about this; after all, Australia is a robust democracy. The one good and hopeful thing to note is that at least one non-authoritarian country on the planet has decided that it may well be possible to put the Genie back in the bottle.

Could this ever work in the United States on a national level? I highly doubt it . . . and for several reasons. First and foremost, there’s the matter of the makeup of the new, incoming 119th Congress. Unless something drastically changes in the next 32 days, the first resolution that body will consider is Rep. Nancy Grace’s (R-SC) bill to ban transgender people from using bathrooms of their choice in the U.S. Capitol.  (It just so happens that on January 3, 2025, the nation's first transgender lawmaker, U.S. Rep.-elect Sarah McBride, D-Del., is set to join Congress). In her obviously disingenuous remarks about the reason behind the resolution, Rep. Grace told the press; "The sanctity of protecting women and standing up against the Left’s systematic erasure of biological women starts here in the nation’s Capitol. We are standing up for women, protecting their spaces, and restoring a bit of sanity to Capitol Hill." She added, "The Left screams TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) politics, we call it putting women first."  There likely won’t be enough serious-minded legislators on Capitol Hill to get beyond the “Attack on WOKE” legislation that holds their base in thrall.

Then too, when one considers that IT’s new BFF, Elon Musk, is not only the richest person on the planet, but also owns X, the planet’s largest money-losing social media platform.  And to make matters worse, who just came by to  kiss the ring at Mar-a-Lago?  Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg, that’s who.  Can you see him being in favor of losing money by putting legal strictures on his platform?  I rather doubt it.

Having said the obvious, I still believe that for the sake of our children . . . and the generation of leaders they will someday become . . . we must follow in the footsteps of our Aussie cousins and doing whatever we can to put the Genie of Social Media (which is inherently anti-social) back in the bottle.  Our future depends on it.

 Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

1,015: In the Land of Oz . . . RFK, Jr., Musk, Hegseth, and the Rest of the Sycophants

           Dr. Memet Oz and Robert Kennedy, Jr. 

OK, so it turns out that 2 weeks is my limit for staying away from writing political blogs. Call me a fool.  Actually, it’s a weakness.  I guess it’s a combination of genetics and ethnicity.  Madame gave me the middle named “Franklin” due to her great love of Roosevelt (which seemingly emersed me in politics from my very my first breath); ); and my Jewish ethnicity, infused me with gobs of guilt. Add them together, and I simply could not stay away from what’s been going on since November 5. Believe me, it’s been like holding my breath to stay away from commenting on ITS Cabinet selections and “non-brain trust” selections over the past several weeks and days. Most of these men and women could easily make a "least experienced, worst presidential selections of all time” list. A high percentage of them are billionaires; most have a systemic aversion to the very programs they are, at least in theory, meant to oversee; virtually all of them share a toadying loyalty that makes a reasonable person want to reach for a strong emetic.

Even before IT and his transition team began announcing the names of those being nominated for his cabinet, he seriously sidestepped the Presidential Transition Act of 1963 by refusing to abide by its requirements. In brief, this act, updated in 2019, requires the 2 major party candidates for POTUS to sign and file with the General Services Administration (GSA) 3 memorandums of understanding (MOUs) which allow an incoming administration to work with the outgoing one to begin an orderly transition process on issues such as providing IT (information technology) services and office space, and permitting the FNY to vet candidates tapped for national security positions.  Theses MOUs are typically submitted by September and October before Election Day.  Why they did not sign the 3 MOUs is anyone’s guess, although I presume they did not want anyone knowing precisely who was underwriting the transition.  In theory - if not in fact - they could be receiving millions or even billions of dollars from the likes of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, or Kim Jong Un and no one would be the wiser.  But then again, there is a distinct downside for the transition team.

Case in point: when advisers to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reached out to the Health and Human Services Department multiple times after the President-Elect tapped him to lead the massive agency, hoping to jumpstart coordination before his takeover in late January. They were rebuffed. Kennedy’s inability to communicate with the agency he may soon manage, is just one consequence of the president-elect’s continued foot-dragging on signing the standard trio of ethics and transparency agreements with the federal government — something his team pledged to do shortly after the election.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.  At this time 4 years ago, then President-elect Joe Biden and his team experienced a multi-week delay in preparing for their administration due to the President IT’s refusal to concede the 2020 election, thus blocking Biden’s access to government agencies and data, and hampering their work on national security and controlling the then-raging Covid-19 pandemic.

                                          Pete Hegseth

Not being able to properly vet cabinet-level appointees is especially dangerous when it comes to defense and intelligence positions. Some of IT’s Cabinet selections, including Pete Hegseth for Sec. of Defense and from former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence could actually force Republicans to choose between their allegiance to IT and their growing concerns that some of his nominees might not be up to the job or might not be possible to confirm in a narrowly controlled Senate. Former Rep. Gabbard has faced accusations of helping spread Russian propaganda and criticism for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Late last week, Pete Hegseth, a former Army National Guard officer and Fox News contributor, huddled with a handful of Republican senators in face-to-face meetings in order for them to get to know him. Earlier on the morning of those meetings, details emerged about a police report from 2017 in which a woman alleged that Hegseth blocked her from leaving a hotel room, took her phone and then sexually assaulted her even though she “remembered saying ‘no’ a lot.” Not too long ago, merely having smoked a joint while in college 20 years ago or not paying withholding taxes on a nanny would have been enough to pull a Cabinet-level appointment. I guess being an alleged sexual predator isn’t such a huge deal in the incoming administration.

Within the world of health, IT’s picks for the top posts are troubling:

• Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

• Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Dave Weldon, M.D.

• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Dr. Mehmet Oz, M.D

• Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Marty Makary, M.D. and  

•  U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, M.D.

A brief comment about the 5 is in keeping at this point. I will leave Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Oz for last, beginning with Dr. Weldon, and then Drs. Makary and Nesheiwat.

                                                    Dave Weldon

Dave Weldon, M.D. (CDC): is a physician who received his M.D. from the University of Buffalo in 1981.  He then went on to serve in the United States Army from 1981 to 1987, and practiced general medicine in Florida for a short while. He was a member of Congress, representing Florida’s 15th District from 1995 to 2009.  During his years in Congress, Weldon raised concerns about the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines, as well as the safety of Gardasil, the vaccine that protects against the papillomavirus virus.  He was perhaps best-known for his legislation to force the federal government to review the case of Terri Schiavo, a young woman who was in an irreversible persistent vegetative state (PVS).  Despite his medical training - and the vast majority of medical ethicists (myself included) disagreeing with him, Weldon insisted that Mrs. Schiavo was not in a PVS: he believed that Schiavo was not in a vegetative state because, "She responds to verbal stimuli, she attempts to vocalize, she tracks with her eyes, she emotes, she attempts to kiss her father."  A self-professed “Christian conservative,” Weldon, like several of IT’s nominees, is devoutly skeptical of vaccine safety . . . a key issue that the CDC deals with on an almost daily basis.  Weldon is the first nominee for CDC director who will need to be confirmed by the Senate, due to a law passed in 2022 requiring the role to have such confirmation. In announcing Weldon as his pick for head of the C.D.C., IT said: Americans have lost trust in the CDC and in our Federal Health Authorities who have engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation. . . .  Dave Weldon is a well-trained internist. He’s practiced medicine . . . He doesn’t [seem to] have traditional public health training, but we’ll learn more when he goes through Senate confirmation.”  I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have access to proper vetting.  Just so long as he will be on the side of Big Pharma, Christian fundamentalists and anti-vaxxers is all that seems to matter to the folks who pull ITs strings.

                                        Dr. Marty Markary

Marty Markary, M.D. (FDA): Marty Makary is a surgical oncologist (cancer) at Johns Hopkins University and frequent guest on Fox News.  He served in the first IT administration, working on issues like surprise medical billing.  He shouldn’t face much difficulty in being approved for the top job at the FDA.  One issue of note: he’s recently made statements indicating support for RFK Jr’s. “Make America Healthy Again” platform. Earlier this year, Makary appeared alongside Kennedy in a congressional roundtable on health and nutrition, where he criticized federal health agencies for not prioritizing chronic diseases and said "the greatest perpetrator of misinformation has been the United States government with the food pyramid."  In announcing his choice of Makary, IT pledged that as head of the FDA, the good doctor would work with Kennedy to "properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our Nation's food supply and drugs and biologics being given to our Nation's youth, so that we can finally address the Childhood Chronic Disease Epidemic." Sounds kind of strange coming from the mouth of a man who has spent a lifetime scarfing down a diet of nothing but MacDonalds faux foods . . . 

Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, M.D., ( U.S. Surgeon General): It’s nominee for S.G. is a medical contributor to Fox News and author of of Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine, a book described on her website as "a vivid Christian memoir" that recounts her experiences during the pandemic and after. She's also medical director at CityMD, a network of urgent and virtual care centers in New York and New Jersey — experience she has drawn on in selling her own line of vitamin supplements. Unlike many Fox medical commentators, she emphasized on camera the benefits of being vaccinated against COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Sec. Designate HHS): Whatever IT  and his Project 2025 handlers had in mind in putting forth RFK, Jr’s name for heading up the Department of Health and Human Services is beyond any thinking person’s understanding.  And no, it’s not just because he spent years addicted to both heroin (for which he was arrested in South Dakota) and sex; or that acknowledged that what was believed to have been a brain tumor was actually 'a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died'; or that he revealed that he uses testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) in order to have, at age 70,  the “ripped” muscle mass of a man at least half his age; or that he suffers from atrial fibrillation (AFIB, irregular heartbeat), which can be fatal; or last but not least, that RFK, Jr. sounds like a raspy frog due to a neurological voice disorder known as spasmodic dysphonia.

If he is confirmed by the Senate, RFK Jr. will will be in charge of a massive portfolio overseeing Americans’ insurance, drugs, medical supplies and food. Once a pioneering environmental activist, RFK, Jr. has, for more than 20 years, been best known for a disproven set of medical conspiracy beliefs, such as:

• Linking the childhood vaccine schedule to autism — a claim that has been debunked by scientists all over the world. Kennedy has falsely blamed autism on thimerosal, a compound safely used as a preservative in vaccines, and decried the number of shots on the childhood vaccination schedule.

• Falsely calling the corona virus vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” The vast majority of public health officials and infectious disease specialists have referred to this as “the intentional spread of health disinformation.”

• His promoting of raw (e.g. non-pasteurized) milk. In a recent posting on “X” (formerly known as  Twitter), he wrote “FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by Pharma.” There is a reason why milk is pasteurized. Raw milk is unsafe to consume, and both the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC have strongly advised against consuming, it because it can contain dangerous bacteria, such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria. It can also contain viruses, including the H5N1 bird flu virus that is causing an outbreak in dairy cattle and, many predict, could form the basis of the world’s next pandemic.

• Taking a page out of the 1950s-era John Birch Society’s playbook, RFK, Jr. urges the removal of fluoride from the nation’s various drinking water systems. (No federal law mandates fluoridation of water supplies. The decision to fluoridate water is typically made by municipal governments, city councils or local water authorities.) But RFK, Jr., Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo (who had a history of controversial public health stances during the COVID-19 pandemic) and other conspiratorialists, have been recommending against adding fluoride to community water supplies, citing inconclusive studies that suggest the practice poses a risk to children’s brains. People of a certain age will recall the Bircher’s contention that putting fluoride in drinking water was part and parcel of the Communist conspiracy to ruin the health of Americans.  (n.b. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called fluoridation of drinking water one of the nation's top 10 public health achievements of the 20th century, noting that it effectively prevents tooth decay regardless of a person's socioeconomic status or access to care.)

Mehmet Oz, M.D. (CMS): Founded in 1965, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is a federal agency within the Dept. of Health and Human Services that administers the Medicare program works in partnership with state governments to administer Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and health insurance portability standards. If approved by the United States Senate, Dr. Oz will become the 17th - and by far best-known - administrator of the Center.  Dr. Oz is a trained cardiothoracic surgeon (Univ. of Penn.) who first came to public prominence in 1996 when Dr. Oz, along with colleague Dr. Eric Rose received extensive media publicity following their work on a successful heart transplant for Frank Torre, brother of then-New York Yankees manager Joe Torre, during the 1996 World Series, which the Yankees won.  Oz loved the publicity.  Not too many years passed before he began hosting a television show called Second Opinion With Dr. Oz.  Although the show only ran 5 episodes, he came into contact with Oprah Winfrey, who began having him on her nationally syndicated program. Eventually, he became “America’s Doctor.”  Over the years, Dr. Oz has made a fortune recommending and selling various herbal, homeopathic and holistic medicines and procedures.   

In 2022, Dr. Oz ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, losing the race to John Futterman.  During that campaign, Oz was a vocal supporter of privatizing Medicare.  According to financial disclosure forms during that race, Oz and his wife own up to $650,000 in stock in UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, both of which make substantial revenue from Medicare Advantage Plans. If he is to be confirmed, he will likely have to divest himself of these and other stocks or face “conflict of interest” problems. 

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST:

                                                  The DOGE Logo

Recently, the President-elect tapped entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head up an advisory panel called the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, that’s tasked with identifying trillions of dollars in government waste. While IT has not detailed how the entity will operate, or from whence its funding will come, he said in a statement that it would “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies” and “provide advice and guidance from outside of government . . . A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement. “I am confident they will succeed!”

Conventionally, what outsiders can do in the government has been pretty limited. But with IT and Musk both known for pushing boundaries, it’s not clear what “DOGE” will look like, who will fund it and what it may legally do.

The federal code’s primary conflict-of-interest law is a big deterrent to adopting government authority. It bans government employees from participating in government matters where they have a financial stake. But it doesn’t apply to outside contractors or advisers, which could be important to Musk, whose businesses interact with many federal agencies and who would most likely be required to make divestments if he became a federal employee.

If this sounds like something straight out of the mind of Barn Von Munchausen, consider that House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) announced this past Tuesday that there will be a brand new caucus to be called “Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency”, and a new  subcommittee called “Delivering on Government Efficiency.” The acronym “DOGE” refers to a once-popular image macro featuring a Shiba Inu dog. The topper is the member of Congress Comer named as the new subcommittee’s Chair . . . . are you ready?

REP. MAJORIE TAYLOR GREENE!

Ciao for now . . .

Copyright2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

There's Got to Be a Morning After (#1,014)

Good morning dear readers: Like you, I awoke this morning with a queasy feeling in my gut and an ache in my head. After checking various online sources of political information, and attempting to deconstruct yesterday’s “Trumpster fire,” I felt the immediate need to be in contact with you all . . . even if briefly.  While contemplating what words of comfort I could compose, two word-streams kept swirling through my brain: the first, Macbeth’s 75-word soliloquy in Act 5 Scene 5 (“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps into this petty pace . . . "  and Al Kasha and Joel Hirschorn’s Academy-Awarding winning (1972) song The Morning After.”  Both word-streams have their own haunting quality this morning: in the former, Macbeth states, in part,  “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot . . .” while the latter bravely asks, Oh, can't you see the morning after? It's waiting right outside the storm. Why don't we cross the bridge together, And find a place that's safe and warm?

While it is true that America is about to enter uncharted ground, the spirit and strength which has seen us overcome so many past challenges still hovers amidst and above us.  Trying to figure out “how we came to this point” is, this morning, a fool’s errand best left for another day.  We owe ourselves a bit of a breather . . . a period of adjustment in which we might reacquaint ourselves with the higher angels of our being.  

Democrats and people who love America are grieving. That is understandable. Everyone will need time to express feelings of shock, anger, and fear. Respect those who need to talk about what happened and those who don’t want to talk about it. Everyone will need to process the results in their own way.

It will take time to digest what happened and why it happened. Both are necessary inquiries. But there is no rational explanation for America’s election of a felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, incessant liar, narcissist, and aspiring dictator. None. So, think about it as much as you need to, but don’t waste emotional energy seeking answers where there are none.

Trump is an avatar of anger for millions who see their world slipping away. There is additional nuance about racism, misogyny, and white nationalism, but it’s not more complicated than that.

We must invest all our energy in the process of recovery and the continued defense of democracy.

For those of you who have the ability to do so, providing leadership, comfort, and hope today will be a blessing to those who feel shattered. No false optimism, just genuine determination.

For myself, I think I will be taking a break from writing about politics.  Instead, I shall spend a bit of my researching, writing and editing time dealing with my other blog, Tales From Hollywood & Vine. Perhaps I will find a bit of comfort getting back to my roots and "visiting” the heroes and heroines of my youth.  I invite you to join me . . . 

Be good to yourselves . . . 

KFS

Copyright2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

Back to the Future: Sinclair Lewis & Robert Penn Warren Were Dead On About Donald Trump . . . Just Ask Huey Long (#1,013)

Redgrave, Witty and Lockwood in Alfred             Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938)

This coming Thursday I will be concluding a  6-week film class at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, entitled Knights and Dames: Cinematic Royalty.  What links the six films together is that each is produced, directed, or written by, as well as  starring titled Brits such as Barons Laurence Olivier, Richard Attenborough and Bernard Miles; Knights Sir John Mills, Sir Peter Ustinov, Sir David Lean and Sir Michael Redgrave and Dames Celia Johnson, Judy Dench, Angela Lansbury and Maggie Smith. The last of these films the one I shall be screening this Thursday, is a classic 1938 mystery starring Sir Michael Redgrave, Dame Mae Witty and Margaret Lockwood (CBE) and directed by no less than Sir Alfred Hitchcock. The film bears - in light of this Tuesday’s national election and where your political sentiments may reside – a title which is either hopeful or deeply eerie: The Lady Vanishes.      

Thank G-d for my film courses . . . as well as the literally dozens of hours I spend each week vetting medical research protocols and consent documents; performing rabbinic functions; and researching and writing at least one 1,000+ word blog article. Otherwise, I would be even more involved in the various political races than I already am. Like you, I receive tons and tons of email requests every hour on the hour from candidates begging me to save democracy by donating as much as I can . . . which I do. I pray that there will be a significant drop-off in the texts and emails after this Tuesday. Like many, I rise and fall with each new poll - although after after spending more than a half century in and around the political world, I should know better; polls are mere snapshots, not chronicles. I too cringe at every gaff, distortion, verbal attack or sign of incipient dementia coming from IT, while glorying at V.P. Harris’ ability to charm, inform and uplift a crowd. Likewise, I wonder how anyone with half a brain (or a passionate love for America, warts and all) could ever vote for a twice-impeached, misogynistic, convicted felon whose psychopathology would have caused Sigmund Freud to change professions.    

When it came to thinking about what my final pre-Election Day essay should be, I began feeling a brain cramp of agonizing proportions welling up and soon to be enveloping me.  Call it PEDM (“Pre-Election Day Malaise”) I knew that,  were I to manage to put all I’m thinking, feeling, fearing and fretting about into a single piece, it could easily require 50,000 words, as well as a minimum of a case-and-a-half of Martini & Rossi Sweet Vermouth. Believe me: writing while imbibing can only lead to incomprehensible gibberish.  And so, after much thought, I’ve decided to republish an essay from June, 2020 . . . during the last presidential election.  Any prescience it may show is purely unintentional; I do not own a crystal ball, just a smattering of knowedge.

And so, without further ado, let’s go "forward into the past” and meet up with a cast of characters known to most political cognoscenti.  The original title was Sinclair Lewis & Robert Penn Warren Were Dead On About Donald Trump . . . Just Ask Huey Long:   

Shortly after his September 10, 1935 assassination at the hands of Dr. Carl Weiss, Louisiana Governor/Senator Huey Long’s final work (and second biography), My First Days in the White House was published by The Telegraph Press. Unlike his best-selling autobiography Every Man a King, My First Days in the White House is more of a novella (barely 100 pages) in which “The Kingfish” (as he was commonly known) outlines both his presidential platform and precisely who he would name to his Cabinet. In many regards, Long comes off as a Socialist. The main thrust of his presidency would be his “Share the Wealth” program, which called for higher taxes on the wealthy (which would provide every American with a guaranteed annual income of $5,000.00, universal healthcare, and increased spending on public works, education and old-age pensions. His favorite slogan was “Everyman a King!”

Long was the kind of politician Americans either loved or hated. The poor and downtrodden loved him for his populist progressivism; the middle-class and wealthy abhorred him for the autocratic means by which he sought to get what he wanted. In his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, novelist Sinclair Lewis used Long as the model for Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a charismatic and power-hungry politician who wins the  1936 presidential election on a populist platform, promising to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, and provide each citizen $5,000 a year.  Once elected, he rapidly outlaws dissent, incarcerates political enemies in concentration camps, and trains and arms a paramilitary force called the Minute Men. They terrorize citizens and enforce the policies of Windrip and his "corporatist” regime.

11 years later (1946), Pulitzer-prize winning poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren turned the Kingfish into Willie Stark, the lead character in All the King’s Men. In this novel, Willie, like Huey, is a small-town southern lawyer who, starting out as a man-of-the-people populist, climbs the political ladder, eventually becoming the dictatorial governor of his state, backed by his own military. Like Huey Long, Willie Stark is assassinated by a doctor who in turn is killed on the spot by the governor’s bodyguards. In passing, it should also be noted that the 1953 film A Lion Is in the Streets, adapted from Adria Locke Langley’s 1946 novel, starred James Cagney as the Huey Long-like southern populist politician Hank Martin, was also based on the Kingfish.

To date, there have been more biographies, novels and movies based on Huey Long than any other Louisianan. He captures our attention because of his audacity, the adoration showered upon him by the little guy, his dangerous turn towards autocracy and the fact that he came the closest to being America’s first dictator. Sinclair Lewis, Robert Penn Warren and Adria Locke Langley all understood just how dangerous the man and his movement was . . . and how much divisiveness some politicians can foist upon the nation.

In many regards, Donald J. Trump shares both character strengths and flaws with the Kingfish . . . and his literary doppelgängers. Both are self-centered egotists whose personal insecurity makes them more fearful of losing than hopeful of winning. Both share a type of charisma which is alluring to many, and repellant to many more. Unlike Donald Trump, Huey Long - and Willie Stark and Hank Martin - are well disciplined and, for the most part, manage to stay on message most of the time.

Not so ‘45.

This point was forcefully made in a recent interview in which Fox entertainer - and Trump favorite - Sean Hannity threw a nerf ball question 45’s way. Here’s the transcript of both question and answer:

Hannity: If you hear in 131 days from now at some point in the night or early morning, ‘We can now project Donald J. Trump has been reelected the 45th President of the United States’ - let’s talk. What’s at stake in this election as you compare and contrast, and what are your top priority items for a second term?

Trump: Well, one of the things that will be equally great: you know, the word experience is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It’s a very important meaning. I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington I think 17 times, all of a sudden, I’m President of the United States, you know the story. I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our First Lady and I say, ‘This is great.’ But I don’t know very many people in Washington, it wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now I know everybody. And I have great people in my administration. You make some mistakes, like you know an idiot like Bolton, all he wanted to do is drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.

We can see that when asked what his top priorities items were for a second term, Trump did not articulate a single item. Instead, he offered a stream-of-consciousness narrative about the importance of the word “experience,” explained how he hadn’t spent much time in Washington prior to becoming president, and derided John Bolton (his former National Security Advisor, who had just published an embarrassing book (The Room Where it Happened) about his experiences in the Trump administration) as an “idiot.”

Compare this to Huey Long, who even before he announced his candidacy for the 1936 Democratic presidential nomination, published a novella in which he clearly laid out what his priorities would be, what direction he wished to lead the nation, how he would deal with the rest of the world, and who his advisers would be. Audaciously (and perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek) Long named General Smedley Butler Secretary of War, former President Franklin D. Roosevelt Secretary of the Navy, former President Herbert Hoover Secretary of Commerce, and Isolationist Idaho Senator William Borah Secretary of State.

One wonders who will be the first novelist/satirist or screenwriter to turn Donald Trump into a fictional character.  That character definitely will not be a poor southern good-ole-boy like Willie Stark, nor a New England everyman like Buzz Windrip.  And unlike Huey Long, he will definitely not be an avowed enemy of Wall Street and the hyper wealthy.  Whoever that fictional character will be, one thing is certain: he will, incongruously, have the devotion of middle America - what Nixon and now Trump refer to as the “Silent Majority,” and Buzz Windrip as “The Forgotten Men.”  It will remain for future historians to figure out just how it was that a lying, larcenous, immoral supposed multi-billionaire could earn the undying allegiance of the undereducated, the hyper-religious and the believers in conspiracy. . . 

(It should be noted that there is a recently released (well, sort of “released”) biopic about IT’s early pre-political days called “The Apprentice,” starring Sebastian Stan as IT, Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, and Mark Rendell as Roger Stone.  Even more fascinating than the movie (which currently has a 7.2 rating on IMDB and 82% on Rotten Tomatoes) is the backstory of the near impossibility of getting the film released due to the fear that the film’s eponymous pitchman would do what he does with such gay abandon: sue, sue, sue).

Lastly, a brief clip from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, where his character, Charles Foster Kane’s staff is waiting for election results: 

And so here we are, back in the present and waiting for the future.

See you next week.  I wonder if we will be any closer to knowing who “won” the election . . . 

Copyright©2020, 2024, Kurt F. Stone

"Democracy Dies in Darkness" (#1,012)

    Edward Gray, 1st Viscount of Fallodon (1862-1933)

Back in 1897, Adolph S. Ochs, the owner of The New York Times, created the famous slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” which still appears on the daily print edition’s masthead. (In recognizing that “The Times, they are a-changing’” the slogan on their digital edition has been changed to “All the News That’s Fit to Click”). In 1897, the then 39-year old Ochs (1858-1935) wrote that the paper’s front-page slogan would serve as a declaration that it was his intention that The Times’ would forever more report the news impartially. (When Ochs purchased his first newspaper, the Chattanooga Times, at age 20, he told the folks of his hometown that his paper would “. . . give the news impartially, without fear or favor.” Eventually nicknamed “The Gray Lady,” Ochs’ the New York Times - which is, in 2024 - owned and published by AG Sulzberger, the Great-Great-Great Grandson of Adolph Ochs, has long been globally accept as “America’s Paper of Record” . . . to almost everyone except, It who considers it to be nothing more than “a failing rag of a paper. . . . fake news.”  Sorry, It, but you are wrong, wrong, wrong.  The NYT still publishes “without fear of favor.”

A brief tour through American newspapers will find a ton of slogans . . . some heartfelt, others absurd.  Here’s a handful:

• The Wall Street Journal: “The daily diary of the American dream.”

• The Scripps Company: “Give light and the people will find their own way.”

• The New York Sun: “It shines for All.”

• The Hartford Courant: “Older than the nation.”

• USA Today: The Nation’s Newspaper.”

• Long Island’s Newsday: “Truth, Justice and the Comics” (a nod to “Superman”).

• Detroit Free Press: “On Guard Since 1831.”

• The Atlanta Journal Constitution: “Covers Dixie Like the Dew.”

• Aspen Daily News: “If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.”

• The Washington Post: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

This last slogan - that of The Washington Post - is unique.  How so?  Well, to begin with, the Post, which had been founded in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins (1838-1912) - a Southern sympathizer and an outspoken racist against African Americans, Asian Americans and immigrants - had never carried a slogan until February of 2017, a month after IT  began his first (and, some of us pray his only) term as POTUS. In other words, it took Jeff Bezos, the owner and publisher of The Post (who had purchased it for $250 million from the Graham family), less than 30 days to adopt a slogan that seemed to be sending a loud warning to the 45th POTUS; to wit, that they were on to him, to his lies, mistruths and total unfitness for leading a Representative Democracy.  At first, it seemed as if Bezos (1964- ), the founder, president and CEO of Amazon, and one of the world’s richest people (c. $205.6 billion as of 2024) would a watchful challenger; a beacon of light in what promised to be an ever-darkening world. 

One of Bezos’ first steps was to beef up the paper’s column - “The Fact Checker” - described as a "truth squad.” In the four years of IT’s presidency, the squad catalogued and published 30,573 lies - an average of more than 50 per day, 365 days a year. 

But something must have happened, because just the other day, Jeff Bezos exercised one of his inalienable rights as publisher, by turning out the very lights by which Democracy survives: he refused to endorse either IT or V.P. Kamala Harris for President.  Writing in The Conversation (a highly recommended online journal)  Denis Muller  said that Bezos’ decision not to endorse either of the two “. . . disgraces journalism, disgraces the papers’ own heritage and represents an abandonment of civic responsibility at a moment when the United States faces its most consequential presidential election since the Civil War.”  Whatever in the world led Jeff Bezos to such a craven decision?  My guess is a mixture of cash and cowardice.  In a joint statement, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, called the decision “surprising and disappointing;” 2 columnists, Robert Kagan and Michele Norris, resigned in protest.  And thousands of subscribers (myself included) cancelled their subscriptions.

But it wasn’t only the Washington Post that withheld an endorsement . . . thereby losing longtime editorial writers and subscribers.  Two days before the Post’s Bezos decided that his paper would remain neutral, the Los Angeles Times which, like the Post, is owned by Dr. Soon Shiong, M.D., a multi-billionaire without a nanoparticle’s worth of journalistic experience,   let it be known that likewise his paper would not be endorsing a candidate in 2024. According to Dr. Shiong’s daughter Nika said, in a statement to The New York Times that the reason for the non-endorsement was V.P. Harris’ continued support for Israel: “Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process,” Ms. Soon-Shiong, who has no formal role at the paper, said in her statement. “As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.” 

When asked to respond to his daughter’s statement, Dr. Shiong merely said “Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion . . . She does not have any role at the LA Times, nor does she participate in any decision or discussion with the editorial board.” He further added that his decision not to offer readers a recommendation would be “less divisive in a tumultuous election year” . . .that he "feared that picking one candidate would only exacerbate the already deep divisions in the country.”  

In other words, there no way of knowing precisely what led the owner of the Times (like the owner of the Post) to withhold their papers’ endorsements.  And so we are left to figure it out for ourselves.  I for one believe the two billionaire owners are first, participating in anticipatory kowtowing; they are worried sick that if elected in November, IT will make good on his continual promises to extract retribution from those who have been disloyal to him.  Second, people like Bezos and Schiong want something from IT  should he wind up back in the White House.  We already know that back in 2017, Dr. Schiong, a transplant surgeon who made his first billion by inventing the drug Abraxane (which is  one of the medical world’s best-selling, most-used chemo drugs for lung, breast, and pancreatic cancer) contributed a ton of money to a MAGA PAC in the hopes of being named the newly-elected President’s “Health Czar.”  So far as what Bezos might want . . . perhaps we need look no further than his latest business venture: Amazon Prime “One Medical.” 

What Bezos and Schiong have done at the very tale-end of the 2024 campaign is nothing short of what might be called either “an act of journalistic sedition” or the “euthanizing of Democracy.” Compare their death by a thousand cowardly cuts to the pride and patriotism of The New York Times’ ringing 1,925-word endorsement of Kamala Harris precisely one month ago. It begins with words meant to shock and shame:

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

and ends with 6 words meant to bring light back to the world:

Kamala Harris is the only choice.

Symbolically, the Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have gone dark at a time when America needs now, more than ever, to continue being a beacon of light for world.  This is the worst possible time for the light to go out.  It is reminiscent of a remark made 110 years ago by Britain’s longest-serving Foreign Minister,  Edward Gray, 1st Viscount of Fallodon (that’s him in the painting at the beginning of this essay).  Just as England was about to enter the “Great War,” as WW1 was then known, Sir Edward remarked to a friend:

The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

There are but 8 days left until Election Day. May we be the torch-bearers who continue providing light for the world, and with all due apologies, to Sir Edward . . . as well as the likes of Bezos and Schiong . . . prove them to have been terribly, terribly wrong. For as we know, Democracy does die in Darkness.

 Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place (#1,011)

                 Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar 

With Thursday’s assassination of Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar, the chair of the Hamas Political Bureau, leader of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, and a chief architect of Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel a little over a year ago, Israel has made a huge dent in a prime objective: eliminating most - if not all - of the prime leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah. For in addition to Sinwar, whose targeted assassination was captured by an Israeli drone, Israeli intelligence has managed to eliminate, among others, Hezbollah  chief Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in a massive Israeli air strike on Beirut this past September 28, and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas since 2017, who was assassinated in the early hours of July 31 in Teheran.  This is only part of Israel’s "Most Wanted” list.  Also taken out in recent months have been Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top commander,  senior Hezbollah commander Taleb Abdallah, who led forces in the central and southern border strip firing missiles into Northern Israel, and Mohammed Nasser, who Israel says headed a unite responsible for firing missiles from southwestern Lebanon into Israel.  

Despite all these targeted deaths, it does not appear that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah is going to give up attacking Israel.  Moreover, Israeli P.M. Benyamin Netanyahu has publicly stated that although the killing of Sinwar et al should end the Gaza War, he won’t let it.  He took an ambiguous stance in announcing the death of Sinwar.  After speaking with President Biden, his office released a statement that acknowledged “an opportunity to advance the release of the hostages.”  But in an earlier video statement, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to side with his coalition partners, warning Israelis of tough challenges ahead and pledging to continue to pursue Hamas’ remaining leadership.

I for one will shed not a single tear over the death of Yahya Sinwar. Regardless of how his early life in a rundown refugee camp (Khan Yunis, which at the time of his 1962 birth was under Egyptian control) how it pushed him towards violent hatred for the Jewish State. The man was, simply stated, a fascist psychopathic, murderer; a man whose repeated gruesome murders of suspected collaborators with Israel earned him both four life sentences in an Israeli prison in 1988, and the nickname “The Butcher of Khan Younis.” What the immediate, mid- and long-range effect his death will have on the future of the bloody struggle between Israel, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon is anyone’s guess.

Still seeking a cease fire as well as the return of all surviving hostages, President Bided has sent American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken back to the region for what will be his 11th trip since October 7, 2023. According to the State Department, Secretary Blinken will visit Jerusalem and a number of Arab countries, once again attempting to hammer out a cease fire. Whether or not this will be in the offing is hard to imagine; this past Saturday, Teheran’s proxy, Hezbollah, launched three drones from Lebanon in an attack targeting PM and Mrs. Netanyahu’s private residence in the central seaside town of Caesarea. Two drones were intercepted over Rosh Hanikra and Nahariya, while the third, according to Axios, hit the Netanyahu’s home. The couple were not at home at the time. This certainly cannot bode well for achieving the POTUS’s goal. Netanyahu’s initial public response was aimed directly at Iran: “The agents of Iran who tried to assassinate me and my wife today made a bitter mistake . . . “

History is replete with fascists (long before the word was first coined by Benito Mussolini in 1915), anti-Semites (first used by German agitator Wilhelm Marr in 1879) and mass murderers who, with or without just cause, sought the utter destruction of a perceived enemy. When it comes to the utter annihilation of the Jews, several names and events stand out:

• British Kings Richard I (Richard Coeur de Lion - reigned Sept. 1189-Apr. 1199) and Edward III (known as “Longshanks” and “Hammer of the Scots,” who reigned from Nov. 1272-Jul. 1307): the former was responsible for the total massacre of the Jewish community of York at Clifford’s Tower in 1190; the latter expelled virtually every Jew from England by All Saints Day (November 1, 1290).

• The medieval “Black Death” (Bubonic Plague, caused by infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which originated in China and Inner Asia, arrived in Europe in 1347.  By a rough estimate, 25 million people died during this pandemic.  Members of the clergy and many royals blamed Jews, who died in far fewer numbers (likely as a result of a Jewish law making it mandatory to wash one’s hands before eating). Anti-Semitism greatly intensified throughout Europe as Jews were blamed for the spread of the Black Death. A wave of violent pogroms ensued, and entire Jewish communities were killed throughout Central Europe by mobs, or burned at the stake en masse. 

• The Ukrainian Hetman (nobleman/military leader) Bohdan Chmielnicki, who between 1648 and 1649 is estimated to have brutally and viciously murdered tens of thousands of Polish Jews, in the process destroying more than 300 Jewish communities. Chmielnicki’s initial agitation against the government was due to a property dispute with a neighboring (Polish) nobleman who tried to steal Chmielnicki’s estate. Jews were easy targets for Chmielnicki and the Cossacks, who joined him in a bloody uprising. Since the Jews were usually well educated, knew mathematics and how to read and write, a substantial number of Jews served as representatives of the Polish nobility and ran their estates.

• SS Stadartenfürer Paul Blogel, who was responsible for carrying out the murder of 33,771 Jews over a 2 day period (September 29-30, 1941) at Babyn Yar (sometimes spelled “Babi Yar”), a ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. 

Is it any wonder that a vast majority of Jewish people around the world acted with aggressive solidarity when Sinwar’s Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 men, women and children on October 7, 2023?  1,200 deaths in a country whose Jewish population is approximately 7,208,000, is the equivalent of approximately 57,190 men, women and children of any and all religions in the United States, which had a 2023 population of  c. 343,477,335. Could anyone blame the United States - let alone Israel - for retaliating with just about everything in its arsenal?  A country or sovereign state can (or should) have the right to defend itself and protect its citizens against those who are its attackers. With Israel (and the United States, its major backer) the rules change when the issue is proportionality  . . . i.e. how much tonnage for how much mayhem and murder. 

Throughout modern history, the American military - often along with its allies - has decimated entire cities and regions as a means of retaliation.  Think of the firebombing of Dresden, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which forever changed human history, and the March 1945 bombing of Tokyo (codenamed Operation Meetinghouse), which killed at least 80.000 people.

When it comes to Israel’s retaliation against both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, things are far, far more difficult to comprehend.  I guess much of the world can no longer accept David’s protecting himself and his kingdom against Goliath and his henchmen.  Many people across the globe still view reality as a zero-sum, black-and-white, us-versus-them proposition . . . without possessing a grasp of the history of religion, politics or ethnopsychology. Although reasonably well educated, I find myself in the throes of an emotional/intellectual dilemma . . .  that which an Israeli would identify as  נתפס בין הפטיש לסדן (neetpas bayn ha-pahsheet l’sadahn . . . “Caught between the hammer and the anvil) e.g. “caught between a rock and a hard place.”

To wit, how to reconcile being foursquarely on the side of the Israelis when it comes to eliminating the bloodthirsty leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, without garnering the world’s utter wrath for killing so many tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians . . . all the “collateral damage,” the undesired death, injury and damage?  How can one be an אוהב ישראל (ohev Yisrael – a “lover of Israel”) while refusing to be a סנקציה של הרס (sanktzya shel heres – a “sanctioner of destruction?” Indeed, it is a disparity which invades my nightly sleep.

I know that I am not alone; most of my family and friends suffer from the same political/psychological bipolarity. Solving this conundrum is never going o be easy. I guess that’s why we’ve long said

("S'iz sjver tsi zayn a yid") .ס'איז שווער צו זײַן אַ ייִד

“It’s hard to be a Jew"

Copyright2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

Sincerity (#1,010)

                                                           Alan Alda (Capt. “Hawkeye Pierce”

For those whose memories will permit them to remember back to last week’s essay (a mere 168 hours ago), you will, I pray, remember that my topic was the loss of truth in political campaigns . . . both on the part of the Democrats, but far, far more on the part of what used to be known as the G.O.P.  In that piece, I posited that outright, clear-cut lies have so inundated our political campaigns that perhaps now is the time to pray for the resurrection of the truth.  I regret to say that sometimes, the answer to an outright plea to the Master of the Universe is “no”; despite our heartfelt supplication, this past week has seen IT proclaim before a crowd of Maga Maniacs in Aurora, Colorado that that city was “overrun by Venezuelan gangs” . . . despite the city’s Republican Mayor, Mike Coffman proclaiming  that the city was “absolutely, positively not a war zone overrun by Venezuelan thugs.”  Moreover, Hizzoner the mayor said concerns about gang activity had been “grossly exaggerated” and that “incidents were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.”  And just yesterday, out in Nevada, IT called Democrats and others who have opposed or investigated him "the enemy from within" describing them as more dangerous than major foreign adversaries of the United States, including Russia and China. Speaking in a state that borders California, he specifically singled out "lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff," who will likely move up to the Senate come November (he is current ahead of his Republican opponent, former Dodger Steve Garvey by more than 30 points).

OK. So much for what former Minnesota Senator Al Franken called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them; lets move on to another human virtue of inestimable value which, like truthfulness, is in increasingly short supply . . . more so on one side of the political aisle than the other: SINCERITY.  That wisest of all Americans, Ben Franklin, reminds us that sincerity is a virtue, or a character trait to strive for.  “A genuine sincerity moves us in the direction of the Golden Rule - treating others the way we’d like to be treated.”  (Or, in the Jewish version, “Do not treat others the way we would wish not to be treated.”)  In his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) lexicographer Noah Webster (1758-1843) defined sincerity as:

1. Honesty of mind or intention; freedom from simulation or hypocrisy. We may question a man's prudence, when we cannot question his sincerity

2. Freedom from hypocrisy, disguise or false pretense; as the sincerity of a declaration of love.  

This past October 1, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz squared off against Ohio Senator JD (Vantz) Vance in the first and only - Vice Presidential debate for 2024.  Who won?  It all depends on your political affiliation and/or from whence you get your news and views.  Predictably, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post ran a piece beginning with the words Blundering Tim Walz dragging down Harris campaign - while brilliant JD Vance helps Trump surge. The New York Times, on the other hand, gave an honestly balanced assessment of the debate, congratulated the two candidates for their “largely civil tone and serious focus,” and declared that Governor Walz won . . . largely by speaking to the issues and being the same person on camera than he is in his private life. The Times did give Vantz Kudos for having the “bravest fashion choice . . . his patterned fuchsia tie . . . and took him to task for providing the “most blatant nonanswer; when asked by Governor Walz whether he accepted that his running mate lost the 2020 election, Vance replied ‘I am focused on the future.'“

While watching the debate in real time, I found the word sincerity bouncing around my brain.  Governor Walz, whose political career I have closely followed ever since his first campaign back in 2007, when he defeated six-term Republican Gil Gutknecht capturing 53% of the vote in the decidedly Republican 1st congressional district.  Over the years, he has always struck me as a sincere, feet-on-the-ground mentsch . . . the kind of fellow who would pull off the road to help change the tire of a stranded motorist. That was precisely the man who came to that debate. Vantz, on the other hand - neither sounded nor acted like the man best-known for referring to “childless cat ladies,” contending that even if Haitians were not stealing and eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio it nonetheless was fair game, and had in the past repeatedly referred to IT as “an American Hitler,” “a moral disaster,” and “cultural heroin.”  Instead, he came off as the class valedictorian . . . and a cheerleader for a far more reasonable, far more moderate former POTUS.  I found him to be a man trying his damnedest to come off being sincere.

Suddenly, I was reminded of one of the last episodes of M*A*S*H (“Foreign Affairs”) where the blue-blooded Major Charles Emerson Winchester falls in love with “Martine,” a French Red Cross nurse. Hawkeye, the eternal sheik also has his eye on her.  When Martine invites Charles (David Ogden Stiers) to sit with her after rebuffing Hawkeye at the officer’s club, the disbelieving surgeon asks his buddy B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell) "What did he try that I didn’t?”  B.J. suggests "Maybe sincerity?” to which Hawkeye replies "Sincerity?  I can fake that!”  

Over the course of the next several days, two other quotes came to mind, the first from Roger Stone (no relation, thank G-d), the worst, most cynical of all Republican strategists of the past half-century, the other from the dean of all classic American playwrights, Eugene O’Neill. Stone, who rarely ever tells his clients or counsels any Republican to tell the truth once said “Unless you can fake sincerity, you’ll get nowhere in this business.”  In his 1922 expressionist play The Hairy Ape, O’Neill has a woman known only as “the Aunt” matter-of-factly tell her niece, the haughty Mildred, “You seem to be going in for sincerity today.  It isn’t become to you, really - except as an obvious pose.  Be as artificial as you are, I advise. . . “

 To tell you the truth, this pseudo sensitivity thing scares the living daylights out of me.  As much of a moral albino and narcissistically-driven dictator-in-the-making as It is, I fear that Vantz, ITs mini-me, is far more dangerous.  And considering how quickly the 78-year old IT is deteriorating before our very eyes, should he be elected in November, חס ושלום, (pronounced chas v’shalom - Hebrew for G-d forbid) chances are that his mini-me would likely serve out the majority of his term . . . and then run for a full four years in 2028 and again in 2032.  Remember: “Project 2025” wasn’t really written with IT in mind; it was written for JD, the guy who wrote the forward to a book (Dawn’s Early Light) by Kevin Roberts, the man who oversaw Project 2025.  In much the way that the Federalist Society finally got their kind of justices installed on the Supreme Court, so too would the Heritage Foundation have their kind of autocrat ensconced in the White House.

I really, SINCERELY hope this prospect terrifies you as much as it does me.

There are a mere 22 days until November 5.  That’s not a heck of a lot of time to change the future.  But it is enough time to make a final push, make a contribution, make some calls, donate some dollars, and above all, make sure you vote to keep progress, hope, sanity and SINCERITY in our midst.

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

Saying Kaddish for the Truth (1,009)

                Philosopher Anna Arendt (1906-1975)

Today, Monday October 7, 2024 (5 Tishri, 5785 on the Jewish calendar) marks the 1 year anniversary of the deadliest day in Jewish history since the end of the Holocaust (shoah in Hebrew) . . . an historic catastrophe which, for reasons beyond human comprehension, millions upon millions refuse to believe ever occurred. One year ago, more than 1,200 Israeli men, women and children were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists. Many victims were raped, and over 250 were taken hostage, 35 of whom are known to have been killed while 101, including seven Americans, remain unaccounted for.  With many of the bodies mutilated or burned beyond recognition - including entire families in their homes - it took forensic doctors weeks to identify them all.  Israel’s response to the massacre was swift, overwhelming and astonishingly lethal. According to the official Palestinian Health Ministry, as of September 29, the official count of Gazans killed - non-combatant men, women, children as well as members of Hamas, totals more than 41,595.  And within recent weeks, the Israelis have taken the battle into Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed Hezbollah functions as a parallel government.  They have been lobbing missiles, rockets and drones into northern Israel for more than a year. 

 This coming Shabbat (The Jewish Sabbath), October 12, Jews the world over will observe Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement,” during which we fast for more than 24 hours, and admit and atone for a long list of sins . . . the majority of which deal with either what we put into or what comes out of our mouths.  At one point in the service, we recite the Kaddish - inaccurately referred to as “the Jewish prayer for the dead” (it is, in reality, a paean to G-d and life itself).  This comes in a part of the service called Yizkor, Hebrew for He shall remember.  Not only will we be saying this prayer on behalf of all our deceased relatives, family members and friends . . . but collectively for the millions upon millions of nameless victims of war, famine, flood and other natural and man-made catastrophes.  I for one will encourage those sitting before me to include in their prayers those Ukrainians and Russians, Gazans and Lebanese who have also lost their lives in the early stages of what I fear shall become a larger regional conflict.  Not all will agree with my sentiment, and that’s OK, but I for one  refuse to limit my tears . 

As strange as it may seem, I am giving thought to including truth (אֶמֶת - emet)  in my kaddish prayer. How’s that? How can one say recite this prayer on behalf of a concept; isn’t it meant only for mortal creatures? I suppose so, but it seems to me that for the past many years, we have been witnessing the death of what is true. I mean, it’s gotten to the point where the distance and difference between that which is demonstrably true and that which definitely false is obscenely small  - what scientists refer to as the Plank Length - about 10-20 times the size of a proton.  Indeed, the truth’s terminal condition has made it possible for tens - even hundreds - of millions to believe that victims are aggressors, that 0.2% of the world’s population (i.e. the Jewish people) are powerful enough to rule the entire planet;  that a presidential election was stolen away (despite innumerable legal findings to the contrary); that there are more Communists in Washington D..C. than there are in the Kremlin; that Vice President Kamala Harris had, in her role as "Border Czar” (?) "let in 13,099 convicted murderers into the United States”; that “illegal Haitian immigrants” (who all had Green Cards) have been "kidnapping and eating” dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, despite a retraction from the woman who started the rumor in the first place.  And most recently, IT has been claiming (against all fact) that FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) can’t respond well enough to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene because it’s diverted so much money to helping migrants. This is a bald-faced lie told in the waning days of the presidential election.  The truth is as obvious as the nose on your face: FEMA’s funds for handling disaster relief efforts are separate from money given to immigrant communities.  Not to outdone in lunacy, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene asserted that Washington used “weather control technology” to steer Helene toward Republican voters in order to tilt the presidential election toward V.P. Kamala Harris!

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  Is it any wonder that I am likely going to be including ha-emet (“The Truth” in my kaddish prayer?

When it comes to tearing apart and explaining the history and power of lies in the public square, none has been more understanding (and understandable) than the late philosopher Hannah Arendt (that’s her in the photo at the top of this blog.  In the 1960s, Arendt’s major work,  The Origins of Totalitarianism was a must-read for any student of political science and political history (yours included).  A Jew by birth and psychological makeup, Arendt was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.  Influenced by the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger, Arendt explored the relationship between truth, lies and authoritarianism.  In one of her more trenchant essays during the rise of authoritarianism in 1930s Europe, she wrote;

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

 The key point in Arendt’s statement is that as lies multiply, the result is not that the lie is believed, but that people lose faith in the truth and are increasingly susceptible to believe anything. When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality, but because they make reality wobble–a phrase Arendt employs in her essay, Truth and Politics. In that essay, Arendt argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world: 
 

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.    

Long, long ago, the rabbis taught a signal lesson about the difference between lies and the truth.  As mentioned above, the Hebrew word for truth is emet

 אמת

They noted that the word begins with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (aleph), ends with the last letter of the alphabet (taf) and has the 13th letter (mem) in the middle.  They also pointed out the obvious: all three letters are exactly the same size.  From this they posited that When one tells the truth, they are on solid ground from beginning to the end.

Not so with a lie.  The Hebrew word for “lie” is sheker

שׁקר

The 3 letters of this word, shin, quf and resh are 3 of the last 4 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.  Unlike emet, the 3 letters making up sheker are unbalanced; they cannot stand firm, because the middle letter (quf)  causes the lie (or liar) to eventually topple over.   

As I put the final words to this essay, I have decided that I will definitely say kaddish for the truth . . . and then pray for its eventual resurrection.  Hear this liars of the world: your time is short.  We shall not permit you to continue filling the world with half-, mis-, or untruths just for the sake of power. Hearken unto this journalists, writers and bringers of news: learn well Kant’s and Arendt’s dictum that there are no conceivable circumstances in which outright lying is morally acceptable; morality is rooted in our capacity to make free, rational choices. Broadcasting lies is, or even worse, accepting them as just another form of free speech is, in effect, an assault on morality because it aims to undermine this capacity.   

To my Jewish readers:

אני מאחל לכם גמר חתימה טובה בשׁנת תשפ"ה

I send wishes that you to be completely sealed in the Book of Life in the New Year 5785.

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#1,008: Putting in My 2¢ On 6 Ballot Amendments

For readers of The K.F. Stone Weekly who do not live or vote in the Sunshine State (Florida), this week’s post may not be of particular interest; it deals with the 6 Constitutional ballot amendments we are going to be voting on starting in just a few days. 2 of the 6, however,  will draw interest all over the country:

• #3, which would allow people ages 21 and older to “possess, purchase, or use marijuana products and marijuana accessories for non-medical personal consumption,” and the biggie:

• #4, which says, in part: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

Please note at the outset that Florida boasts the greatest number of ways to amend its constitution of any other state. There are five ways to get a proposed amendment on the statewide ballot: (1) joint resolution by the Florida Legislature; (2) Florida Constitution Revision Commission; (3) Citizens’ Initiative; (4) Constitutional Convention; and (5) Florida Taxation and Budget Reform Commission. In theory, proposed amendments are required to be clear and straightforward. I say “in theory,” because all too frequently, amendment language has gone through so many different partisan hands that by the time an issue winds up on the November ballot, it is about an comprehensible as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English.

And so, without further ado, let’s delve into these 6 different amendments. Reading them once, twice, even thrice before either filling out and mailing a ballot or going to your local polling place on Tuesday November 5 is a good idea. If you would like to ask me any questions or challenge my conclusions as whether to vote “yeah” or “nay” on any of the ballot issues, feel free to email me at kfstone@kurtfstone.com. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert . . . just a fellow who has devoted more than a half-century to both the study and practice of politics .

AMENDMENT #1 Ballot Language: PARTISAN ELECTION OF MEMBERS OF DISTRICT SCHOOL BOARDS.— Proposing amendments to the State Constitution to require members of a district school board to be elected in a partisan election rather than a nonpartisan election and to specify that the amendment only applies to elections held on or after the November 2026 general election. However, partisan primary elections may occur before the 2026 general election for purposes of nominating political party candidates to that office for placement on the 2026 general election ballot. (This amendment reached the 2024 ballot via a vote of the Florida State Legislature, which is overwhelmingly Republican in makeup):

Supporters of passing this amendment say:

• This amendment could provide voters with clearer information about school board candidates’ political affiliations, “aiding informed decision-making.

•  It reflects the existing political nature of school board races.

Opponents of passing this amendment say:

• Decisions may be more influenced by political affiliation than by the best interests of students and educators.

• Educational policies and content could be shaped by political ideologies, thus undermining the quality of education and freedom to learn.

• Reverse the amendment designed to protect educational governance from political interference. 

• Could lead to closed primaries, excluding independent voters.

Something to consider: Nationally, most school boards are nonpartisan. Only a handful of states (Alabama, Louisiana, Connecticut, most of Pennsylvania and Florida) hold partisan elections.

MY RECOMMENDATION: VOTE NO

AMENDMENT #2 Ballot Language: “Proposing an amendment to the State Constitution to preserve forever fishing and hunting, including by the use of traditional methods, as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife. Specifies that the amendment does not limit the authority granted to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission under Section 9 of Article IV of the State Constitution.”  (This amendment reached the 2024 ballot via a vote of the Florida State Legislature.

Supporters of passing this amendment say:

• Passing this amendment enshrines hunting and fishing as Constitutional rights recognizes their importance in Florida culture and economy.

• Supports activities that contribute significantly to the state’s economy through tourism and other industries.

Opponents of passing this measure say:

• We prioritize hunting and fishing over other wildlife strategies, potentially impacting conservation efforts and jeopardizing the safety, of our wildlife, residents, and communities.

• It would codify lethal force as the state’s primary method for animal control and removal - - overriding protections for vulnerable protected fisheries or wildlife populations.

More to Consider:

 Florida statues already recognize the right to hunt and fish.  Current hunting and fishing regulations would still apply. The amendment does not limit Florida Fish and Wildlifre Conservation Commission’s authority.

 MY RECOMMENDATION: VOTE NO

AMENDMENT #3: BALLOT LANGUAGE:  “Allows adults 21 years or older to possess, purchase, or use marijuana products and marijuana accessories for non-medical personal consumption by smoking, ingestion, or otherwise; allows Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers, and other state licensed entities, to acquire, cultivate, process, manufacture, sell, and distribute such products and accessories.” (Unlike amendments 1 & 2. Amendment 3 reached the balled as a Citizen-Initiated measure).

What it proposes in plain language: Proposes to legalize adult personal use of marijuana in Florida.  If passed, individuals aged 21 and older would be allowed to possess up to 3 ounces of marijuana and up to 5 grams of cannabis sativa concentrate.

Current Status:  Medical marijuana is already legal in Florida; it was approved by voters in 2016. This amendment seeks to expand the legalization to include adult personal use of pot. 

Supporters of passing this amendment say:    

• Passage will generate significant tax revenues and create jobs within the state;

• It will represent a step towards reducing the burden on the criminal justice system by eliminating penalties for personal use and possession;

• A regulated market will ensure safer products for consumers and eliminate illegal sales.

Opponents say:  

• Worries about the potential public impact, including increased usage among minors, and the possibility of impaired public driving incidents;

• The amendment is too broadly written, and could limit the state’s ability to effectively regulate marijuana industry. 

More to Consider:  The campaign has raised most of its funding from Trulieve,  the state’s largest medical marijuana operator.  Trulieve is known for  trying to establish monopolies on the marijuana industries in other states. 

MY RECOMMENDATION: VOTE YES

AMENDMENT #4: BALLOT LANGUAGE: No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion. As with Amendment 3, this amendment reached the ballot as a Citizen-Initiated measure.

In plain language, this amendment proposes limiting government interference in Florida. If passed, it will nullify the current Florida 6-week abortion ban and go into effect on January 7, 2025.

Current status: Florida currently has a 6-week abortion ban in effect, making it illegal for most women to access an abortion 6 weeks from the first day of an individual’s last menstrual period, or 2 weeks after a missed period. It is a third degree felony for doctors to perform an abortion outside of this time schedule, punishable by fines and imprisonment for a period of 5 years. There are no exceptions for cases of rape, incest or human trafficking after the 15th week of pregnancy.

SUPPORTERS SAY: 

• Abortion is a personal medical decision that patients and their doctors should have to make for themselves;

• The current law bans abortion before many women even realize they are pregnant without any real exception for rape, incest and human trafficking;

• This amendment will not change any of Florida’s parental protections or healthcare providers’ scope of practice and ethics.

OPPONENTS SAY:

• The amendment is extreme and misleading;

• It would allow any healthcare provider to determine if an abortion is necessary and eliminate parental consent.

MY RECOMENDATION: VOTE YES

AMENDMENT #5 BALLOT LANGUAGE: “Proposing an amendment to the State Constitution to require an annual adjustment for inflation to the value of current or future homestead exemptions that apply solely to levies other than school district levies and for which every person who has legal or equitable title to real estate and maintains thereon the permanent residence of the owner, or another person legally or naturally dependent upon the owner is eligible. This amendment takes effect January 1, 2025.” (This amendment reached the 2024 ballot via a vote of the Florida State Legislature

This amendment proposes adjusting the homestead property tax exemption value annually for inflation.  This change would apply to the portion of a home’s value that qualifies for the homestead exemption, ensuring that the exemption amount keeps pace with inflation.

Currently, Florida homeowners benefit from a homestead property tax exemption which reduces the taxable value of their primary residence. The exemption is set at a fixed amount, which does not account for inflation.

 Supporters of Amendment 5 say:

• Passage of this amendment could protect homeowners from the eroding effects of inflation, ensuring that their tax exemptions maintain real value over time;

• By adjusting the exemption value annually, homeowners could see more substantial property tax savings, making homeownership more affordable.

Opponents of Amendment 5 say:

• Adjusting the exemption for inflation will decrease property tax revenue, thus affecting local governments budgets and their ability to fund services such as public safety, education and infrastructure.

•  People who are not homeowners will likely be the ones made to bare the burden of the tax shift.

• A legislative analysis estimates a reduction in non-school local government property taxes by nearly $23 million in the 2025-26 fiscal year, with losses potentially reaching $112 million within a few years.

 MY RECOMMENDATION: VOTE NO

AMENDMENT #6 BALLOT LANGUAGE: “Proposing the repeal of the provision in the State Constitution which requires public financing for campaigns of candidates for elective statewide office who agree to campaign spending limits.” This amendment reached the ballot by a vote of the Florida State Legislature.

 Purpose of this amendment: #6 proposes to repeal the provision of public financing for candidates running for statewide offices in Florida, including governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, chief financial officer, and commissioner of agriculture.

Currently, Florida’s public campaign financing system, enacted in 1986 and enshrined in the state constitution following a 1998 amendment, provides matching funds to eligible candidates for these offices.  Candidates must meet specific fundraising thresholds and agree to spending limits to qualify for public funds.

SUPPORTERS SAY:

• Passing this amendment could save taxpayers money, which could be redirected to other essential government services.

 OPPONENTS SAY:

• Public financing helps create a level playing field for candidates who may not have access to large private donations, thus ensuring that elections are fair and competitive;

• Public funding is seen as a way to reduce the influence of wealthy donors and special interests in politics, promoting a more democratic electoral process;

• A similar repeal effort in 2010 failed to pass, indicating significant voter support for maintaining public campaign financing.

MY REECOMMENDATION: VOTE NO

BTW: I hope you are registered to vote.  If you are unsure do remember that the deadline to register is October 7, 2024 . . . just a week from now. 

If you are not sure, you can go online to check your status at:

Registertovoteflorida.gov

See you at the polls!

Copyright2024, Kurt Franklin Stone

#1,007: Oh What a Night!

                      Dodger Shohei Ohtani and "Decoy"

As I ready myself to put fingers to keyboard and begin composing blog #1,007, I am sitting in my library. It is adorned with thousands of books ranging from the complete works of Shakespeare, Boccaccio and Thucydides, Dickens, Dostoevsky and Mark Twain. There are countless shelves containing biographies of classic movie stars (Chaplin, Keaton, Henry Fonda, the siblings Barrymore, and Humphrey Bogart); directors (D.W. Griffith, Sir David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder); and screenwriters (Ben Hecht, Herman Mankiewicz, Dalton Trumbo, and Dorothy Parker. There are also shelves filled with hundreds of history books, the Hebrew Bible, Babylonian Talmud, and Shulchan Aruch (the medieval Jewish code of law) as well as the complete works of P.G Wodehouse . . . one of my absolute favorite writers of all time. To my left, wedged in between Arnold Bergere’s sculpture of Moses cradling the Ten Commandments and a marvelous framed photo of the “It Girl” Clara Bow, there is a metallic sign that proclaims that there are precisely 2.694 miles between this library and Dodger Stadium (a gift from my “slightly older sister” Erica) and autographed baseballs signed by Sandy Koufax, Maury Wills, Duke Snyder and . . . Ted Williams.  And oh yes, I am wearing a brand new Dodger jersey (#50 Mookie Betts  - likewise a gift from my slightly older sister Erica, who is now the matriarch of the clan), and a beat-up Dodger cap from the mid-1960s.

As you may have guessed, this week’s blog has nothing to do with politics.  I think we all deserve a break . . . at least for a couple of days. 

Ever since 2005 - the year I began writing this blog - at least 1 out of every 52 essays has been devoted to MY L.A. Dodgers. (One of my most popular was from August, 2013 about longtime Dodger broadcaster Vince Scully, called “Shakespeare With a Mic”). Ever since 1958 - the year the Dodgers arrived in L.A. - the Stone family has, as we say in Tinseltown, “Bled Dodger Blue.”  We went to lots of games; first at the Los Angeles War Memorial Coliseum, which had a capacity of over 95,000, and then, after 1962 at Chavez Ravine.  I/we had the privilege of watching Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch; of kvelling over the only Jewish brother battery mates in MLB history (Catcher Norm and Pitcher Larry . . . the Sherry brothers), of cheering on Maury Wills as he stole an amazing 104 bases in 1962, and the infield of Garvey, Cey, Russell and Lopes who played an amazing 8 seasons together . . . a major league record.  We got to see such immortals as Stan “The Man” Musial, “Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron, Willie “Say Hey!” Mays, Warren Spahn (the winningest left-handed pitcher of all time), experienced “Fernandomania,” “Moon Shots,” and a thousand-and-one other great plays and players.  

While it is true that I never saw Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Mel Ott, Hank Greenberg, Ted Williams or Bob Feller play, I did, just the other night, get to a game here in South Florida in which we saw the young man who just may turn out to be the greatest player of all time: Dodger pitcher/outfielder/designated hitter Shohei Ohtani. For quite a few years, whenever the Dodgers come south to play the Marlins, my friend “Pal Al” Blake treats me and my son-in-law Scott to a night of great seats, lots of cheers and a chance to see the Dodgers (generally) beat the pants off the hapless Marlins.  We were especially revved up for the game this past Wednesday . . . a chance to see the Ohtani bat!  (Like Babe Ruth, Shohei Ohtani is both a brilliant pitcher and an even better slugger; unlike the Babe, he can also steal bases with the best of ‘em.) 

Most of the people attending the game were wearing Dodger shirts and caps, many blazoned with the number 17 and the name “Ohtani” on the back.  There were about 17,500 people in attendance; great for the Marlins who average less than 10,000 a game. Most were rooting for the Dodgers.  The first Dodger to come to the plate was . . . you guessed it . . . Shohei Ohtani.  He got a standing-room cheer and then singled.  Despite stealing second and then moving over to third on an error, the Dodgers failed to score.  It was a pretty good game; Dodger Catcher Will Smith hit 2 homeruns, and the visitors won 8-4.  

If only we had been there the next night . . . 

The next night, Thursday September 19, 2024 was a night for the ages.  How so?  Well, to begin with, Shohei Ohtani went six-for-six, meaning that he had six hits (3 home runs, 2 doubles, and 1 single in six at-bats.  In the entire history of Major League Baseball, only 43 players have have achieved this goal. Not only that: Ohtani also stole 2 bases and had 17 total bases.  The final score was 20-4; moreover the victory guaranteed the Dodgers a spot in the post season . . . they have won the National League’s Western Division.  What Shohei Ohtani has accomplished this season, not to mention his entire professional career going back to his days in Japan, is beyond breathtaking.  Generally speaking, players who are great pitchers do not know the first thing about hitting.  Next, players who are “sluggers” (capable of hitting many, many long homeruns) generally do not steal bases . . . they are physically too large to be that quick afoot.  Up until the time of Ohtani, only 5 players had hit 40 home runs and stolen 40 bases in a season . . . and 3 of those (Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, and Alex Rodriguez) were found to have been using performance enhancing drugs (PET) when they accomplished the feat.  Now, Shohei Ohtani has become the lone member of the "50-50 club.”  Moreover, as of this afternoon, he has hit 53  home runs and stolen 55 bases to go along with a .301 average and 123 RBI. 

Most baseball cognoscenti (I immodestly include myself in this group) consider his achievement in the September 19 game between the Dodgers and the Marlins to be the single greatest game by any hitter in the history of Major League Baseball.  You hear that Babe?

Not surprisingly, Ohtani is the highest-paid professional athlete in the history of sports: $700 million over 10 years.  And that’s despite Dodger management knowing he would be unable to pitch during the first year of the contract due to his recuperation from “Tommy John surgery.” (Ulnar Collateral Ligament Reconstruction Surgery).

Beyond being a once-in-a-lifetime baseball player, and the highest-paid athlete of all time, he seems, by all signs, to be a genuinely nice, humble and hugely philanthropic human being with a great love of dogs.  This latter issue has taken the Los Angeles crowd by storm.  Everyone in L.A. knows that “Showtime” Ohtani has a beloved dog . . . a Dutch duck-hunting Nederlandse Kooikerhondje named “Decoy.”  In fact, Decoy (pictured above) is so well-known that on the recent Ohtani Bobblehead night,” the pooch was part of giveaway doll.  Dodger fans started lining up at 8:00 AM that day just to be assured of being one of the lucky 40,000 to get a statue of their own.  Talk about popularity!  The icing on the cake that night came when Ohtani came out of the dugout to throw out the ceremonial “first-pitch” - a tradition that goes all the way back to President William Howard Taft, who threw out the first pitch at a Washington Senators game on April 14, 1910.  To see what Ohtani and Decoy did to make the first pitch one of the most memorable of all time, check out the video capture:

At a time when so many of our leaders, idols and “heroes” turn out to have lying lips, feet of clay, and the morals of an alley cat, it is both heartwarming and  essential to have a universally admired super-human to root for. Though only 30 years of age, Shohei Ohtani has long wowed the hearts and minds of baseball fans wherever the game is played. After his record-setting night, his name and fame have now spread to people (whether baseball fans or not) in North America, South America, Europe and Asia . . . where they’ve already known all about their 6’4” 210-lb dog-loving native son for many years. I for one find it entirely refreshing that a young man born and raised in Oshu, Japan, is now both an American and a global icon. And though his English isn’t that good (he generally speaks through his personal interpreter), he knows how to communicate in the international language of mind-numbing accomplishment, nobility and civility.

Thanks for giving us someone to honestly applaud.

Take good care of Decoy!

Copyright2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#1,006: 51 Days and Counting . . .

How many different synonyms can you come up with to describe what Vice President Kamala Harris did to FPOTUS IT at last Tuesday night’s nationally-televised presidential debate, watched by nearly 70 million Americans . . . not to mention people around the world? Was it “a drubbing,” “a shellacking,” or a whupping”? Did she “annihilate,” “trounce,” “route” or “destroy” him? Will it be known to future generations as “IT’s Waterloo?”

Indeed, V.P. Harris came across as being composed, intelligent, articulate, deeply knowledgeable, and - daresay we - PRESIDENTIAL, while IT was his normal self: petulant, puerile, waspish, racist and filled to overflowing with half-truths, mistruths and absurd - not to mention “dangerous” - fabrications. From the very moment the 5’4 1/4” Harris (wearing flat shoes) confidently strode across the debate stage, firmly grasped the hand of the 6’3” IT and introduced herself (“Good evening, I’m Kamala Harris”), one sensed that she already had him in her hip pocket.

Besides the obvious disparities in their physical height, Harris proved to be the bigger, taller candidate . . . and the most truthful.  This is not to say that the Vice President was spot-on honest throughout the full 90 minutes.  Several small fibs or disparities did manage to pass the V.P.’s  lips:

• Harris: “Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result, for middle-class families, in about $4,000 more a year.”  This may be a high estimate.  IT suggested he wants to impose a 10 percent tax on every imported good entering the United States and a 60 percent tax on every imported good from China. The pro-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics has estimated that this would cost a typical U.S. household in the middle of the income distribution about $1,700 in after-tax income. That’s because tariffs are typically passed on to consumers by importers — a standard economic concept that IT rejects.

• Harris: “What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025, that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected.”  to which IT responded “I have nothing to do as you know, and as she knows better than anyone, I have nothing to do with Project 2025 that’s out there.”  Project 2025 is not an official campaign document, and Democrats, including Vice President Harris, have been called out for sometimes falsely suggesting policies that are not in it, such as on Social Security and the definition of family. It’s a Heritage Foundation report called “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page manifesto filled with detailed conservative proposals that is popularly labeled Project 2025. But there are definitely Trump connections.

• Harris: “Let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020, I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of United States. And in fact, I was the tiebreaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”  This is “spin.”  What Harris said in the vice-presidential debate in 2020, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking. He has been very clear about that.” Later in the debate, she reiterated that “the American people know that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact. That is a fact.”  In other words, V.P. Harris was stating Biden’s position — but not making clear her own. When she was still running for president months earlier, Harris took a firm stand against fracking.

By comparison, IT, immediately put on the defensive by his opponent, and  largely abandoning his pre-arranged debate strategy, made more than four times more false or suspect claims than the Vice President.  Some of them were outright whoppers:

• IT: “I have no sales tax. That’s an incorrect statement. She knows that we’re doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world, and the tariff will be substantial in some cases.” IT is flat wrong to claim that the entire tariff is paid by a foreign country.  There is no controversy among economists, who agree that tariffs — essentially a tax on domestic consumption — are paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, which in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers who may use imported materials in their products.

• IT: "You believe in things like we're not going to frack, we're not going to take fossil fuel, we're not going to do things that are going to be strong, whether you like it or not . . . . Germany tried that, and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants."  This was such an undeniably false statement that Germany’s Federal Foreign Office took the unique  step of issuing a rebuttal:  “Like it or not: Germany's energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables, and we are shutting down – not building – coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest."

• Harris: “I’m going to tell you that I have traveled the world as vice president of the United States, and world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.” ITs response drew blank stares around the globe: “Let me just tell you about world leaders. Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men — they call him a ‘strongman.’ He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him.”

• IT speaking on crime during the Biden/Harris years: “They allowed terrorists. They allowed common street criminals. They allowed people to come in, drug dealers to come into our country. And they’re now in the United States and told by their countries like Venezuela, don’t ever come back, or we’re going to kill you. Do you know that crime in Venezuela and crime in countries all over the world is way down?”  This is false. There is no reliable data on crime in Venezuela — the government stopped publishing official data in 2015 — but at campaign rallies, IT says crime has dropped “a staggering 67 percent” in Venezuela, while at other times he has put the drop in crime at “72 percent in a year.” It’s unclear where he gets these numbers.

Then there is the one big fat lie that will outlive It, his running mate Vontz, as well as their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren:

• Speaking of the perils of “unbridled immigration: “A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” IT is channeling right-wing social media sensations. On Springfield, Ohio, he is referencing a ridiculous social media hoax, supposedly centered on Haitian immigrants eating cats and other animals, that has spawned thousands of memes across right-wing social media. There is no evidence that Haitians are doing this.  And yet, despite  a welter of proof that this charge is utter hogwash,  bomb threats have closed down Springfield schools and forced to local hospitals - Kettering Health and Mercy Health - to go on lock down.  Threats have continued to come even after the woman who started the rumors acknowledged to  NBC News that they were unfounded and publicly apologized. 

  This past Friday, President Biden lashed out at IT during a White House event celebrating Black excellence, stating “I want to take a moment to say something [about the] Haitian American community that’s under attack in our country right now.  It’s simply wrong. There’s no place in America. This has to stop, what he’s doing. It has to stop!”

Here in 2024, IT has pledged that on “day one,” he will deport the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio “back to Venezuela”; in September 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate IT came to Miami’s Little Haiti and told an assembled crowd: “I’m running to represent Haitian-Americans.  I really want to be your greatest champion, and I will be your champion.” I guess IT presumes that those who eat cats and dogs, suffer from acute memory  loss.

Not surprisingly, a vast majority of the legitimate media proclaimed Kamala Harris the winner in a landslide.  It immediately proclaimed himself the overwhelming victor and declared that as a result, he would no longer consider engaging in a second debate.  In making his declaration, he used a boxing metaphor: “When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, “I WANT A REMATCH.  Polls clearly show that I won the debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate (sic).”

Despite the relative boost Kamala Harris received among independent and undecided voters as a result of her formidable debate victory; despite the greater polling numbers she is receiving among women and some minorities (such as Haitians and South Asians) she is still pretty much in a statistical dead heat with her Republican opponent. DO NOT PAY TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO DAILY OR EVEN WEEKLY POLL NUMBERS, I beg you.  Many pollsters are paid to report what a candidate wants them to report; there are but a few reliable and scientifically accurate polls out there these days.  Among those I find most trustworthy are:

• The New York Times/Siena College

• ABC News/The Washington Post

• Marquette University Law School

• YOUGOV

• Monmouth University Polling Institute 

• Maris College and

• Suffolk University.

  Among the worst are:

• Florida International University/Univision

• The Florida Poll and

• University of North Florida/Bob Graham Center for Public Service.
  

The way things go nowadays, people who support the Harris/Walz ticket cannot believe for one moment that anyone - knowing what we know about IT/Vontz - could ever support them come November. Then too, those who are ardent supporters of the latter - again, despite what they know about them - could ever in a million years vote for Harris/Walz. In politics, things are never that cut and dried. The path to victory is never paved with prayers or pronouncements; rather, they are the product of door-knocking, phone ringing, postcard writing and $$$. The path to loss is paved with people who give up, convincing themselves that their vote won’t amount to a hill of beans. I’ve lived and practiced politics long enough to know generally speaking, this is not true.

We have 51 days to go . . . 51 days to make our voices and our dreams a reality.

Do remember the words of Louis D. Brandeis, the greatest of all Supreme Court Justices: “The most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen.”

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#1,005: A Critical Insight from John Cheever

                                           John Cheever: the "Chekhov of the Suburbs"

Vice President Kamala Harris and FPOTUS IT will be far away from the public eye for the next 36 hours. Instead, they will be spending their time huddled with their closest debate advisors, putting the final facts and strategic flourishes in place for Tuesday’s first - and perhaps only - nationally televised face-to-face rhetorical joust hosted by ABC News.  The bell will ring at precisely 9:00 PM. EDT.  After much behind closed doors sturm und drang,  the debate rules will be the same as when IT and President Biden debated on CNN back on June 27: an empty hall, mics which are automatically muted at the end of each candidate’s allotted time; Democrat on audience right, Republican on audience left. 

It is a fool’s errand to bet heavily on whether IT or Kamala Harris is going to win. From the point of emotion and innate political bias, I of course believe Harris has all the tools to force IT to look and sound less stable than an inmate of the Asylum of Charenton (think of the notorious provocateur the Marquis de Sade). In order for her to win, she must call out every one of ITs lies, be both brief and succinct on policy proposals, and leave him to do what he normally does best (which is, of course, worst) . . . rant, rave and call names. 

The V.P. seems to have more room for growth than Trump. According to the New York Times’ Lisa Lerer: Twenty-eight percent of voters said they feel like they need to learn more about her, compared to 9 percent who say the same about Trump. It’s a reminder of how even though she is vice president, she remains less defined as a candidate.  From a point of adding new voters, Harris is in much better shape than IT.  He has long been stuck at a maximum of 47% of the electorate: in 2016 he received 46.1% of the vote (62,984,828) to Hillary Clinton’s 48.2% (65,853,514); in 2020, although receiving 74,223,975 votes, his share of the vote only rose to 46.8%, as compared to 51.3% (81,283,501) for Joseph Biden. In other words, as he enters Tuesday’s debate, IT needs to either impress new groups of voters to support him or give a reason for heretofore Democratic voters to switch their votes.  The only place where Kamala Harris  currently trails IT is in the number of people who have developed some knowledge about who she is and what she stands for. The first rule of presidential elections is to gain new voters; to open wide the tent flaps in order to admit a greater array of people.  From what I’ve seen over the past several weeks, this is precisely what the Harris/Walz campaign has been doing . . . and tirelessly so.  By comparison, the IT/Vontz/MAGA crowd doesn’t seem to want the support of anyone who hasn’t been a member of the cult all along .  How much more counterintuitive can you get?

                                                             And in this corner . . . 

What viewers are most likely to see this Tuesday night are the vast differences between Harris and IT in presidential style, deportment, humanity and intelligence.  We will see the difference between a genuine smile and a hurtful smirk.  We will also likely be witness to two utterly different portraits or visions of America.  In one, we will be presented as a land of endless possibilities that has managed to grow its economy, lessen unemployment, lower major crime, take a generous bite out of inflation, grow wages and once again improve its leadership role in the world of nations . . . a country doing its best to meet its challenges by calling on the best within all of us.  In the other, we will be portrayed as a defeated nation caught in the throes of economic chaos; one being overrun by the dregs of humanity who steal into our shores in order to steal away our jobs, raise our crime rate and ultimately destroy the world we once knew.

 This second approach is utter civic neurosis; making victims of the masses and insisting that our enemies are everywhere.  It afflicts not only the politics that come from one side of the aisle; it has infiltrated and become endemic in a wide swath of society.  IT and the MAGA maniacs are consistently “discovering” the “flaws,” “evil inconsistencies’ and “less-than-human weaknesses” of virtually everyone who is not loyal to their cause, who does not look like, act like or agree with the “true believers.”  They simply refuse to see goodness in others . . . 

Which brings us to the late writer John Cheever (1912-1982), often called the “Chekhov of the Suburbs.  One of the best and most entertainingly literate of all 20th-century American novelists and short story writers, Cheever’s WASPY fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages, and based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born.  And although his world and his characters are pretty much foreign to this Jewish Hollywood Brat, I have always found great universal wisdom and understanding in his entire oeuvre. 

  In one of Cheever’s best short stories, “The Worm in the Apple,” the narrator fixates on the seemingly perfect Crutchman family. The narrator suspects they must have flaws beneath their idyllic suburban existence, represented by the hidden ‘worm’ in the apple. The story satirizes the portrayal of perfection in American life, particularly in the 1950s, that golden period of American expansion and confidence.

(BTW: Por those who do not wish to read the entire story [approximately 750 words] I have recorded a version which you may listen to below)

The story’s opening paragraph sets the stage:

The Crutchmans were so very, very happy and so temperate in all their habits and so pleased with everything that came their way that one was bound to suspect a worm in their rosy apple and that the extraordinary rosiness of the fruit was only meant to conceal the gravity and the depth of the infection. Their house, for instance, on Hill Street with all those big glass windows. Who but someone suffering from a guilt complex would want so much light to pour into their rooms? And all the wall-to-wall carpeting as if an inch of bare floor (there was none) would touch on some deep memory of unrequition and loneliness. And there was a certain necrophilic ardor to their gardening. Why be so intense about digging holes and planting seeds and watching them come up? Why this morbid concern with the earth? She was a pretty woman with that striking pallor you so often find in maniacs. Larry was a big man who used to garden without a shirt, which may have shown a tendency to infantile exhibitionism.

The setting, as often in a John Cheever story, is well-heeled American suburbia: the neighborhood is called, suggestively, Shady Hill. The narrator discusses the Crutchmans, a ‘very, very happy’ American family comprised of  husband and wife Larry and Helen and their two children, Rachel and Tom. Through the course of the short narrative, the narrator dissects the Crutchmans’ meticulously decorated home, their expensive car, and their seemingly harmonious family life. Each detail is scrutinised carefully in the hope of finding ‘the worm in the apple’: the one corrupt flaw in the family’s otherwise happy life.

For example, the narrator wonders if the fact that Helen, the wife, is far richer than her husband is a cause of resentment for Larry, who could easily lose his sense of purpose when he is not the breadwinner of the family. But the narrator admits that no proof of such resentment can be found. The narrator also combs over other details of the family’s life: does the husband have a drink problem, or are there issues with their children? But every line of enquiry yields a dead end.

As the narrative progresses, the narrator’s attempts to uncover this ‘worm in the apple’, this hidden darkness in the Crutchman family, becomes increasingly desperate. In the end, the narrative voice shifts from the present tense to the future imperfect: he imagines whole futures for the two children, which contain unsavory or unhappy elements.

The story ends with the narrator confessing that the Crutchman family continues to live happily, with no indication of any worm in the apple of in their lives or their relationships. Despite the narrator’s intense scrutiny, the Crutchmans remain an enigma, leaving the reader to ponder the nature of appearances, hidden truths, and the human desire to find flaws in others.

  Without question, Cheever provides a critical insight - both for his own time (the story was first published in 1958) - and, perhaps, even more so for ours.  For today today, there is so much societal insecurity and civic neurosis that many people are intent upon finding flaws (both potentially fatal and decidedly human) in neighbors, leaders and just plain folks.  While this intention doesn’t provide a whit of cure for whatever it is that ails us, it does seem to lower the social, academic or political playing field by enveloping us in the knowledge that nobody’s perfect . . . something we should have known all along.  If you want to view human imperfection, look into your own mirror. 

What Cheever chose to get across through both irony and satire is a kernel of knowledge that can be of great use in our present time of collective ennui: that most people are shaped as much by their achievements and good intentions as they are by their frailties and failures. 

I fully expect IT to be overwhelmingly guided during tomorrow night’s debate by the latter: turning the Vice President’s  every human flaw, inconsistency or misstep into the embodiment of evil . . . all the while putting on display for the ten thousandth time the fact that he is a thoroughly damaged, deraigned soul who should be kept as far away from the seat of power as a rabid dog from a playground filled with children. 

Like Cheever’s narrator who is initially fixated on finding the worm in the apple of the Crutchman family, far too many are entranced by “discovering” the worst in those who seek to lead, uplift or inspire. Let IT go on and on about the sins, flaws and failings of all those who dare to disagree with him; those who refuse to see in him either the messiah or the ultimate victim. It goes without saying that he is neither; to be either one or the other or both, he would have to be delusional.

As we watch tomorrow night’s debate, let’s keep our feet up, cuppa tea at the ready and John Cheever’s narrator in our frontal lobes. . . .our emotional and behavioral control center.

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#1,004:Thoughts on Labor Day, Turning 75, Sir Mick Jagger, Sir Paul McCartney, Rita Moreno, Al Pacino . . . and Retirement

          A Labor Day Parade in New York City - September 1894

On June 28, 1894, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal federal holiday, to be called “Labor Day.” Nearly a decade before Congress got into the act by making Labor Day a federal holiday, it was recognized by labor activists and individual states. After municipal ordinances were passed in 1885 and 1886, a movement developed to secure state legislation. New York was the first state to introduce a bill, but Oregon was the first to pass a law recognizing Labor Day, on February 21, 1887. Congress’ aim was to establish a federal holiday for the purpose of honoring and recognizing the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements in the United States. 

For decades, the first Monday in September was celebrated by holding parades and outdoor events like large-scale and municipal barbeques. It also came to symbolize the end of summer, the beginning of the school year, and—once every four years - the quasi-official beginning of presidential campaigning.

Today, Labor Day (and the weeks preceding it) is a time for sales at shops, stores, and malls.  The end of summer?  Forget it; with climate change who knows when (or if) summer will end?  The beginning of the school year?  Here in Florida, our grand kiddies have been back in class for nearly a month.  The official start of the presidential campaign season?  Are you kidding?  It never ends; there are already political pros starting to think about 2028. 

This Labor Day It and Vantz are pretty much laying low, with the former liming himself to a single virtual Michigan Rally and the latter staying home and licking his wounds after having been widely booed by a firefighter union audience in Boston just the other day. On the other hand, Vice President Harris is being joined by President Biden for a live joint event in Pennsylvania.  While It will undoubtedly speak about how close to economic collapse this country is (plus his normal assortment of grievances), Harris and Biden will be talking up how much economic progress the economy has made on their watch.  And they have some stats to prove it:

·      On Jan. 20, 2021, unemployment was 6.4%; as of the end of July 2024, it is 4.3%.

·      The annual inflation rate was 2.9% for the 12 months ending July 2024; on January 20, 2021, it stood at nearly 7%. 

·   The Federal Reserve’s favorite inflation number, the Personal Consumption Expenditures index shows that yearly inflation was 2.5%, meaning we can expect a drop in the prime interest rate later this month.

And yet, on this Labor Day, the MAGA maniacs are still insisting that the nation’s economy is heading off a cliff.

Ever since I was a wee sprat, I’ve known that Labor Day comes less than 2 weeks after my birthday.  I used to consider it a slightly belated national holiday in honor of little old me.  Well, this year was no different . . . except it’s finally beginning to dawn on me that at least from a sociodemographic point of view, I am no longer a kid . . . I have just turned (gulp!) 75 years old.  It is really hard to think of myself as a senior citizen.  Yes, I have been collecting Social Security for almost a decade and am a card-carrying member of Medicare (which in some circles makes me a willing Socialist).  And yet, I haven’t cut back on my working hours; between my Institutional Review Board (medical ethics) work and university lectures both of which require hours and hours of research), as well as a minimum of 10 hours of blog preparation and writing per week and officiating at 2 weekly religious services, and the occasional wedding, funeral and/or unveiling, I’m far busier than I was at age 50 . . . and haven’t given any thought to retiring. 

Why is this?  It’s not that I can’t afford to retire.  Or is it?  I mean,  if I were fully retired, what would I be doing? Fishing?  No, I have fished precisely once in my life.  Attending Lifelong Learning classes?  Heck no: I greatly prefer teaching them than taking them. Playing cards or golfing?  No, and no.  I’ve lived on several golf courses in my life, and the only time I went out on the green was to throw a frisbee to my dogs . . . most of whom were far better at kvetching than fetching.  I think I’ve never considered retiring precisely because if I did, I would still be doing the same things I’ve always done.  I’m extremely lucky; where others have jobs, professions, and/or careers from which they retire, I have art forms that I truly enjoy.   Heck, if people are willing to pay me to engage in what I love, why would I consider retirement?

                                        Sir Mick Jagger

Come to think of it, I am not alone; there are an increasing number of people older than yours truly who likewise have no intention of retiring. Want a few stellar examples? How’s about:

• Sir Mick Jagger: Now 81, Sir Michael and his mates have already been out on tour in 2024 in support of their newest studio album, Hackney Diamonds.

• Sir Paul McCartney: A year older than Sir Mick, Sir James Paul McCartney will be commencing a new tour (Got Back) next month, which will take him throughout South and Central America, Mexico, France, and England.

• Rita Moreno: Soon to be 93, the Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy-Award winner just completed 12 episodes of a TV series called Princess Power (in which she played Princess Pussyboots) and is in pre-production of a new film (her 173rd) called Theirs.

• Al Pacino: Recently turned 84, the Oscar-winning actor (1993’s Scent of a Woman) is in post-production for an amazing 9 different films to hit the silver screen in the next 2 years.

• Mel Brooks: Now 98, Brooks, whose career goes back to 1951, when he was on the famed Milton Berle Show, has completed a new film, Fairy Tale Forest, and has  2 in production.

• Anthoney Fauci. M.D.: the 5th Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes for Health, at age 83, Dr. Fauci, who oversaw the creation of the various vaccines that ultimately saved millions of lives from the Covid-19 pandemic, continued to serve as Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden until shortly before his 82nd birthday.  In retirement, Dr. Fauci joined the faculty of the Georgetown University School of Medicine as a distinguished professor in both the School of Medicine and  the McCourt School of Public Policy.

But do you know something? It’s not just the fabulously famous, fabulously accomplished, or fabulously well-heeled seniors (or yours truly, who cannot be placed in any of these categories save being a senior) who are either postponing or turning a blind eye toward retirement.  Why? They simply don’t want to quit.  From a national economic point-of-view, there is a downside to this: the U.S. workforce is now packed with five generations — from the silent generation(which includes President Joe Biden, IT, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi to name but 4) ) down to Gen. Z (those born between 1997 and 2010). 

There are benefits to having so many experienced workers still active, but for younger people, it can be a major hurdle. The career ladder has become crowded at the top, and this dims professional prospects for those at every rung below. Young workers find it harder to launch their careers and to get promoted. The demographic traffic jam also harms societal cohesion by leaving younger groups behind, according to economists Gabriele Guaitoli and Roberto Pancrazi, who study the issue.

For most of history, a worker’s “retirement plan” was simple: death. This began to change in the 20th century when growing American wealth and the creation of Social Security enabled workers to leave the labor force earlier.

Beginning in the 1990s, however, the trend reversed. The age at which Americans could access their full Social Security payments was raised to 67 in the 1980s, and many companies stopped offering pension plans. Workers often had to stay in their jobs longer to make ends meet. But many also did so voluntarily. Longer life expectancies and easier working conditions made this choice more attractive. In 1990, about 10 percent of the labor force was made up of workers over 55. Now, this share is about 23 percent, and it is expected to stay around there over the next decade.

                              Al Pacino, age 84

As older workers stay in their jobs longer, younger people start off in comparatively lower-paying positions and move up more slowly. They often have to wait decades for promotions. In academia, for instance, young professionals now spend years in fellowships and postdoctoral programs waiting for professor jobs to open. No one wants to force older workers out of jobs. (All generations enjoy Al Pacino movies.) But a better balance needs to be struck between retaining older workers and nurturing younger ones. This won’t be easy, but here are a couple of ways to start.

The first is to encourage more start-ups. In new businesses, younger workers move up relatively rapidly to leadership roles. Just look at Silicon Valley’s 20-year-old CEOs. On this front, the recent post-pandemic boom in Americans starting businesses is encouraging. There aren’t a lot of levers that policymakers can pull to incentivize more start-ups, but it would help to make it easier to obtain small-business loans and to further reduce regulatory barriers. It’s good to hear that Harris/Walz are on to this issue and willing to put American tax dollars to work creating small-business startups as well as a $25,000 tax credit for young people purchasing their first home. They have also backed this up with a proposal to construct 3 million new homes by the end of their first term. This ambitious program is not a sure thing (what, in politics ever is?) If nothing else, it will cause the not-so-loyal opposition to shed gallons of sweat and expend millions of syllables contesting it.  Nonetheless, it  is a hopeful step and, as the Chinese philosopher Lau Tzu noted a long, long time ago, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

You will note that I did not manage to post this essay on Labor Day.  After completing about half, I decided to take a long, long walk, watch a baseball game, and share a marvelously slow meal of Caesar Salad and pasta with Annie.  

And then get back to work . . . 

I feel younger already!

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#1,003: Neurodivergence, Empathy and Teachable Moments

          Hope, Gus, "Coach" and Gwen Walz

Without question, the just-concluded Democratic National Convention has set a new standard for televised political extravaganzas. I mean, it had everything: the best, most gifted, and thought-provoking political speakers on the planet; flawless - and I mean absolutely FLAWLESS - direction and choreography; the most imaginative, toe-tapping, hip-hopping roll call of the states ever experienced; a level of exhaustive energy not felt for decades; spot-on video clips; boundless joy, innumerable hugs, hope, laughter, and empathic tears; a billion-and-one red-white-and-blue balloons . . . and, of course, Coach and Gwen Walz’s two children, Gus, and the perfectly-named Hope.  Who will ever forget Hope making a heart shape with her hands and Gus pointing with unbridled happiness and tears in his eyes, repeatedly shouting out “THAT’S MY DAD!!” as they watched their father give his acceptance speech.

Remarkably, within the span of a mere 4 televised evenings, the Democrats managed to steal much of what had long been the Republican brand: becoming the party of “freedom,” “family values” and “patriotism.” This left many MAGA-ites – from IT on down – deeply shaken, angry, perplexed and much farther back on their political heels than they might have imagined even a week earlier.  So how has the Party of IT responded? Simple:  When you are in doubt and the polls are beginning to turn against you, lace up your gloves, toss out the Marquis of Queensberry Rules (a set of guidelines for fair, stand-up boxing matches), and revert to type, rabbit-punching, hitting well below the belt, and generally replacing gentlemanly fisticuffs with dire falsehoods and classless calumnies.   As for IT, he doesn’t know what to make of - or do about - Kamala Harris. He’s tried to play around with how to pronounce her name,  and what nickname to saddle her with (the most recent being “Comrade Kamala”); he’s called her “stupid” and claimed that all the crime in San Francisco is due to her having been The City’s D.A. (that was a long, long time ago). BTW: I prefer calling Kamala by the name her children call her: Mamaleh, which is Yiddish for “little mother.”

Perhaps the weirdest of all weirdnesses coming out of the convention stemmed from the National Assembly of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) which has been citing one of the most reviled Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions in American history (1857’s Dred Scott v. Sanford) to justify its case that Vice President Harris should be deemed ineligible to run under the U.S. Constitution.

        Chief Justice Roger Taney & Dred Scott

An attorney associated with NFRA cited Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 5 of the Constitution, which pertains to only natural-born U.S. citizens being eligible to serve as president. The NFRA argued that the phrase "natural born citizen" is defined as "a person born on American soil of parents who are both citizens of the United States at the time of the child's birth."  Egads!  The serious application of this clause would have made multiple U.S. presidents ineligible to hold office, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among others. The NFRA attorney, Dallas-based Santiago Reich. pointed out that because those presidents' parents were born on land classified as British colonies at the time, they would not meet the standard the NFRA set to define as natural-born citizenship.

It should be noted that the Dred Scott decision was overturned entirely by both the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution and its text cannot be meaningfully cited for any reason whatsoever . . . especially for doing a “birthing redux” over Kamala Harris.  And by the way, IT, in addition to claiming that V,P, Harris is employing a.i. to  make her “empty” rallies look like they are standing-room only (!),  has also, of late, claimed “I am better looking than Kamala.”

Might I make a suggestion?  Take a long look in the mirror.

Getting back to the Chicago convention:  One aspect that will shore up and outlive any mistakes or miscues which might occur in the campaign’s final weeks (for they are inevitable) is its celebration and presentation of the loving Emhoff/Harris and Walz families . . . all of whom . . . children, parents, nieces, nephews . . . onstage and in the audience, hugging, smiling, tearing up and cheering on the two candidates.  Perhaps the biggest star of the entire convention was 17-year old Gus Walz, who melted millions of hearts. Already, there are tee-shirts, campaign buttons and banners emblazoned with simple messages like  “I’m voting for Gus’ Dad,” “Coach Walz: That’s My Dad!” and "Team Gus!”  In addition to capturing all those hearts with his obvious ingenuousness, he has created a learning moment for millions: learning about what makes him both different and truly special.  Gus has already put the words neurodivergent and neurodivergence into numerous vocabularies.  For those who have yet to do their research, you should know that neurodivergent isn’t a medical term. Instead, it’s a way to describe people using words other than “normal” and “abnormal.” That’s important because so far as I know, there’s no single definition of “normal” for how the human brain works. Like a person’s fingerprints, no two brains — not even those of identical twins — are exactly the same. Because of that, there’s no definition of “normal” capabilities for the human brain. (BTW: The word for people who aren’t neurodivergent is “neurotypical.” That means their strengths and challenges aren't affected by any kind of difference that changes how their brains work.)

People like Gus have different strengths and challenges from people whose brains don’t have those differences. The possible differences include medical disorders, learning disabilities and other conditions. The possible strengths include better memory, being able to mentally picture three-dimensional (3D) objects easily, the ability to solve complex mathematical calculations in their head, and many more. From what we saw of Gus, especially on the night his father gave his major address, one obvious  aspect of his neurodirgence is that he wears his heart on his sleeve; he is incapable of pretense . . . what he feels, he shows. 

 Alas, not everyone found Gus’ status (it’s not a condition) and tears to be a teaching/learning moment. Conservative mouthpieces/influencers Ann Coulter and Jay Weber, among others, saw fit to mock and deride the young man. Coulter, writing about the Democratic National Convention on her X (formerly Twitter) account railed on and on about Democrats referring to Republican V.P. candidate JD Vance as “weird.” “Talk about weird,” Coulter posted in reference to Gus on her X account. After tons of negative responses, she did remove it. Then there’s conservative Wisconsin radio host Jay Weber, whose offensive response posted on X was widely condemned: “Sorry, but this is embarrassing for both father and son," Weber wrote. "If the Walzs represent today's American man, this country is screwed; 'Meet my son, Gus. He's a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud.'" As with Coulter, Weber’s post was also deleted. His apology? "I didn't realize the kid was disabled, and have taken the post down."

                 IT and Reporter Serve Kovaleski

Of course, these two insensitive cranks were only following in IT’s footsteps; back in November 2015, IT mocked Politico reporter Serge Kovaleski during an interminable speech in which the then-candidate was defending the contention that "thousands and thousands of people" cheered the September 11th terrorist attack in Jersey City, New Jersey.  Turns out that Kovaleski was one of the reporters who had disproved IT’s batty contention.  “Written by a nice reporter, IT began. “Now the poor guy. You ought to see this guy."  He then "into an impression which involved gyrating his arms wildly and imitating the unusual angle at which Kovaleski's hand sometimes rests," according to Politico. (NB: Mr. Kovaleski suffers from arthrogryposis, which according to the National Organization of Rare Disorders, can affect the function and range of motion of joints and can cause muscles to atrophy.)

Weird leader, weird followers. Or, as we used to say back in our schoolyard days: monkey see, monkey do.

Is it any wonder that more and more people are questioning IT’s humanity, let alone lucidity?  One need not agree with a presidential ticket’s every position or proposal (and for those who say that Harris/Walz did not present anything of the sort in Chicago, do remember that in the main, that’s not the purpose of a national convention) in order to support it.  Many voters seem to have forgotten that character, humanity and magnanimity of spirit are just as important - if not more so - than what Plato would have called “The shadows on the cave wall.”  Just because someone proclaims him or herself to be “pro-family values,” “pro-life,” “pro-freedom,” and a host of other seemingly positives does not make it so.  The presentation of self often provides the greater keys - the more critical teachable moments - than bluster or bombast. Everyone on earth has something to teach . . . even if it is just what not to  be or what not to say.

In sum, doing justice, loving mercy and walking with humility (to paraphrase Micah 6:8) is the key . . . not mockery, mendacity or  malevolence. 

I don’t know  about you, but I’m voting for Mamaleh and Gus’ Dad, 

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#1,002: The Theology of Ecology

  General Sherman: 2,700 years old & 275 feet tall 

By a show of hands, how many are increasingly finding themselves needing a slug of scotch  - or a ginormous bowl of chocolate ice cream or whatever floats your impulse boat -  in order to merely watch, listen to, read about, OR even contemplate the current (and potentially future) state of the world vis-à-vis politics? As I type this opening line, I am hunting and pecking with my left hand because my right is being held aloft; I agree with me. (BTW, my poison of choice is a glass or two of Cinzano Rosso Sweet Vermouth.)

I must admit that now that V.P. Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are at the top of the Democratic ticket, I am beginning to drink more Earl Grey and less eau-de-vie. Before their ascension, I was feeling pretty damn helpless; something generally foreign to me.  I have somehow managed to look to the future with hope and enthusiasm for most of my political life. But over the past several years there’s been this gnawing feeling growing within me that many of today’s most noisome animals in the political zoo could care less than a fig about the future. And here, I am referring almost exclusively to IT, VONTZ, DeSantis, Cruz, and the ward filled with all the MAGA Maniacs, both large or small, rich or poor, well-educated or unlettered.  If the first two on the list (IT & Vontz) crash and burn in November, that will be great . . . although far from perfect.  We’ll still be saddled with the rest of the crazies in the House and Senate, state legislatures, and town councils . . . not to mention the deep-pocketed lunatics who pay them to push their apocalyptic nightmares.  

It seems to me that any political party – or its supporters – that really, truly cared about the nation’s (not to mention the planet’s) future, would place democracy over autocracy, individual rights of the many over the perquisites of the few, and make itself as colorblind as is humanly possible. I am so ready to watch this evening’s Democratic National Convention for a shot of joyful adrenaline. I mean, to have watched last month’s Republican National Convention (which added yet a 3rd glass of Vermouth to my daily intake) would have one believe that the followers of IT/Vontz firmly agree that:

• American voters agree with the Supreme Court that abortion should be kept illegal;

• A majority of Americans are against anything that keeps guns of any sort out of the hands of Americans;

• That a vast majority of Americans favor increasing reliance on oil and coal as the primary sources of American energy (despite America being  the largest single  oil producer on the planet);

• That the support of same-sex marriage and gay rights goes against the literal dictates of the Christian Bible;

• That a vast majority of American Christians firmly believe that America should be officially recognized as a “Christian Nation”’

• That Americans will be happy to get rid of Social Security in order to bring down the national debt;

• That a clear majority believe that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is pure Socialism, and

• That Climate Change is a hoax being perpetrated on the world by progressives and liberals for the purpose of killing the gas, oil, and coal-mining industries.

 Those who pay attention to the news will recognize all the above as playing a large role in the spiritus mundi (world spirit) of Project 2025 . . . the “fascist fever dream"  which currently passes for the GOP platform, and which as recently as 2 weeks ago, IT claimed to know nothing about.  (In reality, more than 140 current and former IT associates have had a hand in creating this monstrously retrogressive document.)  IT’s proclamation that he didn’t know shinola about Project 2025 is on par with his claiming to have never met E. Jean Carol, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted barely more than a week as White House communications director, former porn star Stormy Daniels, or his former campaign director Paul Manafort.

I would hope that after so many years, people have come to realize that the words “reality,” “IT” and “MAGA” should never be in the same sentence; that a majority of the American public:

• Supports: congress to restore Roe v. Wade protections nationwide;

• Favors stricter gun laws;

• Support same-sex marriages and gay rights in general;

• Less than 15% of American Christians support Christian Nationalism.

• About 8 in 10 Americans are willing to pay more to keep Social Security strong; 77% say it is critical to preserve Social Security even if it means increasing the Social Security taxes paid by working Americans. An even higher percentage (83%) say it is critical to preserve Social Security even if it means increasing the Social Security taxes paid by wealthy Americans.

• More than 60% of those polled support Obamacare, and lastly (and at least for me, most importantly)

• An overwhelming majority of those polled not only believe that climate change/global warming is real, but firmly believe that it is the most important issue of our time.

So once again, IT and his MAGA maniacs stand firmly against the thoughts, feelings, and wishes of the majority, all the while selling them snake oil by blaming “illegal immigrants,” “liberals,” “socialists” and “Christian haters” for all the world’s ills.

It is painfully obvious that there are so many critical issues facing voters this election season - issues that separate Americans into two disparate camps.  It has long been my belief, however, that there is precisely one issue that should unite us all: climate change which, if we continue doing nothing about will ultimately cause the death of our planet; everything from amoebae to zebras. 

For those who say “Doc, you’re being a damn drama queen,” consider the following snippet of a medieval folk tale:

          Planet Earth: THE Issue Facing Humanity

The proprietor of a vast estate asked 3 of his overseers to assemble in his library for a challenge.  “I going to ask each of you a question.  Whoever answers correctly will not only be rewarded with a rent-free cottage for the rest of his life but will receive 50% of the proceeds from the estate’s forests, ponds, or hothouses, depending on which he serves as manager. And I will tell you up-front: I do not know the correct answer.  So far as I am concerned, there can be one - and only one - proper response.  And by the way, whoever answers incorrectly, will immediately lose both his job and the cottage that  comes with it.  Two of the three overseers, who had high opinions of their worth and wisdom, asked for - and received permission - to go in on 1 answer.  The 3rd, a simple man remained silent, fearing that he would soon lose his livelihood.  The tandem quickly answered: “The biggest thing in the world is your heart, master . . . for truly, you are the most generous soul in the world.”  The lord of the manor quickly shouted “YOU ARE WRONG!  What kind of a fool do you take me for?  Get off my estate!”  Turning to the simple man, he asked “And what is your answer?”  Swallowing hard and beginning to shake, he said in a faltering voice: “I guess the biggest thing in the world would have to be the world itself.  Am I correct?” Smiling broadly, the lord said “You are 100% correct!  Your question is filled with both wisdom and logic.  For not only is the biggest thing in the world the world itself . . . it is also the most important thing of all . . . where would every living thing - from amoebae to zebras be without our planet?”

This little sketch says it all; we have been vouchsafed a world, a planet, to protect . . . for the good of every living creature. How is it possible that anyone can deny we live in a time of rapidly changing climate, dangerously rising seas, and a historic rise in the extinction of the beasts of the field, as well as the seas beneath and the skies above? One would have to be either utterly blind to reality or the victim of toxic gullibility foisted upon them by a class of moral albinos who haven’t the slightest problem putting today’s profits ahead of tomorrow’s existence. The overwhelming majority of Republican members of Congress refuse to vote in favor of any climate legislation so as not to ruffle the feathers (or shut tight the coffers) of corporations that explore and drill for oil or dig and mine for coal. As for the hyper-wealthy, their very obdurance when it comes to most things ecological seems to indicate that they don’t care a whit for anything that may happen to the planet after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil.  To those who live their lives as if they are, in the memorable words of the Jefferson Airplane, “The Crown of Creation,” I say YOU ARE WRONG!  We have all been placed on this earth to be stewards, not subjugators. 

    Should Trees Have Standing?                     

Nearly a half-century ago, while researching an environmental strategy plan for then-California Governor Jerry Brown, I happened upon a book by Professor Christopher D. Stone (the son of the late muckraker I.F. Stone, the patron saint of this blog).  It was entitled Should Trees Have Standing: Law, Morality and the Environment.   It turned out to be, in my opinion, one of the most important books of all time.  It turned out to be a rallying point for the then-burgeoning environmental movement, launching a worldwide debate on the basic nature of legal rights that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.  More than a half-century later, the book is still in print, still serving as the definitive statement as to why trees, oceans, animals, and the environment as a whole should be bestowed with legal rights so that the voiceless elements in nature are protected for future generations. In its own way, Stone’s brief (248 pages) work is as important in 2024 as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden was when it was originally published back in 1854.

Without question, there are all kinds of critical issues to consider this election season . . . and which candidate(s) are most able to address them in ways that are closest to our beliefs.  These issues range from the “kitchen table” variety (inflation, prices for food, energy, medicine, and healthcare) war and peace, democracy versus autocracy, and fiscal integrity versus political cupidity.  But without a sustainable planet, none of these issues really matter.  Everything begins with the earth.  G-d (or the forces of nature) has placed us here to exercise guardianship.  To me - and hopefully to you - this is as much a matter of theology as it is of ontology, hydrology, or climatology.   

This time around, vote as if the future of the entire planet is at stake, for it really, truly is.  Everything - from the teeniest, tiniest quark to the tallest tree depends on us.  Everything else is secondary.

 Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#1,001: How Do You Say "Bedbug" in Yiddish?

                                 JD Vance

For people whose knowledge and familiarity of Jewish culture is based largely on Fiddler on the Roof and The Jazz Singer, Yiddish is nothing more than a quaint jargon spoken by men who wear fur-trimmed hats (streimelach - שטרײַמלעך) and married women who cover their hair with wigs (sheitln - שייַטלן). They are, of course, wrong. Yiddish is a real, honest-to-G-d language. Hell’s Bells, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Twain, de Maupassant . . . even Raymond Chander . . . have been translated into Yiddish, although it is beyond me why anyone would want to pal around with Feivel (Phillip) Marlow in Mama Loschen (the “mother tongue”). Linguistically, Yiddish is considered middle-high German (מיטל הויך דייַטש - mit’l hoych daytsch) an 8th-century language that provided the nascent Ashkenazi (German-Jewish) community with a vernacular fused with many elements taken from Hebrew and to some extent Aramaic, written in Hebrew letters.  Over many centuries it adopted and adapted words derived from whatever European country Jews might find themselves living.  Today, it is spoken mainly by the Orthodox.

Without necessarily knowing it, a lot of non-Jewish, English-speaking people freely use Yiddish words in everyday speech.  Many of the words are pejorative:

• shmuck, (a foolish or contemptible person); 

• shmendrick (a hapless fool);

• putz (an idiot);

• nosh (a quick bite);

• shmegegge (a sycophant);

• chutzpah (overweening self-confidence, grossly nervy);

• mentch (a wonderful human being); 

• glitch (a minor malfunction) and

• klutz (a supremely clumsy person). 

  This is just a minute sampling.  Most Jewish Baby Boomers know little if any Yiddish beyond these kinds of words; their parents and grandparents only spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want their children or grandchildren to understand what they were talking about. In the Stone household, this was never a problem: neither our parents nor grandparents on either side of the family knew or spoke Mama Loschen . . . they were all American-born, hailing from such places like Minnesota, Chicago, and Baltimore going back to the 19th century.  (I did manage to learn a bit of Yiddish myself while attending rabbinic school, in order to read Sholom Aleichem [the “Yiddish Mark Twain”] in the original.  My mentor and guide to learning Yiddish was a professor with the delightfully Dickensian name of  “Herbert Paper.”)

                  Cimex lectularius Linnaeus,

So what all does this have to do with the Yiddish word for “bedbug,” or JD Vance, the Republican nominee for Vice President, whose picture is at the top on the left?   Well, in Yiddish, וואַנץ (pronounced “vontz’) is the “bedbug” . . . entomologically the Cimex lectularius Linnaeus, a blood-feeding parasite of humans, chickens, bats and occasionally domesticated animals.  This is the definition one stores in the brain.  Yiddish words and expressions, however, are often best “understood” in the kishkes . . . one’s stomach or guts.  And it is in the kishkes where the parallel between “Vance” and “vontz” becomes clear.  In Yiddish, to refer to someone as a  וואַנץ is akin to calling them a disgusting, crazy person . . . as in “crazy as a bedbug.” It seems to me that any- and everyone who can go from calling IT “The American Hitler,” “The ultimate conman” or “insane” to becoming a blindly loyal MAGA straphanger is unquestionably a vontz.  

Not only that: Vance/vontz is also, to teach yet another Yiddish word, טשודנע - tshudne - a weirdo. Unquestionably, JD Vance (a.k.a. “James Donald Bowman,” “James David Hamel,” “J.D. Vance” and [without the periods] “JD Vance) has belly-flopped his way on to the national political scene with less aplomb than  Sarah Palin. While Vonts has attacked Democratic V.P. candidate Tim Walz for everything from being an “unabashed San Francisco-style Liberal” (he’s a Nebraskan who never so much as visited “The City” until recently) to being a “coward” after serving 24 years in the National Guard and becoming the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer ever to serve in the U.S. Congress.  Moreover, Vontz has seen his favorability rating plunge to a record low minus 15 points . . . the worst in modern political history.  Add to that Vonts’  comment about "childless cat ladies,“ his anti-democratic opinion that families with children should get more votes than the childless, and his having written a gushing forward to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ far, far right tome “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” which spells out precisely what IT is going to do to America in his next term, and you have the living, breathing example of a וואַנץ - a bedbug.  (It should  be noted that “Project 2025” is so utterly frightening and un-American that IT has disavowed any knowledge of it - one of the biggest and most obvious whoppers he has ever told.)

There are several well-known rules for selecting a vice presidential running mate, the most basic of which is “First, do no harm.” IT and his advisors have obviously broken this rule . . . presuming that he even pays attention to them. Had they done serious vetting of the man who made his tens of millions in San Francisco and then returned to Ohio to run for the United States Senate, they would have discovered his many liabilities, inconsistencies, and prior questionable comments about his running mate, women, mixed-race people, democracy itself. Many have come back to haunt him. It is doubtful Vontz will be able to attract any new independent/ undecided voters. He is doing quite poorly among suburban women and educated people in general. As a result, the Republican campaign has of late adopted a new strategy about Vontz: downplay his importance to the Republican ticket. In the words of It himself, “Historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact, I mean virtually no impact.” How’s that for a less-than-ringing endorsement? Then again, what can one expect to come from the mouth of a man (i.e. IT) who is currently undergoing the worst public psychological/political meltdown in the history of Presidential elections?

Permit me to close with a slightly altered blessing/curse from the mouth of טבֿיה די מילכיקע (Tevya the Milkman): “May G-d bless and keep Senator Vontz . . . far away from us.”

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#1,000: IT

                                  IT

This past week President Biden, Vice President Harris, Sec. of State Anthony Blinken, White House National Security Advisor Jacob John (“Jake”) Sullivan, and the foreign affairs apparatus of a half-dozen countries including Slovenia, Turkey, Norway, and Germany managed to pull of what is being recognized as “the most far-reaching exchange between Russia and the West in decades.” Details of the swap are beginning to emerge. We now know that more than 2 years went in to putting it all together - and amazingly, without a single leak. Among those freed from Russian prisons were Evan Gershkovich Alsu Kurmasheva, and Paul Whelan.

Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was detained in March 2023, and accused of spying for the United States. Whelan, a security consultant and former Marine, was arrested by Russian authorities 5 years earlier, in December 2018, and convicted of espionage in 2020. Kurmasheva, an editor with the U.S.-funded, editorially independent Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was detained last year and sentenced this summer to 6½ years in a Russian penal colony on a charge of spreading false information about the Russian military. The final hurdle President Biden had to surmount in order to make the swap work, was getting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to agree to President Biden’s heartfelt plea to include Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov in the swap. Krasikov, a former high-ranking FSB colonel serving a life sentence in a German prison, was found guilty of a murder committed on German soil. He was on the very top of Moscow’s list of Russian prisoners it wanted back.  At first, Chancellor Scholz was firmly reluctant. Finally, he agreed to include Krasikov in the negotiation because of his warm personal friendship with President Joe Biden.  Over his half-century in politics, Joe Biden has gotten to know and befriend nearly all the major leaders in the world.  Let’s face it: he is a likable man.  And in the art of diplomacy, personal relationships are everything.

This swap will likely be a capstone on his more than half-century political career . . . at least in the eyes, hearts, and minds of those who research and write about American political history, as opposed to merely responding with partisan kneejerk reactions.   The former POTUS, who once predicted that Evan Gershkovich wouldn't be freed under President Biden, questioned and criticized the terms of the prisoner swap: "So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia? How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash? . . .  Our 'negotiators' are always an embarrassment to us! I got back many hostages, and gave the opposing Country NOTHING – and never any cash."  Trump went so far as to call the prisoner swap “. . . a win for Putin.”  Not to be outdone, Trump’s “mini-me,” J.D. Vance, actually suggested that his boss and BFF - the man he once called “an American Hitler” - that the successful swap was a “testament” to his boss’s strength and skill. 

Regardless of how many moronic takes on the prisoner swap these guys disgorge, it isn’t going to gain them a single new vote . . . and may even turn off some of  their most ardent supporters.  This complex swap provided ample testament to just how savvy a politician/diplomat “Uncle Joe” Biden is.  You had better believe that when political  historians issue their next rankings of the various presidents, Joe Biden will enter the list near the top . . . and Donald Trump will still be dead last.

Above, I referred to Biden as “Uncle Joe.”  To date, I believe this is the closest writers and journalists have come to giving him a proper and fitting sobriquet.  Whether or not it will stick - like “Honest Abe,” “T.R.” (or the “Bull Moose”), “JFK,” “LBJ.” “Give ‘em Hell Harry” (Truman), “Tricky Dick” (Nixon), “His Fraudulency” (Hayes) or “No Drama Obama” - only time will tell. 

              Echo & Narcissus From Ovid’s Metamorphosis (Book III)

It gets me to thinking: what nickname will history give to Donald Trump  - the man who saddled more prominent politicians with nasty, puerile nicknames than any politician in American history?  Of course, early on in his business career, he tagged himself "The Donald.”  My dear friend Alan Wald (one of the wittiest people I have ever known and loved) has long referred to him as "The Orange Blob.”   I’ve heard a few people refer to him as “DonOLD.” Let’s face it: there is an infinite number of possibilities.  Loving Greek mythology as I do, I’ve given thought to calling him “Son of Liriope”, the nymph who bore Narcissus, the eponymous ancestor of all narcissists - people afflicted with a mental condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them. Generally speaking, people with this disorder lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others.  

While trying to come up with a Trumpian epithet for the ages, Annie made me aware of an interview ‘45 had on Fox News (?) in which host Laura Ingraham mentioned that Vice President Kamala Harris has “she/her” in her social media bio to indicate her pronouns.

“What are your pronouns?” Ingraham asked Trump.

“I have no — I don’t want pronouns,” the Republican nominee said.

“So, you’re fluid? What is that?” Ingraham replied.

“Nobody even knows what that means. Ask her to describe exactly what that means,” Trump added.

Clearly, that’s not true. Pronouns are a crucial part of the English language, helping people describe things without repeatedly using names or nouns. 

  “Cousin ITT”  (Played by Felix Silla)

Then it came to me: the 45th (and worst) POTUS of all time should be called by his pronoun . . . IT. Strange, isn’t it? I mean here’s a man who once claimed to “know the best words,” yet doesn’t seem to have the slightest idea about what a pronoun is.  It is the most complex pronoun in the English language.  Among its tens of dozens of possible usages, one of my favorites was when the popular 1920s British romance novelist Elinor Glyn named silent screen actress Clara Bow “The It Girl.”  And what was “It?”  Sex appeal honey, don’t you know?  Add a second “t” (ITT) and you get a character (“Cousin ITT”) from “The Addam’s Family.  ITT is a diminutive, hirsute being, his visible form composed entirely of floor-length hair. He is often attired in a bowler hat and round sunglasses, and speaks in a high-pitched gibberish that is understood only by his family, who are equally weird.  This character has a lot in common with the former president: the worst hairdo in the history of television (and movies) and an inability to make sense to anyone other than his equally weird family. 

Using IT (double capital letters) as a presidential nickname introduces another use or tone of the word: to refer to a general situation, such as “It hasn’t been the same since IT came down that damned golden elevator back in 2015.”  In this sense, IT has a certain nauseating nebulosity that IT so richly deserves.   

At the top of almost every historian’s list of the best POTUS is Honest Abe.  Perhaps my epithet will catch on, and the worst POTUS will simply be known as IT . . . the hairy creature that inflicted so much pain and insanity as to be eternally unpronounceable. 

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone

#999: In Sanskrit, "Kamala" (कमल) Means "Lotus"; In America, It Means "POTUS"

It’s simply amazing how much the world can change in a mere 168 hours (1 week). A week ago, Trump was riding high on the iconic moment when he rose bloodied and with a defiantly raised fist from an assassination attempt, pulling away in the polls. President Biden, meanwhile, was struggling to recover from his dire late June debate against the Republican nominee and an unconvincing performance in the days since. Then, on Sunday, July 21, President Biden’s press office sent out a brief message telling the world that he would be leaving the 2024 presidential race. In the note, which many of us received via email, he wrote, in part:

It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.

Within a few more hours, he would publicly endorse Vice President Kamala Devi Harris for the Democratic nomination to face off against former POTUS Donald Trump and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. The Vice President hit the ground running: by the next day, the Harris campaign had raised in excess of $50 million in smallish donations, and sent a massive steroidal infusion into the body politic. As of today the campaign is still in the deliriously happy “Honeymoon” stage, and has raised in excess of $200 million. (As an unexpected side benefit, viewership of the 2012-2019 cable TV show “Veep” has gone up more than 300 percent within a week.) For people all across the country, Vice President Harris’ entry into the race put smiles on faces, tears in eyes, and hope - until recently, a pretty rare commodity - into souls.  Her polling numbers began creeping upward.  At the same time, her entry into the race - along with an avalanche of endorsements -  sent MAGA-world scurrying in anger, fear, and resentment, the resurrection of racist and birther memes, and above all, dire uncertainty. Suddenly, the campaign they were oh so comfortably running - the one against “Sleepy Joe” - had to be revamped;  they would have to create a new game plan containing a new strategy, along with new lies and brand-new epithets.   

Within the past 168 hours, Trump has called Vice President Harris “a bum”, “lazy,” and a “crazy liberal,” accused her of wanting to “defund the police,” claimed she was a “terrible prosecutor who never won a case,” and most recently, in a rally held in St. Cloud, MN, roared “she has no clue, she’s evil.” He told a rally in South Florida he “couldn’t care less” if he mispronounced her name, (he repeatedly proclaimed that there were “at least seven different ways” to say Kamala). Obviously, he was becoming even more unhinged than the norm; at a rally in Florida this past Friday night organized by the far-right Christian advocacy group Turning Point Action, Trump not only went personal against the Veep, but once again appeared to threaten American democracy:

“Christians, get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it anymore. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said at the event in West Palm Beach, not far from his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence. Trump also promised to create an anti-Christian bias federal task force, as well as to defund schools "pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children."  Madame would have called this “crapola.”

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post got into the anti-Harris attack by claiming that the V.P.’s step-daughter, Ella Emhoff, had personally raised more than $8 million for Hamas, and “does not  consider herself to be Jewish.”  A bit of research shows that Ella Emhoff did not raise $8 million to support Gaza. She did share a link to a fundraiser created by the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. That fundraiser has generated more than $8 million from hundreds of thousands of donors, including one donation from Ms. Emhoff herself.  The Trump campaign  has used this untruth - along with Harris’ public position vis-à-vis Israel’s response to the October 7th attack, to “prove” that the V.P. is an  “anti-Zionist, anti-Semite.”

The same Republican sources have reported that Harris “refused to attend” Israeli P.M. Benyamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress. What they of course left out is that both President Biden and Vice President Harris had a private meeting with the Israeli P.M.  As such, Trumpsters are doing everything in their power to wrest Jewish votes away from the Democrats.  I for one (who, despite being both an ordained rabbi and a Hebrew-speaking practicing Jew) have been accused of being both an “anti-Semite” and “anti-Israel”) because I refuse to condemn  those who cannot or will not approve of  each and every pronouncement of the Netanyahu government.  Likewise, Kamala Harris - like Joe Biden - is, and will long remain, a strong supporter of Israel . . . despite - like yours truly - not agreeing with Bibi Netanyahu or his war cabinet on everything they do.   

Ed Luce, the observant and perspicacious US editor and columnist of the Financial Times notes the rapidity with which Kamala Harris’ “capture of the Democratic crown has changed the political weather. A funereal Democratic party has rediscovered its zest.”  I for one applaud her for also bringing a sense of “fun” to an election campaign that felt, until 168 hours ago, like a “death march.”  Can Kamala Harris and whoever she taps to be her running mate win in November? Without jettisoning our current and much-needed gush of giddiness, we must leave room for political reality. The Harris campaign has quickly outlined the content of their campaign strategy: the seasoned prosecutor versus the convicted felon; the youngish forward-looking progressive versus the oldest presidential candidate in American history who wants to eliminate virtually every bit of progress since the New Deal; a candidate with a full slate of issues and proposals versus one whose strategy is nothing more than the denigration of his opponent; a woman who wants to expand human rights versus a man who wants to make America a land of and for white Christian males.

Kamala Harris, Democrats, Independents and lovers of freedom and democracy everywhere face 100 days of the most serious political knife fight in all American history. MAGA-world knows and follows the famous line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “There are no rules in a knife fight.” Want proof?

Already, we have seen Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter, which I abandoned the day he announced his purchase) break his own rules by retweeting a parody Kamala Harris campaign ad without labeling it as misleading. Segments of video in the altered content — such as Harris speaking to crowds, and general videos of her supporters — were used in a recent Harris campaign video on YouTube. Most notably, the altered content used a voiceover that sounds like the vice president, making it seem she is calling President Joe Biden senile and herself an incompetent presidential candidate.  There has also been a carload of false claims about Vice President Harris ranging from her not being eligible to run for POTUS due to citizenship issues, to having an affair in the 1990s with the then-married Mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown (he had been separated from his wife for nearly a decade before they saw one another) to her not really being Black. Each of these claims (and more) has been fact-checked; all have been found to be total fabrications.

And lest we forget, in the eyes of MAGA-world her biggest negative is SHE LAUGHS TOO MUCH!  When, I ask you, was the last time we ever heard the Sir Donald of Queens laugh?

                 Nelumbo nucifera

In Sanskrit, Kamala, a very popular Indian name, is the lotus flower. Despite their delicate nature, these resolute plants can survive being submerged under ice and can even bloom in extreme heat. Some lotus plants can live for nearly a century! They symbolize both rebirth, (due to its blooming pattern of opening with the rising of the sun and closing as night falls), and persistence (because they're most commonly found in swampy, difficult terrain and emerge from the dark, muddy water looking pristine and beautiful).  

For the sake of our future as a freedom-loving democratic republic, let’s do everything in our power to ensure that 100 days from today, LOTUS will become POTUS.

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone