#( it was genuinely such a prominent phenomenon that there’s a whole book about all the gay men and lesbian women came out after the war )

[lamoreauxspookyboi]

The DeLacey Phenomenon

     Within the beginning of the book, falling shortly after Victor’s creation of the Creature, we come to meet a new set of characters. While wandering the countryside to flee the wrath of Geneva, the Creatures comes upon a small, isolated cabin in the woods. This cabin is where the DeLacey family resides, allowing the Creature to watch them and observe human interactions firsthand.

    The family consists of four main people: DeLacey, Felix, Safie, and Agatha. DeLacey is a blind old man who acts like the man of the house, being the parent to both Agatha and Felix. His daughter, Agatha, is a selfless being who takes care of the family, while his son, Felix, is undoubtedly devoted to his family and his lover, Safie– an outsider in the family. Safie acts as almost an adopted member of the family, as she is soon to be married to Felix.

    Throughout the Creature’s adaptation of the family’s story, we learn that Felix is in the process of tutoring Safie in language and speech. Such tutoring benefiting the Creature as well in helping him form an indirect relationship with her and the family as a whole. The family also aids in the Creature’s general character development in both positive and negative ways, giving him the skill of speech and expression, while also overall making his intelligence a more fearful aspect than his appearance. This plot event is crucial in the sense that it represents one of the first times the Creature is exposed to others, rather than just Victor, and can begin to come to terms with himself through the observation of others.

    Through the monster’s continuous teaching in language, he is able to pick up on more human characteristics. He notices the family’s struggle, as the disadvantages they’re put at are prominent aspects of their everyday lives. Although poverty and disability are typically a roadblock, in the DeLacey family it acts as a great equalizer. They are not given the same opportunities as everyday people, so they are eternally grateful and optimistic about what they do have. He notices the daily tasks the family completes each day to simply survive and feels an urging need to help as well. The Creature shows sympathy for the family, and in his efforts to keep them on their feet, he weeds their garden and picks produce out for them. Although the family is unsure who did such a selfless deed for them, we see how thankful they are again.

    With all summary aside, we can discuss the rising question here:

    Why exactly is the DeLacey family such an important aspect in terms of gender roles?

    If we revert to the very beginning of the book, we’re quickly introduced to Frankenstein’s family. His family consists of both women and men, yes, but their familial roles are what sets them apart from the DeLacey’s. Within Victor’s house, the men typically hold more power and/or importance than the women, who usually serve as servants within the home. This is where we begin to see typical gender roles come into play–– women doing work similar to that of a housewife and men playing the “man of the house” archetype. Though DeLacey himself also acts as the leader of the home, we see one crucial difference: the lack of dominance.

    From an outsider perspective, the DeLacey family has a normal, per se, home with no one holding more power over anyone else. “Mary Shelley underlines the mutual deprivation inherent in a family and social structure based on rigid and hierarchical gender divisions by portraying an alternative social organization in the novel: the DeLacey family… In contrast to this pattern of political inequality and injustice, the De Lacey family represents an alternative ideology: a vision of a social group based on justice, equality, and mutual affection” (Mellor). One could even say the family is the perfect representation of quid pro quo–– doing things to benefit each other, not just themselves. Again, exposure to poverty and disability plays an important role in their family. Since they are all at the same level of struggle, there’s no need for one party to be more dominant, especially when they’re all just trying to survive each day in general. They’re different from the typical family at the time; each member isn't expected to uphold any role or task/job. It seems as if Shelley wanted to bring the DeLacey family in to show a “perfect” world compared to a “man-made” world (that being Victor’s interpretation of the world around him). Building on that, the family represents isolation, loneliness, compassion for the Creature’s character.

    The family gives the Creature a sense of confidence, hence his eventual decision to approach DeLacey during the absence of the rest of the family. Unfortunately for the Creature, the book eventually wipes the family from the plot after the infamous scene of Felix attacking the Creature, upon his return to the cottage, takes place. Despite the attack, he chooses to return to the family’s home, but they had already deserted it. Their lack of presence through the rest of the book symbolizes how such genuinely interworking personalities/roles can never be fully obtained, but also how an artificial, man-made world also can cause demise to those in it. It’s as if no matter how the world is sorted (ie. by class), there will never be true agreement or equilibrium.

(Media Citation 2)

[manifestoonmoralmanlove]

Soulless Riffing: Brainless Ch.10 + 11.

I got a supernatural action/romance book series as a gift that’s just riddled with stuff that I hate….and as a steampunk Victorian London action romance story filled with werewolves and vampires…it’s yeah gonna be easy to poke fun at.

I just want to say, it’s totally cool if you like this story or ones like it!  It’s certainly a better caliber than a lot of what I make fun of…however…I can’t help but want to make fun of it.

Over here for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7+8th, and 9th.

Chapter 10 is short so I threw in 11 too! SO FUCK IT HERE GOES!

Chapter 10

So this zombie bursts in to attack Alexia and Lord Akeldama.  The zombie’s clever plan is to just start…pouring chloroform on the floor. I don’t think that’s how that works but lol ok whatever. Immediately the super powerful vampire is out cold.  They talk about how gaudy and huge Lord Akeldama’s house is, so I totally pictured the zombie kicking the door open, pouring it, and even though he’s still like 50 feet away he’s out like a light.

So my head canon for this is the zombie is like, “Well they’re obviously going to get away! Why bother!?” So he just pours out a medicine bottle’s worth of chloroform out of annoyed futility. Lord Akeldama since he’s such a DANDY thinks the zombie poured some kind of staining liquid like wine all over his centuries old, priceless Turkish rug.  He’s so mortified that his favorite rug is ruined and feints on the spot.

Now this scenario makes sense, YOU’RE WELCOME!

Alexia is able to hit the zombie in the head 3 times before she realizes that’s not working and the fumes OVERCOME HER! YES SHE LITERALLY GETS THE VAPORS!

THANK FUCK! FOR ACTUAL DRAMA!

When she wakes up she’s being dragged bound and gagged into the Hypocras Club for scientists.  She overhears some shady biz about how they want to experiment on Lord Akledama.  She also notices an obnoxiously prominent octopus motif in the place.  It might as well read,

“Alexia turned the octopus-shaped knob, of the octopus-shaped door, to reveal an octopus-shaped hallway, with live octopuses hanging from the wall all wondering where they got such a bad rep from.”

The two of them get thrown in a cell and are able to undo their gags.  The less cool version of Blackadder’s Prince George (Lord Akeldama) explains that the zombie-thing is an automaton or basically a fleshy robot/golem.  He also explains that the robot can only be undone if you speak the magic word. Looks as if safe words work much better in this universe than they ever did in 50 shades!

 ALSO JUST KIDDING CAUSE THERE’S ANOTHER WAY TO STOP IT BUT WON’T BE REVEALED UNTIL IT’S A SUPER TENSE MOMENT! HARDY HAR HAR!

But we actually get a genuinely good scene after this where Lord Akledama talks about the fact they both may die.  He says that, if it’s possible, he wants Alexia to hold his hand so he can see the sun one last time.  It’s cheesy, and probably not going to be applicable in the situation they’re in, but it’s really sweet and sad and I like it.  The baddies then come back to drag Akledama out of the cell, presumably to be tortured to death.

NO! I WAS JUST STARTING TO ACTUALLY LIKE HIM!

Say something Nice Faps:

Actual plot

No or little mention of the dumbass ship

Akledama wanting to see the sun.

Chapter 11

So Alexia is not having the best time in the cell by herself but eventually she hears voices. We have super unsubtle exposition that boils down to.

“So yeah we’re torturing werewolves and vampires, so we can figure out how to genocide them REAL GOOD!”

Hoo boy listen. The only other racist thing against vampires/werewolves we have seen in action is a woman talk briefly about how untoward it is that a business is catering to THOSE kinds of people. I will not count all the vague times Alexia alludes to them being oppressed with no concrete examples.

Going from, Bad person is annoyed they may have to glance at a vampire while at a cafe, to inhuman experiments meant to further genocide is AT BEST a huge jump and at worse flat out feels entirely separate from the setting created.

Fun Fact: Racism isn’t a child predator who hides in the shadows and pops out when you need a scapegoat.  Racism is fucking everywhere effecting everything.

Don’t try to add racism allusions in your story if you can’t grasp that fundamental concept.

Faps, nobody picked up steampunk werewolf fucker for commentary on race. And besides the inability to grasp the complexity of racism is going to seem quaint next to some of the dumb writing bullshit coming up next.

So during this conversation this mysterious bad man also states, “We have a random human in this cell, cause she was there lol.”

“Can I see her?”

“Lol why not!?”

So we open up the cell to meet the big baddie Siemons, whom, I’m probably just going to refer to as childish evilguy nicknames for awhile cause his characterization is as on the nose as you can get.  Like no joke, whenever they mention him smiling it’s, “He smiles psychotically.” 

The guy, Mr. bigbad was talking to turns out to be #1 Stud MacDougall!

GASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSP

Actually I totally called this cause she mentions 3 times during their short conversation that she recognizes the 2nd voice, it would be most DRAMATIC, and cause I have money down that he’s secretly a bad, bad man so Alexia doesn’t feel bad about not fucking a fatty. She’s not shallow; he’s just a bad person you see.

BUT, to this story’s credit MacDougall is AGHAST to find Alexia in there, goes to her side, and demands she be set free at once.

Evilbaddy Von Octo-dump is like, “Oh! She’s Alexia the Soulless who can stop supernatural powers! We inexplicably did not put 2 and 2 together despite being super smart Nazi-scientists.  I mean we very obviously tried to kidnap her 3 separate times, and stole her records for more info. But we weren’t actually interested in kidnapping her. We just tried to get a vampire and took her along for the lulz!”  Why even put in the effort to say they weren’t after her? This is stupid!

MacDougall, despite studying the supernatural FOR A LIVING, has never heard of the Soulless phenomenon and like…

FUCK HOW AND WHY AND ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!

The author states explicitly that all the supernaturals in England not only are aware of the Soulless but are informed of the identity of every single Soulless.  How would normies NOT know? Vampires and werewolves hang with humans all the time, and it makes no sense why the Soulless would be hidden information from the general public.  Soulless can pose a threat to the supernatural not regular boring humans, there’s no reason to believe that the average citizen is going to be upset at this knowledge at all.

This wouldn’t even, so far, cause any plot inconsistencies if everybody knew.  I think the rub here is that we have to justify her family not knowing so the reveal would make them upset, but we’ll see how important that plot point actually is.  Honestly, I fear the author is just so used to supernatural media where SOMETHING is hidden from the general population she felt compelled to do the same.

MacDougall convinces Meaniemollusk NaziStink to take off her restraints and try to get her on their side. They allow her to clean up and change. Alexia takes advantage of this to go to the Octopus shaped mirror, break off an octopus-shaped shard, cover it in octo-cloth, and hide it in her octo-bosum.

Alexia tries to play dumb and meek in order to appease Squidlly MurderMan.  He tells her he plans to kill all Vampires and Werewolves.  She points out that they’re scientists with a political agenda and apparently that’s her breaking her bimbo character and the gig is up.

OKAY?????????????????

They then take her to another cell.  On the way there she hears Lord Akeldama’s blood-curling torture screams, but she doesn’t seem all that upset.  I mean she probably doesn’t want to appear outwardly upset to blow the gig even more, but we don’t really have much internal monologue about how worried she is.

So that’s cool.

They want to test her soulsucking ability and she lies saying it takes an hour. (Which is hard to believe, isn’t soulless supposed to be common knowledge in England, and also they stole all the notes anyway they probably know.)  They also OUTRIGHT SAY they’re planning on killing her anyway but it would be rad if she was cool about it. They say they’re going to murder/test it by putting her in a cell with a rabid werewolf to SEE WHAT HAPPENS!? (She’d probably die but lol turns out it’s Lord Maccon aren’t we all shocked.) But like let’s break this whole mess down.

1.)    You uhhh consider LYING that you won’t kill her if she cooperates. That tends to encourage people to cooperate. YOU ARE BAD PEOPLE AFTERALL AND BAD PEOPLE LIE!

2.)    HOW FUCKING INCOMPREHENSIBLY DUMB ARE THESE FUCKING SCIENTISTS!?  You UHH MAYBE consider you could learn a fuck-load from experiments where a person can turn off a supernaturals’ ability at will? PERHAPS it’ll be easier to genocide them if they’re not super-fast, super strong, immortal AND can heal real fast????? WHAT COLOSSAL FATHEADS ARE RUNNING THIS JOINT!? AUTHOR? YOU CAN HAVE THEM BE SUPER EVIL AND BAD WITHOUT THEM IMMEDIATELY TRYING TO KILL PROTAG? YANNO?

Also throwing her in a locked room with a PEAK werewolf, even if they never believed it took that long, is basically instant-death for her.  She’s kinda arrogant when it comes to self-defense but even she’s like, “I’d be super lucky if I even reach the point of having the shit kicked out of me before I can turn him completely enough for them to not be a threat.”

So they take the antidote to the supposed poison they want to snuff out and just dump it down the drain.

BUT GOLLY I’M SURE LOOKING FORWARD TO THOSE OVERGROWN CHILDREN ALMOST FUCKING IN THAT CELL! THAT’S GONNA BE SWELL!

Say something Nice Faps:

No shitty Maccon/Alexia verbal sparring

MacDougall does try to not get her killed. I mean he just shouts dramatically.  Not that I’m asking him to fall right on a sword but it does seem a bit tepid. But like for a woman who gleefully and regularly puts herself in danger? Maybe that’s the response that’s appropriate.

Also the author never really says MacDougall is down to clown with Murder Bigots.  So I guess what I’m trying to say is I’d still fuck MacDougall apart.

[bestgraffitiremovalproductsicjp7]

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[hollanderin]

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[theresatherethere]

Summary/Intro thoughts

This book is about finding meaning in the suburbs -- in places deemed as “non-places”, those places that “could be anywhere”. All these places, that apparently “could be anywhere”, they are somewhere. And there’s a pervasive attitude about the suburbs that restricts our ability to make meaning of them, to think they are worthy of memory and identity. More broadly, the book is an exploration of how meaning-making transforms “anywheres” into “somewheres”, and how our ideas of place aren’t always linear -- especially when places are moved, renamed, when buildings are relocated, demolished and reconstructed. Sense of place is non-linear, it is flexible, meaning can be made and attachment forged in the most unexpected places.

This book, while rejecting the worst elements of suburbia (alienation, car dependency) is not a diatribe against the suburbs. Nor is it a rejection of the increasingly unaffordable and homogenous inner city. It’s an exploration of what place means, how humans make meaning, and why we think some places are better than others. Urbanity, that cosmopolitan human vibrantness is not married to any architectural form -- it can be found in dense inner cities and sprawling suburbs, and is more about spirit than form.

Throughout the book, my voice will oscillate between genuine curiosity about the suburbs, an urgent curiosity, pleading with the reader, trying to convince them that there is indeed magic in the suburbs, but then being angry with the suburbs, whole heartedly against them, rejecting them. It will be an internal battle, coloured by my personal experiences, in trying to reconcile my relationship with the world as it is.

The book will weave philosophical ideas with contemporary issues, and evocative descriptions of places, ranging from the poetic to the personal. 

__

Gertrude Stein famously commented upon California Sprawl, upon returning to her home in Oakland  after several decades away -- “There’s no there, there”, she said. 

While she meant that her rural home had been demolished and replaced with dense urban development, and she couldn’t return to her home because it had changed so drastically -- i.e., “there’s no there, there”, the phrase has been taken up by those critiquing the monotony of the suburbs -- the globalized, homogenous car-centric land of tiny boxes made of ticky-tacky that could be anywhere.

It’s the kind of planning that Jane Jacobs rejected in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book that would change the way we built cities, and the first knock against the endless sprawl that was creating highly controlled and isolated places. She wrote lovingly about the “ballet of the streets” she observed in her corner of New York City -- Greenwich Village, where the daily pageantry of urbanity and chaos created a lively, messy, organic, and functioning place.

Her influence has carried forward into today’s cities, and noted academics have continued to pan the suburbs and root for the city, like Howard Kunstler’s diatribe against the suburbs, and  Richard Florida touting of the benefits of walkable, vibrant, dense cities, and the rejection of car oriented, energy hogging and socially alienating suburbs.

But the suburbs have changed. And so has the city.

Jane Jacobs’ love of the city, and Kunstler’s rejection of the suburbs has been arguably, too successful. Inner cities, once the great starting places for new immigrants who brought their diverse cultures, foods, and ways of living, are no longer accessible to anyone but those who can afford the most expensive real estate.

Those famous scenes of urbanity that would have played out on downtown streets in the early 20th century can now be found in the outer boroughs -- in Queens and the Bronx in New York City, in the inner suburbs of Toronto, in the banlieue beyond the peripherique in Paris. 

And downtown, a real estate boom has brought on a commercial and cultural homogeneity that has transformed once chaotic streets into orderly outdoor malls -- and condo towers promoting private relations feel increasingly like suburbs in the sky. 

It’s a personal geography punctuated by philosophy, architecture and urban planning theory. It’s urban planning theory, philosophy and architecture brought to life by personal geographies. 

I’m motivated to write this book because the story of urban planning has continued - we were given the story of the decline of inner cities, the urban renewal, the Jane Jacobs - but the story continues! 

Need to reexamine places, our total dismissal of the suburbs, now that they’re 100 years old, have decayed and grown organically. The reversal of high-low invome in city/suburbs. 

80 percent of Canadians are urban - more like suburban - the solutions are suburban. 

I am going to specifically address the Geography of Nowhere, written in the 90s by an angrier kind of person, with predictions of gloom that haven’t happened yet, and the story did not end there. 

I will explore the phenomenon of finding meaning in the suburbs using the places I know best: Toronto will feature prominently, because it’s a city I know well. These ideas will be explored in the many other places I’ve visted and will investigate: Orlando, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Montreal, Copenhagen etc

Miscellany:

Just because the entire country has experienced a specific wave of development, does it make it invalid? Of course the uniqueness of place pokes through, ecology and culturally. Today, gentrification is occurring in every city in North America. It's ehchibting the exact same patterns. But is Biahop arts in Dallas the same as Kensington Market the same as the mission SF? Of course not!

When you see a crowd materialize out of no where in the suburbs A crowded theatre Crowded Mandarin downtown is empty Where did all these people come from? Emerging from their own little private worlds The streets are empty 

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Friedrich Nietzsche: The truth is terrible

Brian Leiter examines Nietzsche's conception of what makes life worth livingBRIAN LEITER

Footnotes to Plato is a TLS Online series appraising the works and legacies of the great thinkers and philosophers

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) pursued two main themes in his work, one now familiar, even commonplace in modernity, the other still under-appreciated, often ignored.  The familiar Nietzsche is the “existentialist”, who diagnoses the most profound cultural fact about modernity: “the death of God”, or more exactly, the collapse of the possibility of reasonable belief in God. Belief in God – in transcendent meaning or purpose, dictated by a supernatural being – is now incredible, usurped by naturalistic explanations of the evolution of species, the behaviour of matter in motion, the unconscious causes of human behaviours and attitudes, indeed, by explanations of how such a bizarre belief arose in the first place. But without God or transcendent purpose, how can we withstand the terrible truths about our existence, namely, its inevitable suffering and disappointment, followed by death and the abyss of nothingness?

Nietzsche the “existentialist” exists in tandem with an “illiberal” Nietzsche, one who sees the collapse of theism and divine teleology as tied fundamentally to the untenability of the entire moral world view of post-Christian modernity. If there is no God who deems each human to be of equal worth or possessed with an immortal soul beloved by God, then why think we all deserve equal moral consideration?  And what if, as Nietzsche argues, a morality of equality – and altruism and pity for suffering – were, in fact, an obstacle to human excellence? What if being a “moral” person makes it impossible to be Beethoven? Nietzsche’s conclusion is clear: if moral equality is an obstacle to human excellence, then so much the worse for moral equality. This is the less familiar and often shockingly anti-egalitarian Nietzsche.

Nietzsche grew up in the belly of God and Christian morality. His father, and his grandfathers on both sides of his family, were Lutheran pastors, and Nietzsche himself went to university planning to study Theology. Theological studies has perhaps never had such a spectacular dropout – one who later ridiculed Luther as a “boor” and declared himself to be the “anti-Christian” par excellence. The young Nietzsche switched after one year at university to Classical Philology – the study of the texts and culture of the ancient Greek and Roman world – where he excelled, earning appointment to the University of Basel in 1869, even before completing his doctoral thesis. He soon met the composer Richard Wagner, and was briefly a disciple, imagining that Wagner’s music would redeem European culture from the ill effects of Christian morality. His enthusiasm for Wagner subsided after a few years, as Nietzsche’s mature philosophical views coalesced, and he grew disillusioned with Wagner’s rabid anti-Semitism.

Nietzsche’s classical training had educated him about ancient philosophy; the Presocratic philosophers (with their simple naturalistic world view) were his favourites, while his disagreements with Socrates and Plato persisted throughout his corpus. But it was only by accident that he discovered contemporary German philosophy in 1865 and 1866 through Arthur Schopenhauer and, a year later, the neo-Kantian Friedrich Lange. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (which was first published in 1818, but only came to prominence decades later, contributing to the eclipse of G. W. F. Hegel in German philosophy) set Nietzsche’s central existentialist issue: how can life, given that it involves continual, senseless suffering, possibly be justified? Schopenhauer offered a “nihilistic” verdict:  we would be better off dead. Nietzsche wanted to resist that conclusion, to “affirm” life, as he would often put it, to the point that we would happily will its “eternal recurrence” (in one of his famous formulations) including all its suffering.

Lange, by contrast, was both a neo-Kantian – part of the “back to Kant” revival in German philosophy after Hegel’s eclipse – and a friend of the “materialist” turn in German intellectual life, the other major reaction against Hegelian idealism after 1831. The latter, though familiar to philosophers today primarily by way of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, actually received its major impetus from the dramatic developments in physiology that began in Germany in the 1830s.  Materialism exploded on the German intellectual scene of the 1850s in such volumes as Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter, a publishing sensation which went through multiple editions and became a bestseller with its message that “the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings”. (Think of Büchner as the Richard Dawkins of the nineteenth century: a popularizer of some genuine discoveries, while also an unnuanced ideologue.)  Nietzsche, who first learned of these “German Materialists” from Lange, wrote in a letter of 1866, “Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange – I don’t need anything else”.

Nietzsche soon soured on Kant, though Kant and Plato remain his most frequent “philosophical” opponents in his writings, even if “philosophical” may mislead as to Nietzsche’s critical method. For Nietzsche’s distinctive writing style is notably anomalous in the canon of great philosophers: he writes aphoristically, polemically, lyrically and always very personally; he can be funny, sarcastic, rude, scholarly, scathing, often in the same passage. He eschews almost entirely the rationally discursive form of philosophical argumentation. In the course of examining philosophical subjects (morality, free will, knowledge), Nietzsche will invoke historical, psychological, philological and anthropological claims, and never appeal to an intuition or an a priori bit of knowledge, let alone set out a syllogism (“Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect”, he quips in Twilight of the Idols).

Nietzsche, under the influence of the Materialists and also Schopenhauer, took consciousness and reason to play a rather minor role in what humans do, believe and value; far more important are our unconscious and subconscious instinctive and affective lives. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that what inspires “mistrust and mockery” of the great philosophers is that,

They all pose as if they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic . . . while what really happens is that they take a conjecture, a whim, an “inspiration” or, more typically, they take some fervent wish that they have sifted through and made properly abstract – and they defend it with rationalizations after the fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such . . . .

Even Kant, recall, finally admitted that his goal was to put limits on reason to “make room for faith” – in God and in morality. But Nietzsche will not partake in this charade of offering post hoc rationalizations for metaphysical theses that are really motivated by “the moral (or immoral) intentions” of the philosopher which “constitute the real germ from which the whole plant [i.e., the philosophical system] has always grown”. Nietzsche’s motivations are, by his own admission, “immoral” ones.

Superficial readers who think Nietzsche defends a “metaphysics of will to power” must ignore his own “mistrust and mockery” of such philosophical extravagance: achieving a “feeling of power” is an important human motivation, as he argues in On the Genealogy of Morality, but that is a psychological, not metaphysical, claim. For Nietzsche the psychologist, the moral views of a philosopher also “bear decided and decisive witness to who he is – which means, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other”. But non-rational drives can be influenced and redirected primarily by non-rational means: if you provoke, amuse and annoy the reader, you thereby arouse his affects (drives are, on Nietzsche’s view, dispositions to have certain kinds of affective responses). Thus, Nietzsche’s mode of writing grows out of his view of what humans, including philosophers, are really like.

On this view, our conscious selves are largely illusory – “consciousness is a surface” Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo, one that conceals the causally efficacious, but unconscious, drives. “The greatest part of our spirit’s activity . . . remains unconscious and unfelt” (The Gay Science), while “everything of which we become conscious . . . causes nothing” (The Will to Power).  When we speak of the “will” or of the “motive” that precedes an action, we are speaking merely of “error[s]” and “phantoms”, “merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness – something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deed than to represent them” (Twilight of the Idols).  Humans are, on Nietzsche’s view, neither free nor morally responsible for their actions.

But the illusion of free will is not the main reason he rejects Judeo-Christian morality. “It is not error as error” as he says in his stylized autobiography Ecce Homo that he objects to in such morality.   Nietzsche’s central objection to morality is more radical and illiberal: any culture dominated by Judeo-Christian morality, or other ascetic or life-denying moralities, will be one inhospitable to the realization of human excellence. What if, as he says in On the Genealogy of Morality, “morality itself were to blame if the highest power and splendor possible to the type man was never in fact attained? So that morality itself was the danger of dangers?”

Consider his objection to moral views that demand that we eliminate suffering and promote happiness.  In Dawn, he writes, “Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your ideal, you heralds of the sympathetic affections?” In Beyond Good and Evil a few years later, he objects to utilitarians that, “Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible . . . . ”

Continue reading: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/friedrich-nietzsche-truth-terrible/

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US Government, Ufologists, Skeptics, and Others Contribute to Rare Mixture of Unreliable and Differing Information US Government

     Project Echo was designed to be a significant step in the United States’ space program. Project Echo was intended to be used for peaceful purposes. It would in due course benefit all mankind (Swenson, Grimwood, & Alexander, 1989). Therefore, in 1947 it may have been prudent for the US Air Force to claim that a weather balloon, Project Mogul balloon, or an alien flying disk had crashed at Roswell than to tell the truth and expose Project Echo. At first the US Air Force dispersed disinformation by stating the

Dr. Bob Wenzel Gross The UFO Chronicles 5-18-18

Roswell wreckage was that of a weather balloon. Later, the United States Armed Forces claimed that the debris from the Roswell crash was bits and pieces of a Project Mogul experimental high-altitude surveillance balloon. Regardless, according to a US Air Force report, the Roswell wreckage was quickly taken away by the Air Force. The Roswell crash represented the beginning of a new cover-up process that was part of an airborne system for atomic-age spying. The process was developed by Columbia University, New York University, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Broad, 1994).

Ufologists

A recent Amazon.com search for books written about the Roswell UFO yielded 622 results. It would be rare, if all 622 books contained the exact same information and arrived at a common conclusion about what occurred at Roswell in 1947. Contradictory information about the Roswell UFO incident is abundant. Conflicting information inhibits creative thought and decreases the ability to innovatively solve problems. As a consequence, conflicting or differing information causes confusion and makes it difficult for even the most brilliant sages to effectively explain the UAP/UFO phenomenon. Some of those who study and contemplate UFOs—ufologists—are pseudoscientists. Traits of pseudoscientists include, but are not limited to: Not adhering to good science, stressing ambiguous scientific claims that lack evidence, using jargon, intimidation, and demanding whatever hasn’t been verified as false must be accepted as true. In this fashion, pseudoscientists avoid disseminating factual material to their audiences. Fake stories are sometimes spread by pseudoscientists. Such stories embody a marketable mixture of fact, science fiction, fantasy, rumor, and disinformation. In the twenty-first century, the public seems to be seeking out factual answers about UFOs. Spreading weird assertions linked to the UFO marvel helps conceal the true nature of the phenomenon, thus affording government officials the necessary cover and additional time to figure out what is really going on. My recent research shows that in addition to the government, ufologists, skeptics, and others may be adding to a massive cover up. In short, where there is no evidence, there is no science. True scientists cannot afford to automatically disregard observations, information, and experiments that refute a certain theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008). We are currently living in a post-truth era. Alternative facts and fake news compete with peer-reviewed research (Birkinshaw, 2017). A post-truth or post-factual civilization makes decisions that are not based on what is true and proven. Such a society follows the beliefs of their members—not factual information. Today more than ever, truth must be factual, or at least have a correspondence with reality (Brown, 2016). In a post-truth world, assaults on science must be repelled. Scientific ufologists are a necessity. UFO literature should not be aimed at the general public alone. Instead, modern ufologists’ writings must stand for accuracy, align with established standards, and withstand a stringent peer review process. Results of research must be verified. Failures can’t be ignored, excused, hidden, lied about, discounted, explained away, rationalized, forgotten, or avoided. When a preponderance of new evidence contradicts old ideas, the proof must be accepted and assimilated. The job of scientific ufologists is to convince—not convert (Coker, n.d.).

Skeptics

Soon after the 1947 Fourth of July holiday, a rancher reported to the local sheriff that he might have recovered the remains of a flying saucer. Unfortunately, no one saw the saucer while it was airborne (Rudiak, 2001a). Although UFO researchers interviewed numerous witnesses, only a few of the witnesses claimed to have seen the suspected saucer debris. Of these few people, only a handful said to have actually held the material. At least one of those handlers was positive that the remnants were not from an extraterrestrial spacecraft (Korff, 1997). Major Jesse Marcel from the Roswell Army Air Field was assigned to look into whatever crashed on a ranch near Roswell that summer in 1947. Marcel drove to the ranch to examine and collect the wreckage. It was General Roger Ramey who ordered Marcel to bring the found wreckage to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. There, General Ramey held a press conference with Marcel present. It was Ramey who first announced that the wreckage was from a weather balloon. He lied. Colonel Thomas J. DuBose was present when the alleged Roswell wreckage arrived at Fort Worth in 1947. DuBose was brought into General Ramey’s office where he viewed the rubble. Decades later, during an interview, DuBose was asked if the original debris in General Ramey’s office had been switched with the remnants of a weather balloon. DuBose answered that the material was never switched. Still, DuBose was unyielding that there was indeed a cover up. DuBose did not know the real source or identity of the Roswell fragments. However, contrary to what was claimed at that time, DuBose did know that it was not an ordinary weather balloon. So, what was the object that crashed near Roswell? In his book, The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know (1997), Kal K. Korff presented previously unpublished, formerly classified photos and drawings of various components of Project Mogul. Korff claimed that from his photos and drawings, it is clear that Project Mogul was made of the same material as the rubble DuBose saw in Ramey’s office. Thus, Korff concludes that wreckage found at Roswell was indeed from a Project Mogul constant-altitude-level balloon train equipped with intelligence gathering instruments. Korff goes on to conclude that the whole Roswell UFO hysteria was caused by people who did not know the true identity of the retrieved material they were looking at (Korff, 1997). The crux of the whole Roswell UFO mystery has to do with a few firsthand witnesses not being able to accurately identify the exceptional metallic shards and other scrap strewn over a debris field on a patch of sandy New Mexican property. I agree with Korff that there was a cover up at Roswell. Furthermore, I maintain that the cover up did involve an extraterrestrial flying disk. But it did not involve the remnants of an alien flying saucer.

Others

Lee Speigel is a writer and reporter who is the only person in history to produce a major presentation at the United Nations on the subject of UFOs. Speigel conducted an interview with Major Jesse Marcel more than 30 years after the 1947 Roswell incident happened. During the interview, Marcel stated that when he got to General Ramey’s office in Fort Worth, the general told him to put some of the Roswell debris on the floor and let the media take a picture of it. Supposedly, the debris was made up of all sorts of materials. A lot of the fragments were made from materials Marcel had never seen before. So, Marcel put pieces of stuff out on the floor, but he did not put out anything odd or anything with detail on it. The media took pictures and one picture appeared in the newspapers. General Ramey allegedly told the news reporters that the debris was nothing but a crashed weather balloon. Later, Ramey wanted to cover up his weather balloon statement because he didn’t know, himself, what the debris was. Essentially what they did at Fort Worth that day was to make a mock display with a battered weather balloon and let the press take pictures of it. The whole thing was a cover-up (Speigel, 2017). In addition, Charles B. Moore was one of three surviving Project Mogul scientists identified in a 1994 Air Force report related to the Roswell event. Moore maintains that many of the materials used in New York University Project Mogul Balloon Flight 4 bear striking similarities to pieces of the 1947 Roswell crash debris. After Flight 4 was launched from Alamogordo, it was tracked as far as Arabela, New Mexico, approximately seventeen miles from the location of the debris field. No diagram is available for Flight 4 because no data were obtained for it in formal New York University reports (Thomas, 1995). The prominent meteorologist, Dr. Spilhaus, who was hired to develop high altitude balloons for Project Mogul, was associated with New York University (Broad, 1994). Science is a body of knowledge acquired through curiosity by using a structured approach. More importantly, science is a process of becoming less wrong over time. Perhaps the most efficient and effective way to solve the UAP/UFO phenomenon may be to encourage genuine scientists to help fortify the masses of those who currently study aerial anomalies. Today, effectively investigating UFOs requires that more genuine scientists—people who rigorously follow scientific methodology when investigating curious phenomena—join the current ranks of ufologists. These scientists must be able to utilize higher order thinking skills. Higher order thinking skills describe intellectual abilities and skills considered to be advanced cognitive processes. Higher order thinking skills encompass the abilities to analyze, evaluate, and create solutions by putting facts together in new ways (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2016).

Extraterrestrial Hypotheses Proffered

The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) proposes that some UFOs are best explained as being physical spacecraft occupied by extraterrestrial lifeforms from other planets (“Extraterrestrial Hypothesis,” n.d.). The 1947 Cold War hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union produced the initial surge of UFO sightings. The first report of a flying saucer over the United States came in June 1947. Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, sighted several disk-shaped objects near Mt. Rainier, Washington. Arnold's encounter was followed by a torrent of additional sightings from all over the United States. In 1948, Project SIGN was established to collect, collate, evaluate, and distribute—within the US government—all information relating to such sightings. UFOs might have been a real national security issue (Haines, n.d.). On July 8, 1947 Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that a flying disk had crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico during a powerful storm. Later, a press conference was held and it was restated that a weather balloon had crashed. Reporters were shown debris allegedly taken from the crash area. The debris included: foil, rubber, and wood, which seemed to confirm the object had indeed been a weather balloon. After initially reporting that the debris had come from a UFO, the Roswell Daily Record submitted a correction which included a statement that the debris was actually pieces of a weather balloon (Edwards, 2015). During a span of more than thirty years, the Roswell crash story all but faded away. Then, in 1978, The National Enquirer reported the original Roswell Daily Record story again. However, the follow-up correction was not reported in The National Enquirer. When the new uncorrected version of the story was published, theories about an alien spacecraft cover up spread. Around the same time, Stanton Friedman, a UFO researcher, started interviewing several people supposedly connected with the incident. Two years later in 1980, the Roswell Incident book was published. Upon the book's publication, The National Enquirer interviewed Marcel again. As a result, all sorts of hypotheses were proposed. Soon assertions surfaced that the US government was indeed covering up information about an alien spacecraft (Dunning, 2007). According to some, the government refuses to divulge the results of its UFO investigations (Haines, n.d.).

Failure of Imagination Persisted Throughout Investigation

A failure of imagination is a circumstance wherein something seemingly predictable and undesirable was not planned for. My research seems to indicate that unknown unknowns existed throughout the course of the Roswell UFO incident. Specific to the 1947 Roswell crash, UFO researchers, skeptics, and the public did not seem to know that a passive communications satellite experiment using metalized balloons—functioning as extraterrestrial relays—had the exclusive attention of the US government.

Backward Mapping

Backward design or backward mapping is a technique whereby a story is told in reverse to identify the root causes of an issue that needs to be resolved (Center for Theory of Change, 2017). Following is a backward mapped outline of factual information related to the Roswell UFO mystery:

Figure #5. NASA’s ECHO II Passive Communications Satellite (Courtesy of NASA).

1964: NASA’s Echo II satellite was sent into orbit around the Earth. The 135-foot rigidized balloon satellite was injected into orbit as a passive communications experiment (Figure #5). 1961: NASA’s Echo IA satellite was successfully sent into orbit around the Earth.

Figure #6. A scale prototype of an Echo Satellite, 12 feet in diameter (Courtesy of NASA).

1960: A Skin Stress Test of a 12-foot satellite built as a prototype of the full-scale Echo Satellite was carried out on May 1, 1960 (Figure #6).

1959: The initial test launch of a 110-foot-diameter inflatable sphere for the Echo 1 Passive Communications Satellite Project ended abruptly with the sphere exploding as it inflated. Thousands of fragments of the aluminum-covered balloon floated back into the atmosphere reflecting the light of the setting sun. It resulted in the sensation of flashing lights. Along the East Coast, reports of extraordinary sightings came pouring into the police, newspapers, television stations, and radio stations. Many people inquired if those mysterious specks of light were fireworks, a meteor shower, or UFOs (Hansen, 1995).

Figure #7. A 100 foot Echo Satellite (Courtesy of NASA).

1958: A 100 foot Echo Satellite underwent inflation tests (Figure #7).

Figure #8. Engineer W.J. O'Sullivan, Jr. with a 20 Inch Sub satellite (Courtesy of NASA).

1957: By the middle to late 1950s, all the technologies necessary for satellite communications had been invented. All that remained was to demonstrate the technologies and to compare the different innovations discussed in the technical literature (Whalen, n.d.). During that time span, small passive communications satellite prototypes were under development (Figure #8). Prototypes included various sizes and varieties of flying spheres and flying disks that had been experimented with for several years (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1957). 1956: As with many early NASA programs, Project Echo originated as a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) effort. NACA was formed in 1915. The original purpose of Project Echo was to measure the density of the air in the upper atmosphere, as well as to provide data related to the design of future aircraft, missiles, and spacecraft. As with many other experiments, the concept that led to Project Echo had modest beginnings. With persistence, it ended with memorable results. After years of developments, Project Echo was eventually placed on an official list of approved experiments to be launched into space. 1955: John R. Pierce of AT&T compared the estimated cost of satellite communications with the cost of the first transatlantic telephone cable. AT&T was in a better position to fund communications satellite research and development than NASA—whose entire budget was only a few hundred million dollars (Whalen, n.d.) 1952: BoPET balloons were not officially built before 1952 (Baluncore, 2016). BoPET, which evolved from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), was a prototype of Mylar. Passive communications satellites were made by constructing a balloon, or satelloon, of thick Mylar film bonded between layers of heavy aluminum foil. Mylar is an aluminum coated plastic material that was, in the long run, used for US passive communications satellites. During the 1950s, prior to the presence of Mylar film, Project Echo experimental balloons were made from BoPET film. BoPET is a polyester film made from stretched polyethylene terephthalate (PET). PET was developed in the early 1940s, several years before the Roswell crash (“BoPET,” n.d.). Early experimental PET, BoPET, and Mylar balloons had a revolutionary surface. Unlike the spherical surface of a latex balloon, these balloons resembled a slightly flattened sphere. This innovative shape is realized by inflating a balloon made of two circular sheets of flexible, inelastic material—now known as Mylar (“Mylar Balloon,” n.d.). Therefore, early Mylar-like balloons would have resembled flying disks. They appeared to be more disk-like than sphere-shaped. In the air, the novel large experimental passive communications satelloons may have been perceived as extraterrestrial flying disks. 1947: A flying disk (flying saucer) crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. That same year, Project Mogul was being employed as a super-secret operation that involved the use of balloon trains that were equipped with various devices for intelligence gathering purposes. Project Mogul was a classified operation begun by the US government after the end of World War II to spy on the former Soviet Union in order to determine the status of Russian attempts to build nuclear weapons. On July 8, 1947, the public information office at RAAF made the shocking announcement that they had recovered the remains of a flying disk. Only a few eyewitnesses claimed to have actually handled material from the disk. At least one of those material handlers was resolute that the stuff was not from an extraterrestrial spacecraft (Korff, 1997). It is highly probable that the flying disk, unbeknownst to the examiners and collectors of the Roswell wreckage, was a precursor of an extraterrestrial relay device made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) metalized with aluminum. Bits and pieces of materials from the Roswell crash were flown to General Ramey in Fort Worth, Texas. Descriptions of the wreckage shipped to Ramey’s office seemed to describe a combination of the inflatable metalized balloon from a Project Echo prototype as well as parts from a Project Mogul balloon train. 1946: An independent study of Earth satellites by Project RAND on behalf of the Army Air Forces observed that a satellite launch would have a dramatic effect on world opinion and that a satellite might have promising uses as a communications relay. In spite of a curtailment of military research and development funds under President Truman’s administration, subsequent RAND studies of geosynchronous communications satellites and the political and psychological aspects of launching spacecraft continued (Whalen, n.d.). Also in 1946, a panel was developed to study experiments worthy of being launched by V-2 rockets. Prototype development was encouraged. In order for a passive communications satellite system to get funded, it was imperative that the project be endorsed by this esteemed panel. The Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel was formed in 1946 to help select the most launch-ready, viable experiments to be carried aboard captured and renovated German V-2 rockets. The panel was originally known as the V-2 Panel. During that year, Project Echo seemed to be a potential candidate for launching aboard a V-2 rocket. Project Echo was based upon Arthur C. Clarke’s concept of an Earth orbiting satellite system. Project Echo’s satellites were intended to be inflatable spheres with a thin metal-coated plastic skin. In the long run, Project Echo satellites ended up being large aluminum-coated Mylar balloons (Hansen, 1995). 1945: The initial concept of a passive communications satellite system was proposed by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke was the godfather of communications satellites and a Royal Air Force officer who hoped to revitalize the British Interplanetary Society after WWII. In an October 1945 Wireless World magazine article, Clarke wrote about the development of a geosynchronous satellite. Clarke’s article was entitled: “EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL RELAYS.” He predicted the development of a telecommunications system based on artificial satellites orbiting Earth. For all intents and purposes, these satellites were extraterrestrial flying disks. Three fixed satellites would provide complete global communications coverage (Whalen, n.d.). Passive communications satellite makers needed Dr. Robert H. Goddard’s rockets to place their satelloons into orbit. Rocket scientist, Dr. Robert Goddard, died in August 1945. However, following his death, Dr. Goddard’s widow, Esther Goddard, completed many of his projects (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, n.d.). By July 1945, Operation Overcast and Operation Paperclip, two highly secret programs, were established to exploit V-2 rocket knowledge. 1945-1942: Dr. Robert H. Goddard was Director of Research for the Navy Department Bureau of Aeronautics. He was developing and testing jet-assisted takeoff and variable thrust liquid propellant rockets, in Roswell, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland (Goddard Memorial Association, n.d.). 1942: American science fiction author, George O. Smith, proposed Earth-Venus relay communications satellites (Whalen, n.d.). Also, in 1942, Dr. Robert Goddard was placed on contract at Annapolis, Maryland to develop rocket takeoff mechanisms (Roswell Museum and Art Center, n.d.). 1941: John Whinfield and James Dickson developed polyethylene terephthalate (PET). PET was patented in 1941 (Johnson, 2017). The 1947 Roswell balloon crash most probably involved a metalized PET balloon. It would have been a precursory passive communications satellite balloon experiment made from PET. In 1941, BoPET inflatables were not yet totally developed. 1940-1930: During the 1930s and 1940s, Roswell, New Mexico was the home of Dr. Robert H. Goddard. On a ranch near Roswell, Goddard and his team established a rocket research site and conducted rocket experiments (The New Mexico Museum of Space History, n.d.). Scientists at this rocket science test facility collaborated with German scientists about the V2 rocket program. During the post-WWII years, scientists from the Goddard team launched variations of the V2 rocket. 1939: For the most part, Dr. Robert Goddard’s rocket work predated the technology used for the German V-2 missiles. Toward the beginning of WWII, German engineers and scientists occasionally contacted Dr. Goddard directly in New Mexico with technical questions. Thus, before 1939, many of Goddard’s developments may have been copied by German engineers as they developed their V-2 rockets (“V-2 rocket,” n.d.). 1923: Hermann Oberth speculated about the use of geosynchronous communications satellites (Whalen, n.d.).

Conclusion

After conducting select interviews, analyzing existing literature, and evaluating data, I arrived at the following conclusion: During the early and middle 1940s, experiments essential to launching passive communications satellites were being conducted in New Mexico. In Roswell, from approximately 1942 to 1945, Dr. Robert H. Goddard and members of his rocketry team were developing and testing German V-2-like rockets. A passive communications satellite system was proposed by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in 1945. In 1946, Dr. Athelstan F. Spilhaus, was developing high-altitude balloons that would stay at a constant height. Dr. Spilhaus’s experiments pioneered the use of polyethylene balloons which were an important tool related to high-altitude research. Polyethylene balloons were manufactured in Mamaroneck, New York and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Experimental balloon test flights were launched from Alamogordo, New Mexico. The type of rockets Dr. Goddard and his team were working on would be needed to inject Clarke’s passive satellite communications system into orbit around Earth. Members of Dr. Goddard’s rocketry team were living and working near Roswell in 1947. Therefore, it is highly probable that in 1947, an experimental metalized inflated polyethylene terephthalate (PET) balloon, intended for future use as a US government Project Echo passive communications satellite, was covertly undergoing testing as part of, or in conjunction with, a Project Mogul balloon train. The Project Echo precursor had instruments added to it that included some type of temperature sensors to monitor the prototype balloon's skin temperature and pressure sensors to monitor internal pressure. The metal-coated PET balloon was struck by lightning in the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico during a severe thunder storm. The prototype inflatable metalized balloon—designed to function as an extraterrestrial relay—exploded into shreds when hit by lightning. Hundreds of shards from the metal-covered balloon floated down upon a ranch near Roswell. Following is a succinct summary of the Roswell UFO mystery: Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and create products that are valued in a culture. Since about 1945, the US government valued passive communications satellites made of a flexible, inelastic material that was coated with metal. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) had been invented in 1941. In 1946, experiments were being conducted with polyethylene to develop high-altitude balloons. Some of the debris retrieved from a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico had an aluminum-like dull finish on one side, but appeared shiny on the other. The fragments were thin, lightweight, and would flex when struck. That debris field near Roswell was hard proof that scientists had invented a way to coat polyethylene with metal by 1947. Thus, technically, an extraterrestrial flying disk did crash close to Roswell, New Mexico during the summer of 1947. The simplest explanation is the best one.

Reference List

Anderson, L. W. & Krathwohl, D. R. (2016). Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised: Understanding the New Version of Bloom’s Taxonomy. In The Second Principle. Retrieved April 30, 2018, from https://thesecondprinciple.com/teaching-essentials/beyond-bloom-cognitive-taxonomy-revised/ Baluncore. (2016, July 17). Re: Is "Roswell metal" at all a possible material? [Thread comment]. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/is-roswell-metal-at-all-a-possible-material.799097/ Birkinshaw, J. (2017). The Post-Truth World - Why Have We Had Enough Of Experts? In Forbes.com. Retrieved May 2, 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/lbsbusinessstrategyreview/2017/05/22/the-post-truth-world-why-have-we-had-enough-of-experts/#5e7544ef54e6 BoPET. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BoPET#cite_note-2 Broad, W. J. (1994). Wreckage in the Desert Was Odd but Not Alien. New York Times. New York. Retrieved April 8, 2018 from https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/18/us/wreckage-in-the-desert-was-odd-but-not-alien.html Brown, T. (2016). Evidence, expertise, and facts in a “post-truth” society. In BMJ. Retrieved May 2, 2018, from https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6467/rr-10 Center for Theory of Change. (2017). Backwards Mapping and Connecting Outcomes. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from http://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/how-does-theory-of-change-work/example/backwards-mapping/ Clarke, A. C. (1945). EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL RELAYS. In Wireless World. Retrieved May 5, 2018, from http://www.tnmoc.org/sites/default/files/Extra-Terrestrial%20Relays2.pdf Coker, R. (n.d.). Distinguishing Science and Pseudoscience. In Quackwatch. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pseudo.html Dunning, B. (2007). Aliens in Roswell: Skeptoid Podcast. In Skeptoid Media. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4079 Edwards, B. (2015). The Roswell incident: how 'UFO sighting' led to 68 years of conspiracy theories. In The Week. Retrieved April 21, 2018 from http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/59331/roswell-ufo-crash-what-really-happened-67-years-ago Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_hypothesis Federal Bureau of Investigation. (n.d.). Project Blue Book (UFO). In FBI Records: The Vault. Retrieved April 23, 2018, from https://vault.fbi.gov/Project%20Blue%20Book%20%28UFO%29%20 Friedrich, T.L. & Mumford, M.D. (2009). The Effects of Conflicting Information on Creative Thought: A Source of Performance Improvements or Decrements? Creativity Research Journal, 21:2-3, 265-281. Gangi, S. (2011). Differentiating Instruction using Multiple Intelligences in the Elementary School Classroom: A Literature Review. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin-Stout, Menomonie, Wisconsin. Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century. New York, New York: Basic Books. Goddard Memorial Association. (n.d.). Highlights From the Life of Robert H. Goddard. Retrieved May 4, 2018, from http://www.goddardmemorial.org/Goddard/timeline.html Gross, B.W. (2017). Closing the Kecksburg UFO Case Opened Another Mystery – Pt 1. In The UFO Chronicles.com. Retrieved April 23, 2018, from https://www.theufochronicles.com/2017/09/closing-kecksburg-ufo-case-pt1.html Haines, G.K. (n.d.). CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/ufo.html Hansen, J.R. (1995). SPACEFLIGHT REVOLUTION: NASA Langley Research Center From Sputnik to Apollo. In The Odyssey of Project Echo. Washington, D.C. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4308/ch6.htm Jet Propulsion Laboratory National Aeronautics Space Administration. (n.d.). Mission and Spacecraft Library. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from https://web.archive.org/web/20100527211747/http://samadhi.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/QuickLooks/echoQL.html Johnson, T. (2017). Polyethylene Terephthalate: The Plastic Commonly Known as PET. In ThoughtCo. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-polyethylene-terephthalate-820354 Korff, K. K. (1997). What Really Happened at Roswell. In Skeptical Inquirer Volume 21.4. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from https://www.csicop.org/si/show/what_really_happened_at_roswell Mutual UFO Network. (n.d.-a). Kecksburg Crash – 1965. Retrieved August 22, 2017, from http://www.mufon.com/kecksburg-crash---1965.html Mutual UFO Network. (n.d.-b). ROSWELL UFO RETRIEVAL – 1947. Retrieved April 30, 2018, from http://www.mufon.com/roswell-ufo-retrieval---1947.html Mylar Balloon (Geometry). (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 22. 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mylar_balloon_(geometry) National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (n.d.). Dr. Robert H. Goddard, American Rocketry Pioneer. Retrieved April 27, 2018, from https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/about/history/dr_goddard.html National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (1957). Engineer W.J. O'Sullivan, Jr. with 20 Inch Sub satellite [Image]. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://images.nasa.gov/details-LRC-1957-B701_P-00528.html National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2011). Echo II, a Balloon Satellite. Retrieved April 23, 2018. From https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2124.html National Reconnaissance Office. (2007). The Nation’s Eyes and Ears in Space [NRO_Fact_SheetPubAckLaunch.pdf]. Retrieved from http://www.nro.gov/about/nro/NRO_Fact_Sheet.pdf New Mexico. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico Olmsted, K.S. (2009). Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford University Press. Project Echo. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo Project Mogul. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul Roswell Museum and Art Center. (n.d.). Robert Hutchings Goddard: Dreamer, Tinkerer, Pioneer. Retrieved May 4, 2018, from https://roswell-nm.gov/348/Robert-H-Goddard-Dreamer-Tinkerer-Pionee Roswell UFO Incident. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 30, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident Rudiak, D. (2001a). ABC News Radio, July 8, 1947, 10:00 p.m., Headline Edition with Taylor Grant in New York. In Roswell Proof. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from http://roswellproof.homestead.com/abc_news_july8.html Rudiak, D. (2001b). 2. Tough, Flexible, Foil-like Material, with Memory. In Roswell Proof. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from (http://roswellproof.homestead.com/debris2_memory_foil.html). Speigel, L. (2017). Roswell’s Unanswered UFO Questions. In Huffington Post.com. Retrieved May 5, 2018, from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/02/roswell-ufo-crash-unanswered_n_7716828.html Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2008). Science and Pseudo-Science. Retrieved April 22, 2018, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/ Swenson, L.S. Jr., Grimwood, J.M., & Alexander, C.C. (1989). Election Year Appraisals. In This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4201/toc.htm The New Mexico Museum of Space History. (n.d.). About the Museum. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from http://www.nmspacemuseum.org/content.php?id=16 Thomas, D. (1995). The Roswell Incident and Project Mogul. In SKEPTICAL INQUIRER Volume 19.4, July / August 1995. Retrieved May 7, 2018, from https://www.csicop.org/si/show/roswell_incident_and_project_mogul V-2 rocket. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 27, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket Visit Albuquerque. (n.d.). Western Legacy. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from https://www.visitalbuquerque.org/about-abq/culture-heritage/western-legacy/ Whalen, D. J. (n.d.). Chapter 9: Billion Dollar Technology: A Short Historical Overview of the Origins of Communications Satellite Technology, 1945-1965. Retrieved April 21, 2018, from https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4217/ch9.htm

See Also: See Pt I The Children Who Bore Witness to Roswell: Their Tragic Stories Roswell Witness Described 'Morphing Memory Metal' Alien Survived Roswell Crash, Confesses General in Death Bed Confession | VIDEO

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[simonconsultancypage]

Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder

One of the highlights of the yearly business calendar is the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Every spring tens of thousands of the Berkshire faithful make the haj to Omaha, to hear the wisdom of Berkshire’s Chairman, Warren Buffett, and his long-standing side-kick and straight man, Charlie Munger. How did this assembly become such a widely attended and closely watched event, and why do so many people attend year after year? These questions are interestingly examined in a recent book of short essays edited by the wife and husband team of George Washington University Law School Professor Lawrence Cunningham and New York attorney and real estate developer Stephanie Cuba. The book, entitled “The Warren Buffett Shareholder: Stories from Inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting” (here), provides a series of interesting glimpses of what the Berkshire shareholder meeting means to a number of different regular attendees, along the way illustrating how and why the meeting has become the phenomenon that it now is.

  Even those who do not closely follow Berkshire know some of the standard features of the company’s annual meeting, including the hours-long Q&A session in which Buffett and Munger field questions from the audience on a wide range of subjects. Other perennial features for many attendees include, for example, the obligatory jewelry shopping trip at Borsheim’s or steak dinner at Gorat’s, Buffett’s newspaper throwing contest, and a host of other campy or corny features and events. The Berkshire shareholder meeting is not your typical shareholders’ meeting. In the annals of corporate America, Berkshire’s meeting is unique.

  On reading this book of essays, it becomes clear that while these well-known features of the meeting are valued and even treasured by many of the essays’ authors, for many these aspects of the meeting are not their most important reasons for attending. Rather, for many, the value of the meeting is the opportunity to encounter and to get to know other like-minded people who have also re-arranged their lives to spend a few days in Omaha.

  The book’s 40 essays include contributions from a wide range of prominent and not so prominent authors, including, for example, the journalist Jason Zweig; Vanguard founder John C. Bogle; and Berkshire subsidiary CEOs Tony Nicely, of Geico, and Bruce Whitman of Flight Safety.

  While all of the essays are interesting, there are a few gems. I particularly liked the contribution from Tom Gayner, who has been credited with running Markel Corporation, the company of which he is co-CEO, as a “baby Berkshire.” Gayner recounts how early in his career he became a Buffett devotee, and how he came to organize what has become one of the many satellite events, the Markel brunch, which now regularly attracts hundreds of attendees. The book’s essays also include charming accounts from two local Omaha booksellers and how they and their businesses became a regular part of the shareholder meeting, in order to service the shareholders’ demand for books about Buffett or that Buffett or Munger mention from the stage.

  The essays also include a number of anecdotes about funny or interesting things that happened over the years at the shareholder meetings. My favorite anecdote in the book is recounted in the essay by University of Nebraska Omaha business professor Robert P. Miles. As Miles recounts, an elderly women approached the microphone on the floor at the shareholder meeting and said “Mr. Buffett, I only own one B share. May I ask a question?” Miles reports that Buffett answered, “Ma’am, between you and me, we own half the company. What’s your question?”

  The one thing that comes through from reading all of the essays is the fervor that each of the authors feels about the annual meeting. Many of the authors describe their feelings about the meeting use the vocabulary of religion or spirituality. Numerous authors refer to their attendance at the event as a “pilgrimage.” In the same vein, many of the authors say that attending the meeting has not only made them better investors, but better people, as it has helped them to gain insight into the right way to live. In his essay, Whitney Tilson, the CEO of Kase Learning, expressly describes the feelings of the Berkshire faithful as “like a religion” (adding, perhaps aware of how over-the-top this sounds, “I’m only sort of joking.”)

  There is no doubt that Buffett’s and Berkshire’s accomplishments are remarkable, and the fact that Buffett has accomplished all he has while retaining a well-deserved reputation for integrity is extraordinary, but some of the pseudo-religiosity expressed in the essays is excessive. Let’s be honest, none of this would be happening if Buffett had not made Berkshire shareholders a lot of money. As attorney Simon Lorne admits in his essay, “if Berkshire had not been so financially successful, the other endearing qualities would quickly wear thing.”

  But while the zeal of some of the authors may be excessive, their enthusiasm for the meeting seems genuine enough. Over and over, the authors mention how rewarding it has been over the years getting to know the other Berkshire shareholders. A number of the authors’ essays emphasize that the reason they come back year after year is not just the meeting itself, but the various satellite gatherings, side meetings, lunches and post-meeting events, many of which have been annual occasions just like the shareholder meeting itself. The one thing is clear is that the meeting has created its own ecosystem in which a broad community of like-minded people enjoy each other’s company.

  A number of authors note that there is a certain sameness to the meeting itself. More than one author notes that over time, you do start to hear the same questions and answers over and over again. Several authors attempt to suggest that the sameness is part of the event’s reassuring familiarity and charm. Others noted that it may be time for some changes.

  For example, investment manager and author Robert Hagstrom suggests in his essay that the time may have come to change the line-up a little bit. He suggests that Berkshire assistant investment managers Ted Weschler and Todd Combs could get some airtime, or that Ajit Jain and Greg Abel, the company’s Vice Chairman, would be popular additions to the program. For Berkshire shareholders nervous about Buffett’s and Munger’s mortality, these suggestions have merit – better to introduce the back-up squad now, before the day comes when they have to be rushed into the lineup.

  One thing reading these essays did for me is that it made me reflect on my own experience in attending a Berkshire shareholders meeting. (I own BRK.B shares although not nearly as many as I wish I did.) I attended the 2003 event. I did the whole thing. I went to Borsheim’s and ogled the jewelry I couldn’t afford. I stood in line for hours in the hoping of getting a good seat. I managed to meet Buffett, as he was walking into the entrance of the Omaha Marriott. I met Ajit Jain. I also got to hang out and spend some quality time with the CEO and CFO of my company’s parent organization.

  It was all great, I enjoyed it and I am glad I did it. But once was enough for me. I feel about the Berkshire shareholders meeting the same way I feel about Mardi Gras or Octoberfest; they are all great events and worth doing, but doing it once is enough to get the idea. Having done the shareholders meeting once, I feel no need to do it again.

  The authors of the essays clearly had a different experience. By contrast to my experience, they seem to feel almost compelled to return for the meeting every year. Perhaps the difference is that I didn’t connect the same way with the community of the Berkshire people. Or maybe it is that the meeting attracts a certain kind of person, consistent with the way that Buffett has set about systematically trying to attract a certain kind of shareholder as his owner/partners.

  The meeting itself is an expression of the company’s personality and culture. The most devoted of the Berkshire faithful – and all of the authors represented in this book are nothing if not devoted – see themselves in the company’s personality and culture. It is not too much to say that the company’s personality and culture has become part of who they are – perhaps just as they are part of what the company has become as well.

  I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand the whole Berkshire phenomenon. The essays are well-chosen and readable, and collectively they help explain why Berkshire is a unique company, in so many ways.

  The post Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder appeared first on The D&O Diary.

Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder published first on http://simonconsultancypage.tumblr.com/

[lawfultruth]

Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder

One of the highlights of the yearly business calendar is the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Every spring tens of thousands of the Berkshire faithful make the haj to Omaha, to hear the wisdom of Berkshire’s Chairman, Warren Buffett, and his long-standing side-kick and straight man, Charlie Munger. How did this assembly become such a widely attended and closely watched event, and why do so many people attend year after year? These questions are interestingly examined in a recent book of short essays edited by the wife and husband team of George Washington University Law School Professor Lawrence Cunningham and New York attorney and real estate developer Stephanie Cuba. The book, entitled “The Warren Buffett Shareholder: Stories from Inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting” (here), provides a series of interesting glimpses of what the Berkshire shareholder meeting means to a number of different regular attendees, along the way illustrating how and why the meeting has become the phenomenon that it now is.

  Even those who do not closely follow Berkshire know some of the standard features of the company’s annual meeting, including the hours-long Q&A session in which Buffett and Munger field questions from the audience on a wide range of subjects. Other perennial features for many attendees include, for example, the obligatory jewelry shopping trip at Borsheim’s or steak dinner at Gorat’s, Buffett’s newspaper throwing contest, and a host of other campy or corny features and events. The Berkshire shareholder meeting is not your typical shareholders’ meeting. In the annals of corporate America, Berkshire’s meeting is unique.

  On reading this book of essays, it becomes clear that while these well-known features of the meeting are valued and even treasured by many of the essays’ authors, for many these aspects of the meeting are not their most important reasons for attending. Rather, for many, the value of the meeting is the opportunity to encounter and to get to know other like-minded people who have also re-arranged their lives to spend a few days in Omaha.

  The book’s 40 essays include contributions from a wide range of prominent and not so prominent authors, including, for example, the journalist Jason Zweig; Vanguard founder John C. Bogle; and Berkshire subsidiary CEOs Tony Nicely, of Geico, and Bruce Whitman of Flight Safety.

  While all of the essays are interesting, there are a few gems. I particularly liked the contribution from Tom Gayner, who has been credited with running Markel Corporation, the company of which he is co-CEO, as a “baby Berkshire.” Gayner recounts how early in his career he became a Buffett devotee, and how he came to organize what has become one of the many satellite events, the Markel brunch, which now regularly attracts hundreds of attendees. The book’s essays also include charming accounts from two local Omaha booksellers and how they and their businesses became a regular part of the shareholder meeting, in order to service the shareholders’ demand for books about Buffett or that Buffett or Munger mention from the stage.

  The essays also include a number of anecdotes about funny or interesting things that happened over the years at the shareholder meetings. My favorite anecdote in the book is recounted in the essay by University of Nebraska Omaha business professor Robert P. Miles. As Miles recounts, an elderly women approached the microphone on the floor at the shareholder meeting and said “Mr. Buffett, I only own one B share. May I ask a question?” Miles reports that Buffett answered, “Ma’am, between you and me, we own half the company. What’s your question?”

  The one thing that comes through from reading all of the essays is the fervor that each of the authors feels about the annual meeting. Many of the authors describe their feelings about the meeting use the vocabulary of religion or spirituality. Numerous authors refer to their attendance at the event as a “pilgrimage.” In the same vein, many of the authors say that attending the meeting has not only made them better investors, but better people, as it has helped them to gain insight into the right way to live. In his essay, Whitney Tilson, the CEO of Kase Learning, expressly describes the feelings of the Berkshire faithful as “like a religion” (adding, perhaps aware of how over-the-top this sounds, “I’m only sort of joking.”)

  There is no doubt that Buffett’s and Berkshire’s accomplishments are remarkable, and the fact that Buffett has accomplished all he has while retaining a well-deserved reputation for integrity is extraordinary, but some of the pseudo-religiosity expressed in the essays is excessive. Let’s be honest, none of this would be happening if Buffett had not made Berkshire shareholders a lot of money. As attorney Simon Lorne admits in his essay, “if Berkshire had not been so financially successful, the other endearing qualities would quickly wear thing.”

  But while the zeal of some of the authors may be excessive, their enthusiasm for the meeting seems genuine enough. Over and over, the authors mention how rewarding it has been over the years getting to know the other Berkshire shareholders. A number of the authors’ essays emphasize that the reason they come back year after year is not just the meeting itself, but the various satellite gatherings, side meetings, lunches and post-meeting events, many of which have been annual occasions just like the shareholder meeting itself. The one thing is clear is that the meeting has created its own ecosystem in which a broad community of like-minded people enjoy each other’s company.

  A number of authors note that there is a certain sameness to the meeting itself. More than one author notes that over time, you do start to hear the same questions and answers over and over again. Several authors attempt to suggest that the sameness is part of the event’s reassuring familiarity and charm. Others noted that it may be time for some changes.

  For example, investment manager and author Robert Hagstrom suggests in his essay that the time may have come to change the line-up a little bit. He suggests that Berkshire assistant investment managers Ted Weschler and Todd Combs could get some airtime, or that Ajit Jain and Greg Abel, the company’s Vice Chairman, would be popular additions to the program. For Berkshire shareholders nervous about Buffett’s and Munger’s mortality, these suggestions have merit – better to introduce the back-up squad now, before the day comes when they have to be rushed into the lineup.

  One thing reading these essays did for me is that it made me reflect on my own experience in attending a Berkshire shareholders meeting. (I own BRK.B shares although not nearly as many as I wish I did.) I attended the 2003 event. I did the whole thing. I went to Borsheim’s and ogled the jewelry I couldn’t afford. I stood in line for hours in the hoping of getting a good seat. I managed to meet Buffett, as he was walking into the entrance of the Omaha Marriott. I met Ajit Jain. I also got to hang out and spend some quality time with the CEO and CFO of my company’s parent organization.

  It was all great, I enjoyed it and I am glad I did it. But once was enough for me. I feel about the Berkshire shareholders meeting the same way I feel about Mardi Gras or Octoberfest; they are all great events and worth doing, but doing it once is enough to get the idea. Having done the shareholders meeting once, I feel no need to do it again.

  The authors of the essays clearly had a different experience. By contrast to my experience, they seem to feel almost compelled to return for the meeting every year. Perhaps the difference is that I didn’t connect the same way with the community of the Berkshire people. Or maybe it is that the meeting attracts a certain kind of person, consistent with the way that Buffett has set about systematically trying to attract a certain kind of shareholder as his owner/partners.

  The meeting itself is an expression of the company’s personality and culture. The most devoted of the Berkshire faithful – and all of the authors represented in this book are nothing if not devoted – see themselves in the company’s personality and culture. It is not too much to say that the company’s personality and culture has become part of who they are – perhaps just as they are part of what the company has become as well.

  I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand the whole Berkshire phenomenon. The essays are well-chosen and readable, and collectively they help explain why Berkshire is a unique company, in so many ways.

  The post Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder appeared first on The D&O Diary.

Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder syndicated from https://ronenkurzfeldweb.wordpress.com/

[golicit]

Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder

One of the highlights of the yearly business calendar is the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Every spring tens of thousands of the Berkshire faithful make the haj to Omaha, to hear the wisdom of Berkshire’s Chairman, Warren Buffett, and his long-standing side-kick and straight man, Charlie Munger. How did this assembly become such a widely attended and closely watched event, and why do so many people attend year after year? These questions are interestingly examined in a recent book of short essays edited by the wife and husband team of George Washington University Law School Professor Lawrence Cunningham and New York attorney and real estate developer Stephanie Cuba. The book, entitled “The Warren Buffett Shareholder: Stories from Inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting” (here), provides a series of interesting glimpses of what the Berkshire shareholder meeting means to a number of different regular attendees, along the way illustrating how and why the meeting has become the phenomenon that it now is.

  Even those who do not closely follow Berkshire know some of the standard features of the company’s annual meeting, including the hours-long Q&A session in which Buffett and Munger field questions from the audience on a wide range of subjects. Other perennial features for many attendees include, for example, the obligatory jewelry shopping trip at Borsheim’s or steak dinner at Gorat’s, Buffett’s newspaper throwing contest, and a host of other campy or corny features and events. The Berkshire shareholder meeting is not your typical shareholders’ meeting. In the annals of corporate America, Berkshire’s meeting is unique.

  On reading this book of essays, it becomes clear that while these well-known features of the meeting are valued and even treasured by many of the essays’ authors, for many these aspects of the meeting are not their most important reasons for attending. Rather, for many, the value of the meeting is the opportunity to encounter and to get to know other like-minded people who have also re-arranged their lives to spend a few days in Omaha.

  The book’s 40 essays include contributions from a wide range of prominent and not so prominent authors, including, for example, the journalist Jason Zweig; Vanguard founder John C. Bogle; and Berkshire subsidiary CEOs Tony Nicely, of Geico, and Bruce Whitman of Flight Safety.

  While all of the essays are interesting, there are a few gems. I particularly liked the contribution from Tom Gayner, who has been credited with running Markel Corporation, the company of which he is co-CEO, as a “baby Berkshire.” Gayner recounts how early in his career he became a Buffett devotee, and how he came to organize what has become one of the many satellite events, the Markel brunch, which now regularly attracts hundreds of attendees. The book’s essays also include charming accounts from two local Omaha booksellers and how they and their businesses became a regular part of the shareholder meeting, in order to service the shareholders’ demand for books about Buffett or that Buffett or Munger mention from the stage.

  The essays also include a number of anecdotes about funny or interesting things that happened over the years at the shareholder meetings. My favorite anecdote in the book is recounted in the essay by University of Nebraska Omaha business professor Robert P. Miles. As Miles recounts, an elderly women approached the microphone on the floor at the shareholder meeting and said “Mr. Buffett, I only own one B share. May I ask a question?” Miles reports that Buffett answered, “Ma’am, between you and me, we own half the company. What’s your question?”

  The one thing that comes through from reading all of the essays is the fervor that each of the authors feels about the annual meeting. Many of the authors describe their feelings about the meeting use the vocabulary of religion or spirituality. Numerous authors refer to their attendance at the event as a “pilgrimage.” In the same vein, many of the authors say that attending the meeting has not only made them better investors, but better people, as it has helped them to gain insight into the right way to live. In his essay, Whitney Tilson, the CEO of Kase Learning, expressly describes the feelings of the Berkshire faithful as “like a religion” (adding, perhaps aware of how over-the-top this sounds, “I’m only sort of joking.”)

  There is no doubt that Buffett’s and Berkshire’s accomplishments are remarkable, and the fact that Buffett has accomplished all he has while retaining a well-deserved reputation for integrity is extraordinary, but some of the pseudo-religiosity expressed in the essays is excessive. Let’s be honest, none of this would be happening if Buffett had not made Berkshire shareholders a lot of money. As attorney Simon Lorne admits in his essay, “if Berkshire had not been so financially successful, the other endearing qualities would quickly wear thing.”

  But while the zeal of some of the authors may be excessive, their enthusiasm for the meeting seems genuine enough. Over and over, the authors mention how rewarding it has been over the years getting to know the other Berkshire shareholders. A number of the authors’ essays emphasize that the reason they come back year after year is not just the meeting itself, but the various satellite gatherings, side meetings, lunches and post-meeting events, many of which have been annual occasions just like the shareholder meeting itself. The one thing is clear is that the meeting has created its own ecosystem in which a broad community of like-minded people enjoy each other’s company.

  A number of authors note that there is a certain sameness to the meeting itself. More than one author notes that over time, you do start to hear the same questions and answers over and over again. Several authors attempt to suggest that the sameness is part of the event’s reassuring familiarity and charm. Others noted that it may be time for some changes.

  For example, investment manager and author Robert Hagstrom suggests in his essay that the time may have come to change the line-up a little bit. He suggests that Berkshire assistant investment managers Ted Weschler and Todd Combs could get some airtime, or that Ajit Jain and Greg Abel, the company’s Vice Chairman, would be popular additions to the program. For Berkshire shareholders nervous about Buffett’s and Munger’s mortality, these suggestions have merit – better to introduce the back-up squad now, before the day comes when they have to be rushed into the lineup.

  One thing reading these essays did for me is that it made me reflect on my own experience in attending a Berkshire shareholders meeting. (I own BRK.B shares although not nearly as many as I wish I did.) I attended the 2003 event. I did the whole thing. I went to Borsheim’s and ogled the jewelry I couldn’t afford. I stood in line for hours in the hoping of getting a good seat. I managed to meet Buffett, as he was walking into the entrance of the Omaha Marriott. I met Ajit Jain. I also got to hang out and spend some quality time with the CEO and CFO of my company’s parent organization.

  It was all great, I enjoyed it and I am glad I did it. But once was enough for me. I feel about the Berkshire shareholders meeting the same way I feel about Mardi Gras or Octoberfest; they are all great events and worth doing, but doing it once is enough to get the idea. Having done the shareholders meeting once, I feel no need to do it again.

  The authors of the essays clearly had a different experience. By contrast to my experience, they seem to feel almost compelled to return for the meeting every year. Perhaps the difference is that I didn’t connect the same way with the community of the Berkshire people. Or maybe it is that the meeting attracts a certain kind of person, consistent with the way that Buffett has set about systematically trying to attract a certain kind of shareholder as his owner/partners.

  The meeting itself is an expression of the company’s personality and culture. The most devoted of the Berkshire faithful – and all of the authors represented in this book are nothing if not devoted – see themselves in the company’s personality and culture. It is not too much to say that the company’s personality and culture has become part of who they are – perhaps just as they are part of what the company has become as well.

  I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand the whole Berkshire phenomenon. The essays are well-chosen and readable, and collectively they help explain why Berkshire is a unique company, in so many ways.

  The post Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder appeared first on The D&O Diary.

Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder published first on

[jewishphilosophyplace]

Not On Antisemitism (JVP)

If you are a gentile on the left side of the political spectrum and you want to be an ally to Jews, but do not fully understand the history of antisemitism and the politics of Israel and Palestine, you may not want to look to this book for guidance. If you are a Jew, committed or not to the struggle for social justice, you may find unpleasant or awkward a book “on antisemitism” that is not a book on antisemitism.

After years avoiding a direct address to the problem of antisemitism, particularly as it manifests itself on the political left, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) came up with a manifesto and a volume of edited essays on the topic. The strongest selling point of On Antisemitism: Solidarity and The Struggle for Justice lies in opening the discussion to diverse writers, among them Ashkenzai Jews, Black Jews, Latinx Jews, Mizrachi Jews, and Queer Jews alongside Christian and Muslim allies of “the movement.”  The focus of this book “on antisemitism” is not antisemitism, but rather the claim that antisemitism is being abused by “the Jewish community” to silence “criticisms” of Israel and to obfuscate racism in mainstream Jewish society. The strongest essays are those that actually return to the subject after addressing endemic problems concerning the marginalization Jews of Color in the Jewish community. The book’s primary emphasis is political.

On Antisemitism is noteworthy if only for the fact that JVP has successfully captured a prominent visible profile for itself at the far anti-Zionist left of the Jewish community. The volume offers a snapshot view of the American Jewish community at this historical moment after 50 years of Occupation and de facto annexation in the West Bank, creating a single state under semi-apartheid Jewish hegemony in Israel/Palestine, the rise of religious radicalization and racial animosity, the collapse of the Zionist dream as heretofore dreamed as Jewish and liberal-democratic. The book highlights a vocal, even obnoxious segment of the American Jewish left. Written by activists, not scholars, On Antisemitism raises serious questions about the American Jewish community, Israel and the Occupation, the history of Zionism, power and privilege. Alongside these are genuine questions concerning the positioning of the Jewish left in relation to the liberal mainstream of the Jewish community and to larger national and international political contexts and social justice agendas.

On Antisemitism is not a book about antisemitism. One will find nothing to learn by way of a direct examination of its history and its contemporary expression on the right and on the left, the demonization of Jews, stigmatization, tropes of Jewish power, privilege, and influence, claims regarding Jews, money and the media, or the active attempts at excluding Jews from society and culture, primarily on campus. The volume advances no leftist point of view that might shed light on the actual phenomenon from that particular perspective. Not antisemitism, the book’s primary intention is to explore how antisemitism has been allegedly misused to cudgel critics of Israel, to obscure or justify Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and to hide completely from view the dynamics of white Ashkenazi privilege vis-à-vis Mizrachi Jews and (other) Jews of Color including Black Jews.

In this way, the discussion in On Antisemitism pivots constantly off topic, and about this one begins to wonder. Consider the “JVP Statements on Antisemitism” included in the volume as a case in point. The Statements would seem to be a formal institutional position paper in which the opening historical sketch and discussion of Christian hegemony and racial antisemitism are interrupted by the caveat that antisemitism does not effect all Jews in the same way. The caveat is then followed by the claim that, unlike anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia, antisemitism in the United States is not “systemic,” by which is meant reinforced by state institutions such as criminal law and police, and immigration law. The “Statements on Antisemitism” continues to explore the white privilege enjoyed by Ashkenazi Jews in this country and U.S. responsibility for Israeli apartheid. This is all crammed into the two pages of section #1. In section #2, the “Statements” pivots to explore allegedly false claim that anti-Zionism (the struggle for justice for Palestinians, including a comprehensive right of return) is antisemitism. The “Statements” rejects the image of eternal Jewish suffering and the idea of eternal Jewish victimhood, and refuses to equate what the “Statements” call anti-Semitic “micro-aggressions” with “structural inequality.”  The point is not to “divert” attention from power and privilege enjoyed by “some Jews.” The discussion of antisemitism gives way to what in the “Statements” is the motivating overriding concern for Muslim Americans and people of color and for how Muslims and Arabs are blamed for antisemitism (pp.213-16).

Treating its contemporary manifestation as an isolated microgragession is an index to the non-centrality of antisemitism or Jewish lives in this book “on antisemitism.” What is defined as “a starting point” in each of the contributions in a book “on antisemitism” is not antisemitism, but rather “the fight for Palestinian rights,” which forms an integral “part of the framework of our commitment to justice” (p.3, emphasis added). This is why the book refuses even to define antisemitism, because the task would “distract” from “necessary attention” to state power and the structural power of Islamophobia, anti-black, and anti-immigration bigotry. In On Antisemitism and at JVP, the problem with “antisemitism” is that it “shields” Jews from having to confront their own complicity in oppression in Israel and the United States. According to the director of JVP, this is “the proper context” for a “serious consideration of antisemitism” (ibid.).

That JVP and the anti-Zionist left might actually have a real antisemitism problem is suggested by the confession that for the contributors the subject is considered “fraught” and reflects not a little “frustration.” The frustration has to do with how allegedly isolated incidents of real antisemitism that arise in “our movement” threaten to overshadow the “more urgent” need to end the occupation (p.207). The apologetic purpose of the book is how to help “interfaith partners” who want to know how to “deflect” accusations that they are antisemitic. At the very moment in which “Christians and other partners” are challenged to consider the antisemitism they may harbor, the discussion quickly pivots, as if on cue, back to Israel and how “relentless privileging” of antisemitism in debates about Israel and Palestine “stymie” the struggle. The purpose here is ultimately is to let liberal Christians and pro-Palestine activists off the hook when they seek to boycott Israel (pp.209-10). At the same time, people at JVP are “confused” by how to distinguish the fight against “actual antisemitism” with “false” accusations of antisemitism.

No doubt, the confusion is of their own making. The very idea of Jewish privilege and the reality of Jewish power today are vexed ones that require critical care. Long time critics of JVP will not be surprised to see how, without such care, actual expressions of antisemitism slip into this book “on antisemitism.” One contributor, a Christian clergyperson, regurgitates claims about “disproportionate Jewish influence,” “entitlement,” “privilege, and “control” of Holocaust narrative (pp.111-120) while two Palestinian contributors effectively compare Israel to Nazi Germany (pp.139, 146, 151, 201-2). The promotional blurb on the back of the book by a onetime professor widely perceived in the Jewish community to be an antisemitic internet troll only contributes to the sense that there is an antisemitism problem at JVP, that certain expressions of antisemitism will not be perceived as such at JVP. Perhaps these are the isolated incidents, but surely they would have had no place in a volume had it been organized by a movement that understood antisemitism to be a primary topic of concern.

The Achilles’ heel of the JVP book “on antisemitism” is the intentional refusal to define the term antisemitism (pp. vii, 3, 61, 207). In part, the refusal comes from the laboratory of bad or misplaced academic ideas, although in this book the function is apologetic and polemical. One contributor suggests the need for a minimum definition, which she herself does not provide even as she is preoccupied with the challenge of interpretation (p.vii). As for the definition provided in the “JVP Statements,” it is a painfully thin description of antisemitism as “discrimination against, violence towards, or stereotypes for being Jewish” (p.213). That one single sentence is as much as one gets. Failing as it does to define the term with more robust clarity, the volume as a whole slips into a meta-discourse (discourse about the discourse of antisemitism) that quickly gets lost at the “intersection” with Islamophobia and other forms of racism. Before antisemitism is even addressed, the subject has been changed at JVP. A case in point being the author who insists first that there is no need to define the term, but then, some pages later, states that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism “by definition” (p.67).

Jewish or not Jewish, for any radical leftist to be called an antisemite must undoubtedly be “painful.” It is hard, however, to understand in what way it holds, according to the author of the book’s foreword, that “whether or not the accusation is true” is “less important” for the person who wields the cudgel of calling someone an antisemite than whether it is politically effective in silencing critics of Israel. The claim is certainly false that the person who calls another person an antisemite “knows” that the person being accused of antisemitism is not, in fact, an antisemite (p.xi, xii).  On Antisemitism gives no tools with which to make that discernment. Without a minimum working definition, there are no criteria with which to refine the critique of Israel or Zionism, or of Jews and Judaism, or with which to distinguish between true and false accusations of antisemitism. What one is left with is anti-Zionist special pleading.

Another one of the scholars included in the volume, himself neither a member of JVP nor a supporter of BDS, traces the conflict of interpretation back to David Engel’s essay “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism.” Engel’s argument is against the historically anachronistic and uncritical application of a modern term with distinct and traceable origins in the 1870s to create the false impression of an abstract, disembodied, and eternal “antisemitism” (Rethinking European Jewish History, p. 45). Engel argues that there is “no necessary relation among particular instances of [anti-Jewish] violence, hostile depiction, agitation, discrimination, and private unfriendly feeling across time and space can be assumed. Indeed, none has ever been demonstrated” (Ibid., p. 53). All of this is well and true, but a little beside the point. In this particular context, an academic argument serves as a political pretext fundamental to the overall apologetic and polemical structure of the book, the point of which is to dissolve the sharpness of what is considered to be an ideological weapon directed at critics of Israel.

About Engel’s thesis, without a doubt, antisemitism is a retrospective term and it is also true that antisemitism is not a unified phenomenon. It is impossible to speak of any abstract identity persisting over time. The data is too diverse in manifestation. There is no cause and effect chain, and no necessary lines link all of the data into a complete and rounded whole. Historians immersed in historical data submit the data to the splintering effect that is basic to their analytic work. That does not mean, however, that the data do not lend themselves to patterns based on a family of shared overlapping consistencies. One tries to define the pattern while alert to the variations in mode. All of the concepts with which we think are retrospective. They are used to reflect from the present and for the present back on the accumulation of variant historical data. In our case, to disavow the labor of abstract conceptual work is to leave antisemitism unthought. To not define antisemitism supports the ready-made conclusion that today it is an isolated epiphenomenon, not deeply or permanently structured, in large part a figment of the political imagination, nothing very much more than an ideological cudgel.

As for the claims made about Israel in On Antisemitism, it is simply not true that the problem for many Jews who support the well-being of the State of Israel in one form or another is “criticisms” of Israel. It would be more accurate to say that only the far Jewish right in the United States and in Israel judge any and all criticism of Israel to be antisemitic (p.xi). In contrast, most mainstream Jewish organizations and personages have consistently maintained that Israel and Israeli policy regarding religion and state and regarding settlements in the occupied West Bank, are open for criticism. The argument has always been focused on particular forms of criticism that many people perceive as slipping into expressions of antisemitism, namely the specially pronounced hostility with which a people, and now a country, is treated. As the author of the foreward suggests, “we have to change the terms of the question itself.” An adjective designating which “criticisms” are considered by some to be genuinely problematic and which “criticisms” are not considered problematic at all by most reasonable people would have helped clarify the terms of the debate in the first place.

Looking past Israel, the second general purpose of On Antisemitism is to set up “the American Jewish community” as a strawperson. We see this by way of blanket and general condemnations. Already on the first page mention is made against the alleged “[a]cquiescence of and even support for Trump by a number of major Jewish institutions” (p.1). These institutions go unnamed, creating the false impression that major Jewish institutions support Trump. The claim fails to clarify that these were rightwing Jewish organizations and does nothing to reflect the opposition against Trump by so many Jewish institutions. Ditto regarding the ugly language that “certain” influential groups whose focus on antisemitism is “infected” with “Zionist bias” (p.19). Ditto regarding the claim that “some mainstream Jewish institutions” misuse antisemitism for the express purpose of justifying any and all Israeli actions. Two rightwing Zionist groups, Amcha and Stand with Us, are accused of mainlining Islamophobia on camps, as is Hillel (pp.159, 170). Ditto regarding a claim that Jews support the status quo or that American Jewish students side with state power in Israel (pp.113, 178). What goes ignored in Antisemitism is the nearly wall-to-wall opposition against the Trump agenda in the Jewish community from liberal organizations and synagogues to prominent Jewish neoconservatives. The creation of this caricature is part of a self-serving attempt to create a clean friend/enemy distinction, positioning JVP on one side and “the Jewish community” on the other side. Painting this false picture, JVP, which is a more or less marginal group, is self-defined as a true reflection of the American Jewish community (p.2).

Always quick to change the topic, On Antisemitism is an unreflective book and as such does little to advance its own agenda. Marked as it is by extreme defensiveness, unclarity, and confusion, missing from the volume as a whole is a genuine culture of self-criticism. In place of self-congratulation, sustained attention to instances and patterns of real antisemitism in “our movement” would have gone a long way in creating a volume that took its topic with the requisite seriousness that it deserves. The same holds true for the subject of antisemitism in the Arab world, which gets only very little notice and which is mostly glossed over (pp.61-2, 148, 131). The same is true regarding anti-Arab racism in Mizrachi communities, which gets mentioned only once (p.78). These are among the other “difficult conversations” evaded in the volume. While I do not count myself among them, one could argue that Jewish neoconservatives have with more consistent rigor opposed the racism expressed by President Trump and his supporters than JVP has opposed antisemitism from the left.

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism by definition, but one first has to define antisemitism to make this argument stick. In his own classic study, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, the distinguished medieval historian Gavin Langmuir, culling through the data, came to a specific understanding of our topic. He distinguished carefully between “realistic,” “xenophobic,” and “chimerical” assertions of inter-group hostility and hatred. A “realistic” assertion of antipathy towards Jews, as members of an out-group, would be one based on the same assumptions with which one assesses the behavior of all other groups, including one’s own in-group. A “xenophobic” assertion is one in which all members of the targeted outgroup (the Jews, or Muslims) are judged on the basis of a small sub-group among them. In contrast, a “chimerical” assertion about the out-group has no recognized basis in reality (Langmuir, p.328). The classic example is the blood libel and ritual cannibalism. Such assertions would involve fantasies, figments of the imagination, monsters that, although dressed syntactically in the clothes of real humans, have never been seen and are projections of mental processes unconnected with the real people of the outgroup” (ibid., 334).

As opposed to anti-Judaism, by which Langmuir means antipathy of an ethnic and/or religious nature against Jews for reasons that are either “realistic” or “xenophobic,” antisemitism is defined as a unique form of chimerical expression, with origins in medieval France. For our purposes here and today, one criterion with which one could determine whether or not one can call a criticism of Israel antisemitic would depend upon whether or not the expression of anti-Zionism is or is not realistic. Are, for instance, the assumptions applied to the State of Israel or to Zionism the same ones that the critic would apply to the members of any other group, especially one’s own in-group? A second criterion with which to clarify these questions would depend on whether the expression of anti-Zionism is or is not simply a xenophobic form of inter-ethnic antipathy, in which the outgroup as whole is held responsible for the act of an individual or, we should add, the individual for the group. None of this can be settled in the abstract. It depends on the speaker and the action. But insofar as Israel and Zionism are ascribed with devilish attributes, extra-ordinary guilt causing extra-ordinary harm, and chimerical powers, insofar as Zionism becomes the special target of intense group animus, the more the discourse tends to unmoor itself from the practical character of normal inter-group conflict, and the closer we get drawn to the border with classical antisemitism.

Realist appraisals of antisemitism and anti-Zionism would have to recognize that, increasingly, antisemitism is becoming a pronounced problem in American society and in Europe, one that represents a hard challenge for the political left insofar as it takes up the banner in opposition to Zionism. For the left, in particular, this requires a better understanding of Zionism, a term that also goes undefined in On Antisemitism. A central chapter in modern Jewish history, is Zionism to be understood simply as a manifestation of “settler colonialism”? Or was Zionism a national movement, promoting self-determination (auto-emancipation) as the correct political response to the condition of Jewish precarity in the modern period? As a historical form, Zionism originated in the surge of antisemitism in western and central Europe, to waves of pogroms in Russia starting in the 1880s, to massive and violent disruption in the wake of the Russian Revolution, to the Holocaust, to the collapse of colonial rule and the rise of pan-Arabism across the postwar Middle East. Today, the State of Israel is home to half the Jewish people, the only country in the world whose culture as a whole is stamped by Judaism and Jewishness, where Jews do not live in a minority, subaltern or semi-subaltern social status. The tight intertwining of Zionism into the modern Jewish experience of systemic antisemitism cannot be simply waved away and made to disappear under the umbrella of postcolonialism. In this respect, On Antisemitism is not the place to look for a realistic reckoning of a human phenomenon as complex and fraught as the experience of Jewish powerlessness and power. To not see the history of Zionism in relation to the history of antisemitism may not itself be antisemitic, but it is arguably “anti-Jewish.”

What gets under the skin of so many of the group’s critics is how JVP flouts a cardinal moral rule of a pariah people, which is the deep, often myopic solidarity that defines the embattled in-group. Themselves subject to internecine rifts, the most active members inside the in-group tend to circle around their own narrow wagon when pressed from the outside. One could look for this in rabbinic and Hasidic sources, where the love of the people Israel (ahavat Yisrael) reflects a supreme religious value, one that has carried over into the larger Jewish world. No matter how much they fought against each other, Jewish socialists and socialist Zionists, rightwing Zionists and leftwing Zionists, Reform Jews and orthodox Jews, religious and anti-religious staked their position in uncompromising solidarity with the Jewish group and its immediate political interests. Given the history of anti-Jewish prejudice and violence, the anti-Zionism over at JVP faces insurmountable obstacles in the Jewish community. The impression that JVP deliberately sets itself outside the communal tent aggravates these arguments at the very moment when recent governments under Prime Minister Netanyahu do so much to alienate American Jews from Israel with sustained lurching towards the radical political-religious right. JVP and the Jewish right are inverse mirror images to each other. In a co-dependent relationship, neither can do without the example of the other. The one is a buttress to the other and the other to the one, excepting for the fact that JVP holds no power.

JVP has its own perceived problem with Jewwashing that On Antisemitism will do nothing to resolve and everything to aggravate. In their self-positioning, they and they alone are “the good Jews,” the litmus test often being used to exclude “bad Zionist Jews” from various parts of the intersectional left. Given the prominence on the anti-Zionist left which has been deliberately cultivated, they are ultimately responsible for promoting and providing cover for full-blown expressions of anti-Zionism, including those that are structurally adjacent to and slip into actual antisemitism. Under the cover of JVP, one can say under the banner of the anti-Zionist left whatever one wants to say about Israel and Palestine, and now act against any and all Jewish groups that support the State of Israel. How can they be antisemitic, or at least anti-Jewish, when they act out against a broadly perceived Jewish political interest if JVP stands with them?

JVP should enjoy no monopoly on the Jewish left. Compare in contrast what in Langmuir’s words one might call the more “realistic” statement put out by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREG). It is more thoughtful, more nuanced, more focused on a conception of “the Jewish experience” as a basic starting point. The statement does not share the same reflect to change automatically the terms of the debate as soon as antisemitism is raised as a topic of concern, even within “the movement.” The JFREG statement even addresses why so many Jews, perhaps the vast majority of them, perceive the State of Israel to be a vital Jewish political and social interest. If Not Now represents another serious voice to the left of liberal Zionists like JStreet and Americans for Peace Now. If JVP gets a lion’s share of attention, they can only be commended for having mastered the art of agitprop. But much of that attention is of a negative sort. It owes itself to the vociferousness with which they have mangled Jewish norms and attacked Jewish communal institutions with so much destructive heat as to call their moral judgment and political priorities into serious question.

After reading On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice, with what information will the reader walk away with regarding modern Jewish history, antisemitism, and the history of Zionism beyond a cursory sketch and crude caricature? What do we learn about the American Jewish community other than it it supports the status quo, in the Age of Trump?! And what do we learn about antisemitism except that, today, is a microaggression used for political purposes in relation to Israel and Palestine and to shoring up Ashkenazi privilege and white supremacy?

Solidarity and the unified struggle against antisemitism, racism, and Islamophobia in this country and in Israel are all urgent political tasks, and the “question of Palestine” has always been and remains an urgent Jewish political interest. Not taking the subject seriously, On Antisemitism effectively leaves the discourse about antisemitism in the hands of the Jewish far right, and in the more responsible hands of mainstream organizations like ADL that are themselves committed against antisemitism and racism. For its part, the Jewish left has to bring something to the table aside from apologetic obfuscation and intra-Jewish trolling. JVP and BDS are the useful idiots of the Jewish right. Wielding no actual political power, they work to whip up the Jewish right and alienate politically non-committed liberal Jews from social justice work. On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice is wrapped special for Hanukah, a gift to the Jewish right from the intersectional left.

http://ift.tt/2jO0k55

[english102-1059-blog]

Hamilton isn't just looking for Tony awards or good reviews, it's looking for a mind at work.

Fangirls really don’t know how easy they have it, or really fans of anything for that matter. Fangirls all over the world say things like “One Direction is the absolute greatest band ever!” and no one really challenges them on it. They don’t need evidence or supporting facts to back up their claim. They’re just speaking casually in an informal setting expressing how much they love something. But what if you are a fan of something different than a boy band or dreamy actor? Say, something like a hip-hop musical about a dead founding father who became the first U.S. Treasury Secretary. What if beyond just being a big fan of this brilliant thing, you saw it had dynamic potential to impact the American conscious forever? What then? 

Then you write an 8-10 page research paper expounding on why everybody, not just teenage, musical theater nerds, should recognize Hamilton: An American Musical and think about the work it’s doing every night as it sells out another show on Broadway.  

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes the word phenomenon as, something that can be observed and studied and that is typically unusual or difficult to understand or explain fully. This might be one of the better words to describe Hamilton, and particularly the reactions people have had to it. It genuinely is hard for me to explain but I do think it is worth an explanation. 

Let’s start with the music. In a CBS interview, the composer Lin-Manuel Miranda said that he couldn’t imagine a better genre of music to tell the story of our nation’s founding than rap. That sounds like a heavy claim to make but that idea in itself is the foundation in which genius is found and however strange it might seem at first, Miranda has a point. You don’t have to listen to albums and albums of rap songs to know that there is often a theme of “rising to success” or “going from a peasant to a prince”. Rappers talk about working and writing and rapping their way out of an impoverished life to the top and that is exactly what Alexander Hamilton’s life was. 

For a country that now has a growing sentiment against immigrants it’s funny to learn the origin of Alexander Hamilton, born in on the Caribbean island of Nevis, miles away and completely unaffiliated from the American colonies. He was born in poverty to a father in debt who left when he was young and a mother who died shortly after succumbing to an illness. Hamilton is in this complete destitute state without much hope of ever becoming a man of wealth or power and is probably the farthest thing from the elite title of “founding father” at this point. In fact part of the reason he was even able to make it out of poverty was because of another tragedy he suffered. His island of Nevis was struck by a devastating hurricane. Hamilton survived and write this insanely detailed account describing the horror left after the storm. The other survivors in the small town found the writing and started the collection for Hamilton’s passage to America and tuition there. Hamilton literally wrote his way of a seemingly inescapable circumstance at the age of 17 and that is only the beginning of his story. We arrive at this intersection of colonial history and modern music that no one has ever seriously thought of before. Upon first hearing there was a new musical showing-casing rap to tell a revolutionary war story, I didn’t like the idea. It sounded like it could never work. Maybe that’s something a lot of people feel. However upon hearing it you kind of join Miranda’s on this concept. When it comes to rap there is often a sense that the listener can’t keep up with the music. Rappers spit a word a second and have lyrics are carried by strong, energetic music. Even in the lyrics themselves sometimes rapper talk about “how you can’t keep up with this flow” or kind of poke fun at how audiences can’t handle them. Rap is new, rap is progressive, rap is revolutionary. Just like the idea of American independence and thus the birth of our nation. 

It doesn’t stop here though. Musicals aren’t frozen in this vacuum of time when they first surfaced in America in the early 1900s. They evolve with the times, show tunes might always be categorized as show tunes but what a song from a musical might sound like is fluid and as people continue to compose them it’s often a cumulative progress. Keeping this in mind it makes me wonder of Hamilton will be the last of it’s kind or if other composers will turn to rap or even other modern genres of music to tell stories from history and what, not only the future of musicals but the future of telling history will look like. As I write this, I can figuratively hear imaginary people asking “Why does this matter? Hamilton did it, who cares if anyone else does?” It matters because, people now have this really cool choice set by the precedent of Hamilton. Wether they want to read about history and take notes on things like the Italian Renaissance or if they want actually see and hear Michelangelo throw down about how no other chick can compare to his girl Mona Lisa. Hamilton is a space in which art and history equally coexist. 

This leads me straight to another question worth exploring which is, what are then rules when recounting history? If any, and how do these rules differ from person to person, from artists to historians, the unchallenged keepers of the historical narrative. It might seem like a dry question but it’s something that has to come up, considering Hamilton is literally, entirely based of of American history. Though there are a lot go things I think have to come up of I want this thesis of Hamilton’s importance to be taken seriously. This is a concept I thought about when reading an article titled “Alexander Hamilton: The Wrong Hero for Our Age” by Billy G. Smith. It’s aligns with this idea of art and history being brought together because this author recognizes that artists should be allowed at least a little bit of artistic license so long as they are completely rewriting history. They deserve this license because its essentially they’re job as artists. He unapologetically points out his opinion that Hamilton wasn’t quite the man the musical sells him as but despite that he still can recognize this musical as a work of artistic genius. 

One of the reasons I think this musical is important is because there is literally a whole song, the finale actually, titled “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”. The song asks almost in a rhetorical sense for the audience but within the context of the actual musical you get and answer. “Who tells your story?” the ensemble asks? For Alexander Hamilton it was his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. After his death many other prominent men at the time including other founding fathers tried to slander Hamilton’s name for his wildly passionate, unstoppable vigor when it came to his Federalist ideas, abolitionism and plans for a strong federal form of government as well as for the affair he had with Maria Reynolds. Though his wife Eliza had been the victim of an unfaithful husband, lost her eldest son in a duel partly through Hamilton’s doing and became a premature widow she still lived the rest of her life trying to preserve Hamilton’s legacy. She had been wronged by Hamilton herself but still saw the raw determination and goodness in Hamilton past his faults. She was the one who saved many of his letters and writings and worked to make sure, despite his very real flaws, that the goodness in Hamilton was also remembered. That act in itself, the work of Hamilton’s wife Eliza is why we have Hamilton today.

This song’s message is exactly what the title is, there will be people that you outlive and people who will outlive you and you have no control over who tells your story when you leave this earth. However in another respect its message is more specifically talking about this idea of legacy, what it means for these people who have had instrumental roles in history, wether someone will be forgotten or remembered and if they’re remembered will they be heroes or villains and lastly if they actually deserve those titles or not. It is a lot to unpack but it’s the first time in my life something has made me think more critically about the history I’ve learned. History is important not just by virtue of being the past but because of they way the past is interpreted, the people who get tell the narrative win no matter what side they are on.The most common response people will give when asked why learning history is important is that “if you don’t learn history, you’ll repeat it.” and if that is the case than isn’t in immensely important to make sure these historians are getting the facts right? Who will put historians in their place if they don’t get the facts right? Who is here to make sure that doesn’t happen? Who tells the story?  Hamilton asks this question more seriously than any other history class, historical documentary, historical fiction book or movie I’ve ever seen.This song from Hamilton asks this question over and over again until the ensemble’s voices fade and show ends leaving audiences in a darkened to think about it, who tells the story.

-Isabel V.

[naomiarataxpolthe2-blog]

Indigenous Filipino theories

Sikolohiyang Pilipino is pursued not only as a science but also a form of art. It looks into the deep sociological settings among Filipinos that is embedded in Filipino behavior that can be deemed far-fetched from the traditional Psychology of the West. Although it presents a universal understanding of psychology, it adds a layer of distinction of its “Filipinoness” relating to the material and spiritual aspects that owuld better understand the Filipino psyche. Dr. Virgilio Enriquez revolutionized this view that shed some spotlight on the importace of viewing psychology not as a canon, but as a tool for us to create a better leeway to see the apex of Filipino Personhood. Featured in the Sikolohiyang Pilipino are unique traits identifiable to a Filipino: Pakikipagkapwa, Pakikiramdam, Kagandahang loob and Kalayaan. 

Pakikipagkapwa  This is the core value of Filipino personhood. This Filipino idea of a “shared self” is something different from the Western idea of “Otherness”. Filipinos have the tendency to include the “I” to the “other”. Regardless of the characteristics of a person, a Filipino considers another person from the same group to be his “kapwa”, completely opposite to the individuality that the Westerners possess. 

Pakikiramdam

People practicing the notion of “kapwa” are identified by their people-centered orientation. One observes this though people who render service to others under the predilection of being a “kapwa”, hence the prevailing qualities of Filipinos being “matipon” and “matulungin”. When they take into different roles in society, they never forget to involve everyone as a whole, especially in barkadas.  

Pakiramdam is often described as an all-important “shared inner perception” that compliments the “shared identity” of kapwa. It is an emotional a priori that goes with the Filipino personhood (as Enriquez called the Kapwa Personality). Pakiramdam operates behind all Filipino values. This steering emotion triggers the spontaneous voluntary actions that come with the sharing of the Self. It is the keen deep inner feeling that initiates all deeds. Because of kapwa, this Pinoy feeling— pakikiramdam— is a participatory process, where emotions tend to be experienced mutually. Since most Pinoys can boast a “heightened awareness and sensitivity”, Enriquez’ student Rita Mataragnon declared pakiramdam a Filipino “emotional a-priori.” Filipinos are good in sensing cues (magaling makiramdam), she said and pointed out that both, the empathic “feeling for another,” or the talent of “sizing up each other” were active emotional processes that involved great attention to the subtleties non-verbal behavior. Heightened sensitivity is a good survival tool in a society where not all social interactions are carried out with words.

Kagandahang Loob

Kagandang Loob is a general concept that means the beauty of something. In the Philippine setting, it understood as generosity. Considering the notion of kapwa and pakikiramdam, kagandahang loob would come naturally out of the concept of togetherness and concern for other people. It is the “inner nobility” or the “shared humanity” of Filipinos rooted from the genuine feeling of empathy for others.

 These core values: Pakikipagkapwa, Pakikiramdam and Kagandahang Loob are not new to Filipinos. It has been the qualities that identify one person of being a Filipino. On a personal note, even though I have a mixed Japanese blood, I have always preferred the Philippines despite the better living conditions in Japan. I value more the connections I have made with people who also possess the same pakikipagkapwa, pakikiramdam and kagandahang loob as me. I have personally seen how different the Japanese perceive these qualities – and for me Japanese people are too stoic, distant and too unaffectionate for me. I was able to notice this in the different scenes that I observed while I lived there - my favorite social laboratory - the subways - would reveal alot about the strained relations of Japanese people that are comparable to the values of camaraderie and warm-heartedness of Filipinos. 

Books, cellphonesand other distractions are used by the people who use Tokyo subways to kill the travel time, instead of using time time to communicate with their companions in trains. I rarely do see Japanese people boisterously laughing with their peers because it is in their social norms to not do so. Furthermore, their advancement in technology strained them from being physically close to their loved ones. I recall a friend from Waseda University who participated in an experiment about their relationship with Japanese adolescents to parents. When asked when was the last time he physically touched his parents through a kiss, a hug or an affectionate contact, he wasn’t able to answer because it had been a long time since then. I can definitely relate to this phenomenon when I compare my relationship with my mom and dad. Fathers are expected to be distant to their children, however, if you put another layer of “Japanese culture” into it, one would realize that my Dad never hugged me growing up because it is not what their culture tells them. Nevertheless, we might not say our “I love yous” to each other, deep inside we both know that we do feel it. These are only afew of the reasons why even though it is tempting to stay in Tokyo and earn a living there, to start over, make new friends, it will never be the same because I have in me the values of Pakikipag-kapwa, Pakikiramdam and Kagandahang Loob that I have to share to other people as a Filipino, and I can’t do it if the other party doesn’t feel the same way. 

The prominence of these heartwarming qualities of Filipinos is beautifully exhibited in the latestDepartment of Tourism promotional video, where a Filipino “adopts” a foreigner as part of the family being a visitor in our land. And I must say, it is one of the most honest commercials I have ever watched. It shows the true heart of the Filipino that it shares to other people as their kapwa. 

Video: Department of Tourism Promotional Video, “Anak”

References:

- De Guia, K. (2005).Indigenous Filipino Values: A Foundation for a Culture of Non-Violence. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc. 

- Video: Department of Tourism Promotional Video 2017. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaZCGfOWtME

[wolfmaskart-blog]

What You Don't Know About What Is Musical.ly

The Pain of What Is Musical.ly

You should have the ability to fully grasp how these arpeggios fit in the scale positions you use for soloing and have the ability to Musical.ly this. You may use these 5 chords in your music clearly, but not understanding the way to use them with each other to be fantastic songs means your songwriting ability will greatly decrease. The melody is powerful and tuneful. Vocals ought to be very obvious. They should be equally crisp. Wayne's vocals ought to be very obvious. It also has to be remembered that a deep voice is nearly always related to power, authority and lots of confidence.

You'll know whether the speakers can deal with the lows along with the treble with the vocals. In the event the speakers cannot create the bass, you're know and hear if it's straining. Most speakers will not have the capability to take care of this. It needs to be prominent with good headset. Your ears can become your guide. 

Music may be the same manner. Their music usually offers the unbossed gong known as the Gangsa. It is known as non-tonal music. You should begin playing guitar today!

More then 1 musician will appear and you want to devote your coin wisely. It has a tendency to grab a child's attention. It's more a style of approaching music. The background music ought to be very obvious. It should also be clear. 

The very first movement in particular is extremely well-known and is among the most famed movements he created. Mingus too, I believe, couldn't play without swinging. Music enrichment isn't virtually developing superstars. A teacher has the capability to shape your youngster's attitudes toward music for a long time to come, so make certain to choose a person who empowers your kid and makes learning fun. When you've decided that lessons are a wonderful fit for your loved ones, it's time to locate a fantastic teacher. Music lessons might be real-life lesson. Few successfully compose a poem, however.

The Benefits of What Is Musical.ly

No one facet of the piece will help it become stellar. A fundamental understanding of book-keeping is critical to the satisfactory conduct of any company, however tiny. Music theory may be a crucial attribute in somebody's life, for a lot of reasons. It is a rather common phenomenon. 

  When you enroll your child in music lessons, it's vital to understand that you're registering for a couple minutes of day-to-day practice too. In case the kid is musically talented, a tiny counselling, positive reinforcement and crystal clear communication could possibly be required, but it's critical to genuinely work out what the issue is and to handle it constructively. If he or she says they want to quit music lessons, this needs examination. Take some time to locate an experienced, caring teacher who works nicely with your son or daughter. If he or she is talented, do talk to the music teacher about this. Nowadays fewer children can earn any money of their very own in any respect. 

  If someone is musically inclined they will often enjoy these kinds of games since they can practice their musical skills. Virtually every man or woman will come across some kind of game they enjoy playing. Some individuals discover that it's shallow, but this's only the way it is. Or you may be comforted by the simple fact which you didn't need to resort to wearing tie dye. There's much meaning that could be derived from melancholy. 

What you've got to develop is a feeling of deciding whether or not a person rejected your song since it was not good or since it is not the best day to play for them, or if they simply have lousy taste, whatever. It truly broadens your head, since there's so much to discover as you learn the various aspects of music for a whole. Remember that aren't alone. You had to have the ability to play everything. Therefore, what is it and what's more how can you avoid it! When it's the later, then you're all on your own. Producing your youngster perform every time relatives visit (in case the youngster hates doing this) is another wonderful means to prepare resistance. 

You are going to be in good business. Most recording computer software packages arrive with a minumum of one reverb plugin that should work fine. Most importantly, keep in mind that reverb ought to be used tastefully

. 

[hardword-blog]

Am I a Christian, Pastor Timothy Keller?

Am I a Christian, Pastor Timothy Keller? Nicholas Kristof DEC. 23, 2016

What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st century? Can one be a Christian and yet doubt the virgin birth or the Resurrection? I put these questions to the Rev. Timothy Keller, an evangelical Christian pastor and best-selling author who is among the most prominent evangelical thinkers today. Our conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

KRISTOF: Tim, I deeply admire Jesus and his message, but am also skeptical of themes that have been integral to Christianity — the virgin birth, the Resurrection, the miracles and so on. Since this is the Christmas season, let’s start with the virgin birth. Is that an essential belief, or can I mix and match?

KELLER: If something is truly integral to a body of thought, you can’t remove it without destabilizing the whole thing. A religion can’t be whatever we desire it to be. If I’m a member of the board of Greenpeace and I come out and say climate change is a hoax, they will ask me to resign. I could call them narrow-minded, but they would rightly say that there have to be some boundaries for dissent or you couldn’t have a cohesive, integrated organization. And they’d be right. It’s the same with any religious faith.

KRISTOF: But the earliest accounts of Jesus’ life, like the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s letter to the Galatians, don’t even mention the virgin birth. And the reference in Luke to the virgin birth was written in a different kind of Greek and was probably added later. So isn’t there room for skepticism?

KELLER: If it were simply a legend that could be dismissed, it would damage the fabric of the Christian message. Luc Ferry, looking at the Gospel of John’s account of Jesus’ birth into the world, said this taught that the power behind the whole universe was not just an impersonal cosmic principle but a real person who could be known and loved. That scandalized Greek and Roman philosophers but was revolutionary in the history of human thought. It led to a new emphasis on the importance of the individual person and on love as the supreme virtue, because Jesus was not just a great human being, but the pre-existing Creator God, miraculously come to earth as a human being.

KRISTOF: And the Resurrection? Must it really be taken literally?

KELLER: Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19).

KRISTOF: But let me push back. As you know better than I, the Scriptures themselves indicate that the Resurrection wasn’t so clear cut. Mary Magdalene didn’t initially recognize the risen Jesus, nor did some disciples, and the gospels are fuzzy about Jesus’ literal presence — especially Mark, the first gospel to be written. So if you take these passages as meaning that Jesus literally rose from the dead, why the fuzziness?

KELLER: I wouldn’t characterize the New Testament descriptions of the risen Jesus as fuzzy. They are very concrete in their details. Yes, Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus at first, but then she does. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) also don’t recognize Jesus at first. Their experience was analogous to meeting someone you last saw as a child 20 years ago. Many historians have argued that this has the ring of eyewitness authenticity. If you were making up a story about the Resurrection, would you have imagined that Jesus was altered enough to not be identified immediately but not so much that he couldn’t be recognized after a few moments? As for Mark’s gospel, yes, it ends very abruptly without getting to the Resurrection, but most scholars believe that the last part of the book or scroll was lost to us.

Skeptics should consider another surprising aspect of these accounts. Mary Magdalene is named as the first eyewitness of the risen Christ, and other women are mentioned as the earliest eyewitnesses in the other gospels, too. This was a time in which the testimony of women was not admissible evidence in courts because of their low social status. The early pagan critics of Christianity latched on to this and dismissed the Resurrection as the word of “hysterical females.” If the gospel writers were inventing these narratives, they would never have put women in them. So they didn’t invent them.

The Christian Church is pretty much inexplicable if we don’t believe in a physical resurrection. N.T. Wright has argued in “The Resurrection of the Son of God” that it is difficult to come up with any historically plausible alternate explanation for the birth of the Christian movement. It is hard to account for thousands of Jews virtually overnight worshiping a human being as divine when everything about their religion and culture conditioned them to believe that was not only impossible, but deeply heretical. The best explanation for the change was that many hundreds of them had actually seen Jesus with their own eyes.

KRISTOF: So where does that leave people like me? Am I a Christian? A Jesus follower? A secular Christian? Can I be a Christian while doubting the Resurrection?

KELLER: I wouldn’t draw any conclusion about an individual without talking to him or her at length. But, in general, if you don’t accept the Resurrection or other foundational beliefs as defined by the Apostles’ Creed, I’d say you are on the outside of the boundary.

KRISTOF: Tim, people sometimes say that the answer is faith. But, as a journalist, I’ve found skepticism useful. If I hear something that sounds superstitious, I want eyewitnesses and evidence. That’s the attitude we take toward Islam and Hinduism and Taoism, so why suspend skepticism in our own faith tradition?

KELLER: I agree. We should require evidence and good reasoning, and we should not write off other religions as ‘superstitious’ and then fail to question our more familiar Jewish or Christian faith tradition.

But I don’t want to contrast faith with skepticism so sharply that they are seen to be opposites. They aren’t. I think we all base our lives on both reason and faith. For example, my faith is to some degree based on reasoning that the existence of God makes the most sense of what we see in nature, history and experience. Thomas Nagel recently wrote that the thoroughly materialistic view of nature can’t account for human consciousness, cognition and moral values. That’s part of the reasoning behind my faith. So my faith is based on logic and argument.

In the end, however, no one can demonstrably prove the primary things human beings base their lives on, whether we are talking about the existence of God or the importance of human rights and equality. Nietzsche argued that the humanistic values of most secular people, such as the importance of the individual, human rights and responsibility for the poor, have no place in a completely materialistic universe. He even accused people holding humanistic values as being “covert Christians” because it required a leap of faith to hold to them. We must all live by faith.

KRISTOF: I’ll grudgingly concede your point: My belief in human rights and morality may be more about faith than logic. But is it really analogous to believe in things that seem consistent with science and modernity, like human rights, and those that seem inconsistent, like a virgin birth or resurrection?

KELLER: I don’t see why faith should be seen as inconsistent with science. There is nothing illogical about miracles if a Creator God exists. If a God exists who is big enough to create the universe in all its complexity and vastness, why should a mere miracle be such a mental stretch? To prove that miracles could not happen, you would have to know beyond a doubt that God does not exist. But that is not something anyone can prove.

Science must always assume that an effect has a repeatable, natural cause. That is its methodology. Imagine, then, for the sake of argument that a miracle actually occurred. Science would have no way to confirm a nonrepeatable, supernatural cause. Alvin Plantinga argued that to say that there must be a scientific cause for any apparently miraculous phenomenon is like insisting that your lost keys must be under the streetlight because that’s the only place you can see.

KRISTOF: Can I ask: Do you ever have doubts? Do most people of faith struggle at times over these kinds of questions?

KELLER: Yes and yes. In the Bible, the Book of Jude (Chapter 1, verse 22) tells Christians to “be merciful to those who doubt.” We should not encourage people to simply stifle all doubts. Doubts force us to think things out and re-examine our reasons, and that can, in the end, lead to stronger faith.

I’d also encourage doubters of religious teachings to doubt the faith assumptions that often drive their skepticism. While Christians should be open to questioning their faith assumptions, I would hope that secular skeptics would also question their own. Neither statement — “There is no supernatural reality beyond this world” and “There is a transcendent reality beyond this material world” — can be proven empirically, nor is either self-evident to most people. So they both entail faith. Secular people should be as open to questions and doubts about their positions as religious people.

KRISTOF: What I admire most about Christianity is the amazing good work it inspires people to do around the world. But I’m troubled by the evangelical notion that people go to heaven only if they have a direct relationship with Jesus. Doesn’t that imply that billions of people — Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — are consigned to hell because they grew up in non­Christian families around the world? That Gandhi is in hell?

KELLER: The Bible makes categorical statements that you can’t be saved except through faith in Jesus (John 14:6; Acts 4:11-12). I’m very sympathetic to your concerns, however, because this seems so exclusive and unfair. There are many views of this issue, so my thoughts on this cannot be considered the Christian response. But here they are:

You imply that really good people (e.g., Gandhi) should also be saved, not just Christians. The problem is that Christians do not believe anyone can be saved by being good. If you don’t come to God through faith in what Christ has done, you would be approaching on the basis of your own goodness. This would, ironically, actually be more exclusive and unfair, since so often those that we tend to think of as “bad” — the abusers, the haters, the feckless and selfish — have themselves often had abusive and brutal backgrounds.

Christians believe that it is those who admit their weakness and need for a savior who get salvation. If access to God is through the grace of Jesus, then anyone can receive eternal life instantly. This is why “born again” Christianity will always give hope and spread among the “wretched of the earth.”

I can imagine someone saying, “Well, why can’t God just accept everyone — universal salvation?” Then you create a different problem with fairness. It means God wouldn’t really care about injustice and evil.

There is still the question of fairness regarding people who have grown up away from any real exposure to Christianity. The Bible is clear about two things — that salvation must be through grace and faith in Christ, and that God is always fair and just in all his dealings. What it doesn’t directly tell us is exactly how both of those things can be true together. I don’t think it is insurmountable. Just because I can’t see a way doesn’t prove there cannot be any such way. If we have a God big enough to deserve being called God, then we have a God big enough to reconcile both justice and love.

KRISTOF: Tim, thanks for a great conversation. And, whatever my doubts, this I believe in: Merry Christmas!

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/opinion/sunday/pastor-am-i-a-christian.html?_r=0

[simonconsultancypage]

Book Review: The Warren Buffett Shareholder

One of the highlights of the yearly business calendar is the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Every spring tens of thousands of the Berkshire faithful make the haj to Omaha, to hear the wisdom of Berkshire’s Chairman, Warren Buffett, and his long-standing side-kick and straight man, Charlie Munger. How did this assembly become such a widely attended and closely watched event, and why do so many people attend year after year? These questions are interestingly examined in a recent book of short essays edited by the wife and husband team of George Washington University Law School Professor Lawrence Cunningham and New York attorney and real estate developer Stephanie Cuba. The book, entitled “The Warren Buffett Shareholder: Stories from Inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting” (here), provides a series of interesting glimpses of what the Berkshire shareholder meeting means to a number of different regular attendees, along the way illustrating how and why the meeting has become the phenomenon that it now is.

  Even those who do not closely follow Berkshire know some of the standard features of the company’s annual meeting, including the hours-long Q&A session in which Buffett and Munger field questions from the audience on a wide range of subjects. Other perennial features for many attendees include, for example, the obligatory jewelry shopping trip at Borsheim’s or steak dinner at Gorat’s, Buffett’s newspaper throwing contest, and a host of other campy or corny features and events. The Berkshire shareholder meeting is not your typical shareholders’ meeting. In the annals of corporate America, Berkshire’s meeting is unique.

  On reading this book of essays, it becomes clear that while these well-known features of the meeting are valued and even treasured by many of the essays’ authors, for many these aspects of the meeting are not their most important reasons for attending. Rather, for many, the value of the meeting is the opportunity to encounter and to get to know other like-minded people who have also re-arranged their lives to spend a few days in Omaha.

  The book’s 40 essays include contributions from a wide range of prominent and not so prominent authors, including, for example, the journalist Jason Zweig; Vanguard founder John C. Bogle; and Berkshire subsidiary CEOs Tony Nicely, of Geico, and Bruce Whitman of Flight Safety.

  While all of the essays are interesting, there are a few gems. I particularly liked the contribution from Tom Gayner, who has been credited with running Markel Corporation, the company of which he is co-CEO, as a “baby Berkshire.” Gayner recounts how early in his career he became a Buffett devotee, and how he came to organize what has become one of the many satellite events, the Markel brunch, which now regularly attracts hundreds of attendees. The book’s essays also include charming accounts from two local Omaha booksellers and how they and their businesses became a regular part of the shareholder meeting, in order to service the shareholders’ demand for books about Buffett or that Buffett or Munger mention from the stage.

  The essays also include a number of anecdotes about funny or interesting things that happened over the years at the shareholder meetings. My favorite anecdote in the book is recounted in the essay by University of Nebraska Omaha business professor Robert P. Miles. As Miles recounts, an elderly women approached the microphone on the floor at the shareholder meeting and said “Mr. Buffett, I only own one B share. May I ask a question?” Miles reports that Buffett answered, “Ma’am, between you and me, we own half the company. What’s your question?”

  The one thing that comes through from reading all of the essays is the fervor that each of the authors feels about the annual meeting. Many of the authors describe their feelings about the meeting use the vocabulary of religion or spirituality. Numerous authors refer to their attendance at the event as a “pilgrimage.” In the same vein, many of the authors say that attending the meeting has not only made them better investors, but better people, as it has helped them to gain insight into the right way to live. In his essay, Whitney Tilson, the CEO of Kase Learning, expressly describes the feelings of the Berkshire faithful as “like a religion” (adding, perhaps aware of how over-the-top this sounds, “I’m only sort of joking.”)

  There is no doubt that Buffett’s and Berkshire’s accomplishments are remarkable, and the fact that Buffett has accomplished all he has while retaining a well-deserved reputation for integrity is extraordinary, but some of the pseudo-religiosity expressed in the essays is excessive. Let’s be honest, none of this would be happening if Buffett had not made Berkshire shareholders a lot of money. As attorney Simon Lorne admits in his essay, “if Berkshire had not been so financially successful, the other endearing qualities would quickly wear thing.”

  But while the zeal of some of the authors may be excessive, their enthusiasm for the meeting seems genuine enough. Over and over, the authors mention how rewarding it has been over the years getting to know the other Berkshire shareholders. A number of the authors’ essays emphasize that the reason they come back year after year is not just the meeting itself, but the various satellite gatherings, side meetings, lunches and post-meeting events, many of which have been annual occasions just like the shareholder meeting itself. The one thing is clear is that the meeting has created its own ecosystem in which a broad community of like-minded people enjoy each other’s company.

  A number of authors note that there is a certain sameness to the meeting itself. More than one author notes that over time, you do start to hear the same questions and answers over and over again. Several authors attempt to suggest that the sameness is part of the event’s reassuring familiarity and charm. Others noted that it may be time for some changes.

  For example, investment manager and author Robert Hagstrom suggests in his essay that the time may have come to change the line-up a little bit. He suggests that Berkshire assistant investment managers Ted Weschler and Todd Combs could get some airtime, or that Ajit Jain and Greg Abel, the company’s Vice Chairman, would be popular additions to the program. For Berkshire shareholders nervous about Buffett’s and Munger’s mortality, these suggestions have merit – better to introduce the back-up squad now, before the day comes when they have to be rushed into the lineup.

  One thing reading these essays did for me is that it made me reflect on my own experience in attending a Berkshire shareholders meeting. (I own BRK.B shares although not nearly as many as I wish I did.) I attended the 2003 event. I did the whole thing. I went to Borsheim’s and ogled the jewelry I couldn’t afford. I stood in line for hours in the hoping of getting a good seat. I managed to meet Buffett, as he was walking into the entrance of the Omaha Marriott. I met Ajit Jain. I also got to hang out and spend some quality time with the CEO and CFO of my company’s parent organization.

  It was all great, I enjoyed it and I am glad I did it. But once was enough for me. I feel about the Berkshire shareholders meeting the same way I feel about Mardi Gras or Octoberfest; they are all great events and worth doing, but doing it once is enough to get the idea. Having done the shareholders meeting once, I feel no need to do it again.

  The authors of the essays clearly had a different experience. By contrast to my experience, they seem to feel almost compelled to return for the meeting every year. Perhaps the difference is that I didn’t connect the same way with the community of the Berkshire people. Or maybe it is that the meeting attracts a certain kind of person, consistent with the way that Buffett has set about systematically trying to attract a certain kind of shareholder as his owner/partners.

  The meeting itself is an expression of the company’s personality and culture. The most devoted of the Berkshire faithful – and all of the authors represented in this book are nothing if not devoted – see themselves in the company’s personality and culture. It is not too much to say that the company’s personality and culture has become part of who they are – perhaps just as they are part of what the company has become as well.

  I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand the whole Berkshire phenomenon. The essays are well-chosen and readable, and collectively they help explain why Berkshire is a unique company, in so many ways.

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