Never Forget

I observed the event by watching a tour of the facility on YouTube, and I’ve spent some time reading, thinking and writing about the Holocaust over the past five years.  For those of you that want to learn more, I highly recommend The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees.  Rees meticulously researched this horrific stain on humanity and was able to access sources heretofore unavailable from the Eastern Bloc countries.  In film, Son of Saul captured the life of man that worked a sondercommando at Auschwitz and is a fine film. 

But the most provocative and relevant film was Austerlitz, a documentary that did not get wide distribution and is available for rental for $5 on Vimeo.  The film shows visitors at Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/21/austerlitz-review-holocaust-tourism-documentary-sergei-loznitsa).  What strikes one about the film is the irreverence with which young people act while touring these places, sometimes laughing and joking as they walk through.  It is a most relevant film today and made me realize that we are forgetting.

As the survivors of the Holocaust dwindle, along with the survivors of the Stalin terrors, the horrors of fascism and Communism are fading rapidly.

We are seeing it play out every day.  Anti-semites are not only out in the open but run rampant on college campuses and now grace the halls of Congress.  The Democratic party couldn’t even censure Ilhan Omar for her anti-semitic comments and just this week Rashida Tlaib spread blood libel, with no consequences from her fellow Democrats (https://www.timesofisrael.com/tlaib-deletes-retweet-claiming-settlers-killed-boy-found-dead-in-rain-filled-pit/).  Jews have been openly beaten in the Bronx and an attack on Jews left one man brain damaged. 

75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the darkness of anti-semitism has rebounded.

But its ugly twin, Communism has also made a comeback.  Not to dilute the commemoration of the liberation of Holocaust, it is also appropriate to talk about remembering the horrors of Stalinism. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the apologists for the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela are dangerously close to seizing executive power in the U.S.  Bernie Sanders, backed by The Squad is now leading in Iowa and has a sizable base.  Now more than 50% of young people prefer socialism to capitalism.

This reality became apparent to me a couple of years ago when I attended the funeral of the mother of one of my oldest friends.  His father had passed a couple of years before.  He was a Ukrainian immigrant .  During the Stalin terrors, the Russians shot one of his friends in the head in front of his eyes.  He went into hiding and for a time, fought in the insurgency against the Russians that were systematically murdering the Ukrainians.   My friend’s father eventually fled and came to the U.S. after being hunted by the Communists.

At the reception following his mother’s funeral, I learned that all of the grandchildren were Bernie Sanders supporters.  I held back the urge to scream, “Do you realized that your grandfather was hunted like an animal by these people?”

It is clear to me that as the Holocaust survivors dwindle,  “Never Again” is becoming a historic relic to a lot of American Jews, especially young Jews.  Likewise, as the survivors of the Stalin terrors die off, the horrors of Communism fade away as the voices that experienced it grow silent.

Virulent anti-semitism and Communism have different faces today.  But if you don't recognize them in Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, you aren't paying attention to the fading voices.

Upside Down

The world seems to be upside down right now and the decade is off to a choppy start.  First, House Democrats are still frantically trying to undo the 2016 election.  Then we had the press panicked over the killing of Soleimani and worries that it would touch off WWIII. And now we have a threatened pandemic.  The Doomsday Clock has been moved forward to 100 seconds before midnight.  But it moved toward midnight when Reagan got elected and we actually moved away from Doomsday, so I don’t fret too much.  Still, little Greta has given us 8 years until the world collapses, and I would feel silly if Greta turned out to be too optimistic.

We spent billions of dollars and put all of our citizens on the line with a nuclear umbrella to protect Western Europe from an invasion from the Eastern Bloc for 45 years.  Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s the Eastern Bloc countries that are having to defend themselves from the dictates, policies and attempted forced immigration mandated by Western Europe. 

The EU is now keeping open the threat of sanctioning Poland over its the independence of its judiciary, threatened Hungary for its resistance to taking in large Muslim populations, yet resisted imposing sanctions on Iran. 

And after taking out Soleimani, the Democrats and MSM heaped criticism on Trump as if we had taken out a head of state, when in fact he was responsible for killing over 600 of our soldiers.  After the seizing of our embassy in 1979 and attacking our embassy in Iraq, Trump decided he had had enough.  From the caterwauling of Democrats and the MSM you would have thought that Trump nailed the French foreign minister.

Closer to home, Illinois has inverted the American Dream.  For decades government subsidized and encouraged home ownership, fostering the desire of all Americans to own their own home.  Illinois now has the 2^nd highest real estate property taxes in the country (and now threatening a progressive income tax).  Coupled with the federal tax law that caps the deductibility of local property taxes, Illinois has lagged behind the entire country in price appreciation.  In Illinois, the American Dream is to be able to SELL your home.

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot (Motto: I’ll focus on ANYTHING but pension reform) announced that she was supporting contract set asides for LGBT owned companies.  Now, this leads to some interesting questions.  Since gays outearn heterosexuals, why the need for set asides?  Second, how do you certify/verify?  Do you send in video clips?  And doesn’t this discriminate against individuals that would prefer to keep their sexual orientation private?  Finally, who ranks higher in the set aside hierarchy if this moves forward, blacks or gays? 

And now that Illinois has legalized weed sales, politicos are scrambling to try to get more minorities into the recreational marijuana business.  But with Cook County layering on yet another tax, bringing the total tax on weed to 41%, government has now assured that there will be a vibrant black market.  I predict there will be more minorities exercising their entrepreneurial skills in the black market than in the licensed market.  Interestingly, much is being made of expanding minority business ownership in the weed business but there is not a single black owned bank in the Chicago area.  So the message from Illinois politicians to minorities seems to be, “We want you in the weed business, but in lending and finance—meh.”

We seem to be living in a real life Poseidon Adventure.

Rough Start

Well, we’re halfway through the first month of the first year of the new decade and it’s been a rough start for some. 

·        Soleimani and the Mullahs.  Tough start to the year for Soleimani, the head of the Quods force in Iran as he received a date with martyrdom via drone.   Pushing his luck while striding through Iraq, Soleimani was incinerated after years of wreaking havoc in the Middle East.  The hit was really a twofer.  In the aftermath, we learned that the regime garnered more sympathy from the Democratic party in the U.S. than Russia.   The regime painted flags of the U.S. and Israel for students to step on at Tehran University, and students respectfully stepped around them.  WWIII has not yet materialized.  The mullahs are off to a rough 2020.  Someone on Twitter set up a Soleimani parody account purporting to send messages from hell (@Qasam_Soleimani), which is darkly hilarious.  One entry:

“Me and Saddam were bored, so I suggested we play hangman. 

 He was not amused.”

·        CNN.  After framing the Covington kids as racists, CNN settled its libel lawsuit with Nick Sandmann, and rumor has it, the settlement was for $25 million.  So college is paid for.  He can even skip college if he wishes.  Then, CNN, ever a champion of the people and of the DNC, was forced to pay $76 million to former employees and contractors in the largest award ever meted out by the NLRB.  And if that wasn’t enough, many strongly suspect that CNN coordinated with the Warren campaign to leak out the charge that old Bernie had told her that a woman could not win the presidency, which he denied.  Given Warren’s allergy to the truth, it looked a lot like a coordinated smear.

·        Paul Krugman.  Paul Krugman tweeted out last week that someone had hijacked his IP address and downloaded child porn onto his laptop, blaming Qanon for the hack.  Now, Krugman, the lefty, Nobel Prize winning economist that has apparently given up economics for purely partisan journalism looked foolish first, for tweeting about it, then deleting his tweet, making it look like he was simply trying to get ahead of the story.   As much as I dislike Krugman, his views and his style, I felt badly for him.  His tweet was a fumble and the hack should have been handled quietly.  The disclosure triggered a tweetstorm of skeptical comments, “Sure, Paul,” and comparisons to Anthony Weiner.

·        Michael Avenatti and Hunter Biden. Michael Avenatti, former darling of CNN and the rest of media, who some supported for –gag—the presidency was once again arrested and jailed for scamming clients out of thousands of dollars and being prosecuted for fraud, embezzlement and lying to investigators.  That CNN (see above) gave him a platform says a lot about CNN.  Avenatti and Biden seem to be competing for first place in the “Most Like Something You Cleaned Out of Your Drain Trap Award.”

·        Pope Francis.  The vulgar term b—tch slap now has a sister term—Pope slap.  Francis’s slap of a woman that grabbed him generated a bit of controversy.  Although he later apologized, the incident affirmed a commonly held image of Francis as part of the global elite.

So Long, Old Friend

For the most part, I have avoided posting any essays of a personal nature of any sort on my blog.

But this week I need to make an exception for the passing of an old friend, Dan Tepke.  His death just before New Year took me my surprise and hit me like a baseball bat to the midsection.

Like most professionals, I have hundreds of “connections” in my LinkedIn profile.  But the truth is that if any of 90% of them moved away, retired, or otherwise exited the professional world, it wouldn’t make much of a ripple.

But Dan mattered.  Dan mattered greatly to me and dozens of other people.

One of the litmus tests of how much a person matters is whether that person changed the trajectory of your life.   For me and so many others, Dan did in a very major way.  Several aspects of my life would have turned out differently had my life not intersected with Dan’s.

At a time when The University of Chicago football program was in the infancy stages of its rebirth,  and The College had only about 2400 undergrads, Dan kept recruited and kept guys in school.  He kept the embers burning.  And among these student-athletes were a number from blue-collar backgrounds that were among the first in their families to go to college.  Convincing a kid to play football in such an intense academic environment was no mean feat, but Dan was up to the task.  The emails and text messages from the athletes of that era all resonated with the same themes:

“Dan was the reason I went to U of C.”

“Those of us from the classes of ’81 and ’82 had three coaches in four years, and Tep was the only constant in those years (and beyond)."

“Dan was a role model and outstanding mentor to me during my years at UChicago.”

“Dan kept me at U of C”

 “Dan was truly the glue in those early years.  Also a lot of fun.”

 Dan was all in on getting and keeping student athletes at the school. 

After athletics and football, Dan went on to get an MBA at Chicago and had a varied career, taking on took on different roles at different stages, university administrator, business executive, consultant and executive coach and business strategist.  Finally, he became an author, penning the book, Hatching Your Million Dollar Business.

Through all those experiences, Dan managed and successfully dealt with an incredible variety of people.  I don’t know anyone that could successfully manage relationships across a spectrum like Dan could.  From obstreperous university presidents and prima donna tenured faculty to facilities management staff (i.e. janitors) to neurotic, anxiety filled students and mischievous jocks, to daffy coaches and athletic directors to CEO’s, bare-knuckled contractors and Nobel Laureates.  Dan dealt with them all, matter-of-factly, with respect and without judgment or undue deference. 

Dan not only could successfully deal with a wide variety of people, his interests were just as wide.  Over the years we had lengthy talks about politics, economics, management, football, and family matters.  He could talk about high school football as well as the genius and leadership skills of Vaclav Havel.

In this era in which “beta” males are celebrated, Dan was a man in the best sense of the word.  He was responsible for and devoted to things outside himself—to his family, to the institutions he worked for, and the students under his aegis. He always seemed to find the right balance in things.  He was competitive without being ruthless, ambitious without being greedy, and ruthless, and principled without being rigid.  He was a physical person—a college athlete that stayed fit throughout his life, and outdoorsman.  One of the difficulties in processing Dan’s passing is the idea that he could be physically subdued by anything. It was hard to get my head around.

I often joked with Dan in later years that he had been helping me to get my act together for over 40 years…with mixed success.  But it wasn’t really a joke. 

Dan helped me so many times in so many ways over the years—from recruiting me at U of C, to helping me get summer jobs, to giving me career advice later on, to helping my daughter with the college admissions process, and, of course, simply being a friend.  We had lots of laughs over the years, particularly at the expense of the politically correct.

Sadly, I have had to write several eulogies and tributes over the years.  And in doing so, I try to keep in mind two questions:  How and to whom did this person matter?  Who was this person, really?

The answer to the first question is unanimous.  For me, and so many others and I have the emails to prove it.  He changed the trajectory of many, many lives.  As to the second, Dan was as complete a person as I have ever encountered.  He was a professional.  He was a devout family man.  He was a business strategist and author.  He worked in several very different environments. He had a rich intellectual side. He was a regular guy that like sports and fishing.  He was a true Christian, a very loyal person that maintained relationships that spanned decades.

Dan, I will miss you.  You will be one of the first people I look up to have a beer with when I get to the other side. 

Kill Shot

In the immediate aftermath of the assault on the U.S. embassy in Iraq, I was discussing the matter with a friend of mine and my immediate reaction was that the most appropriate response was a “proportionate response,” that is, something military, but more or less meaningless.  No one was killed in the assault on the embassy, so taking out a port or something like that seemed to me to be the correct response.  That would have been the incorrect answer.

I fell into the trap that many have been falling into since 2016 with Trump—that of underestimating him.

A targeted hit on the head of Iran’s notorious Quods force, Qasem Soleiamani was the perfect response, for it had multiple positive effects.  Sure, it represents a major escalation in the Middle East and with Iran, including the risks of a general war with multiple parties.   But smoking Soleiamani achieves a number of objectives that make the risk worth it.

·        Trump is not going to get Jimmy Cartered.  The attack on our embassy in Iraq was beginning to look like a replay of 1979 and he was simply not going to allow that to happen.

·        The contrast with Benghazi needs no more comment.

·        The attack occurred on foreign soil, and not Iran’s.  What was he doing there anyway?  The attack reinforced the message that, as with bin Laden, the U.S. will pull the trigger on a terrorist any place, any time and will not necessarily be bound by borders.  Better to ask forgiveness than permission.   The Israelis piloted that response in their reaction to the murder of their athletes at the 1972 Olympics.

·        This was the third major incident.  The first was the Iranian downing of our drone.  Then came the attack on the Saudi oil fields.  “I told you once.  I told you twice…”

·        This is retribution for the hundreds of killed and maimed servicemen and women in Iraq.  Soleimani was behind all that.

·        There were no civilian casualties.  No other Iranians were killed except the bad guys.  It was antiseptic and precise, perfectly executed.

·        It also put Kim Jung-Un on notice.  The U.S. has a long arm.

·        Almost as important, the hit highlighted the fecklessness of the American left.  WaPo nauseatingly referred to Soleimani as a “revered military leader.”  Richard Haass fired off several tweets of hand wringing calling for diplomacy.  But this is diplomacy.  Stop your aggression and we can talk.

It is important to remember how this was handled pre-Trump.  Obama flushed the Iranians with cash, and permitted Hezbollah to operate with impunity….in our own hemisphere.  Hezbollah was raising cash through the drug trade via Venezuela.   The DEA was on the brink of shutting this all down and Obama stepped on his own DEA.

Yes, there were risks in taking this step.  But we were bearing those risks anyway, and it was Iran that chose escalation, not us.

The real beauty of this operation is the only Iranians that died are those that needed to. 

I did not expect the mistakes of two administrations to be fixed overnight and without risk.  But Trump correctly assessed that the bigger risk was in inaction. The game is changing and Trump is bold enough to do it.

Last Year of the Decade

This is a difficult time of year.  I normally feel tremendous pressure in the last few weeks of the year to frantically see how many films, books and musical performances I can catch up on to be able to weigh in on those things.   This year, I freely admit that I was a bit reclusive this year, especially with respect to films so my usual year end summary will have a little different twist to it this year, since my authority as a music and media critic is severely limited.

Winners-

The American Worker.  Despite fears of a global slowdown, unemployment in all categories remains at a half century low.  The impact of the trade wars has not damaged the American worker, and many businesses are having difficulty attracting skilled workers.  Real wages are up and more workers are willing to change jobs.  Labor participation rates are up after an extended period of stagnation.  The strong labor market is being widely experienced.  African American and Hispanic unemployment are also at historic lows.  The state of the U.S. labor market will make Trump very tough to beat.

The American Investor-  The S&P 500 was up over 30% this year, confounding the Doom Crew.  Since Paul Krugman predicted that the markets would never recover from Trump, the market is up approximately 40%.

Tulsi Gabbard.  Gabbard is the only politician outside Trump that is willing to push against the establishment and core of her own party.  She single handedly destroyed the candidacy of Kamala Harris, forcefully took on Hillary Clinton (eliciting dark jokes about her impending suicide), and did not vote for impeachment.  There are plenty of points of disagreement with her, but you have to admire her chutzpah.

Losers-

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg.  His company introduced a line responsible for two tragic airline accidents, and then pushed deadlines for re-introducing the 737 Max, forcing the FAA to publicly chastise the company.  American Airlines flight attendants said they wouldn’t fly in the plane and the whole episode raised issues about the cozy relationship between the airlines and their regulator.

Adam Neumann and SoftBank.  Neumann walked away with a $1.7 billion “golden parachute” after We Work’s initial public offering failed, and the company announced layoffs of thousands.  SoftBank bailed out the company after it came close to missing a payroll and astonishingly announced, “The fund now recognizes that the public markets are looking for businesses with a path to profitability.”  Duh.

These two spectacular flameouts beg the question of whether you would ever fly in a 737 Max or put any of your retirement money with SoftBank.

Nike, the N.B.A. and the Vatican- All three genuflected in front of the Beijing regime.  Pope Francis gave the Chinese government a voice in the selection of bishops in China.  Oh, how we miss JPII.

Notable Deaths-

There were a number of notable deaths in 2019: Doris Day, Ginger Baker (of Cream) Toni Morrison, Harold Bloom, Caroll Spinney (Big Bird), Bart Starr, Valerie Harper and Paul Volcker among them.

But the most notable and surprising death may have been The Phillips Curve.  The Phillips Curve was a widely accepted relationship between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate.  The Phillips Curve would predict a much higher inflation rate, given and unemployment rate of 3.5%.  There are various theories of why inflation is so subdued, especially considering trade restraints that many would have would have added to inflation.  Yet inflation is hovering around 2%.   I think we can have a memorial service for the Phillips Curve.

New Words-

Two of the public intellectuals that I follow coined new words.  Deirdre McCloskey coined “innovism” as a better descriptive term than capitalism.  Daniel Pipes coined the term “civilizationist” to counter the term “nationalist.”  So I decided to follow suit and coin a few of my own:

De-networking- Much has been written about the importance of networking to advance your career.  I have taken a contrary position and have asserted that de-networking, that is dissociating yourself from individuals that are a waste of time and/or a drain on your time and resources can be even more important than networking.

Wantrepreneur- A wantrepreneur is someone that has suffered a career disruption or layoff and is going it alone as a “consultant” or in a loose confederation with others in an “eat-what-you-kill” arrangement, or someone in the gig economy.  In either case, it is someone that hops right back to a corporate job once an appropriate opportunity presents itself. 

Nerdgasm- The exquisite pleasure and heightened sense of stimulation one feels when fully engaged in certain intellectual pursuits.  A Nerdgasm can occur during a book fair, lecture series, new museum exhibitions or opening a brand new book that you’ve been lusting after for some time.

Finally, here are my Best of 2019-

Books

Fiction- Property by Lionel Shriver.  This collection of short stories and a novelette center on property ownership.  Shriver is a brilliant writer as well as a steadfast foil to the woke literary community.

Nonfiction- Lake of the Ozarks by Bill Geist.  Geist’s book is a timepiece, a trip down memory lane as he recounts summer working at a summer camp in the Lake of the Ozarks.  This book is best read in the late summer on the back porch with a glass of wine and the cicadas chirping.

Film- Never Look Away.  This is the best film I have seen in a decade.  A young artist is caught between the soul crushing regimes of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union.  Its three hour length nearly scared me off but the film never dragged.  Screenplay, acting, music score were all superb.

Musical Performances- Zepparella.  With great apologies to violin virtuoso, Itzhak Perlman (see documentary Itzhak), this Led Zeppelin tribute band had me transfixed.  This high energy, young, all female band was perhaps the best tribute bad I have ever seen.  Perlman was wonderful but Zepparella was loads of fun.

All in all, 2019 wasn't a bad year.

Bloody Fall

This week my post will be short and somber.  While many of us are getting ready for the holidays, this autumn has been an awful and brutal one for three families that have experienced the unimaginable.

Take a good, hard look at these three pictures.  They are young, beautiful, and vibrant.  Their personalities sparkle in these photos.

And they are all gone.  Taken from us.   Brutally and viciously.  One in New York.  Two in Chicago. 

I don’t know any of them, or their families.  My only connection is that I know the places where each one died.  I know the 7-11 where Akiera Boston was shot.  I have parked in the garage where Ruth George was strangled.  And I have walked the staircase in Morningside Park where Tessa Majors struggled up before she died.  I have been to all those places. 

All three died this fall. 

Look at those faces.

Each one killed,  each more heinously than the next. 

Akiera was 16, and a cheerleader at Simeon high school.  Simeon has a very good public school football team.  Akiera should have had the time of her life, cheering and watching her classmates win football games.  Instead, someone drove up beside the car she was in, fired shots at her boyfriend, missing him but hitting her.  Akiera didn’t get to cheer at one game this fall.   To my knowledge, Akiera’s murderer has not been caught.

Ruth George, 19, a sophomore at UIC was sexually assaulted and strangled in the UIC parking garage by a thug out on parole with an armed robbery conviction.  Ruth was a kinesiology major, and by all accounts, a sweet and caring young woman.  She had previously ignored the suspect’s catcalls.

Perhaps the worst—if there can be such a thing--- was Tessa Majors.  Tessa Majors, a freshman at Barnard, was confronted by three assailants in Morningside Park that wanted her phone and she fought back.  One assailant slashed and stabbed her.  She struggled up the staircase and died.  Two of her assailants were 13 and 14 years old.  They are looking for a third as of this writing.  13 and 14.  Children killing children.

Each one of these news stories punched me in the gut, even though I have no personal connection to any of them.  I can’t imagine the parent receiving that phone call that their daughter is never coming home again.  My heart just aches for each of them.  Three different girls of three different races bright and cheery, just taken from us.

Taken together the murder of these beautiful young women triggers a myriad of questions.  What kind of society are we becoming?  Why can’t we protect these young women?  Who failed them?   Police protection?  The schools they attended?  The criminal justice system?  The parents of the perpetrators?   Something is terribly wrong with a society that cannot protect girls like this. 

Are we so consumed with criminal justice reform that we are willing to accept this as collateral damage?  Do we really believe in Nancy Pelosi’s admonition that in each human there is “a spark of divinity?”  I don’t think there is any divinity in the thug that shot Akiera or the beast that strangled Ruth or even the young punks that stabbed Tessa. 

Please, look at these pictures.  And look again.  And tell me what you see.  And give me your thoughts on how we failed these young women and their families.  How do we keep these soulless animals from our girls?

And just as I drafted this, another 16 year old girl was shot and killed in Little Village here in Chicago. Her picture is posted below the rest.

What have we become?  Why can’t we protect these precious girls?  4 families are going to be without them this holiday season.

I am sick at heart.