What’s Your Color?

The Presidential Election of 2024

Listening to cable news outlets, reading newspapers, and, especially, scouring social media over the Internet, one can easily conclude that most Americans have been segregated preferentially into those living in blue or red states.

The attention of TV pundits as the vote counts are tabulated on Tuesday, November 5^th will be concentrated on a mere handful of those two.

 The least populated states will get some attention but nothing to text your friends about.

The real contest is the drive for the electoral count. Whichever presidential candidate gets more votes from a mere handful of densely populated states; namely, the Reds or the Blues wins the prize.

However, don’t allow yourself to be personally typed into one of those categories simply because you happen to reside in one of them. You are an American. That! is your color.

Makes for good neighbors don’t you think? Could even lead to some friendly, over-the fence, cool-as-a-cuke discussions.

We need not allow ratings-hungry media and self-identified elites confine us into political paint cans,.

Consider Nature. It has a magnificent palette of colors. Yet it will not lose one iota of sleep on November 6.

Steve Kalafer: His Imprint on a Community

 

Occasionally, if a community is lucky, it is graced with a person like Steve Kalafer, a man who measured his success not merely as to how he built his wealth from scratch, but who saw himself as responsible for employing his substantial resources to support benevolent organizations, and a host of people less fortunate in life.

One of Kalafer’s principal legacies to Somerset County, NJ reflects his love for baseball; namely, TD Bank Ballpark, the stadium that he built in Bridgewater and the team to go with it:  the Somerset Patriots, now a Double-A affiliate of the New York Yankees. 

Some might think that Steve missed the opportunity to see the first pitch thrown for the 2021 season, but others will think of him and say that he will be cheering his team to victory from a higher vantage point.

The Center of “Excellence” (?) – A Done Deal?

October 26, 2019

On Monday, September 23, I attended a public hearing of Bridgewater’s Planning Board about a proposal for a major mixed-use development project on the site of the property vacated by Sanofi-Aventis on Route 202/206 South, after the company moved its research and development activities to Cambridge, Massachusetts, upon the acquisition of Genzyme, a major leader in the biotech industry.


This plan is highly contentious and disruptive to the character, demographics, and traffic issues of the area, while also disregarding the impact upon the small, historic village of Pluckemin, our neighbor very close by to the north on Route 202/206.

As a result, it has spawned a flood of opposition from a Bridgewater community that feels itself largely, if not wholly left out of the process.


I concur with the logic and claims of Preserve Bridgewater, a large, significantly meaningful group of Bridgewater Township citizens which has banded together to make its case against what it perceives as runaway development.


The Process:  The procedures in place at the October 23 Planning Board meeting were heavily skewed in favor of the site’s owner, Advance Properties which pushed its agenda forward on steroids that evening.

The Center has Collapsed

If there are two things that I don’t like, they are these: 

Hypocrisy and mendacity – two nefariously complementary characteristics which have been on full display in the Senate hearings of Brett Cavanaugh for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.


I’m not going into preferences here, but I will go into the behavior of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its overly sycophantic supporters of whatever persuasion.

McCarrick: Zenith of Perfidy and Hypocrisy

So much has been written in recent days about Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, D.C.,  a man who once held one of the most powerful and influential positions in the American Catholic Church, that it is almost redundant to revisit the ugly details.

What seems more pertinent to me at this moment is to share a few words which symptomatically describe the behavior of this man. 

Several days ago, I came across an ancient, highly appropriate source that fits this man’s conduct, and have adapted it to the current situation while preserving its intent:

There was no fear of God in his twinkling eyes . . .

Because, in the morning, in the mirror, he flattered himself too much to detect his own sin . . .

During the day, cunning words of deceit spilled from his mouth as he rejected goodness and wisdom . . .

Even when he lay in his bed at night, he plotted the next day’s evil . . .

. . . To which he committed himself while rejecting what is wrong.

Simple, isn’t it?

The preceding excerpt reflects my situational adaptation of the first few verses of Psalm 36, which I came upon in one of my early morning readings. 

The sages who penned the original sentiments nearly three millennia ago were right on point in properly describing the never-ending human perfidy and hypocrisy housed in the mind of some humans.

Preserving National Memory

On a late morning, on July 25, 2012, while visiting family, we found ourselves in Arlington National Cemetery, paying respect to the brave souls who gave their lives for our American republic.

As we walked these sacred grounds among seemingly endless grave markers, we came across the ceremony of a solder being laid to rest with full honors.

Memorial Day is about remembrance -- the price of freedom. We may not be a perfect country, but it beats the alternatives.

If Only He Could, What Would He Say?

Remember the journalist Jay Jefferson Cooke?

I miss this guy.  Very much.

I wonder how he would opine about all the politically-related shenanigans and the mendacity swirling about us in the Public Square today?

What I liked best about Jay was the unvarnished personal authenticity that characterized his writing style.

From Blue Jeans & T-Shirt at Facebook, to Business-Blue Before Congress!

What’s so uncanny about Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook scandal is not simply how all-pervasive is the extent to which his firm  developed  a wide array of drill-down tools to data-mine virtually all of over two billion users’ personally identifiable information, but that Zuckerberg has also permitted third-party businesses to construct apps to access that information and to employ it for their own commercial purposes without user consent.

The tsunami behind this scandal has been building up in the depths of the Silicon Valley information ocean for years, but it finally hit the shores of the Washington D.C. Beltway with the revelation that Russian interests had wormed their way into Zuckerberg’s empire of data and used that source to meddle in the 2016 American elections.

Best of the Bunch

Jerry Izenberg, sports writer emeritus for The Star-Ledger, sits at the top of his craft for that publication.  Too bad that he is no longer permanently active but, whenever he comes out of his well-earned retirement, he sure sets the ink on fire – a master at using words to get his point across.

On Saturday, February 3, 2018, he penned a justifiably scathing front-page column about the hypocrisy of the National Football League; namely, the NFL’s “hypocrisy” in its defensive legal battle to keep the Garden State from becoming what could be the Las Vegas of the East Coast for sports gambling.

No Place to Hide

Wednesday’s edition (Jan. 17, 2018) of the Courier News featured a guest article on its opinion page on how American civilians should prepare for a potential nuclear strike.

Yikes!  Are you kidding me?

There is no way for civilians to logically prepare for survival following a massive nuclear strike.  Photos depicting the WWII obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from two atomic bombs should have made that abundantly clear.

Yet Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and author proposes exactly that.

 

He quotes a government agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as his authority, “While a nuclear detonation is unlikely, it would have devastating results and there would be limited time to take critical protection steps. . ..” and so on, and so on.

I lived through the Cold War between Russia and the U.S., and I vividly recall the concept of deterrent dubbed MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). 

The Value of Lives vs. the Cost of Technology

Yesterday, a devastating train wreck in Dupont, Washington took human lives and caused serious injuries to dozens of passengers when a southbound train on its maiden high-speed voyage was about to encounter a looming, yet preventable, mini-Titanic situation.

Approaching a curve at 80 miles per hour instead of the designated 30-mile per hour limit, the speeding train (Amtrak Cascades 501)  could not reverse the laws of physics as it spilled its passenger-laden rail cars helter-skelter into the woods, off an overpass, and onto an interstate.

A Youthful Contender Aims for the Brass Ring.

Of the three Bridgewater candidates in the race for two open seats on the Bridgewater-Raritan Board of Education (BR-BOE) is Zachary Malek, a recent graduate of Bridgewater-Raritan High School, and a new face in his quest for public service. 

 

Malek is in his first year at Rutgers, where he is majoring in political science.  Should he be elected, he will be one of a few, if not only the second person of his age ever to win election to such a responsibility in New Jersey.

This is not a run-of-the-mill school board election, because the other two candidates are heavily experienced in school board affairs.  One is an incumbent, while the other is a previous board member.

So why consider Zachary Malek? Why place your bet on a young man studying at Rutgers?

Equifax Reports Hack of 143 Million Consumer Records

At a time when the nation’s attention is turned to the hurricane disasters of Irma in Florida and Harvey in the Houston area, Equifax, one of three large credit reporting agencies in the U.S. chose, in true political fashion, to disclose that its customer credit data base has been compromised -- 143 million social security numbers and other personal information records are now in the hands of cyber criminals.

Equifax discovered this breach in July but did not report it until late this week and after certain executives of the company had sold some of their stock.

Company representatives said that the executives had no prior knowledge of the cyber attack.

A class-action lawsuit has already been filed against Equifax, and its stock dropped by 14% in this Friday’s trading.

Camino Island

Captivating Reading

This mystery novel spins a story of romance and local color, effectively weaving them together into a yarn with books, writers, deception, and stolen manuscripts, culminating into a frantic search to find the latter before they quietly disappear into the underground libraries of wealthy private collectors.

Author John Grisham will command your attention as he moves you through this fast-paced drama in a desperate race against time to solve the heist of five original, handwritten works by renowned author, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Allegedly stored in a rare books vault at an undisclosed location within the Firestone Library of Princeton University, Fitzgerald’s original manuscripts, Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, This Side of Paradise, and The Beautiful and Damned are protected by sophisticated technology in a climate-controlled environment.

Dunkirk – The Cost of War.

Credit: Set Photo, Christopher Nolan Movie, Dunkirk

The first and most obvious cost of war is the violent loss of lives and of its aftereffects upon survivors in the form of PTSD.  The other cost, ironically, is to be unprepared for war.

 

Sounds somewhat oxymoronic, does it not? But paying for the cost of preparedness may be the precondition to avoiding or minimizing the former: This concept was demonstrated during the long years of the Cold War between America and Russia.

Dunkirk:  At the onset of World War Two, the stranding of over 300,000 British and French troops who were driven to the edge of the sea on the beaches of Dunkirk, France, by German forces, abundantly underscores the fallacy of appeasement, a disastrous policy adopted by British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

FALL from GRACE

Dust cover from the hardback book.

Fall from Grace, written by master storyteller Richard North Patterson, a former trial lawyer turned author, is an excellent choice for summer reading.

The plot is set on Martha’s Vineyard, as are those of the other books in this trilogy, Loss of Innocence, and Eden in Winter. Not coincidentally, the Vineyard is also Patterson’s summer home.

As the denouement of this tale progresses, it tears at the heart and soul of the Blaine family, where intrigue, mystery, and complex relationships rule its days.

Benjamin Blaine, alpha personality, principal protagonist, and renowned author drives himself to success and fame, yet becomes dysfunctional within his own family.

Duty and Honor

From the Paperback Version

Jack Ryan Jr appears once again in this novel that partially owes its success to the fame of Tom Clancy, but which was penned by Grant Blackwood following Clancy’s death in 2013.

It was The Hunt for Red October that propelled Clancy to the best-seller lists, especially after Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of that book as being “my kind of yarn.”

In this more current tale, Jack Ryan Jr, son of President Ryan, finds himself being tracked for assassination.  He doesn’t know who is attempting to find and eliminate him; nor does he know why.

And he doesn’t want his famous dad’s help.

Somewhere Safe . . .

. . . With Somebody Good is the title of Jan Karon’s book, one her latest in the life of small-town Mitford.  Karon is a prolific and easy to read author. 

Nonetheless, her series of tales about the mythical town of Mitford has grown into at least nine books, all of which are better read in sequence.

I discovered this when I purchased Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good at a Barnes & Noble book store in Washington, D.C. during one of my visits there.

It’s much more enjoyable to have read Karon’s books about life in Mitford in the order in which they were written.

The plot lines in Somewhere Safe . . .  resolve around the servant leadership of an Episcopal parish priest, Tim Cavanagh and his wife Cynthia, both of whom become the center of life in their little corner of the world. 

 

Father Tim evokes a time when residing in  and participating with the activities and rituals of a Christian parish was at the core of life for many people. 

The Upcoming Insipid New Jersey Primaries?

Jack Ciattarelli at an April, 2013 Town Hall Meeting

According to an article in Sunday’s The New York Times, the interest being demonstrated by Garden State voters to the gubernatorial primary elections which will be held on June 6, are of little interest.

That’s too bad, but not unanticipated given that rarely do primaries garner much attention.

Moreover, the Times story used up most of its ink naming and discussing the Democrat candidates, giving negligible attention to the other side of the aisle.

The only reference to the GOP was that of Democrat front runner Phil Murphy’s criticism of “the transportation plans of Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, one of two main candidates running in the Republican primary,” according to Nick Corasaniti, writer of the Times report.

The Virus Infecting Political Discourse

In the aftermath of the national elections, rancor continues to rise in a crescendo of ill-will.  It’s happening on a daily basis, hour-by-hour. The civility and mutual courtesy which once existed between and within the Congressional and Executive branches seem to have melted away in the last three decades.

Lately, I’ve recused myself from publicly sharing my views and commentaries on this blog, refusing to wade into the muck.  Yet the Public Square will not go away, and there are no rocks to hide under.

But don’t expect my blog to justify one side of the political argument or the other during your reading of this essay.  Very few people are listening these days except to the sound of their own voices, insisting that they are correct and, therefore, that all others are wrong.  I hope you are different.