The Presidential election sends people into spasms of pain, or delight, depending on whether they fear Trump or embrace him. The powerful reaction of people has more mystery than the political issues. Nobody knows what to expect, Trump included, from a man who rode gambling casinos into bankruptcy. Gambling is an addiction! If you cannot succeed playing to people's addictions, wow, you've got a problem. That's like failing with a liquor store. Hardly ever happens.
I understand Trump turned his failed casinos into a profit-maker, for him, but that's another story. I have none of the information on how you turn failure into profit. You've got to be big-time player to pull off that kind of ruse. And now Trump is the biggest of all players!
Why does hucksterism work so well in the new media environment-- the electronic universe we all occupy in the present day. Trump mastered Twitter. Everybody constantly studies the phone in their hand. Marshall McLuhan warned us that the digital environment would be grafted directly to our brain and nervous system. Trump, give him credit, figured this out and circumvented Jeb Bush and his hundred millions of dollars. Trump did the same to Hillary. He went directly to the spinal chord of the people via their telephones.
Will Donald Trump use electronic communications to run the country? He spoke grandly of manufacturing and other dreams of restoring the past. That mechanical, industrial stuff is not the thing 21st century dreams are made of. Obama kept saying that the less fortunate needed to learn the digital skills that enable a worker to flourish as a present-day worker. That gets down to learning to program computers, or at least function in the digital environment, beyond the ability to study your phone. Trump promises factory jobs. That seems like sentimentality. But he sold it brilliantly.
The people hired a businessman, a guy with an aversion to paying taxes. He wants to punish the high tech moguls for keeping their billions offshore. Well, takes on to know one, as they say...
Celebrity Apprentice prepared Trump for his present mission. Only now he is the celebrity apprentice, trying to learn the job of President of the United States. Could be something of a challenge-- and not sure Twitter works as well when you're behind the wheel of the country. Not as easy to lob Twitter grenades when suddenly you find yourself as the establishment. And Trump is now the main guy, no longer the gadfly.
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Friday, September 9, 2016
Climate Change Initiatives-- building an Ark in the 21st Century
Dear Friend,
Thanks for the link to New York Magazine article on rising waters. I like the insights about people's resistance to imagining the unpleasant. I've noticed how much we deny the obvious in these matters.
I mentioned to you that FEMA gave home owners on Long Island with waterfront property lots of money to lift their houses after the destruction caused by Super Storm Sandy. Some homeowners raised their homes to weird heights-- and then found some difficulty in reselling their houses. I'm sure it was a boon to the construction industry to fix up and build new houses along the shoreline and on the canals.
And in Manhattan I notice that the apartment on West End Ave is in close proximity to the Hudson River on the west. The east-west thoroughfare, West 79th St, takes a big rise as the land moves from Riverside Park up into central Manhattan. So I guess Riverside Park would be underwater before West End Ave. Maybe we would have riverfront property-- though our apartment faces away from the river.
I've never really been able to get my head around the rise in ocean levels. I'm a big believer in the validity of most climate change warnings. I guess water level rise is something we can actually do something about-- move further inland.
The stuff that I wonder most about it are the changes in rainfall, temperature etc. that I experience more directly. Just watched a video clip on NY Times website, an interview of Obama. He points out that Chinese leaders were most motivated to cooperate on Climate Change Initiatives-- due to their concerns about the political stability of their nation. If it gets much harder to breath in Beijing you could have a riot on your hands-- or something along those lines is how I pictured it. Maybe I'm way off base-- and their afraid of food riots or something else?
Thanks for sending the New York Magazine article-- better to discuss it than put our heads back in the sand.
Thanks,
John
Thanks for the link to New York Magazine article on rising waters. I like the insights about people's resistance to imagining the unpleasant. I've noticed how much we deny the obvious in these matters.
I mentioned to you that FEMA gave home owners on Long Island with waterfront property lots of money to lift their houses after the destruction caused by Super Storm Sandy. Some homeowners raised their homes to weird heights-- and then found some difficulty in reselling their houses. I'm sure it was a boon to the construction industry to fix up and build new houses along the shoreline and on the canals.
And in Manhattan I notice that the apartment on West End Ave is in close proximity to the Hudson River on the west. The east-west thoroughfare, West 79th St, takes a big rise as the land moves from Riverside Park up into central Manhattan. So I guess Riverside Park would be underwater before West End Ave. Maybe we would have riverfront property-- though our apartment faces away from the river.
I've never really been able to get my head around the rise in ocean levels. I'm a big believer in the validity of most climate change warnings. I guess water level rise is something we can actually do something about-- move further inland.
The stuff that I wonder most about it are the changes in rainfall, temperature etc. that I experience more directly. Just watched a video clip on NY Times website, an interview of Obama. He points out that Chinese leaders were most motivated to cooperate on Climate Change Initiatives-- due to their concerns about the political stability of their nation. If it gets much harder to breath in Beijing you could have a riot on your hands-- or something along those lines is how I pictured it. Maybe I'm way off base-- and their afraid of food riots or something else?
Thanks for sending the New York Magazine article-- better to discuss it than put our heads back in the sand.
Thanks,
John
Thursday, April 21, 2016
How We Got Into Vietnam (David Halberstam)
Finished "The Best and The Brightest" book by Halberstam on Vietnam. I'm glad I got to the end. He talks about LBJ's failed decision-making on Vietnam. LBJ looked to the past and the Cold War to try and understand Vietnam:
"The forces at work in the fifties were very real to him. If Jack Kennedy was a man who knew more about where the sixties were headed but whose intellect preceded his courage, who stepped forward gingerly, then Johnson was more a man of the past. He reacted to what he thought the country was; the country which twice defeated Stevenson for the Presidency, where the powerful people on the Hill seemed primarily to be hawks, where the dominant figures of journalism were proud survivors of the worst of the Cold War, and where American universities had also given willingly, too willingly in fact, of their talent and support to the Cold War." (p. 592)
And here is how LBJ got us so deeply involved in the war, using his astute political skills, for subtly escalating the War, while missing the boat on the sixties revolution brewing and about to explode:
"That would all come later: perhaps another politician might have sensed it, if not clearly identifying the change. But Lyndon Johnson did not sense it, rather he sensed that he had position on everybody else, he had control of the center, he had moved all opponents to the extreme. He had handled the Congress, signed it on without really signing it on: he had handled the press by slicing the salami so thin that they are never able to pin him down, and he handled Ho by making it seem as if Ho were attacking him at Tonkin. He was using force but using it discreetly, and he was also handling the military. They were moving toward war, but in such imperceptible degrees that neither the Congress nor the press could ever show a quantum jump. All the decisions were being cleverly hidden; he as cutting it thin to hold off the opposition." (p. 593)
This poses some interesting questions for me on how public policy lurches forward-- often based on the prevailing, conventional wisdom, based on the leader's beliefs about his peers and what they will find acceptable, as rational behavior. Of course, our Vietnam policy does not appear rational in retrospect, but LBJ operated within the paradigm he knew and had experienced.
What do we believe now-- based on a present-day conventional wisdom that is actually totally inaccurate and misplaced? People think we need to get industry back to America? Is there any likelihood of that? How might our energies and resources be used to improve the situation in our country? I'm sure there is much confusion on the subject, and some of our unlikely Presidential candidates (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders) have risen because of confusion around where the country should be heading. Not sure any of the candidates has proposed anything of substance. Mainly its emotion-- Make America Great Again, Stop the 1%.... Obama has kept a cool head. He didn't come out with a "New Deal" or anything on a grand scale. I doubt there would have been support for that kind of thing in this environment. The candidates kind of imply that they will achieve something on a grand scale. That seems unlikely.
"The forces at work in the fifties were very real to him. If Jack Kennedy was a man who knew more about where the sixties were headed but whose intellect preceded his courage, who stepped forward gingerly, then Johnson was more a man of the past. He reacted to what he thought the country was; the country which twice defeated Stevenson for the Presidency, where the powerful people on the Hill seemed primarily to be hawks, where the dominant figures of journalism were proud survivors of the worst of the Cold War, and where American universities had also given willingly, too willingly in fact, of their talent and support to the Cold War." (p. 592)
And here is how LBJ got us so deeply involved in the war, using his astute political skills, for subtly escalating the War, while missing the boat on the sixties revolution brewing and about to explode:
"That would all come later: perhaps another politician might have sensed it, if not clearly identifying the change. But Lyndon Johnson did not sense it, rather he sensed that he had position on everybody else, he had control of the center, he had moved all opponents to the extreme. He had handled the Congress, signed it on without really signing it on: he had handled the press by slicing the salami so thin that they are never able to pin him down, and he handled Ho by making it seem as if Ho were attacking him at Tonkin. He was using force but using it discreetly, and he was also handling the military. They were moving toward war, but in such imperceptible degrees that neither the Congress nor the press could ever show a quantum jump. All the decisions were being cleverly hidden; he as cutting it thin to hold off the opposition." (p. 593)
This poses some interesting questions for me on how public policy lurches forward-- often based on the prevailing, conventional wisdom, based on the leader's beliefs about his peers and what they will find acceptable, as rational behavior. Of course, our Vietnam policy does not appear rational in retrospect, but LBJ operated within the paradigm he knew and had experienced.
What do we believe now-- based on a present-day conventional wisdom that is actually totally inaccurate and misplaced? People think we need to get industry back to America? Is there any likelihood of that? How might our energies and resources be used to improve the situation in our country? I'm sure there is much confusion on the subject, and some of our unlikely Presidential candidates (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders) have risen because of confusion around where the country should be heading. Not sure any of the candidates has proposed anything of substance. Mainly its emotion-- Make America Great Again, Stop the 1%.... Obama has kept a cool head. He didn't come out with a "New Deal" or anything on a grand scale. I doubt there would have been support for that kind of thing in this environment. The candidates kind of imply that they will achieve something on a grand scale. That seems unlikely.
Friday, November 29, 2013
Time Machine -- Aug. 28, 1972
Found a Time magazine at an estate sale from Aug. 28, 1972 with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, my fellow Greek-American featured on the cover. They had just won the 1972 presidential election but look none too happy on the cover. The story, entitled, "Once More With Feeling," seems ironic. They look so deadpan. No happiness. No smile. "Once More With Cheating" is more like it. Watergate was just ahead and about two years later, Aug. 1974, and Nixon would resign.
But I'm more interested in the aesthetics from 1972. Bet you would have a big smile from a victorious president in today's mass media. Smiling was probably considered too effeminate in those days. But let's look at the magazine. First page-- an ad for VW bugs and they cost $1,999 in those days, at least that was the Suggested Retail Price. McGovern compared the bombing of Vietnam to the Holocaust, "the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler." Time magazine felt such rhetoric was "difficult to excuse." Nowadays Obama's Healthcare plan is compared to Katrina and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. So much for loose rhetoric.
Page 26 featured an article on Club Med. Around Europe "nudity has reached epidemic proportions." The article featured some topless pics from St. Tropez. Sixties revolution!
An El Al airplane bound for Tel Aviv was rocked by a bomb explosion. The bomb was brought on board by two British girls, unaware the cassette player given to them by two guys, either Iranian, Pakistani or Indian, was rigged with a bomb. Luckily the plan landed safely. The bomb exploded at low enough altitude to blow a hole in the fuselage but not bring down the airplane with 140 passengers.
Oui magazine, a Hugh Hefner product designed ostensibly for both males and females, came out with a first issue. The European style magazine lasted until 2007. Who knew?
The great Oscar Levant died at 65 years.
The world readied for the 1972 Olympics and eleven African nations declared they would not participate if white-supremacist Rhodesia was allowed to compete. Remember what happened at the 1972 Olympics in Munich-- the Black September terrorist takeover and massacre that left 11 Israeli athletes murdered along with the killing of a German police officer and 5 terrorists.
A Chevy Vega with a zinc chloride battery ran for "three uninterrupted hours," a 150 mile trip at 50 mph, an early attempt at electric car transportation.
And, on a more optimistic note than today's situation, Tijuana, Mexico "was parading a new-found reputation as a respectable, commercially solid city, frocked out in its Sunday best for a three-week international trade show called Mexpo." The article points out that the caesar salad was invented by Alex and Caesar Cardini "one evening to feed the throngs in their beleaguered restaurant." Necessity again proved to be the mother of invention!
The magazine proves our inability to see the future-- as always we have 20-20 hindsight while the future, and even the present, can barely be detected.
The Time subscription went to a guy named Sabino Pesce on Farragut Rd. in Brooklyn. Maybe Joe Pesci's uncle?
But I'm more interested in the aesthetics from 1972. Bet you would have a big smile from a victorious president in today's mass media. Smiling was probably considered too effeminate in those days. But let's look at the magazine. First page-- an ad for VW bugs and they cost $1,999 in those days, at least that was the Suggested Retail Price. McGovern compared the bombing of Vietnam to the Holocaust, "the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler." Time magazine felt such rhetoric was "difficult to excuse." Nowadays Obama's Healthcare plan is compared to Katrina and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. So much for loose rhetoric.
Page 26 featured an article on Club Med. Around Europe "nudity has reached epidemic proportions." The article featured some topless pics from St. Tropez. Sixties revolution!
An El Al airplane bound for Tel Aviv was rocked by a bomb explosion. The bomb was brought on board by two British girls, unaware the cassette player given to them by two guys, either Iranian, Pakistani or Indian, was rigged with a bomb. Luckily the plan landed safely. The bomb exploded at low enough altitude to blow a hole in the fuselage but not bring down the airplane with 140 passengers.
Oui magazine, a Hugh Hefner product designed ostensibly for both males and females, came out with a first issue. The European style magazine lasted until 2007. Who knew?
The great Oscar Levant died at 65 years.
The world readied for the 1972 Olympics and eleven African nations declared they would not participate if white-supremacist Rhodesia was allowed to compete. Remember what happened at the 1972 Olympics in Munich-- the Black September terrorist takeover and massacre that left 11 Israeli athletes murdered along with the killing of a German police officer and 5 terrorists.
A Chevy Vega with a zinc chloride battery ran for "three uninterrupted hours," a 150 mile trip at 50 mph, an early attempt at electric car transportation.
And, on a more optimistic note than today's situation, Tijuana, Mexico "was parading a new-found reputation as a respectable, commercially solid city, frocked out in its Sunday best for a three-week international trade show called Mexpo." The article points out that the caesar salad was invented by Alex and Caesar Cardini "one evening to feed the throngs in their beleaguered restaurant." Necessity again proved to be the mother of invention!
The magazine proves our inability to see the future-- as always we have 20-20 hindsight while the future, and even the present, can barely be detected.
The Time subscription went to a guy named Sabino Pesce on Farragut Rd. in Brooklyn. Maybe Joe Pesci's uncle?
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