Author: RJ

Retired English prof (Ph. D., UNC), who likes to garden, blog, pursue languages (especially Spanish) and to share in serious discussion on vital issues such as global warming, the role of government, energy alternatives, etc. Am a vegan and, yes, a tree hugger enthusiastically. If you write me, I'll answer.

Sad news out of India: a vindictive government persecutes its critics

The news out of India is disturbing, violence and repression of those opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) daily occurrences.

Recently reelected to a third five-year term, but with diminished support that’s resulted in a loss of his parliamentary majority, Modi must now rely on a coalition government to maintain power.

This hasn’t proved a roadblock to his recent cabinet appointments, none of them Muslim, though India has a burgeoning Muslim population exceeding 200 million, presently 14% of the country’s population. Nor has it tempered his embrace of a Hindu hegemony (Hindutva).

Speaking out against his policies and the BJP risks severe consequences.

Many of his political opponents have been jailed on trumped up charges of corruption, while others are under investigation.

In March, 2024, Modi’s government froze the bank accounts of its main adversary, the Nationalist Congress Party, alleging non-payment of taxes.

In 2023, it eliminated the country’s chief justice as one of three commissioners overseeing elections. The BJP now enjoys a majority vote.

For another example, there’s the ongoing harassment of Waheed-Ur-Rehman, arrested in 2019 and held for two years, much of it in solitary confinement, for his opposition to the crackdown on Kashmir resistance to the suspension of Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status.

Now comes the BJP’s newest outrage in pursuing prosecution of 1997 Booker Award winner Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) for her remarking in 2010 that Kashmir was never a part of India.

Kashmiri academic Sheikh Showkat Hussain, who appeared with her at the rally in Delhi, will also be prosecuted under India’s Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (1967).

Roy has been a longtime critic of Modi policy.

If media pundits thought the Modi government would learn from its election setback, they’re sadly mistaken.

The BJP has become even more vindictive—more arrests, more violence.

In 2023, the Biden administration gave Modi a lavish welcome, replete with a state dinner. Talk about Kissinger, expediency is still in vogue.

Entrepreneurial moguls Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who view India as an investment quarry, sent their congratulations to Modi on his win.

At the just concluded G7, a lengthy queue assembled to do acquiescence to its invited guest.

The casualty is India’s secular constitution.

—rj

Carl Sagan and My Incalculable Debt


I’ve always admired Carl Sagan, taken from us so early at age 62.

Renowned for his contributions to space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life, his thirteen year running public TV series, Cosmos, garnered an international audience of 500 million.

A prodigious scholar, he wrote some 600 papers and twenty books.

He wasn’t a child of privilege. His family knew poverty firsthand.

Sagan taught at Harvard for five years as an assistant professor following his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Chicago, only to be denied tenure. They said his interests were too broad.

Cornell immediately offered him a teaching position, and he would teach there, loved by his students and esteemed by colleagues, until his death thirty years later. Following his death, Smithsonian Magazine declared him “irreplaceable.”

I liked him especially for his advocacy of skepticism and embrace of reason and scientific methodology.

There’s a biblical proverb I remember: “Let another man praise you, and not your own mouth; A stranger, and not your own lips” (Proverbs 27:2).

Sagan was never given to affectation or condescension, an anomaly among eminent professors from elite universities I’ve known across the years:

“I think I’m able to explain things because understanding wasn’t entirely easy for me. Some things that the most brilliant students were able to see instantly I had to work to understand. I can remember what I had to do to figure it out. The very brilliant ones figure it out so fast they never see the mechanics of understanding.”

Along with Voltaire, Hume, Mill, and Russell, I owe Sagan an incalculable debt in helping me find the truth of reason that has set me free from the cultural biases, of which all of us are heirs.

–rj

Time Musings

Can you hold time in your hand? Place it on your dresser? Put it in your wallet?

Can something impalpable exist?

And yet we measure by it—past, present, future.

While physicists debate its existence, intuitively we believe in it.

Like we do God.

We age by it. We are not what we once were.

Gardeners know its passage, from seed to birth, ripening to harvest.

Or as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam renders it, “One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies; The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.”

Perhaps we’d do better to conceive time as flow, or infinity’s rhythm, with neither beginning nor ending, our lives but a wink amid a stellar darkness of unending boundary, a universe among universes, yielding mystery and wonder to finite eyes.

Always Was, Is, and Shall Be.

If we truly believe in time, it behooves us to use it wisely, alter our history, relish awareness, and live in the present.

Or as Mark Twain, one of America’s genuine truth-sayers, put it, “There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”

–rj

A Great Feeling Comes

I’ve always found suffering difficult. I write not of myself but of others. From a child, I’ve been for the underdog. In America, in spite of its E pluribus unum imprint on our currency and a bloody civil war to end slavery, racism still lingers.

I remember being appalled as an eleven year old, gazing out of a train window as we sped toward Miami, the shacks, the impoverished black sharecroppers laboring in the South Carolina and Georgia cotton fields.

The South was still racially segregated, the legacy of post reconstruction days, later engrained by the United States Supreme Court in 1896.

Separate schools, separate accommodations, separate seating.

I was attending sixth grade in Coral Gables, Florida. All of us were white. Going and coming, I’d catch transportation at a bus terminal. Water fountains there were designated Whites Only, Colored Only.

I chose to drink from the fountain for the Colored.

A white man took me aside, directed me to the fountain for Whites. I rebelled.

I don’t know where this empathy came from. My urban family was racist. Our neighbors likewise.

My first encounters with blacks was in the military. In basic, my upper bunk mate was black. I had a close black buddy. Sadly, I lost him in an on base accident.

I’m still learning to listen to the grievances of my black brothers and sisters.

But back to the empathy element.

Driving home from my barber this morning, I saw this bedraggled man along the shoulder, pushing a cart, presumingly filled with his possessions, and accompanied by a dog.

How many thousands like him? And this in America.

Lately, I’ve been reading a biography of the eminent American psychologist and philosopher, William James. For years I kept a copy of his The Varieties of Religious Experience on my nightstand. I hadn’t known of his first love, Minnie Temple, a kindred spirit, intellectually his equal, a vivid conversationalist with strong opinions and inveterate rebel, eager for life, but doomed by tuberculosis, like Keats, at age 25.


In her last letter to William, which he kept all his life behind a photograph of her at 16, her hair cut short in an act of social defiance, she wrote:

“The more I live the more I feel that there must be some comfort somewhere for the mass of people, suffering and sad, outside of that which Stoicism gives—a thousand times when I see a poor person in trouble, it almost breaks my heart that I can’t say something to comfort them. It is on the tip of my tongue to say it and I can’t—for I have always felt myself the unutterable sadness and mystery that envelop us all—.”

This is how I feel each day.

This is how I felt when I saw that man this morning with his canine friend. Where will he sleep tonight, find food?

I think often of the homeless,

the warehoused forgotten in nursing homes,

the millions, lonely and estranged,

those terminally ill, often in pain,

the daily dying in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza.

Even though it often yields no solace, I’m unwilling to wish empathy away.

–rj

Antigua’s Chinese Enclave: What it Means

ANTIGUA: TOURIST PARADISE:

A mere 264 miles from US shores lies the sovereign Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, a tourist’s paradise blessed with stable, year round temperatures; several hundred pristine beaches; lush lagoons; and hideaway natural harbors. It has mountains, too, offering scenic views of a vast mangrove forest. 80% of Antigua’s GDP derives from tourism.

But Antigua, like other island nations, faces immense challenges in the maelstrom of climate change: increase in hurricane intensity and frequency, rising sea levels, erosion, salt water intrusion, and ground water depletion.

2017 saw Antigua devastated by Category 5 Irma, destroying 97% of
Barbuda’s infrastructure, rendering it nearly uninhabitable.

Often dubbed “the Switzerland of the Caribbean,” Antigua finds itself lacking the financial resources to sustain its economic viability in the context of climate change and yielded to Chinese overtures: a 2 percent interest loan, with a 5-year moratorium on repayment.

Antigua’s prime minister, Gaston Browne, views China as a friend: “I see China, though, as a country that stands on truth, and a country that, you know, at least has some level of empathy for small states, and generally for poor and dispossessed persons globally” (Newsweek. May 5, 2024).

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS POSED BY CHINA IN ANTIGUA:

Newsweek’s recent study of leaked documents indicates 1000 acres of forest will be razed to accommodate a Chinese Economic Free Zone juggernaut, ultimately consuming 2000 acres for housing and businesses. It includes an airport, up to seven resorts, a shipping port, and Antigua’s first four lane highway. Construction has begun.

Bearing all the earmarks of a Chinese enclave, the completed project confers independent immigration and customs formalities for the enclave and a license to issue passports. It will not pay income taxes, unlike native Antiguans, sales taxes, or import duties. Anyone investing $400,000 or more will be eligible for Antiguan citizenship

Browne touts his Chinese venture as an investment in the future, creating hundreds of jobs.

Browne sweetens the deal by promising environmentalists a 70 acre mangrove reserve and a 60 acre nursery for growing 100,000 trees.

This hasn’t pacified the island’s environmentalists, however, who contend the free zone transverses the island’s largest marine reserve, under legal protection since 2005, and destroys most of its mangrove forests, a haven for migrating birds.

They point out the area’s “nesting ground for critically endangered sea turtles, the threatened West Indian whistling duck and the Antiguan racer, once dubbed the world’s rarest snake, brought back from the brink of extinction by efforts from local environmentalists” (Newsweek).

Browne angrily brands his critics “ecoterrorists.”

AIR AND WATER POLLUTION:

China has a history of contributing to pollution through industrial production and waste processing. Enforcement of environmental protections is often ignored when it comes to garbage, water, atmospheric, and excrement pollution, undermining economic development and investment.

Opponents insist the Antiguan government adequately address these issues, which could have deleterious effects on soil ecology, agricultural production, and water supply.

Antigua’s first environmental report by the government’s environmental management authority, issued in 1992, proved alarming in terms of pollution, waste disposal, deforestation, and entrepreneurial nonchalance.

As for the accommodation sector, the study noted that the water supply for the bankrupt Grand Royal Hotel was found inadequate, singling out Chinese businesses for dumping.

OVERFISHING AND MARINE ECOSYSTEM DEGRADATION:

Chinese nationals also have a legacy of illegal and unregulated logging of parrotfish in the coral reefs, which are important to the marine environment of Antigua’s Marina Bay. As such, not only are the food chain and the environment in peril as acres of mangroves fall to chainsaws, but its fisheries as well

China’s relentless pursuit of high-quality fish (apex predators in the ocean communities), and the destruction of the ecosystems that consistently produce these creatures, have been implicated as the main culprits in extensive ecosystem degradation when applied at galactic scales to Africa, the American Pacific coast, and now the Eastern Caribbean.

Buying seafood from China, which will be allowed to operate a fish farm, has negative consequences for both the environment and Antiguan fishers. Chinese vessel owners profit greatly from buying or leasing fishing rights from over 60 countries, including Antigua and Barbuda. While this provides a trillion meals per year, it causes damage to the ocean.

HISTORY OF CHINESE CARIBBEAN INVESTMENT:

The major Chinese enterprises in Antigua mainly involve construction, infrastructure, real estate, and hotels. The total value of China’s FDI in the seven countries of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) was estimated at almost 300 million US at the end of 2011. Chinese financing came in the form of concessional loans. In the Eastern Caribbean, it funded the construction of the national stadium, the American University of Antigua, and the Lyndhurst Road Development Project. China has also engaged in a number of technical cooperation projects in capacity building and training and granted subsidies to the Tropical Storm Grant Program.

The bottom line is that China’s growing influence on Antigua’s politics and economy comes at a cost, primarily to the environment and the United States. Air and water pollution in Antigua are predominantly caused by Chinese firms.

The challenges deriving from air pollution and inadequate addressing of such concerns leave open the question of whether a distinction should be made in Antigua between government policies attracting investment contributing to the economy while exacerbating the country’s environmental problems and those policies that mitigate polluting.

Antigua’s economic growth in the last decade has been due to investments and loans from China, which reflect China’s strategic objective in the Caribbean. Smaller island nations have been overly enthusiastic in embracing China’s support since they have been relegated, as well as stigmatized, by powerful global financial institutions in times of crisis. The Chinese have presented their assistance with no condition of policy or regime change, thus undermining the frequent dictates of the Washington Consensus.

China has been exploiting the vulnerability of developing nations. If Beijing can increase its investments in countries that are dependent on tourism and other single export industries, it can anticipate predictable returns. Focusing on countries that rely on imports, not on natural resources, China is now the second largest trading partner with some Caribbean countries.

POTENTIAL FOR ESPIONAGE AND CYBERSECURITY RISK:

Given its proximity to US shores, Antigua obviously has strategic significance.

On August 17th, 2020, former Trump administration Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney warned that China’s post-crisis economic policy, including investment in impoverished Caribbean nations like Antigua and Barbuda, jeopardizes US security.

Historically, the Monroe Doctrine (1823), was strictly enforced to keep foreign interests from interference in the Americas. Among its provisions, further colonizations in the Americas would be viewed as threatening US interests.

In 1861, France attempted creating an empire in Mexico, encountering protest.

In 1962, Russian missile intrusion in Cuba nearly launched WWIII.

In 1983, President Reagan committed troops to expel Cuban military from pro-Soviet Union Granada.

Will Antigua become an espionage base like Cuba?

While the U.S. military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has issued concerns about China’s growing presence in Antigua and the Caribbean region, the Biden administration has been silent.

–rj

Dr. Henry Marsh’s And Finally: Matters of Life and Death


Am reading Henry Marsh’s And Finally: Matters of Life and Death. Marsh is a retired brain surgeon, who recently was diagnosed (2021) with advanced prostate cancer, presently in remission, but with a 75% chance of reoccurrence.

His previous books include Do No Harm and Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon, both well received. Professionally, he has published 179 papers in peer reviewed journals and performed 50,000 surgeries over a 40-year span.

In his fulsome writing, Marsh reminds me of the late neurosurgeon Oliver Sacks, gifted in eloquence, humble, and unfailingly compassionate.

Perhaps I’m stereotyping, but he’s unlike many in the medical sciences, consumed by professional interests and profit motive, insensitive or ignorant of the arts and, professionally, objectifying their patients rather than seeing them as individuals, each with gradients of need and longing.

One of his cherished accomplishments is the creation of two balcony gardens for neurological patients at St. George’s hospital

Impressively, he’s been working pro bonum with colleagues in Ukraine since 1992. Neither cancer nor the Russian 2022 invasion of Ukraine has deterred the good doctor visiting the country regularly to consult and advise colleagues.

At home, Marsh is an assisted dying activist.

Of his previous Do No Harm, now translated into 37 languages, The Economist wrote that it’s “so elegantly written it is little wonder some say that in Mr Marsh neurosurgery has found its Boswell.”

Marsh reads widely, owns several thousand books, keeps a garden, raises bees, and enjoys woodcrafting.

I’m early in my reading of And Finally, so I’ll delay full commentary for another post when fully read. But let me share a passage I read this morning that amplifies Marsh’s writing talent infused with observation and an affinity for nature, under assault by climate change:

The {COVID} lockdown coincided with perfect spring weather – so fine, prolonged and warm that it spoke of climate change. The bushes in the little paradise of my back garden almost all burst into flower all at once, and the trees went from being bare winter skeletons to towers of spreading green leaves in a matter of days. The bees came rushing out of their hive in front of my workshop and shot up into the sunlight, rejoicing in vertical zigzags. And the lockdown brought complete peace and quiet. The air felt as fresh as if you were in the countryside and the sky was a clear and deep blue. The only sounds were of birds singing, children playing and the wind in the trees. And at night, at first there was a full moon, looking down kindly on the suddenly silent city, and you could see the stars. It was a vision of heaven, here in London, SW19. Time had stopped. Eternity is not the infinite prolongation of time but instead its abolition.

The silence and clear air, and the return of birdsong, reminded us of what we have already lost with cars, pollution and the changing climate, and the unnaturally fine weather told us that Nature is out of joint, and that there is much, much worse to come.

I feel it in my bones. This is going to be a great read.

—rj

 

Opening Paragraphs Matter

The opening paragraph is among literature’s most important gestures, or like the fly fisher’s fly line and crafted lure, imperative to netting her catch, in this case, the reader.

Exemplars of this refined craft are many: the opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Orwell’s 1984, and not least, Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, spring to mind. I’m sure you have your own favorite.

Surprisingly, my favorite opening comes from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a non-fiction classic latent in its prelapsarian beauty, resonance and relevance, an America of pristine promise in its unspoiled abundance. She caught me in her cast:

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. 

If I were still teaching a college composition course, I’d likely point out the opening’s rich, visual detail. When it comes to description, abstractions won’t suffice. Good writers, ever mindful of their readers, seek to gain their readers’ attention, employing the sensory, i.e., taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing. Take, for instance, Carson’s choice of “checkerboard,” to achieve concreteness and economy.

Good writing, action-centered, selects its verbs adroitly for the sensory and kinetic (movement): clouds drift, “oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered,” “foxes barked” and “deer silently crossed the fields.”

Among still other things, I’d emphasize the paragraph’s unity and varied sentence structure, lending ambience.

Superb openings like this don’t just happen. They are wrought through multiple revision.

Carson’s opening paragraph, prescient in its parabolic foreboding of a lost Eden, initiated a lasting awareness in me of nature’s frailty amidst human assault. It changed the way I live my life, to do no hurt to Nature that gave me birth and sustains me.

—rj

Amazon: Anatomy of a Behemoth

Despite its humble beginnings in a Seattle two car garage in 1994 and web presence in 1995 as a purveyor of books, Amazon has subsequently grown into a behemoth, becoming the world’s largest online retailer with a current market cap of $1.61 trillion.

Founder Jeff Bezos, ever the visionary and e-commerce pioneer, observing that the internet was growing at a rate of 2300% a year, quit his job at a Wall Street firm and moved to Seattle, hoping his venture world payoff in the best and largest online mall.

He initially dubbed his new company Cadabra, Inc, but after his lawyers misheard it as cadaver, he decided on a change. Browsing through a dictionary, the word Amazon for the world’s largest river caught his eye.

It wasn’t long before Amazon moved beyond its foothold of selling books to diversifying in 1999 into selling and auctioning toys, electronics, tools and hardware, and kitchenware.

Sales took off and Amazon hired 20,000 seasonal employees to meet demand.

Today, Amazon continues to be the global leader in e-commerce, providing a refined marketplace which connects buyers with sellers, boasting the largest fulfillment network in the world, and promoting a vibrant culture of innovation and emerging technologies.

The Seattle based company employs more than 90,000 people in the state of Washington, with the actual number of employees exceeding 380,000 worldwide, making Amazon one of the biggest job creators in the last decade. These jobs consist of anything from corporate engineers and marketers to hourly warehouse and customer service representatives. The company operates at a scale unequaled in contemporary business and technology.

Unfortunately, it’s become “a bloody beast,” says one of its critics, swallowing up independent brick and mortar enterprises, commencing with its purchase of Whole Foods in 2017, a $13.7 billion deal.

Now a multifaceted eCommerce platform, it earns its income through arrangements of retail, third-party sellers, subscriptions and,more recently, in servers and other forms of employee data storage.

Innovation has been the hallmark of Amazon’s continuing success. Kindle, for example, proved one of its best, changing the way the public buys its books to the chagrin of physical bookstores.

Currently, Amazon has been investing in drone delivery, which would revolutionize how packages are sent and received worldwide.

Despite Amazon’s critics, the public’s response has been very favorable, with Amazon delivery trucks now a daily sight in residential neighborhoods .

Amazon’s adoption of public reviews of its many goods is a stroke of genius. Readers can see what others think before making a purchase.

Then there’s the convenience of not having to climb into your car, consuming time and gas. The fallout, of course, is huge for local retail.

Amazon is also consumer friendly, offering fast delivery, easy return of goods, and speedy refunds. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Amazon is the #1 company in the US for customer satisfaction. Over 100 million paid subscribers globally have signed up for Amazon Prime, which allows for two day delivery on more than 100 million items, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows, along with a million songs.

Recently, it purchased audio.books.

Critics have too often ignored its progressive hiring policies. Amazon has ranked in the top three for new job creation in the United States. Its employee headcount has grown from 31,000 in 2008 to 382,400 in 2017, and it is expected to continue growing. Amazon is known for creating jobs that are not temporary or seasonal.

A study done by eHealth found that Amazon ranks first as the most Military Spouse Friendly Employer in the list of the top 50. Additionally, Amazon has fulfilled its pledge to hire 25,000 Veterans and Military Spouses by 2021. Amazon is committed to training and hiring Veterans for the Career Choice Program, which is exclusively for active duty service members and spouses. The program educates and prepares them for job placement at Amazon or any other company. This exclusive program is a win for Veterans who are searching for a new career, as they receive training for a job that is guaranteed to them.

Moreover, Amazon is dedicated to hiring people with disabilities and provides accommodations for over 120 roles. They have expedited the hiring process to as little as 48 hours for those who apply.

Amazon is one of the front runners in hiring ex-offenders and individuals who were recently incarcerated. With the Ban the Box movement gaining momentum, many companies are removing criminal offense questions from their initial job applications.

Amazon has also approached the United States and Canadian Governments for vital roles in public sectors and special clearance jobs that help fund public projects. An example of this is Amazon’s creation of a second headquarters (HQ2), in Arlington, VA, which is expected to create an estimated 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investments over the next 10-15 years.

Amazon is focused on long-term employment and has been implementing various initiatives to improve job quality and employee benefits. An example of this is the large recruiting and hiring efforts in the state of Wisconsin.

But there remain negative aspects that merit attention; namely with regard to warehouse employees, pressured to take on physically demanding tasks, skip bathroom breaks to maximize targets, penalized for taking sick days or time off, resulting in high turnover.

The extent of Amazon surveillance has led to numerous complaints as workers feel their privacy is being compromised and that they’re being treated like robots. In 2018, warehouse workers reported they were being monitored by GPS tags, with exact details of their location and any rest breaks they take.

Alongside surveillance, there are strict productivity quotas involving a completion rate of tasks within a certain time frame. Failure to do so can lead to warnings and in worse cases, termination of employment.

When it comes to stock units paid to new employees in their third or fourth year, many aren’t around to receive them.

Stress is inherent with any Amazon hire, whether in a warehouse, office, or delivery. Amazon ranks employees against each other and eliminates the bottom 6% annually.

Meanwhile, Amazon has maintained a tough stance against unions, hiring the firm Complete Solution Staffing to inform its employees of the problems with unions.

Amazon has recently been subjected to controversy over its tax policies and their implications. Over the past few years, the corporation has paid very little or no taxes to the government. Contrary to most U.S. based corporations, Amazon paid no federal taxes for the year 2017 and 2018, despite the fact it was a highly profitable company.

Despite this, the company has contributed state taxes that total almost $1.2 billion dollars and has created many jobs that have in turn, increased tax revenue. Amazon defended their tax payment policy in a statement to Business Insider: “Amazon pays all the taxes we are required to pay in the U.S. and every country where we operate, including paying $2.6 billion in corporate tax and reporting $3.4 billion in tax expense over the last three years.”

Critics cite Amazon’s dynamic growth as a detriment to retail business, under selling them and driving them out of existence. Former Amazon chief financial officer Warren Jenson commented that if your business makes a profit, Amazon sees you as the competition and will be coming for you. Currently, it seeks to imitate highly successful Trader Joe’s.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently sued Amazon for being an illegal monopoly, where 40% of online shopping occurs on Amazon.com, creating higher prices for consumers. 

Amazon vigorously disputes the FTC assertion and continues to seek expansion.

—rj

Biden plays politics: The Gaza fiasco


On one hand, President Biden urges a ceasefire in the nearly six month Gaza conflict; on the other, he has stealthily authorized a potent new military aid package to Israel that includes jets, 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs.

Although 2000 pound bombs are capable of taking out whole city blocks and have been abandoned by most Western militaries for employment in urban locales, they have dominated Israel’s aerial assault on Gaza, with the death toll currently estimated at 33,000, the vast majority of them civilians.

Anonymous Pentagon sources disclose the armament transfer includes transfer of 25 F-35A fighter jets and engines at a cost of 2.5 billion.
Biden isn’t mandated to disclose any of this to lawmakers since Congress had approved the transfer in 2008, presently unfulfilled.

Israel is currently the largest recipient of U.S. aid since the 1970s, receiving on average $1.8 billion in military and $1.2 billion in economic aid annually.

Such aid incentivizes documented Israeli violations of Palestinian rights by humane organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They have included ongoing abusive detention practices (including the torture of prisoners), restrictions on freedom of movement of Palestinians, the targeting of medical personnel and facilities, and severe damage to infrastructure such as water and electricity to Palestinian civilians prior to Israel’s current Gaza incursion.

It does not move the needle to a two state solution.

All of this comes even as Biden expresses concern over a pending Israeli assault on the alleged remaining Hamas stronghold of Rafah along the Egyptian border and UN warnings of incipient mass starvation. 1.2 million Gaza refugees have sought refuge in this enclave.

Jewish pressure weighs heavily on the Biden administration in an election year with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee donating millions to unseat Democrats deemed unfriendly to Israel. A recent Pew Research survey indicates 80% of American Jews regard aid to Israel as essential.

Those constituencies calling for suspension of aid to Israel are branded as anti-Semite, with surging efforts to pass legislation abridging their First Amendment right to free speech.

Republicans, even more than Democrat leaning Jews, have vigorously supported aid to Israel, though increasingly resistant to approving aid to a besieged Ukraine.

Biden would do well to mind an increasingly assertive Muslim-American electorate that threatens to boycott him in November.

Meanwhile, any full scale attack on densely populated Rafah, gateway for food convoys, would conceivably result in thousands, not hundreds, of killed and maimed.

The morally compromised Biden administration has been complicit in Israel’s blitzkrieg that includes mosques, churches, hospitals and refugee camps, abetted by American armaments.

For this, the U.S. proves deserving of world condemnation.

The elephant in the room is Biden; but then again, endeavors to dislodge him by voting for his Republican adversary are surely non sequitur.

Conversely, efforts to encourage divestiture at home and abroad of Israel merit encouragement. They brought down South Africa’s apartheid regime.

America must do what is right, not what is easy.

–rj

David Copperfield: An Enduring Nexus

Those of us who read fiction do so for many reasons, the majority perhaps to relieve the tedium of a long flight or empty minutes in the lobby of a doctor’s office, or as a verbal nightcap absolving the tensions of a frenetic day of undulating joy and sorrow, nuanced by disappointment or regret.

As a child, I read to escape into a fantasy world remote from the quotidian squalor of waterfront Philly and the domestic insecurity of a single parent home suffused with alcoholic addiction. In these maturer years, I read fiction mostly for connection and inspiration that my strivings have mattered, despite my myriad blunderings, providing solace and meaning—and best, that I am not alone.

Of the books I’ve read, David Copperfield resonates most by way of nexus: a childhood annulled by environment, a sensitive child seeking emancipation, a failed marriage and, at last, a soulmate found. It was Dicken’s “favorite child” among his fourteen completed novels over a brief twenty years.

In many ways, David Copperfield navigates the journey of its protagonist for sovereignty over life’s intemperate intrusions, impeding one’s happiness; the fissuring of expectation and event; in Tom Wolfian parlance, the looming challenge of having the “right stuff” to break through.

Observing the mythic triad of separation, trial, and restoration, David’s journey becomes our own.

I first came upon David Copperfield when in the eighth grade in Massachusetts at age thirteen. How wonderful the schools were then. Instantly, the book became a first love, an affection that has endured.

This novel differs from Dickens’ earlier ones, its early chapters autobiographical and penned in first person. A novel of memories and reflections, it plays down his usual melodrama.

As for its teeming, colorful characters—a Dickensian constant—latent behind their public personae lies a good deal of dissonance, the incongruity loved by Shakespeare between appearance and reality:

Micawber, outwardly jovial, masking an inner angst and volatile moods as debtor prison looms ever closer.

The narcissist Steerforth, whose duplicity manipulates David, but
achieves a lesson learned.

Mr. Dick, whose labored utterances suggest mental illness, sympathetically drawn.

I know David Copperfield ends in fairytale recompension, resilence rewarded, injustice vanquished—if only life were like that. Still, we need to dream that life may sometimes prove compensatory, a lotus land dulling life’s transgressions.

There’s so much in David Copperfield that revives dormant memory of my own childhood and early adulthood, its idealism and reality’s harshness; not least, growth paradoxically through failure.

It works the same way for many others as well. I think of a couple that nightly reads five pages of the novel to each other before turning in.

I understand that. As said, I also read to connect.

–rj