White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Beware the Armchair Terrorist

by Leave a Comment

Terrorism isn’t what it used to be. Disruptive technology is at work, and terrorism is much more threatening than it was.

The long-running, terrorist wars of the last century – like those of the Palestinians, the Basques in Spain, or the Kurds in Turkey – were relatively contained, both in the fields of operation and the political motivations.

The new face of terrorism is more awful, more random, and has little of the political purpose of terrorism of the past, however terrible its consequences were.

A new generation of robots is coming, which will make remotely controlled terrorism a real threat throughout the world. Add to that threat the profound difference in terrorism motivation.

Yesterday’s terrorism, though heinous, could claim high purpose: It was wholesale terrorism with political goals to be attained by murder and destruction of civilian targets. Today’s terrorism, by contrast, is increasingly retail, motivated by hatred and revenge. Often the motivation is more religious than nationalistic. The 9/11 attacks were the harbinger of this new terrorism.

Now take blind, irrational hatred, as in the Middle East, mix it with killer robots technology, and you have a huge global threat.

In May, the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons convened a first-ever meeting of experts in Geneva to discuss Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, which could be the start of a wave of anonymous killing across continents and oceans.

These new robotic weapons can do everything that a human with a bomb or improvised explosive can do. The old brake on terrorism — that the terrorist would be caught or, more likely, be killed in the attack — could be over. The age of the armchair terrorist is at hand.

We have all seen the carnage from a simple bomb made from fuel oil and fertilizer. Now add to that the possibility that bombs and other weapons could be made and stored for future detonation using mobile phone technology; or that remotely operated vehicles could drive down a street with machine guns blazing.

Then there are drones. The United States has pioneered the highly sophisticated Predator — remotely-piloted vehicles that can destroy a target across continents and oceans with precision. But non-lethal drones are doing all sorts of work, from examining pipelines to determining the views from potential skyscrapers in New York.

Not only will tomorrow’s terrorists have farther reach, but they will also have the Internet to create chaos. Imagine a Web whisper about a drone armed with biological or chemical agents flying over a big city, its effects magnified by public panic. Likewise, a drone armed with a dirty nuclear weapon – its impact is likely to be quite limited, but the public panic over radiation could cause severe incident.

Israel may have been more panicked over the appearance of a drone from Gaza than the rockets that the Iron Dome missile system took out. A slow-moving drone at rooftop level might one day be a greater threat than a fusillade of high-flying rockets.

The late James Schlesinger, a former Defense secretary and CIA director, liked to discuss the British Empire with me and how it had held together. Because I had grown up in a British colony, he thought I could tell him.

The answer is a combination of economics, psychology and formation before the worldwide proliferation of small arms and explosives. It was fundamental after the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 that weapons be kept strictly in the hands of the British. African regiments and police, for example, were seldom armed, and then only for special purposes.

Schlesinger emphasized that all arms developments demanded further developments, because your enemy would soon catch up with you. This has happened throughout history: The British invented the tank in World War I, the Germans perfected it in World War II and overran Europe with its Panzer divisions.

Those who hate the West may use its own technologies to attack it at random with remote-controlled weapons, mobile phones, Google maps, and vehicles invented in America. Disruptive technologies are coming to terrorism — and that’s a horror. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Merger Industry Is Doing Just Fine

by Leave a Comment

Whether Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox succeeds in its $80 billion bid for Time Warner, rest assured the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry will do just fine. Very fine, actually.

There is such a thing as the M&A industry, but it is elusive. It has no trade association and cannot be looked up in the telephone directory. But this virtual organization is a power in the land and very, very rich.

It is made up of investment bankers, lawyers, economists, advertising agencies, public relations tacticians, lobbyists and legal printing firms. They all swing into action like sharks alerted by blood in the water. They are a diverse crew with one thing in common: They do not come cheap.

At the top of the pinnacle are the investment bankers and their pals in the hedge-fund world, who are ready with ideas and capital if it is needed; ready to reap the rewards of arbitrage. These are the elite officers of the Wall Street Brigades; money is their North Star. They have been bred, in the best schools, to expect it as their entitlement, and they are keen to live up to that expectation.

They are retained by both sides in a hostile takeover and, however it goes, their fees will be enough on one transaction to keep them on Easy Street for years. They fly high, shoot high and live high. They are aristocrats in the kingdom of money.

Just below them come the lawyers, droves of them each offering advice on some aspect of the challenge. Each billing more for one hour than most people earn in a week. When working on a big merger, where there are billions and billions of dollars in play, the legal fees run into the tens of millions of dollars — and nobody cares. Outside of the senior management, who expect to get extraordinary wealthy — hundreds of millions of dollars, at least — in a takeover, it is the bankers and the lawyers, denizens of Fifth Avenue and the Hamptons, who make out beyond normal dreams of avarice, and do it over and over.

So it is not surprising that it is often bankers who instigate mergers either by pushing the ideas and the finance mechanism on the firm that hopes to be the acquirer, or persuading a firm that it is time to put itself on the market. Once a target is “in play,” as Time Warner is, anything can happen: A white-knight suitor can come along or the vulnerable company can become an acquisition, as in the way Men’s Warehouse stitched up Jos. A. Bank.

If there is a hostile battle, the advertising and public relations people come in, cajoling shareholders to hold out or sell out. More millions are spent in this effort: No one is trying to save money when the transactions are so large.

The biggest winners are those at the top of the heap: the managements. They own stock options and shares, plus special deals are written to sweeten things for them.

Everyone engaged in the M&A industry makes money when the game is on, all the way down to the caterers, who provide the sustenance when the midnight oil is burning. A merger is a grueling and fun undertaking; the fun of making money under pressure, a lot of pressure and even more money.

Who loses? Certainly the staff of the lesser-partner firm. The conqueror calls the shots and decrees the layoffs, which are one of the principal savings or “efficiencies” of the takeover. There will be less duplication, fewer subsidiary businesses, and fewer facilities that can be consolidated.

The other loser, feverishly denied in advance of the nuptials, is the consumer; the poor stiff who purchases the goods and services that the new entity offers. These may be fewer and, almost certainly, they will become more expensive over time.

Not all mergers are bad. Actually, Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of The Wall Street Journal has resulted in an invigorated newspaper.

But anyone, including myself, who has flown on the merged American Airlines and U.S. Airways has nothing good to report about service, pricing, or frequency. I’ll venture that the M&A moguls are taking private jets — wouldn’t you? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
— 

Barking Mad about Dog Justice

by 3 Comments

You are embarking on reading something that is hopelessly one-sided, patently biased and completely partisan. It is plainly and simply a call for equality.

I want dogs in the United States to be accorded the same rights and privileges as they are in France.

I say that if you want to be born a pooch, do it in France. The French dog’s life is tres bonne.

You may think I am barking mad, but I have been studying pampered pooches for decades. In Britain, people have a screw loose about all animals. But in France, the dog is the overlord of all it surveys.

British dogs may get roast beef on Sunday, if they are lucky. Their French equals drag their owners to the patisserie whenever they feel the urge for an eclair or a napoleon.

British dogs get a bath infrequently in the family tub. But French dogs go to a salon. Sadly, in America, we outsource the grooming to a chain; not the same as a salon for Fifi the Pomeranian or Jacques the wolfhound.

But it is really at lunch and dinner when the French dog struts his or her superior situation: They go to fine restaurants with their owners, and sometimes — Mon Dieu! — eat their meals on the same china.

In England the lucky few four-footers can go to the pub and, with the publican’s permission, enter the hallowed premises. After some unpleasantness with the same publican’s large mongrel, which always blocks the entrance, he or she will find a spot under the table and hope for a bit of overcooked banger.

It is quite amazing how many dogs will show up in a restaurant in France and, after a few snarls, how fast they will settle down to the serious work of begging for food, or waiting in the certain knowledge that if they have the power over their owners to be taken out to lunch or dinner, delicious victuals will be provided with a loving, “Bon appetit, mon petit chien!” Last month in Paris, I saw a happy dog sitting on a banquette in a fine restaurant.

Dogs in France also are conspicuous on public transportation. You see them on the trains, both local and intercity, and the intercity airplanes. Some taxi drivers feel safer with a German shepherd or Rottweiler on the front seat. I have always thought a dog is superior to plastic dividers and other security devices in these uncivil times.

The French indulge their dogs and owners to such an extent that they have special sanitation workers who ride motorcycles equipped with vacuum cleaners, so that the good citizens do not, well, step in it.

But in America, dogs are defendu, not allowed to darken the door. They are classified as a health hazard. You can get away with dining with your best friend outdoors at some establishments. But mostly, the dear creatures must endure confinement at home while we gorge.

My fellow Americans, can this go on? Can we allow the pampered poodles of France to lord it over good ol' American coon hounds? Liberte, egalite, fraternite for the dogs of the U.S.A.! — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

The Short and Important Life of the ‘New Class’

by 1 Comment

The “new class” was a concept in the 1970s that various writers and commentators, led by Irving Kristol, used to describe an important social and political phenomenon of the time. It represented a kind of Fifth Estate, or extra curricular branch of government.

The new class in the context of the time had nothing to do with the use of the same term (sometimes employed to describe manifestations of communist society), but had everything to do with what had happened in the turbulent 1960s. Most especially, it was a manifestation of the opposition to the Vietnam War by young professionals in the United States.

By the time Kristol used the phrase, he had already taken his epic journey from the left to the right of the political spectrum and was already ensconced as the godfather of neo-conservatism.

As I remember, he used his column in The Wall Street Journal to identify the new class and to attack it. I, too, was writing about it and was leery of its effect on energy supply, but intrigued as to whether a whole new social strata was going to change things; whether we were going to see policy by the young, for the young.

The new class was a rump of disassociated and unaffiliated professionals that had been impacted by the draft and were sensitized to the other social issues of the 1960s – the civil rights, the environmental and the women’s liberation movements.

The new class was important because it was smart and it knew how to use power effectively. It did this by co-opting journalism and using – and perhaps abusing — the court system. They were people who had either served in Vietnam or had avoided doing so by fleeing the country, seeking deferments, or, actually rejecting the draft and going to prison.

The latter, predictably, produced a surge of interest in prison reform. The draft-avoiders were drawn into the other social issues of the time. Their most profound impact was probably on the environmental movement. To this day, the environmental organizations influence public policy by the use of media and selective litigation — tactics perfected by the new class.

The new class was in many ways a non-political movement, leaning to the left but not exclusively. It was the result of comfortable, middle-class kids waking up to what was wrong with the society they lived in. Because they had, in their view, felt the heavy hand of government, they were appalled by conditions in black America, the criminal justice system and the state of environmental degradation. Of course, they were appalled by the war and the institutions that supported it, including corporations, government, universities and the military.

With the end of the war, came the end of the new class; not immediately, but surprisingly fast. Its lasting legacy is in tactics, not policy. Its members morphed into a generation of self-interested professionals; its idealism, like the war, a fading memory.

As a social pressure group, the new class has left its mark. It showed how effective a few people with literary and legal skills could redirect policy. As it was not affiliated with a political party, or even a defined philosophy, it could pick its targets. In today’s world of rigid left and right, the power of unaffiliated movements is abridged, if it exists at all.

I used the term “new class” contemporaneously with Kristol, but I am not sure whether I had just heard it and it had seeped into my consciousness. At the time, I thought the use of the courts was excessive and I wrote and criticized the new class. But I was fascinated by how they had gotten their hands on the levers of power outside of Congress and the presidency but powerfully affected those institutions.

Looking back, one wishes the new class were still a force: upset about the wanton cruelty of the immigration standoff, angry about income inadequacy, appalled by the surging power that mergers and acquisitions are handing to a small number of supra-national organizations, and worried about unfettered money in politics. Global warming would be a classic issue.

The new class drew its strength from being indignant but without an organization — just a few good writers and propagandists here and a few sharp lawyers there. They were amorphous and effective. Would they could be reprised.  — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Nuclear Waste Disposal: The French Connection

by 1 Comment

MARCOULE, France – In times to come, sociologists may well puzzle on America’s attitude to nuclear energy. We love our nuclear defense capacity:  its weapons, its submarines, and its aircraft carriers. But we have a kind of national anxiety about the use of the same science, under the most controlled conditions, to make scads of electricity.

Equally perplexing is our duality of opinion about nuclear waste. At every turn, those who dislike nuclear power — often with pathological disaffection — raise the issue of nuclear waste as a reason to give up on nuclear power. However, they do not have the temerity to suggest that we abandon nuclear aircraft carriers, subs, and even weapons.

The point is that whatever happens to the faltering nuclear power program in the United States, it will have nuclear waste aplenty — in addition to the waste which already exists – from the 100 civil reactors now in operation, and all of the military applications.
One step toward reducing nuclear waste is well underway here in France; in fact, it has been part of the country’s nuclear program for 40 years. The French recycle the waste from many of their reactors, along with the waste from six other nations.

Using technology developed decades ago in the United States, the French recycle nuclear fuel cores in a production chain that begins at the La Hague plant in Normandy – the northwestern region known for its orchards and Calvados, an apple brandy — and ends at the Marcoule nuclear site in the southeast, near Avignon, on the banks of the Rhone — famous for the vineyards that produce Cotes-du-Rhone and Chateauneuf-du-Pape wines.

When a nuclear power plant operates, it produces some plutonium, but only burns a small amount of valuable uranium 235, the fissile isotope at the heart of the nuclear power process. The French extract these fissile products at La Hague. Then they ship the plutonium to the Melox plant on the Marcoule site, where they are made into a new fuel for civil reactors. This fuel, which is made from plutonium oxide mixed with uranium oxide, is known as MOX.

The United States was set for world leadership in recycling when President Jimmy Carter pulled the plug; he believed it would lead to nuclear proliferation. France forged ahead, and now China is going to do likewise in a major way.

The United States may not be as enthusiastic about burning plutonium from civil nuclear reactors, but it is, or was, building a state-of-the-art facility near Aiken, S.C., to make MOX, in order to burn up plutonium from disassembled nuclear weapons. In 2000, as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians, the United States committed to decommission many nuclear warheads, releasing 34 metric tons of plutonium and to making this into MOX to be used in civil reactors. The Russians pledged to burn up in their reactors an equivalent amount of plutonium from weapons once aimed at the United States.

Now the Department of Energy wants to put the 60- percent-complete Aiken facility into a kind of limbo that it describes as “cold standby.” Contractors fear this is the beginning of the end of the project, and that it will neither be revived nor will the supply chain be there to go on with it in the future. The department only requested enough money in the 2015 budget for the cold standby not for the completion of the facility. So far $3.9 billion has been spent, and the project is an important employer in South Carolina.

Congress, mindful that the Obama administration did considerable damage to the concept of safekeeping of used nuclear fuel when it abandoned the $18-billion Yucca Mountain, Nev., waste repository as it was about to open,  wants none of this. Used-fuel cores are piling up at civil reactors, their future uncertain. So Congress, on a bipartisan basis, is seeking to put the funds for the South Carolina facility back into the budget.

The House and Senate have voted to do this. The message is clear: Not again, Mr. President.

No word from the White House.

Here in France, they are hoping that the lessons learned from burning plutonium will evolve into even more elegant solutions to the nuclear waste problem. The one certain thing is that nuclear waste will keep coming, and the administration has so far frustrated efforts to deal with it. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

When Less Was More in the News Business

by Leave a Comment

When I first worked at the newspaper trade in Washington, back in 1966, it was a different journalism. I don’t mean the difference in the technology, the 24-hour news cycle, or the ramped up interest in celebrity. I mean something more protean, more organic.

I worked at The Washington Daily News — a tabloid in size but not in mission — and we covered the news in a very traditional way: whatever our news judgment demanded. Although we were a Washington afternoon newspaper, politics was just part of the mix.

The Daily News had one full-time congressional correspondent, and we sent reporters to Capitol Hill when there was really a lot going on. The Washington Post — then as now the dominant paper in town — covered The Hill more intensely, but not with the intensity that it does today.

In short, political coverage was more laid back; not asleep, but not as frantic as it is now. Nobody felt it necessary to record every slip of the tongue, or where a congressman had lunch or, for that matter, with whom. Certainly, nobody felt they should shun the wine list — and few did.

Covering the White House was a simple matter: once through the gate, you could stroll through the West Wing and talk to people. Today, even if you have a regular or so-called hard pass, you are restricted to walking down the driveway to the press briefing room. If you have an appointment, or want to smell the flowers, you have to have an escort – usually a young person from the press office.

Why this is, and what the purpose of this minder is, nobody has been able to tell me. It is so dispiriting to see the equanimity with which reporters accept their prisoner status.

It did not happen overnight, but gradually under president after president. In my time in Washington, reporter freedom has been curtailed at the White House to the point that unless you want to go to the briefing, there is no point in going through the gate. No news is available because you, the reporter, are not at liberty to collect it.

News out of the White House now has to be gained off the premises, on the phone or by the Internet. The briefing room is a dead zone for print reporters, with the television reporters going back and forth with the press secretary, which is what their medium demands. No news is broken except when the president saunters in and things pick up. That is not worth hanging around there day after day.

But the real change is the proliferation of political media, including the dedicated publications like Roll Call, The Hill, Politico, The National Journal and the cable news networks. This means there are more reporters chasing snippets of news. The big issues get lost as often as not while the news hounds are baying after trivia, little non-events, misstatements, or failure to apologize for imagined sleights.

Also, White House staffers and people who work on Capitol Hill have less and less confidence in reporters and are less frank with them. I find very little point in interviewing Congress people these days because they worry that whatever they say will, if you like, go into their record to be dredged up way in the future.

The other great organic change is in reportorial ambition. Back in the 1960s (and I must confess I started reporting in the 1950s), reporters longed to be foreign correspondents; to go abroad and tell us about life in faraway places. Today, with the emphasis on politics, the ambitious reporter longs to cover politics in Washington. So if there is a big international event, such as the Iraq-ISIS conflict, it ends up being covered through politics. What did Obama say about it? Has John McCain been heard from?

This affects both our understanding of an issue, and does nothing to ameliorate propaganda narratives. Over-covering the snippets does not help: it obscures when it should clarify.

A lot of news used to come out of reporters' long lunches with politicians. Now the number of drinks served, as espied from another table, would be the news. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Ocean Power, the Other Alternative Energy, Is Coming

by Leave a Comment

Tens of millions of us will flock to the beach as summer rolls on. As we frolic along the shore we will also be awed by the relentless, eternal power of the ocean.

This power has been tantalizing engineers since the dawn of the electric age in the 19th century. Those great tidal havens, the Bay of Fundy and the Bay of Biscay, have had electrical entrepreneurs salivating down through the years.

Yet harnessing the ultimate renewable energy resource has lagged its two big renewable competitors, wind and solar. Both of the latter are now mature alternative energy generating sources, picking up an increasing part of the electricity market without producing any greenhouse gasses.

Sean O’Neill, executive director of the Foundation for Ocean Renewables, says the technology has not been ready for large deployment, but it soon will be. There is increasing use of first-generation machines around the world, he adds.

In the United States there are complex legal hurdles from activists, who worry that beaches could be impaired and their recreational value diminished, to the fascinating challenge of who in government is responsible for licensing this new use of the ocean. Contenders include the Department of the Interior, the Navy, the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which controls the electric markets.

What about fishing? The states will want a say with their coastal commissions. What about offshore shipping lanes and even recreational boating? The oceans are vast and they already are invaded by drilling rigs, wind turbines and undersea military activity, to say nothing of traditional marine uses like shipping, fishing and boating.

Yet, so far, the problems have been technological rather than governmental. The sea is a great resource, but it is a hostile environment for mechanical and electrical equipment. At present, the nascent ocean energy industry is still sorting through a galaxy of devices for making electricity from ocean kinetic power. These show engineering imagination run riot — gloriously so.

As many as 100 machines for harnessing the ocean are being developed around the world. They can be described as gizmos, widgets, gadgets, devices, or dream machines.

Machine design for ocean kinetic power is at the stage that flight was in the 1920s, and the devices are spectacular in a Rube Goldberg kind of way, at least to the eye of a non-engineer. There are big hinges, designed to flap in the waves, and buoys that pop up and down with the waves, generating electricity through a mechanism like one in a self-winding wristwatch. Just as a person jiggles a wristwatch and it winds, so too the waves jiggle the buoy and it turns a turbine, which makes electricity.

There wildly diverse approaches including one, called an oscillating water column, that uses compressed air from wave action to turn a turbine. Another set of machines is destined to work on tides and can consist of helical turbines, which look like gigantic eggbeaters, or machines that look like wind turbines, but they are sunk in the tidal path or on strongly running rivers. The latter are being tested in New York City’s East River. Anadarko, an oil company, wants to put turbines miles deep in the Gulf Stream.

Ireland and Scotland – the latter the world leader in the ocean power race – are generating electricity from the ocean on a small scale. At East Port and Lubec in Maine and Yakutat in Alaska, small plants are being installed.

As solar power was first used in remote locations, the immediate appeal for ocean power is for remote locations, too. Settlements and villages in Alaska have the costliest electricity in the country.

The Foundation for Ocean Renewables’ O’Neill estimates that tidal will be the salvation of many of Alaska’s remote villages; unlike wind and solar, it would be there 24/7 — in the dead of winter and in high summer. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Memo: Mothers and Others March on Washington

by Leave a Comment

To: ME/CFS Community

From: Llewellyn King

Date: June 8, 2014

Subject: Mothers March on Washington

Since I wrote and spoke about the need for a Washington presence for ME/CFS I’ve received many e-mails which ask, in essence, what next?

Here is a modest proposal of what I think should be done, and what can be done with a minimum of effort and a big impact: schedule a Mothers March at the U.S. Capitol on May 12, 2015.

I envisage about 100 mothers of ME/CFS sufferers walking through the Capitol wearing distinctive sashes; a very dignified demonstration — with lots of handouts for anyone who wants one.

Marchers don’t have to be confined to mothers. But if mothers predominate, there will more media attention than if it is just a general demonstration. I think if everyone is wearing, say, white with a blue sash, and women far outnumber men, that will have impact.

There is a long and effective history of mothers en masse changing history: South Africa and Northern Ireland are two examples.

The aim of this demonstration should be to inform the 113th Congress and serve notice on the agencies of government that the ME/CFS community wants parity in research dollars with other diseases that are more in the public eye – and right now.

This demonstration – and there is nearly a year in which to plan it — should be seen as the beginning of something big and enduring, not just a one-time or even an annual event.

My thinking is: If we can generate the right publicity in the major media (and I mean across the spectrum, from NPR to the big newspapers), we may attract the patronage of a major foundation. This would support the creation of a national association for ME/CFS, devoted to lobbying and educating on behalf of the disease until it is established as a medical priority in Congress, the administration and the media. The need is urgent.

I was once sent a wise saying by the mystic Rabbi Nathan of Bratislav which said, in effect, “You will never leave Egypt, any Egypt, if you start by asking how will I make provision for the journey?” There is a life lesson in that — and a lesson for the ME/CFS community.

Maybe a benefactor with time and resources will emerge to organize this mothers demonstration. But, if not ,why not do it anyway?

Suppose right now you decide to go to Washingon, and make your way to Capitol Hill, wearing white with a blue sash (I choose blue because it stands out against white) and walk the halls of Congress, handing out literature that you have downloaded. That is the bare minimum, and it’ll have an impact.

If an organization emerges before then, so much the better, but it is not essential. But as a general proposition, a Committee of 100 is a well-tested, public-pressure device.

The thing is to commit, as individuals, to doing it now.

There is nearly a year to build passion, to get the local CFIDS associations engaged and to make the grand, seminal event of the Mothers March happen. If not en masse, go alone. But go. Start the movement with your white outfit and a blue sash, scarf or shawl.

The best organizations start with determined, committed, like-minded individuals. The power of one is awesome once that person empowers herself or himself. A leaderless demonstration is not leaderless if everyone agrees.

You asked me what should happen next, and my answer always is “Start something, if you are well enough or if you are an advocate. Just start.


Commencement: What Graduates Won’t Hear

by 4 Comments

No one having asked me to give their commencement address this year, I have decided to give it anyway. Here.

I have been reading reports of these addresses, mostly given by public figures, some stirring debate, demonstrations and boycott. All in all, the passion is wasted because most of these addresses are not worth the fuss, the fee or the honorary degree. They occupy the unhappy space between a Sunday sermon and a sales meeting. Having exhorted the students to heights of moral rectitude they urge on them a manic menu for striving; of getting to the top of the class of life by making a lot of money and keeping America in front of China, India and, on a good day, Germany.

To read these addresses is to be told that life is a marathon in which most of the participants are from Asia and the United States is on the slippery slope to oblivion, and it missed the starter’s pistol shot.

With fine irony, it is many of those who have made a hash of national policies and foreign adventures who feel the most obliged to urge the bewildered young people of the class of 2014 to sally forth and do great things. I would humbly suggest they sally forth and live their lives: less striving, more living.

My commencement wisdom:

Do not be defined by where you work, but by what you do. Working for the dominant institution in your field may sound swell at a cocktail party, but it is almost guaranteed to be less fun and less invigorating than a lesser institution, which is not inhabited wholly by strivers. Strivers can be very tedious.

The same goes for the institution you are leaving. Worry less about where you studied and more about what you learned.

The best thing I can advise any young person is to have a well-stocked mind. It is a bulwark against adversity, a comfort in disaster, and a place where you can find strength all the days of your life; in success and disaster, in helping to heal a broken heart – and there are going to be broken hearts aplenty in this class, as there have been in all the preceding graduating classes.

Life has stages and it is worth knowing them, without being dictated to by them. In your twenties you will suffer Cupid’s arrow, the ecstasy and pain of love, make your professional mistakes, and begin the intriguing business of finding out who you are.

The thirties are the great decade: the idealism is intact, most of the mistakes are in the past, and you have the enthusiasm and energy to make your move in life. It is a golden decade when everything starts to come into focus.

The forties are for consolidating, watching children grow and deciding what is possible.

From age 50 on, you are in the harvest years. Harvest the rewards of being good at what you do, the respect of your peers, while as ever stocking your mind — the permanent joy of learning, and especially of learning that you have not taken the human pilgrimage alone.

I have known too many people who do not know the reward and sanctuary of reading. Prodigious readers, like Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, would read in the five minutes before a meeting, or while waiting for a call to come through. It was the secret life that balanced the public life.

My father was not a lettered man, and reading was not something that came easily for him. As result, he missed the great community that is open to all with the good fortune to know how to read.

Do not fence yourself in — and do not let others do it for you. Do not believe that you have aptitude for this or that on a hunch: Please find out.

I have made a living as a public speaker and broadcaster for many decades. But a lawyer, in a traffic case, once told me that she would not put me on the stand because she felt I was not good at speaking in front of people. The terrifying truth is that I accepted her judgment – and lost the case.

Besides being corralled by false knowledge of ourselves, the other great monster lying in wait for you is rejection. We all dread rejection, not just those who meet it constantly like writers and sales people. Fear of rejection is a great disabler; fight it, you are not unique that way. Treat “no” as the prologue to “yes.”

Good luck. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Elite on Edge in Turkey

by 4 Comments

ISTANBUL — The skyline of this most cosmopolitan of cities also tells the political narrative of Turkey and the strains that may decide its future. Minarets from a thousand mosques implore the skies in the name of Islam while multistory buildings proclaim the secular ascendancy that is the 20th century heritage of this country.

Modern Turkey — population 74 million — was the creation of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who, with his band of "Young Turks," took the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and by force of will and vision decreed that Turkey would put aside Islamic governance and favor the secular ways of the West.

He left a powerful military that has acted, since the creation of the state, as the guarantor of the secular tradition he founded. When the government in the nation's capital, Ankara, has wavered, the military has stepped in.

Starting in 2003, a different kind of strong leader has dominated Turkish politics and has both swung the country toward its Islamic roots and brought about a decade of economic expansion. He is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who heads the Justice and Development Party (AKP), an unashamedly Islamist-leaning political concoction.

Erdogan draws his strength not from the prosperous elites with their expensive apartments in Istanbul and their equally expensive summer homes in seaside resorts, like Bodrum on the Aegean, but from the pious rural peasantry, who have been forgotten in the rush to modernization.

As you move East in this country, you move away from this city with its stylish women and international stores to a land that is more religious and feels more threatened. Or go from the beaches of the Aegean, where tourist girls frolic topless, to a few miles inland where many women are covered from head to toe in black robes, and nearly all wear headscarves.

It is not just that Erdogan has found a neglected and distraught base of support in rural Turkey, but he is also an uncommonly attractive leader. The word "charismatic" is, in his case, truthfully applied.

Watch him on television and, even if you do not speak a word of Turkish, you can see why he has been politically unassailable.

Now his term as prime minister is about to come to an end, as he bumps up against term limits. He is expected to do as Vladimir Putin did in Russia, sit out a few years as president, which has become a more powerful office under a constitutional change.

He will leave behind a state that is more Islamist, prosperous and determined to be an even greater regional power than it already is.

But despite Turkey having the largest military in NATO, after the United States, and being a firm U.S. ally, the West cannot look to Turkey for axiomatic loyalty, as has been the case in the past. Erdogan has defanged his own military — which has been the guardian of the secular state — by appointing officers loyal to him, and loosened the once firm ties with Israel. He has largely abandoned any hope of Turkey being allowed into the European Union.

Turkey has priorities of its own. Just two of these are settlement in Cyprus that will allow Turkey to become a conduit of natural gas from the Eastern Mediterranean to Europe, and a settlement with the Kurdish minority after years of insurgency.

The large gas fields lying off the coasts of Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Cyprus, have geopolitical ramifications for the Middle East and far into Europe — all the way to Russia.

Ataturk essentially held Islam at bay. He prohibited men wearing the brimless hats that Muslims favor for prayer, adopted the Roman alphabet, barred women from wearing the veil in public places and relegated religion to the mosques.

Erdogan has re-established religious rights and not discouraged Muslims to wear traditional dress, while pushing forward an industrial society. Sometimes, as with the recent mine disaster in Soma, where 301 miners were killed, the price of this push to free-market industrialization has been high.

Erdogan has been held accountable, but will almost certainly survive politically — as he has survived corruption scandals.

"The elites forgot about the people and he reached out to them," an observer, who has lived the elite life, told me.

One way or other, it is unlikely that we have heard the last of Erdogan when he leaves the prime minister's office in August.

He may not be another Ataturk, but he has modified the vision of the father of his country and left it straddling two visions — the way it straddles the Bosporus between Europe and Asia.— For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate