Christmas Isn’t the Most Wonderful Time of the Year for All

Deck the halls! It’s Christmas and I love the warmth of it: strangers embracing and goodwill flowing; gorgeous music, particularly the English and German carols; the feasting; and the wondrous excitement of it all. It’s every year’s exuberant moment.

But it isn’t for everyone.

The shut-in and the shut-out have an especially hard time as the rest of us cavort in funny hats, red vests, hugging, laughing, eating (too much) and drinking (a bit too much). My mother, who was a teetotaler all year long, would drink two small glasses of sweet sherry and declare that God would forgive her because it was Christmas.

But it’s also a time when those who are hurting hurt more. When those who are lonely feel their isolation more keenly. And when those who are bedridden feel the bondage of the blankets more acutely.

For those incarcerated at Christmas, the bars press in. For those who have no home, the sidewalks are hard and the shelters are terrible. Homelessness is the workhouse and sleeping in the streets is the debtors’ prison of the 21st century.

There are no mangers in urban America.

Spare a thought among the jollity and mirth for those who are sick, those who care for the sick, those who are in prison, and those who will lay down their heads on a concrete couch maybe after a charity handed out dinner. They weren’t made for that.

The Dog Poems That Warm The Heart

If you’re getting a puppy for Christmas, or if you have a dog, it’s time you read the four greatest poems ever written, to my knowledge, about dogs. They are the work of Rudyard Kipling.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I routinely send them to friends who have lost a dog or, even more sadly, have had to put one down.

I can’t resist the first two lines of “His Apologies”:

Master, this is Thy Servant. He is rising eight weeks old.
He is mainly Head and Tummy. His legs are uncontrolled.

Or this verse from “The Power of the Dog”:

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

After the Tax Cuts, Where Will We Get the Workers?

If the tax cut produces more jobs, as President Trump promises, there will be a labor shortage of gargantuan proportions.

Talking to an executive from a trucking company, I learn that his company is desperate for drivers. Nationwide, there are more than 30,000 vacancies for drivers in a workforce of 3.5 million. Turnover is 90 percent, as drivers seek better jobs and easier work.

A driver makes about $41,000 — a wage that hasn’t kept up with living costs. In the glory days, before trucking was deregulated in 1980, a driver made good money and was firmly a part of the middle class.

Likewise, the contracting industry is hampered by a lack of workers. An architect in a large practice tells me they can’t get contractors for new projects because the contractors can’t get qualified help.

Next step: Welcome back the undocumented? Considering the severity of the labor shortage, one wonders how soon automated trucks will hit the streets. My friend in the trucking industry says his company is watching Tesla with keen interest and is in touch with Tesla management.

At Harvard, I sit in on a Boston Global Forum session whose participants are talking about massive job displacement by artificial intelligence. Optimists tell you that all past automation has led to an abundance of new jobs. But, avers a friend in industry, in the past, automation produced new products, and AI looks like it will just make old ones better. And there’s the rub, as Hamlet said.

The Things They Say

“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked me for my autograph.” — Shirley Temple Black

Mr. President, one of the things you should know, as your first tumultuous year in office draws to its close, is that the United States has the best media in the world. Only United Kingdom media rivals it.

It is a bulwark of the American Dream, of American exceptionalism.

Its role as the carrier of information in the United States is as important as it is outside the nation.

That is why your situation room in the White House has so many news feeds. Often, despite the huge apparatus of government information gathering, it is reporters who tell it like it is first and give you actionable information.

It is because of the media that we know what is going on in Myanmar, Syria, Yemen and Zimbabwe — even inside the royal family of Saudi Arabia.

I would have the temerity suggest that even you, despite your seemingly pathological hatred of all information that does not accord with your own views, and your administration in times of crisis turn first to the media, and especially to outlets like The New York Times and CNN. In your heart of hearts, you know you are going to find out what is happening there, not on the political networks like Fox, One America News and Newsmax, and not through government’s cumbersome channels of information relay.

Mr. President, we are an irregular army of no-particular hue. We wear no uniform and are the antithesis of unity. We live in a world of miserable pay (the television stars are the exceptions), bad hours, stress, sometimes too much drink, and disrupted private lives. We write about everyone’s hurt but our own. But we love what we do and know when it matters; matters globally as much as domestically.

Dan Raviv, when he was with CBS, described his job his way, “I like to find out what’s going on and tell people.” Exactly.

For all of the academic talk about media and society, that is the job –finding out — and it is a great and important job. That is why thousands of news people work through the night, or crawl out of bed at 3 a.m., or risk their lives in places like Iraq, Syria and Congo, and will be working on Christmas Day and every other holiday. That is why we eat bad food out of machines, fly in cramped aircraft and go without sleep.

So journalists do not mind personally if you denigrate us, call our work “fake” and impugn our integrity or have your agent, press secretary Sarah Sanders, do so.

But, Mr. President, we do mind and we should mind, and we should be in a state of incandescent rage with the way you are damaging the truth and hurting America at home and, especially, abroad. We do mind and should mind and keep minding when you put journalists’ lives at risk in distant and hostile places.

And we should mind, and you should mind, when you and Sanders give aid and comfort to criminal coddlers, dictators, kleptocratic governments and oppressive regimes.

This scum, these men and women who trash decency as the inherent right of power, now fear the scrutiny of media less. They dismiss the incriminating as “fake.” It happens in Ankara, Beijing, Budapest, Damascus, Moscow, Nairobi, Riyadh and many other places.

You have provided the world’s malfeasants with the great blanket rejoinder: fake.

Everything not laudatory to the absuers is fake and the messengers, the journalists, trade in untruth and should be treated accordingly — as concoctors, fabricators, liars, spies and even traitors.

Mr. President, you have damaged the world’s safety valve and given huge comfort to the enemies of decency, openness and democracy.

You have armed the dictators with a pernicious weapon by undermining the freedom of the press to find out what is going on and publish it. You have spread the suffering of the politcal prisoner in distant jails and all who are suffering the brutality of oppression. Their hope is often only the faint light cast by inquiring media.

A great shame on you, Mr. President.

Photo credit: Jon S., “Newspapers BW” Used under license Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

The key player in one of the greatest sex scandals, Christine Keeler, died on Dec. 4.

When it comes to sex scandals, nothing which has been revealed lately, has anything on Britain’s Profumo Scandal of the early 1960s. The cast was incredible: two nubile and very sexy young women, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies; a society osteopath, Dr. Stephen Ward, who organized sex parties for men at the top; including the minister of war, John Profumo; a KGB officer at the Soviet Embassy, Yevgeny Ivanov; and Lord Astor, a leading aristocrat.

The set: Cliveden, Lord Astor’s country estate.

The unraveling: Christine’s two earlier lovers got into a fight and shots were fired outside of Ward’s home. Britain’s libel laws were very strict, and the extent of the sex scandal did not break in the newspapers until the rumors were published in the United States. The security services had already warned Profumo that he was sharing Christine with a Soviet spy, and he ended his affair with her.

The unforgivable factor: Profumo lied to the House of Commons and weeks later had to resign. He left the scene for social work in the East End of London, which he did for the rest of his life.

I met Christine and Mandy at the offices of The Sunday Mirror in 1963. My opinion: Christine was one of the most beautiful and intriguing women I have ever laid eyes on. She had a mystical quality, a Mona Lisa.

Mandy was less attractive, but bubbly and exuded fun. She was a good time-girl, who liked parties and sex by her own admission.

Christine averred these were her interests, too. But she was more: a beautiful, tragic child. She was just 19 and hoped to be model.

When it all came tumbling down, Ward was convicted of living off immoral earnings and committed suicide. Mandy married three times, lived in Israel and the United States, and was involved in the London theater. Christine began a huge and tragic slide that two marriages and two children failed to arrest. When she died, she was living in public housing; fat and raddled, all traces of her daunting beauty gone.

Lord Astor left England for the United States while the scandal cooled.

I always wished that Christine would have thrown her head of dark hair back and said, “I did it and I loved it.” Mandy more of less did.

Scandals don’t have happy endings, laced as they are with hypocrisy and betrayal. Everyone betrayed everyone in the Profumo Scandal. Christine was the most betrayed.

The Unexpected Consequence of Bitcoin Energy Hogging

The bitcoin fever — along with all of the other cryptocurrencies that blockchain technology has made possible — has one interesting consequence: a huge new demand for electricity.

Bitcoin miners, the operators who seek to create new entries and to verify the chain and both to make money and to protect from fraud, use staggering amounts of computing and staggering amounts of energy, including to cool the supercomputers.

But the electric bonanza won’t benefit all the electric utilities: The server farms follow the lowest cost for power. Therefore, electric companies with very cheap power, as those in the Northwest with hydropower, are the winners. But all the winners aren’t domestic: Some are likely to be overseas, and Iceland is a strong candidate to host the next rash of server farms.

Environmentalists are calling this a disaster. If cryptocurrency growth continues at its present wild speed, more electricity is likely to be generated with coal, especially outside of the United States.

It is the great growth area for electricity. While natural gas is becoming dominant in the United States, poor countries which want to jump on the high-tech bandwagon, like Poland, could be burning vast quantities of coal.

See it as the real-life consequences of something that only exists in cyberspace, a ghost materializing. The winner maybe Iceland with mega hydro available.

The Things They Say

“Work is much more fun than fun.” — Noel Coward (1899-1973), English playwright, actor and composer.

Some years are indelibly etched into history, like 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; 1964, with the Civil Rights Act; and 1968, with the anti-war demonstrations.

Such a year may be 2017, not only because of Donald Trump’s presidency but also because of revolutionary changes in the way we live and work that aren’t directly produced or ratified by politics.

Here are some of the takeaways:

• The uprising of women against men in power who have harassed them, assaulted them and sometimes raped them. Nothing quite like this has happened since women got the vote. The victims have already wrought massive changes in cinema, journalism and Congress: Great men have fallen, and fallen hard. Can the titans of Wall Street and the ogres of the C-Suite be far behind?
• This Christmas, more people will buy online than ever before. Delivery systems will be stretched, from the U.S. Postal Service to FedEx, which is why Amazon and others are looking at new ways of getting stuff to you. There will be bottlenecks: Goods don’t come by wire, yet. The old way is not geared for the new.
• The sedan car — the basic automobile that has been with us since an engine was bolted in a carriage — is in retreat. Incredibly, the great top-end manufacturers, from Porsche to Rolls Royce and even Lamborghini, are offering SUVs. They win for rugged feel, headroom and, with all-wheel drive, they’ll plow through snow and mud. In the West, luxury pickups are claiming more drivers every year for the same reasons.
• No longer are electric vehicles going to be for the gung-ho few environmentalists. Even as the big automakers are gearing up for more SUV production, they’re tooling up for electrification on a grand scale, although the pace of that is uncertain. Stung by the success of Tesla, the all-electric play, General Motors is hoping to get out in front: It is building on its all-electric Volt. Volvo is going all-electric and others want to hedge the SUV bet. The impediments: the speed of battery development and new user-friendly charging.
• The money we have known may not be the money we are going to know going forward. In currency circles, there is revolution going on about a technology called “blockchain.” Its advocates, like Perianne Boring, founder and president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, believe it will usher in a new kind of currency that is safe and transparent. A few are making fortunes out of bitcoin, which has risen 1,000 percent in value this year so far. A fistful of new currencies are offered — and even bankrupt Venezuela is trying to change its luck with cryptocurrency. For those in the know, blockchain is the new gold. Will it glitter?
• The proposed merger between CVS, a drugstore chain, and Aetna, an insurance giant, may be one of the few mergers that might really benefit the consumer as well as the stockholders and managers. It will lower drug prices because both the drug retailer and the paymaster will be at the same counter. Expect this new kind of health provider to drive hospital charges toward standardization.

This holiday season, consider the changes in the way you live now. Watch out for whom and how you kiss under the mistletoe, and for how internet purchases get to you. If a new car is in store for you in 2018, a difficult choice may be to venture electric, go SUV or stay with a sleek sedan. And will you pay for it with the old currency or the new-fangled cryptocurrency?

Happy holidays!

Photo: “The Moment”, credit: Stephen Willis. This photo is used under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.

The new president of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has one thing going for him. Maybe it is the only thing going for him.

He may just remember how it was when Zimbabwe was a functioning country; when it was the jewel of Africa, as well as being the breadbasket in its neighborhood; when it was peaceful and kind; and when the future beckoned as it did nowhere else in Africa. When it was the Camelot of Africa.

At 75, he is old enough to remember that era. If he keeps that memory in mind, he may be able to start his tortured and failed country back on the path toward normalcy. At present there is no currency, 90 percent unemployment and up to a third of Zimbabwe’s adults are living in neighboring countries, political and economic refugees. Hunger is as constant as the rising and setting of the sun on the beautiful savanna.

He will have to unlearn the lessons he learned so well as the right hand of the fallen dictator Robert Mugabe.

I can write this because I have that memory of a country of peace and plenty. I was there.

It was my country. It was where I was born and went to school. I remember its hopefulness, and I remember its wrongheadedness as a British colony that thought it would survive in perpetuity.

I was there and I remember the good and the less so.

I remember as a youngster, maybe 11 years old, writing “passes” so that an African servant or friend could be free to roam in white areas at night.

But I also remember during that time when Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, was linked to its neighbors in the Central African Federation, how the prime minister drove his own car and picked up hitchhikers. No security. No worries. No color barrier.

I learned about this firsthand. One day, as I stood outside my home, hitching a ride to school (sometimes I walked the three miles), a large black car (a British Humber Super Snipe, made by the Rootes Group) pulled up and the driver said, “Jump in.” It was Sir Roy Welensky, the prime minister. No security, no police. I was 14 years old, and it was the first of many rides with him.

But as Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, said in 1960, the winds of change were blowing and it was clear that Southern Rhodesia had to change. The steps toward change came in the late 1950s, but they were small. Racial barriers were relaxed in law, if not in practice, but an indigenous African political movement was nascent. I knew its founders; gradual change was the goal in keeping with the peaceful tenor of the country.

But Robert Mugabe and an extreme element had decamped for training in China, North Korea and Egypt. The struggle had been internationalized. The African leaders, especially the young Mugabe, were indoctrinated with communism. Dictatorship was the creed, command economies the way to go.

Mugabe came to power after a civil war that was bloody and damaging, orchestrated by Ian Smith, the last white prime minister, who played to his base of frightened whites and their supporters in Britain and the United States. Change would have come but without Smith, it might have come without a war.

Mugabe’s rule began in 1980, after a London-brokered peace conference. While he said nice things about all the people living in what is now called Zimbabwe, he had another agenda.

In 1983 Mugabe, a Shona, sent his dreaded Fifth Brigade (a private army trained by North Koreans) into the south of the country, known as Matabeleland. It was the home of his political opposition and a rival tribe, the Ndebele. The whole ghastly apparatus of genocide was employed: murder, torture, rape and starvation.

Somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 people died.

Mugabe had shown his iron fist. At his side: Mnangagwa. Can he now forget the murder, the corruption, the repression and the devastation and remember the time when things were otherwise?

Mnangagwa is old enough to remember, but he also is a man schooled in dictatorship, with blood as well as memory in his toolbox.

Photo: Emmerson D. Mnangagwa, Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs of Zimbabwe during High Level Segment of the 25th Session of the Human Rights Council. 5 March 2014. UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré. Used under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Fake news in Europe does not mean what it means in the White House. It means Russia and it means a clear-and- present danger.

That was the message loud and clear at the annual congress of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ) in the country’s capital last week. The rubric of “fake news” covers a parcel of Russian subversion, from phony news to staged events with surrogate players and stunts, such as sending in Russians posing as skinheads to imply the presence of fascists when none are there.

To Europe – especially to those countries near or bordering Russia — the threat is most keenly felt. At the AEJ congress, speaker after speaker spoke of it not in abstract terms, but as part of a continuing struggle.

Russia is waging its war with Europe, using new tools, like social media, but with old KGB tactics, according to Marius Laurinavicius, senior expert at the Vilnius Institute of Policy Analysis. “We are at war with Russia. It’s a different war: There are no tanks or fighters. It’s their perception, not mine,” he said.

The three Baltic nations — Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia — are under relentless attack by Russian disinformation and dirty tricks.

Whereas much of the world is indifferent to Russia’s seizing of Crimea, the insurgency in eastern Ukraine, and Russian troops in Georgia, to the Baltics, those acts are a scenario for their re-occupation.

When the Baltics were part of the Soviet Union, they suffered in ways not fully comprehended elsewhere. In Vilnius, for example, the former KGB headquarters is a museum of horror, open to the public. Here are the torture chambers and the execution cell. Those who were not killed in this building, right in the center of town, were shipped to Siberia — an incredible 300,000 Lithuanians out of a population of just under 3 million.

President Vladimir Putin has said Russia is entitled to come to the aid of any Russian-speaking minority which is being maltreated: his rationale for invading Crimea. All three Baltic states have Russian-speaking minority populations listening to and watching Russian radio and television broadcasting ceaselessly fake news to stir them up and denigrate their host countries.

At the AEJ congress there were tales of Russian subversion across Europe, from the French and German elections to the attempted Catalonian secession in Spain. Russia has a huge apparatus for fomenting trouble in the democracies, according to Brian Whitmore of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Thousands of people working on fake news in dozens of languages, factories of lies.

Why does Russia do it? One reason is that Russia is deeply unhappy at having NATO on its borders, fanning an old Russian paranoia about the countries to its west. Another, according to Whitmore, is that “Russia is doing to the West what it believes the West is doing to it: It believes the West is trying to undermine it.”

At the AEJ congress a year ago, in Kilkenny, Ireland, the buzz was all about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and his likely impact in Europe. This year in Vilnius, less so. The big issue is Russia and how the media can deal with the Russian propaganda onslaught, sorting out the real from the fake. It is a daily challenge for Europe’s journalists: Is it a scoop or a state-sponsored lie?

Delegates heard from Laurinavicius that the Putin administration in Moscow is a kind of c-suite of corruption, built around the old KGB (where Putin was No. 2 in East Germany), mixed with the Russian Mafia and collaborating oligarchs. Taken together a potency of evil, seeking to make mischief and possibly to conquer weak and unprepared democracies by lies and fakery.

Photo: A newspaper kiosk on Savanoriu Avenue in Vilnius Credit: Umnik. Creative Commons License.