tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181716922024-02-20T12:53:58.952-05:00AntipodesCecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.comBlogger747125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-60279936191366933292022-02-25T15:53:00.001-05:002022-02-25T15:53:26.299-05:00It's September 1939<p>Did any of the young German men in motorcycles with sidecars, motorized armor carriers, tanks and plain trucks crossing into Poland would end in devastation from London to Moscow 6 years later, with their own country nothing but rubble? </p><p>Probably not.<br /><br />I don't think any of us can imagine the major cities of the world flattened by nuclear weapons. Yet we are at the brink.</p><p>Vladimir Putin, who thinks he is a Tsar, has reminded us of past dictators who risked world peace to attain essentially minor geopolitical gains along their countries' borders. </p><p>Would Hitler have stopped at splitting Poland with Stalin if Britain and France had not declared war? Will Putin stop at overthrowing the present Ukrainian government and "de-nazifying" (whatever that means and it isn't good) the country? Will Ukraine even be allowed to be a separate country? Then, when does he make a grab for Poland and Romania?</p><p>Are we at the beginning of the last World War?</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-42077955814141312262022-01-19T10:48:00.001-05:002022-01-19T19:15:12.993-05:00It's August 1939 in Warsaw<p>You're a retired gent enjoying your sauterne in the late summer breeze at an outdoor table at a cafe in Warsaw. All right, so the papers say Nazis massing on the western border and Soviets on the east. Important men are warning each other loudly. Young people, these days!</p><p>Actually ...</p><p>... Russians are reportedly massing at a border (west, north, south of Ukraine). Important men are warning one another. Meanwhile, there's a global pandemic. </p><p>... The United States has at its helm a likable fellow who can't even get the crazies in his (and my) own political party in Congress to agree to such things as essential as voting rights for all ... are we ready for Trump to become the 47th president in three years?</p><p>... The latest movies and internet memes inform me about "<a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Salad%20Tossing">salad tossing</a>," which I am told has to do with a human tongue in another person's derriere. (Yes, Virginia, this is a thing.)</p><p>... Oh, and let's not forget, an ecological disaster of climatological origin will engulf the Earth in less than 20 years. Just this week there was a tsunami advisory issued for Vancouver Island, of all places!</p><p>"To wieści z jeziora Lake Wobegon," as they say in Warsaw. Santé!</p><p><br /></p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-21303087103535590752021-12-09T12:55:00.000-05:002021-12-09T12:55:14.063-05:00Is McCarthyism back? What was it all about?<p>The news tells us that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and one oddly named Sen. John Kennedy (R-La), have falsely claimed that a Soviet-born Biden nominee, Saule Omarova, whose family was nearly wiped out by Josef Stalin, was a "Communist."</p><p>On the whole, the American public was never fond of V. I. Lenin's and later J. V. Stalin's application of the obscure and hyper-intellectual phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" — which Karl Marx had never intended to mean a state with a secret police and concentration camps for political prisoners.</p><p>However, it took one Joseph Raymond McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin between 1947 and his death in 1957, to seize upon a groundswell of fear generated by the surprisingly early acquisition of the atomic bomb by the Soviet Union and whip it up into a second Red Scare, the first having occurred right after the original Russian revolution. </p><p>In a speech in February 1950, McCarthy presented a list of alleged members of the Communist Party USA working in the State Department, which attracted substantial press attention, and the term "McCarthyism" was published for the first time in late March of that year in <i>The Christian Science Monitor</i>, along with a political cartoon by Herblock in <i>The Washington Post</i>. </p><p>Now, some Republicans are trying again. Will they succeed?</p><p>The primary targets of McCarthyist persecution in the 1950s were government employees, prominent figures in the entertainment industry, academics, left-wing politicians, and labor union activists. McCarthy accused them. often without conclusive evidence, and exaggerated the person's real or supposed leftist associations and beliefs.</p><p>Incredibly, the McCarthyist accusation fell on people as diverse as Lucille Ball, Aaron Copland, Albert Einstein, and Linus Pauling.</p><p>The dramatic demise of McCarthyism came in April 1954, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were televised live. In one exchange, McCarthy reminded the attorney for the Army, Joseph Welch, that he had an employee in his law firm who had belonged to an organization that had been accused of Communist sympathies. </p><p>"Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch said in his famous rebuke of the senator.</p><p>The Supreme Court subsequently ruled, repeatedly and consistently, against actions such as firing or disciplining employees who invoke the Fifth Amendment when asked about Communist sympathies or even the State Department denying passports based on an applicant's Communist beliefs or associations. However, loyalty oaths are still required by the California Constitution for all officials and employees of the government of California (a problem for Quakers and Jehovah's Witnesses, whose beliefs preclude pledging absolute loyalty to the state).</p><p>The oppression of liberals and leftists during the McCarthy is also similar to 2000s-era actions against suspected terrorists, most of them Muslims. In fact, conservative writer and political bomb-thrower Ann Coulter has drawn parallels, arguing that the liberals hindered the anti-communist cause and todayś critics hinder the "War on Terrorism."</p><p>At some point, as the public realizes that 9/11 inspired actions that were mainly designed to enrich military contractors, the new McCarthyism will also wane.</p><p>Until the next time.</p><hr /><p>This is the latest in a series of entries on the development of ideas that made the United States and the economic, social, and political issues Americans debate, posted under the label WeHoldTheseTruths.</p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-70390182159636820692021-12-03T12:38:00.000-05:002021-12-03T12:38:42.213-05:00War Footing<p><i>(This is a return to an incomplete series about the political and economic ideas that made the United States what it is.)</i></p><p>The Second World War was a vast conflict that came close to involving the entire planet, directly or indirectly. For Americans at home, however, it was something that happened far away, removed from daily experience — aside from the one-time air attack by Japan in 1941, American cities and territory were never bombed, attacked, or invaded.</p><p>The single, real, and notable effect of WW2 on the United States was the launch of the economic model that would be described by the former military commander-in-chief in that conflict, Dwight David Eisenhower, in his farewell presidential speech of warning, as "the military-industrial complex."</p><p>After all, World War II had the novel effect of truly reviving the U.S. economy. The 1941 annual average unemployment of 13.3 percent, still lingering in the Great Depression's double digits despite the New Deal, dropped to 6.3 percent in 1942, the first full year of the war for the United States. </p><p>By 1943 it fell to 2.5 percent and every year until the war's end the jobless rate remained well below what nearly all economists deem "full employment." This was largely due to the incorporation of women, never before widely employed in wage-earning work, into the labor force at munitions and war-machine factories. This occurred as a sizable portion of men were drafted into military service.</p><p>After the war, things changed. A leap in unemployment occurred in the fall of 1945 and the open war turned covert.</p><p>The USSR's approach to occupation in eastern Europe, which involved a series of coups to install Joseph Stalin's version of Marxist-Leninist Communism, led to inevitable clashes with the Truman Administration. The USSR's acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949, much earlier than expected, transformed the contention into what none other than George Orwell had already been describing as postwar powers "at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war.' " </p><p>The United States and its allies created the NATO military alliance in 1949 and the Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955 in response. Yet all this was in the grand stage of foreign affairs, about which the U.S. general public has always been profoundly uninterested, not to say ignorant. Most Americans barely care what happens in the next county, let alone other continents.</p><p>The actual real significance of the Cold War to Americans was how it justified maintaining a global U.S. military footprint — occupation of Germany aside — run from the Pentagon, the world's largest office building, on the Virginia bank of the Potomac River. Flashpoints such as the 1948–49 Berlin Blockade, allowed the U.S. military to demonstrate the peacetime value of massive air superiority. </p><p>During that crisis, the Soviets blocked off the railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. Food and other supplies were flown, in as many as 20 to eventually 1,500 flights a day, to the French, U.K., and U.S. sectors of the city over a period of a year.</p><p>The Cold War crystallized into a hot war in Korea during the 1950-1953 conflict between the United Nations and North Korea. UN intervention was possible because the Soviet Union was boycotting the international organization for recognizing Taiwan (Republic of China) as China, and not mainland Communist China. Thus the USSR veto was not used in the resolution to send troops under the UN banner.</p><p>After that, the pattern was set. The Soviets learned not to boycott the UN and to use their potential to use nuclear arms defensively as a deterrent to actual all-out war with the West, while agitating in a number of developing countries under Western influence. </p><p>The United States kept a ring of military bases around the world, from which they would mobilize displays of force in crises such as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1961 when the Wall was built, and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.</p><p>The Vietnam War, originally conceived as a short-term, limited intervention, led to a humiliating military defeat for the United States, the first in its history and — ultimately — the waning of the Cold War. That did not decrease the military significantly.</p><p>Here we are, a good 40 years since the end of the Cold War, maintaining a military designed to fight two-and-a-half world wars, by the Pentagon's own admission. Yet it is a military easily defeated by unconventional forces of Southeast Asians in jungles and robed Muslims in mountainous terrain.</p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-15426399015671196262021-11-18T09:55:00.002-05:002021-11-18T09:59:18.632-05:00Machismo Cubed<p>A woman from Barcelona posts that now there are all sorts of nightlife bars in major Spanish cities where women routinely and unknowingly have rape drugs added to their drinks. This is a deplorable extreme.</p><p>No man has an unfettered right to use a woman's body. Not even a husband.</p><p>Nuff said.</p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-28333774651977549192021-11-15T10:18:00.001-05:002021-11-15T17:15:39.540-05:00"I don't like politics"<p>I keep hearing the phrase in the title from a lot of people. The phrase is usually followed by an explanation that all politicians, or some prominent ones, are corrupt. The people who say this are well-meaning, but they don't realize how dangerous their stance is.</p><p>In the context of countries with an electoral system, a citizenry full of people who "don't like politics" is precisely what the most corrupt and craven politicians want. They want an electorate where no one but their followers will bother to go vote. Or vote, but without any real information.</p><p>Let me provide an example that will show how this is already working in most countries with an electoral system. In those countries, people with the smallest incomes either do not vote or often vote for whom they are bribed to vote (this is real; it's been captured on film). </p><p>The result is that there are few countries whose governments, run by elected officials, are serious about tackling poverty. So, don't care, don't bother to learn how your government works. That's a recipe to guarantee that government will worsen.</p><p>Now granted, roughly from 1945 to 1968, when a majority of the people in the world had experienced dislocation and near-poverty as a result of the Great Depression, the Second World War, or some remaining form of colonialism, most governments responded to majority needs. </p><p>In western Europe, Canada and Australia, governments approved national health systems, vast income supplements, housing assistance and unemployment compensation — this was the famous "Welfare State." Even doggedly capitalist USA, got old age social security and unemployment insurance.</p><p>Have you noticed that ever since waves of conservative governments have trimmed the sails of these general welfare programs? Reagan, Thatcher and their successors: today Johnson in the UK, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India and the very strange coalition in power in Spain. </p><p>Their opposite numbers are weak and barely have enough support to stop them. Biden won as "anybody but Trump" but not for the reasonable agenda he has always espoused.</p><p>What happened? The children of the generation that lived through the Depression and war took the gains their parents got for granted. Even when youth was most "radicalized" (in the 1960s, 70s, 90s and 2000s) the youth vote continued to be very low given the numbers.</p><p>Politicians serving their own interests, or those of the people who finance campaigns, took notice and began to trim public benefits so they could cut taxes on the wealthiest. We are drifting toward plutocracy or societies governed by the very rich for the very rich.</p><p>So, go ahead, don't care. By the time you realize what is happening to electoral democracy, imperfect though it may be, it will be too late.</p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-22221626588253421452021-11-12T09:08:00.002-05:002021-11-12T09:10:22.160-05:00Why Do (Some) Women Obsessively Post Pictures Of Themselves?<p>One eloquent answer to the question in the title was provided by a woman friend: "If society, and men in particular, valued women more in terms of intelligence, kindness, abilities, and talents, obsessive selfie-posting would vanish."</p><p>I understand her point, although absent a change in how women are valued, the vanishing has yet to be proven. Responses tend not to be quite as automatic and uniform as my friend thinks.</p><p>Now, I understand perfectly well that our society puts a premium on a particular set of fashionable female looks. These have varied from age to age, from Rubenesque to Twiggy. There isn't one objective standard of female beauty, or of beauty in general.</p><p>When a woman's body fits the recipe of the day, it results in male attention (wanted and unwanted), sometimes jobs, and other benefits. The "uglies" are shunted aside.</p><p>None of this is new to me. I was first exposed to feminism in 1972 by a very good woman I was dating,, who inspired me to read most of the feminist canon of the day. </p><p>The result was that I felt quite guilty. My girlfriend Doreen was, to me, akin to Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai calling to my attention that I had been trained to be a Tsarist officer, in other words, a man trained to be a male chauvinist, even if I didn't realize it. It's not something you just shuck off easily.</p><p>Over the years, however, the childhood "womenist" stance I adopted when my father abandoned my mother and me, flourished with Doreen and further experiences into a well-founded ingrained intellectual attitude that I would describe as "feminist" from a somewhat reformed man. Certainly, I recognize the importance of abortion rights and equal pay as public planks that must be a prominent part of any progressive agenda. Also, I recognize that certain customs concerning women, including especially body over brain, need to change.</p><p>This is precisely why I find the obsessive selfies appalling! It's a step backward.</p><p>A young woman may be unable to change human history, but she can change her own life. As a Hispanic of Argentine origin, who has lived in both the USA and Argentina, I know perfectly well about being told to be someone that society wants and choosing my own path. </p><p>The desire to be beautiful as society wants is a skewed idea. Just as the desire to be successful the way society wants. What is beauty and success other than a social convention? At a defined point in adolescence and youth, each of us has the challenge of deciding for ourselves. This is a reasonable challenge, it's about becoming truly your own person.</p><p>A young woman may be unable to change customs that come down from millennia, but she can change her own life. </p><p>There is a lot to be changed in society and I think feminism is doing a good job of identifying some of the things that most concern women. There's a conservative and regressive pull right now that must be fought by all. It's not just a war against women, it's a war against the 99%. We have to hold fast on these issues.</p><p>The idea of getting validation, or social acceptance, is a foolhardy goal. In my more devoutly religious days, I thought God was the only one whose acceptance I needed. The Quakers have a less religious view in seeing the spirit of God and Her wondrous love in the hearts of each one of us, regardless of creed. </p><p>Let women, young and older, seek their own heart's acceptance above all. Toss out the cosmetics (even the antiperspirants)! Dress for yourself, without regard to fashion. In the same vein, men need to cultivate their inner selves by crying when needed, by accepting vulnerability, by declining to be money machines. No more fake stoicism, going to war and brawls and running the rat race. </p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-26012193714373740932021-11-11T08:59:00.003-05:002021-11-11T08:59:56.421-05:00Labels to Respect<p>Woke, Antifa, Feminists, are a few of the labels coined in recent years for people who believe that humans should be equal before the law and treated with respect by all their fellow humans, regardless of traits, especially those that don't harm anyone and are largely involuntary.</p><p>Do you really want a society that pretends to be about equality but is not?</p><p>Do you really want to be ruled by someone whose mere whims are more powerful than reason?</p><p>Do you really want women to be barefoot and pregnant servants of men?</p><p>I didn't think so.</p><p>Let's try to be more respectful of feminists, small-d democrats who are willing to stop creeping authoritarianism, and folks who insist on being aware of ethnic prejudice in our society.</p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-19741193765506317702021-11-09T10:02:00.002-05:002021-11-09T10:02:34.581-05:00Is it me or is it The World?<p>You've probably experienced it: the browser gets syrupy, the OS hangs, your body makes a new demand you hadn't experienced before, no one understands you. Just because they're after you doesn't mean you're not paranoid.</p><p>So what is it and what do you? I wish I knew.</p><p>OK, yes, you just stop. You go play a computer game that works.</p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-62599864911901963162021-11-08T08:51:00.004-05:002021-11-08T08:51:24.741-05:00Praying to the Divine Lady<p>Here's a secret trick for praying: pray to Our Mother in Heaven. No, not the BVM that Catholics may recall from childhood, the real God just anthropomorphized as a woman, a caring mother.</p><p>Most of us know a caring mother. We know a mother who gave us life in a co-creative experience. We know a mother who laid down the law and spanked us or sent us to our room, a corner, or whatever. We know of a mother who accepted and forgave everything, without for a second forgetting. We know of a mother who was ready to give her life for ours, one who indeed did give her life, by devoting much of hers to us. </p><p>This is much better than the usual experience with fathers. Many fathers leave, uncaring for anyone but themselves. Many others are distracted by their workplace, their own ambitions, their wants. Fathers can teach, can love in a more tough-love way. Fathers can seem all-powerful. But they can't God-like no matter how they try.</p><p>God the Father is a human image. God does not have a penis. Yes, God the Mother does not have a vagina, either. God could be an It. More likely than not, God's being is so unique it is closer to an It than a Him or a Her. </p><p>God might as well be dog spelled backward, for all we know. God might bound over and lick us when we come home.</p><p>For now, I'll stick with anthropomorphizing, A human-like God is more accessible. It's only an image, a persona, if you will. No one has seen God (for the Bible-minded, see Exodus 33:20-23, 1 Corinthians 1:21, John 1:18, 1 John 4:12). <br /><br />So, why not imagine Her as the beautiful Mother in the sky, among the twinkling stars!</p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-57538031199122268282021-11-07T04:16:00.003-05:002021-11-07T04:16:22.109-05:00Reminder About My Book<p>Here's the original "press release" <br /></p><p> https://letmountainshear.blogspot.com/</p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-84860052023788994992021-11-06T11:05:00.003-04:002021-11-06T13:17:40.392-04:00Saying Goodbye<p>Nothing tells you how utterly unimportant you are more than leaving a job or a social medium. Suddenly, you realize that when you die there will be nothing remotely like the JFK cortege to Arlington for you.</p><p>When I retired as an editor and publisher of a specialized publication three years ago, I wrote a farewell letter from the publisher. I was selling to an employee.</p><p>Number of calls, letter, and emails I got after 33 years? 0, zip, nada. I might as well have never existed in that admittedly obscure little world.</p><p>At least, less than a week before cancelling (being hounded out and gaslighted by a well-known social media outlet) I have received two emails. Also, quality beats quantity, no?</p><p>Still, the world has not come to a halt without me at the helm of my former publication or me at the SMO.<br /><br />Sigh!</p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-27403357275373845492021-04-19T13:02:00.001-04:002021-04-19T15:54:56.897-04:00 All Hail the Matriarchist Revolution!<p>The world is going to hell in a hand basket and no leader is presently going to provide the social order that allows everyone to survive happily. Time to try Matriarchism.</p><p>Anarchism, capitalism, communism, neoliberalism, patriarchalism, socialism, traditionalism, and any the other of the isms known to us, have all failed. We are less than a generation from climactic disaster, worldwide authoritarian rule and endless conflict. <br /></p><p>What is Matriarchism, you ask? Fair question.</p><p>The Wikipedia tells us that "matriarchy is a social system in which females hold the primary power positions in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property." It's also called gynecocracy. </p><p>That's <u>not what I am proposing</u>, which would be a mere inversion of the current patriarchy.<br /><br />Matriarchism, and a revolution to empower it, means setting up a maternal form of social order in which the primary goal of those who govern and possess moral authority is to
nurture and ensure the happy survival of all, in a peaceful and benevolent way.<br /><br />The Matriarchist Revolution will not be achieved by beheadings, tortures, imprisonment, or social "cancelling" of purported "enemies of the people." A Matriarchist regards all people as if they were her children, favoring none, helping and loving all.<br /><br />Most women are
presently best prepared for leadership in such a society, by virtue of their preparation for or experience of motherhood; however, so
are some men.<br /><br />Yes, some mothers can be harmful. Also, Margaret Thatcher (and a few others like her) is not who I would want in charge; she was merely a patriarch without a penis.<br /></p><p>But ideally, what is motherhood among mammals supposed to be about?</p><p>Think about the mothers you have admired. They were people who made sure their children were fed, clothed and otherwise nurtured, learned to distinguish right from wrong, benevolently enforced such values, always with the aim of seeing the child profoundly and permanently happy.<br /><br />Angela Merkel, without knowing it, is an example of a Matriarchist leader. She has striven mightily to push for the best of all her citizenry, without easy shortcuts. Is she perfect? Of course not. <br /><br />But what if we replaced all the world's leaders with Angela Merkels? Wouldn't our nations be cooperating to bring about a green economy globally? Wouldn't the poorest of the poor be looked after? Wouldn't there be benign leaders everywhere who attempt to persuade and direct society toward universal love?<br /><br />I'm certain Angela Merkel, if she ever reads my puny blog, will be horrified to be placed on such a pedestal. That's precisely why she is there!<br /><br />My Facebook friend Christina Kelly unknowingly voiced a Matriarchist belief when she said: "I would prefer [matriarchy] if all men and women had access to sufficient
education, and training to fully self-govern, with no need for either
male, or female dominance."<br /><br />Think about it!<br /></p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-80542868143769623852021-02-18T16:09:00.001-05:002021-02-18T16:11:01.749-05:00LIBERAL DEMOCRATS VS THE WAR MACHINE<p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql gk29lw5a a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d9wwppkn fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb hrzyx87i gfeo3gy3 a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"></span></p><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">I'm beginning to see criticism of Biden from the Left, of which I am a moderate member. Did anyone think that Biden was anything but a standard issue liberal Democrat? Remember LBJ and Vietnam? (But also LBJ's Medicare, AFDC, Job Corps, etc.?)<br /><br /></div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">From a policy standpoint, liberal Democrats have always faced a puzzling paradox since World War II concerning the military. Think of the economic effects of military spending:<br /><br /></div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">1) The military yields higher employment for otherwise unqualified lower-middle class and poor citizens and a generally very nice, wholly subsidized, suburban lifestyle for military families. (Admittedly, with drawbacks such as injury and death. Although US casualties have usually been kept comparably low. No wars since 1941 have involved civilian deaths in the mainland USA. In WW2, the USSR had 11 million military deaths, Germany 4 million ; the USA 407,000, less than half a million. With civilian deaths, in Europe and Asia, some 70 million were killed. The much vaunted 55,000 US dead in Vietnam pale next to the 700,000 military Vietnamese dead and the million or so civilians killed in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.)</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><br />2) The Pentagon also subsidizes a nice chunk of the civilian economy. Boeing workers, for example, are highly paid and unionized, as are most major military contractors. After WW2, Boeing declined to the point it shrank to having a clothing store, in Seattle I think, as its main facility in the late 1940s. The Korean War saved Boeing.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><br />3) Then there are the communities in which bases are located, which, once again, reap untold indirect economic subsidies.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><br />4) The military is the only social welfare program that can be sold as pro-business and "patriotic."<br /><br /></div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">So the question is: with what do we replace the war machine?</div></div><p></p>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-41842129592719189812020-07-02T10:05:00.000-04:002020-07-02T10:06:15.607-04:00The Real Independence Day<i>Cecilieaux is off for the holiday, but he left behind his now-traditional Independence Day blog post. Happy 2nd!</i><br /><br />Today, July 2nd, rather than July 4th, is the actual day that independence of the territories that were to become the United States from Britain was first approved. This came in the form of a resolution that attorney Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, proposed to the Second Continental Congress.<br /><br />The brief document read:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"> Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.<br /> That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.<br /> That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.</blockquote>The motion was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies. Indeed, John Adams, of Massachusetts, who seconded Lee's proposal, was so certain that a great step had been taken that he wrote to his wife Abigail:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"> The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.</blockquote>Now, 241 years later, the festival is held on the 4th, when the delegates approved the wordier, some would say grander, announcement of the decision by Thomas Jefferson, who composed it in the absence of Lee, who had rushed back to Virginia due to his wife's illness.<br /><br />In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-25140742362030056252020-06-25T11:26:00.001-04:002020-06-25T12:36:32.905-04:00The Regeneration of 2020We, humanity, were adrift.<br />
<br />
Men abused women. Caucasians oppressed
Blacks and nearly everyone else. The rich and powerful had forgotten
noblesse oblige, corrupting corporations to deceitfully seduce all
others to greed and envy, reducing governments to institutions that,
at best, are mostly adrift.<br />
<br />
All of us were, the best of our personal
abilities, despoiling our planet and sole native home.<br />
<br />
Then came a pandemic and we got a chance to survey the world from
our little caves. That’s when the need for regeneration became
obvious to me. In biology, regeneration is a process of renewal,
restoration, and growth that allows everything from cells and
organisms to entire ecosystems to overcome natural fluctuations, or
episodic disturbance or damage.<br />
<br />
As a man, I recognize in pornography and erotic literature our
savage pollinating fantasies of women as the source of sexual
satisfaction available for the taking, penetrating, and controlling,
at our whim. When I hear of domestic murder, gang rapes, sex
trafficking, I realize that a #MeToo movement cannot stop this.
Feminist research can’t rectify this.<br />
<br />
We men need to be healed.<br />
<br />
We need an outward regeneration, from
the cells in our spinal cord and from the deepest recesses of our
psyches. We need to cleanse society of all messages, supports,
tradition, socialization, imagery and propaganda inducements to
ravage and conquer women that have developed over thousands of years.<br />
<br />
The same applies to Caucasians, the rich and powerful and their
institutions, and indeed to all of humanity.
<br />
<br />
Even the oppressed and less fortunate have to change. Women have
often enough enslaved themselves to fantasies of beauty sustained by
malevolent industries. Non-Caucasians have absorbed notions of a
tribal hierarchy of ethnicity, nationalities, and races.
<br />
<br />
No one is free of blemish.<br />
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<br />
After the pandemic, if we survive, we
need to start a process of regenerating humanity.</div>
<style type="text/css"></style>Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-18407824874247512312020-06-23T12:42:00.000-04:002020-06-23T12:42:26.857-04:00My Transitional YearThe first full year of transition into retirement.<br />
<br />
The first few mornings I came to my computer at the
early rush hour and looked out my window to the busy thoroughfare on
which I live. There were the lines of cars and buses,
with passengers in suits and office apparel. I laughed.<br />
<br />
“Suckers!”<br />
<br />
I
had first gone to work as an adult, with the end of a working life
nowhere in sight — nay, unthinkable! — in 1975. I just added it up:
forty-two years, longer than my older son has been alive.<br />
<br />
My working life finished Dec. 29, 2017, with no working days left, so January to January is a fair measure of being retired rather than on a weekend.<br />
<br />
I first came to retirement with a project and a schedule in mind: a blog I would turn into a book — check that as done — and a plan to walk the 8 blocks to a nearby library with my laptop in a new backpack. There I would edit my work and do some net surfing thanks to taxpayers like me, who delight in paying taxes so long as they go to schools and libraries and such.<br />
<br />
Oh, I was also going to go room by room, one a month, chucking all the useless stuff I never had the time to sift from the treasures, then reorganizing the latter in an orderly way.<br />
<br />
Those were the best laid plans of mice and men ...<br />
<br />
I did complete the blogbook and published it as an ebook in November. You can read about it here <a href="https://www.letmountainshear.com/2018/10/lmh-series-on-story-of-faith-is.html">Discover How a Faith Became Christianity — Even if You Skipped Sunday School</a> and learn where to get it. (Hint: Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, other places.)<br />
<br />
My walking to the library fell off somewhat.<br />
<br />
Instead I gained a volunteer gig at a place called Samaritan Ministry, where I now help folks write their resumes and apply for jobs online.<br />
<br />
My cleanup of my home stopped at my study in the third month, having done what could be done to the bedroom and bathroom.Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-82708367749024802432018-12-29T12:00:00.000-05:002018-12-29T12:00:14.313-05:00Last Times(<i>A year ago, I wrote the following to myself.</i>)<br />
<br />
In the past year or so, I have had the rare and bittersweet pleasure of observing myself do or experience a variety of things for the last time. It has been a season of last things that ended today as I left my final employment, my office and the company I owned for the last time ever.<br />
<br />
How often do you get to observe this? When was the last time you changed your child's diaper, hugged a deceased parent, made love to your last lover? Most often we don’t realize it’s the last time.<br />
<br />
When last December ended, however, I suddenly realized that it was only a matter of months before I retired. That January and February, with that bitter wind on the walk to the bust stop five blocks away, was happening to me for the last time.<br />
<br />
March I filed my last corporate tax return. I’d surrendered to my successor a number of editorial and production tasks and decision making. This year I would slowly surrender corporate operations. I have been a business owner since 1997. By year’s end, no more.<br />
<br />
May I had my last board meeting in that season. July I took my last short vacation. When you are the boss, you’re always in. In November, I extended banking privileges to my successor, along with running the payroll.<br />
<br />
Then came the inevitable last month.<br />
<br />
Dec. 14 I put to bed the last issue of my weekly publication that I would have a hand producing. It would be the last issue before the Christmas break. It was my 1,525th issue.<br />
<br />
“Putting to bed” is a journalism expression meaning to complete all editorial and layout work on a newspaper or magazine so that it is ready to go to press; it comes from an old printing phrase to lock up the type form of a publication in the press’ bed, before printing. My publication hasn’t been printed since 2006, but I was still putting it to bed on this day two weeks ago.<br />
<br />
On Dec. 15th, I last saw my favorite luncheon checker, with whom I played the game of trying to find out what happened on the year matching the amount due; for example, if the lunch cost $14.92, the year was 1492, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue.<br />
<br />
Dec. 19, I last saw my favorite street person outside the luncheon place I go pick up something to eat at my desk. We exchanged the daily refrain. His was “What’s the word? Thunderbird!” For that he got my ritual $5 “tip.”<br />
<br />
On Dec. 22, I finished writing the last story I would ever write for my publication, no longer under my byline (just as the first one didn’t have my byline, both for institutional reasons).Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-43559178360672035002018-10-18T14:25:00.002-04:002018-10-18T14:28:01.925-04:00Central Americans are an "illegal-alien invasion" and Europeans weren't?The great hue and cry among U.S. Americans watching northbound Central American emigrant caravans probably resembles what the North American natives thought as hordes of Europeans from Britain to Spain started arriving some 500 to 300 years ago.<br />
<br />
See what I just did? I turned a bunch of poor, brown, mostly Indo-American, emigrants from Central America and Mexico into peers of the august Thanksgivings' Day Puritans and the celebrated Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus.<br />
<br />
"This was organized so that the illegal-alien invasion into the country would occur right around the elections in mid-November," exclaimed my Facebook friend Joe Tiernan in a post yesterday early morning (10/18 at 8:33 AM). <br />
<br />
Perhaps we might envision a Native American response to the enterprises of Columbus, Purtitans and other European migrations organized without the slightest thought given to the American natives' rules. <br />
<br />
A part-Chippewa scholar at Berkeley's <a href="https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~katster/Hist16p.htm">essay</a> draws on Desmond Tutu's famous words about European missionaries to offer the following reflection: "When the white man first came to this land, we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them again, we had the Bible and the white man had the land."<br />
<br />
“Your mouth is of sugar but your heart of gall,” said more succinctly, the Abenaki leader Atiwaneto to a British official in 1752.<br />
<br />
The caravan movement started with an original 1,000-person group in Tapachula, Mexico, this past March. Most of the caravans have been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the-migrant-caravan-denounced-by-trump-will-end-in-mexico-city-but-some-people-vow-to-go-on-alone/2018/04/04/e0a8fa96-378c-11e8-af3c-2123715f78df_story.html?utm_term=.02fc9289ad41">reportedly</a> organized by Irineo Mujica, the Mexican-American director of <a href="http://www.pueblosinfronteras.org/">Pueblo Sin Fronteras</a> (People Without Borders), who sought for them asylum in the United States for Central Americans fleeing gang violence and turbulent elections.<br />
<br />
Out of that experience, in more or less spontaneous local bursts of outrage in response to the separation in the United States of children from parents, still ongoing, in recent months others have started caravans that Mujica and a string of local migrant help centers along the route to Mexico have decided to aid as a matter of humanitarian concern.<br />
<br />
Tiernan, a retired television news executive, posted a <a href="https://reut.rs/2OrelaO?fbclid=IwAR2f6Uah2sBG-4VRt0wjaQ4OqUPs3WtpKfc8zNb9Pw7s2YtwzJ_l8YhVOHA">Reuters story</a> announcing that the governments of Honduras and Guatemala had agreed to halt caravans of would-be Central American emigrants. The emigrants have journeyed from as far south as Honduras to, so far, Mexico — triggering a spate of nervous Trump tweets threatening dire consequences if they try to enter the United States.<br />
<br />
One would think Tiernan was waving red flags at a happy herd of Republican bulls. However, his associates, think he is "grossly minimalizing" the politics.<br />
<br />
They come with ready-made explanations as well. "[The emigrants] are encouraged to come to America because of our totally insane and mostly unenforced border policies, as well as the decades of dirty politics by Progressives to flood the country with Illegal Aliens," writes one Sabra Merle, from California. <br />
<br />
Tiernan himself offers as an explanation against immigration that "European American culture will be a minority culture in America by 2050. America was 85% White in 1965." He does not go so far as to suggest, as Dana Littlefield, a self-described former IT professional at Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, who declares: "Time to start deporting all illegal invaders, put the military on the border, and defend it at all costs."<br />
<br />
Lost in all this is current immigration patterns from south of the U.S. border exhibit a combination of push and pull factors. The magnetism of the world's largest and most transparent economy on a per capita basis pulls would-be immigrants, while a combination of economic and political instability, high crime and corruption in their poor home countries pushes them out.<br />
<br />
There are always transitory waves caused by events on both sides of the border. Civil war in several Central American countries the 1980s pushed emigrants to the USA. Both the Great Depression and the Great Recession caused massive departures of immigrants to south of the border.<br />
<br />
Moreover, every study of the economic effects shows that except for slight job competition with the least schooled Americans, immigrants have a positive effect. Those without papers, moreover, leave billions in tax, social security and medicare contributions, from which they are barred from taking the slightest advantage.<br />
<br />
One still is left with at the contrast between the great bemoaning of newcomers today and the North American natives' rumination on shore at the first arrival of Europeans at Manhattan Island. <br />
<br />
As it was related to John Heckwelder by "aged and respected" Delawares, Momeys, and Mahicaanni, they wondered: "These arriving in numbers, and themselves viewing the strange appearance, and that it was actually moving towards them, concluded it to be a large canoe or house, in which the great Mannitto [or Supreme Being] himself was, and that he probably was coming to visit them."Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-16959869424512204622018-10-05T06:42:00.001-04:002018-10-18T11:21:32.125-04:00Trump's Great Favor to the RepublicBy becoming the obvious boil in the body politic and personifying the most venal characteristics of U.S. plutocrats, Donald Trump has done the republic the enormous favor of stripping bare the power relationships in our society. This is becoming ever clearer with every new outrage as the midterm elections of 2018 approach.<br />
<br />
This is one reason that, rather than respond with epithets and anger, the true small-d democrats in the United States must vote against Trump's allies and work to undo the plutocracy in every way. Not for the first time, there is a broad awareness of this reality. We
need to defend the civil rights won so far and expand democracy to
include economic and social rights.<br />
<br />
History teaches us that it is doubtful that the United States was ever a democracy — that is largely an as yet unrealized aspiration. <br />
<br />
At its founding, the states, which regulated voting rights, allowed only male, free property owners to participate in electing political decision-makers. By law, this was in theory overthrown with finality by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a 1972 Supreme Court decision (Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533); however, this is being undone by clever, largely Republican-inspired voter suppression tricks. <br />
<br />
Moreover, even among the participating great unwashed, there existed a broad group of Americans of Northwestern European origin who lived in a near-poverty of under-education and underemployment. These Americans directed their resentment not at the wealthy who kept them down, but at the easy marks whose skin was darker and spoke with accents other than their own.<br />
<br />
Nor has the United States honestly and deservedly been a land of milk and honey with streets paved with gold for anyone with pluck.<br />
<br />
Sure, some younger sons of the English nobility, who inherited nothing, became wealthy thanks to slaves. Also, some landless English, German and Irish people became small farmers thanks to land theft from the natives.<br />
<br />
Even the great American bonanza after 1945 came at the expense of a Europe mired in rubble and was merely a temporary accident — rather than the fruit of American know-how"; the broad middle class was a temporary myth, it had never existed before and it is vanishing now. Until the New Deal's and Great Society's mildly heroic soft capitalism, it was sink or swim for everyone and most sank.<br />
<br />
The true story of American wealth is more aptly told by a famous epigram of Balzac's: "Behind every fortune lies a crime." The American crimes of slavery, land theft and industrial warmaking made a few very wealthy and these few convinced a broader less fortunate group of "whites" that they shared in the bounty, when they never did.<br />
<br />
It's the classic Trump con.<br />
<br />
Trump inherited money — we now know that it was more than he should have thanks to tax dodges. His own business acumen expanded that by little more than an ordinary savings account would have yielded — as shown by his now discredited feverish attempts to misrepresent his fortune to financial reporters. Moreover, he has publicly spoken of his own base as "stupid," women as something to grab and ethnic minorities as criminal escaping effective outhouses.<br />
<br />
Thank you, Donald Trump. The scales have now fallen off our eyes and we can see the work that remains to be done to make the United States reasonably closer to its historic aspirations and goals. First, let's get rid of you and your allies.Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-60373588071301591982018-09-11T13:47:00.001-04:002018-09-11T13:47:19.833-04:00Lessons Unlearned 17 years after 9/11Nothing invites rebellion and doubt more than the ritual and the dogma of the American Civic Religion's new Holy Day, September 11.<br />
<br />
I remember September 11, 2001. I was working two blocks from the White House when news started arriving. However, the idea of the alleged military heroes and the supposed patriotic meaning that is widely spread today rings hollow and false.<br />
<br />
First of all, let's recognize that the attackers committed a crime but were never subjected to anything resembling justice under the U.S. Constitution, in part because they were willing to die in furtherance of their purpose. Instead, international goodwill toward Americans was squandered by the fake arms industry "patriots" who lined their pockets inflicting "vengeance" on Afghanis and Iraqis — over a million of whom were killed — who had nothing to do with the crashing planes in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.<br />
<br />
Second, the Twin Towers were artless slabs that destroyed the classic Manhattan skyline with the Empire State Building as its topmost point in a central location. I was born in Manhattan and that skyline was one of the first things I knew. Long before 9/11, I regarded the World Trade Center as an eyesore. If there is an icon for 9/11, the towers are not it. Moreover, the professionals who died in the various buildings were not heroes. Most of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were bond traders, thus not exactly worshipers of anything but Mammon.<br />
<br />
Third, the fact that any unarmed plane could crash into the Pentagon without the slightest interference is a monument to the stupidity and overall incompetence of the U.S. military. The event told the world what idiots we are to spend gazillions on it. A few guys with box-cutters could destroy the building without meeting a single counterattack. As a consequence, the thousands of Americans who signed up to kill Afghanis and Iraqis were chumps — 9/11 vets, get what you were promised while you can because the guys who promised you lollipops are about to take them away.<br />
<br />
As to real heroes, I propose the Flight 93 passengers, who saved the United States from government by presidential fiat alone, under no less that George W. Bush, unquestionably the second worst president we have ever had. The plane is known to have been on a trajectory headed straight for Capitol Hill. As for one-man rule, this is not mere surmise: the Dubya White House sent Congress a message within days of 9/11 asking for extraordinary powers to act in case Congress was attacked. The legislative branch wisely declined.<br />
<br />
But there is an anti-hero who should be studied. Mohammad Atta, the on-site leader of the hijackers, exhibited a moral and philosophical consistency and cogency, and even an asceticism and conviction sadly lacking among American leaders at the time and since. To Atta, the United States was the cause of much suffering in the Middle East. We can debate whether his view was correct — it hasn't been seriously examined: why did they think what they thought? — but given such an opinion, what he did was consistent with his beliefs. Moreover, it was brilliantly planned and executed.<br />
<br />
In considering the possible grievances that people in lands far away may have against the United States — meaning the government, mostly, and its most deluded followers — 9/11 offers an intriguing paradox. On September 11, 1973, with CIA collusion and U.S. military and financial support, Chile's military overthrew the elected president of that country, Salvador Allende, a democratic socialist. Might not the Chileans who were subsequently terrorized by their government see with some sympathy the claims of aggrieved Muslims from a vastly different culture many years later?<br />
<br />
In sum, we still need to learn the real lessons of 9/11, which I fear the current pageantry and slogans only dim. Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-47047563230028662922018-07-26T07:27:00.001-04:002018-07-26T07:27:55.644-04:00The Human Crisis We are always in crisis. Things around us, and even ourselves, are changing in unexpected ways. We find the present troubling because it never quite conforms to our hopes and dreams.<br />
<br />
Instead of climate change and autocracy, we could be facing the black plague and feudal lords. It's just a matter of century.<br />
<br />
It always seems we are on the edge of doom. We are. Our self of yesterday has died and at the end of the day today's self will become history.<br />
<br />
Crisis comes from the Greek krinein, to decide. We are always deciding to take the next breath. Or not.<br />
<br />
Trump may yet serve, as a foil, to awaken the greatest egalitarian movement the United States has ever seen. Or not. Climate change may usher in the most careful and generous resource use in history. Or not.<br />
<br />
This is fraught with uncertainty, for we must always face the decision: do we go on or give up?<br />
<br />
In the end, the present is the only time in which we decide to act and be.Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-90947101217587578042018-04-04T08:20:00.002-04:002018-04-04T08:22:46.964-04:00Dan Rather vs Sinclair<div zoompage-fontsize="16">
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I hate to break it to all the people enraged by Sinclair Media anchors reading a script criticizing “fake stories”: the lowest common denominator in news reporting was reached by television (and radio) decades ago. Sinclair is merely the laziest version of an intellectual void called broadcast news; it is broadcast, but it merely summarizes what a few people decide should be told as news.</div>
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You will never see news that embarrasses an advertiser, or seriously calls into question capitalism or even the Constitution. All the biases of society are affirmed: non-whites are criminals a priori, whites make mistakes; women are emotional, men are rational; and so on.</div>
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I have been an economic journalist focusing on unemployment and poverty for more than three decades. I have fired and hired reporters. I have edited news.</div>
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A journalist is not someone who reads a collection of facts in front of a camera from a script someone else has written. Anyone can do that in bed with the newspaper. </div>
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A journalist is someone who goes out and finds news, then reports on it, by finding a balanced variety of sources to provide as even-handed a story of what happened in the time allotted before the deadline. Ben Bradlee, a man whose personal ethics and privilege were questionable but whose journalism was not, called journalism "the first rough draft of history." That's what it is.</div>
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Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of <i zoompage-fontsize="16">The Washington Post</i>, to name the two most famous investigative reporters of our time, spent hundreds of hours finding, obtaining, then poring through excruciatingly boring documents to find the chain of corruption that unseated Nixon. That's reporting!</div>
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In contrast, most broadcast news reporters are generally airheads. They have one go-to question they parrot at every news conference: "What do you feel about [topic or event]?" I shall never forget the dumb blonde at a press conference who, cameraman in tow, asked an economist how he felt about the unemployment rate. Who cared what the guy felt? Joblessness is not about the feelings of economists. This is why their nickname is "twinkies" (blond on the outside, fluffy on the inside).</div>
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Many network news anchors <u zoompage-fontsize="16">may</u> have once been reporters. Although if they were broadcast reporters, they were really in show biz from the start. You don't really think radio and television actually goes out to find out anything, do you?</div>
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Dan Rather was a small-town wire service stringer for almost 8 years. It may not have been famous or groundbreaking work, but that was legitimate journalism. Then he became a sports newscaster. Imagine the investigative reporting involved in saying who passes the ball to whom! After that, he was almost continuously an on-the-air TV figure who got lucky and was in the right places at the right time. At best, he read the news script and edited two or three words of it before airing. That's not journalism.</div>
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The actual reality of television and radio news is that they are, at best, headline services that provide shapeless, emotion-stirring stimuli read by people with mellifluous voices and handsome faces and makeup. In the seconds you hear one TV news lead with generalities aimed to make you happy, sad or angry, you could read at least three detailed print paragraphs with lots of actual and necessary facts needed to think and make decisions.</div>
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Print journalism is dying because Americans don't want to read and think. They want fluffy entertainment that requires no thought and all the hard thinking done for them and spoon fed by telegenic actors who look serious but don't really know what they are talking about. </div>
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Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-87547820907734288932018-02-21T13:01:00.002-05:002018-10-29T08:25:38.428-04:00Cinderella Goes to the Ball On Her OwnIn response to my last post, a reader suggested an inverted one, in which the thorns become roses and the crows fly off as butterflies: so here there are no fairy godmothers. The life I had beginning with my days, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti memorably put it in his poem "Dog" (click <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53076/dog-56d2320f90631">here</a>), when I was "a real live barking democratic dog."<br />
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Indeed, I was once a real, live soaring freedom-seeking teenager. The 1931 film "The Front Page" inspired me to consider journalism as a career and a bout in the university newspaper confirmed this vocation beyond anything I had studied. I did not major in journalism but in political science, specifically international affairs, but journalism was where I felt I soared.<br />
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It was, after all, the era of Woodward and Bernstein, and Washington, D.C., was my home town. Even as a university student in frigid Canada, I could dream at the typewriter, although I mostly wrote about Latin America because ... "write about what you know."<br />
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My writing, then and now (I think), had a way of "soaring," according to my good friend and older colleague, Charlie Ericksen. Founder of Hispanic Link, Charlie kept me in the journalism game while I was an in-house writer for the U.S. conference of bishops. His group was a peculiar news organization that began as a column syndication service, later a newsweekly, that unfortunately did not survive his retirement not very long ago.<br />
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However, while I was drafting a national pastoral letter that all the U.S. bishops ultimately approved, meaning that a sitting pope had to chance a glance at possibly one of my words (popes have to approve such things), Charlie accepted me writing about a variety of ideas about the U.S. Hispanic identity. Stuff that came out in newspapers across the country.<br />
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With a little imagination I was for a while a kind of Hispanic James Reston. (Who? The British-born James Barrett Reston, nicknamed "Scotty," an American journalist between the mid-1930s and early 1990s, who was so senior when I started that his columns adorned the op-ed pages of The New York Times.)<br />
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Married and with two young boys to feed, I eventually had to set my sights on a more prosaic career in specialized publishing for a weekly on employment and unemployment. We covered the labor market and the poverty joblessness inflicts, including the vast panoply of strategies, services, policies, programs, proposals and research on ways to lift people chronically unemployed into the Eden of a working life.<br />
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In the meantime, I managed some extracurricular writing, op-eds in The Washington Post, occasionally carried by the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald and other related papers, mostly on Hispanics.<br />
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The U.S. Jesuit magazine America ran some news analyses of mine on welfare reform and topics I covered in my work. In one story (click <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/525/article/myth-reform-tougher-better">here</a>) I revealed that I coined the phrase "welfare-to-work program" in the 1980s. Then a friend and colleague made my name known to their book review editor, who was looking for a reviewer who could read economic and social works intelligently.<br />
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Clerics and churchy people talk a great game about "blessed are the
poor" but most don't understand economics or social sciences worth spit.
It was my good fortune to have studied social sciences (I had a major
in sociology until I switched to political science, fleeing a subject
called statistics) and in my work I had learned to grasp a poverty
coefficient almost as well as Corrado Gini (look him up). Maybe I exaggerate a bit on that last one.<br />
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One of my early contributions (click <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/culture/face-poor-ours">here</a>), which came at the 40th anniversary of the War on Poverty, was a little gem that was badly mangled in editing. For example, I had written "Johnson successor Ronald Reagan" meaning that Reagan was a successor of LBJ's. They changed it to "Johnson’s successor, Ronald Reagan," which makes it sound as if I never heard of Richard Nixon. America magazine really needs better copy-editors. (During the Nazinger papacy, America was overrun by conservative Jesuit clerics, as hard to believe as that may sound, and I haven't published a comma there for years.)<br />
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Meanwhile, at work, I rose to my level of incompetence, getting promoted to managing editor of the weekly. Later, the firm that published my weekly, which was a subsidiary of the venerable Bureau of National Affairs (eventually swallowed whole by Bloomberg), gained its independence from BNA as a result of a spat with the congressional Periodical Press Gallery that I had a hand in. I became executive editor.<br />
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Twenty years ago I purchased the company through a very leveraged transaction and became president (and CEO, a term I detest). One of the things about being president of a small corporation of 10 employees is that you have all the legal obligations of the head of General Motors, without an army of lawyers and accountants to advise you and help you do it. I taught myself business; another feat.<br />
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However, as I told some of my Argentine friends, I didn't quite get to be president <u>of</u> the United States, but I did become president <u>in</u> the United States. Hey, it's something.<br />
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Of course, as I lucked out to be in an industry that has been decimated by the Internet, over the years the enterprise dwindled so that eventually I was a corporate one-man band running a staff of 2 and 2/5ths, myself included. However, even that was a kind of triumph.<br />
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All my competitors have long vanished. My publication survived because at its helm sat someone like me who could learn to do the accounting, marketing, write and edit articles, layout a publication and write programs to keep up some basic electronic distribution systems. Not many like me around.<br />
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My retirement on Dec. 29 has started a new phase in which I am turning my other blog into a book, revising my 500-page family history, all still hoping that one day I will leave a mark.<br />
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Just as with Ferlinghetti's dog, I see myself "head cocked sideways at streetcorners as if he is just about to have his picture taken for Victor Records." In my case, however, I am being photographed flashing a V, for Victory herself.Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18171692.post-87996571615848091672018-02-16T08:41:00.002-05:002018-02-21T13:01:59.120-05:00If She Had a Magic WandOffered the image of a fairy godmother's magic wand giving me the life I would want to have had, I decided to take up the challenge.<br />
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I wish I could look back on a life of accomplishment. The dictionary tells me that accomplishment means bringing something to completion, doing so successfully to the point it is an achievement or having acquired a skill or expertise.<br />
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Thinking about it, I did none of the three. Sure, I have brought to completion some repetitive or routine tasks. I have bathed and eaten to completion.<br />
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I have written an article to completion (or have I?); for the many years I was my own chief editor I may have thought the article was complete, but it wasn't. No one told me otherwise; indeed, so few people have ever commented on anything I have written that I might as well never have written anything. Maybe nobody read anything I wrote.<br />
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I have attempted novels that turned out to be terrible and meaningless. I have written a family history its intended readers could not bring themselves to read. I have been writing a book on Christianity I realize I am morally and academically unqualified to even attempt. Aquinas called his work "straw" at the end of his life; I have written nothing worth a comma in the Summa Theologica.<br />
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I would have liked, also, to have done some tangible good. I can think of endless things I have done that were plain wrong, morally or practically. I can point to nothing I did that is a good I performed. Oh, sure, I spawned two children who are fine grown men, thanks to their sane mother. I may have gotten up in a crowded bus to give an elderly lady a seat. I gave street beggars money. I assure you, I am no Albert Schweitzer bringing modern medicine to the hinterlands of Africa.<br />
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I would have liked not to have my many character flaws, including my temper and my depression. People might be drawn to me, as I see them drawn to others. Instead I repel almost everyone.<br />
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I could wish to have skipped many misadventures but that would make me even more pointless, useless and selfish. What if I achieved nothing and did no good after an idyllic childhood, instead of my own? At least I can fall back on plain bad luck, to some extent (I did not live in a Calcutta slum, so I can't call myself that unlucky, either).<br />
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The terrible thing is that I am of an age in which my capacities are waning and nothing awaits me but death. I am not going to make up for a useless, pointless, selfish and disagreeable life ever. My chances are all gone.<br />
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I would gladly have stepped in the path of those bullets at the school in Florida or Connecticut or wherever. My death in place of that of promising children might at least have had some redeemable value.Cecilio Moraleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05283375962527765787noreply@blogger.com1