Letter From New York O6 04 15 An evangelical mess, among other things…

June 4, 2015

I am traveling down to DC on Amtrak, having five meetings in DC tomorrow before heading up to Baltimore for a weekend with friends. It is grey and gloomy again today, which has been the theme of this week’s weather. It doesn’t do much to keep the spirits up. I am yearning for a little sunshine though I think I have a couple of days more of this before the weather changes.

What isn’t changing is the growing numbers joining the Republican race for the Presidential nomination. Rick Perry, who ran in 2012, has thrown his hat back in the ring, hoping he will not open his mouth and insert his foot as much as he did last time.

Chafee of Rhode Island has joined the much smaller list of contenders for the Democratic nomination.

It will be an interesting nomination season, particularly on the Republican side as there are more to come. Jeb Bush will make an announcement on June 15th. Allee all outs in free!

As I was scouring some websites today, there was a quote from George Soros about his concern that we are on the brink of WWIII, certainly not a happy thought. And that remark was underscored by a Czech NATO officer, musing about what might happen if Russia overwhelmed the Baltic States. Could that result in a use by the West of nuclear weapons?

Even the whisper of WWIII should give us a major case of the willies. The sad thing is that the whispers are there as the global situation deteriorates. I have a slight case of the willies as I ride the rails into the nation’s capital.

The bright hope that infused the world at the end of Communism has grown dim. Can we bring back the light if we all clap loudly enough, the way Tinkerbelle is saved in Peter Pan?

US military leaders and ambassadors are being called to Stuttgart by Pentagon Chief Ashton Carter, to discuss preparedness in the face of Russian aggression. Ukrainian President Poroshenko warned of all out war with Russia as fighting renewed in the rebel east, near Donetsk. It appears the last suburb of that city has fallen to the rebels.

Meanwhile, Putin is going to be visiting Pope Francis on June 10. Think Francis can talk any sense into the man?

In what is shocking news, if true, is that the Red Cross, which raised half a billion dollars for Haiti relief, has apparently spent very little of that in Haiti and has built only six homes instead of the thousands it promised.   It seems unbelievable though the Red Cross is being very quiet about what they actually spent there, which is raising suspicions.

I’ll have to find another charity to donate to, I guess.

The rescue operation for the Eastern Star, the Yangtze cruise ship that capsized, has come to an end and it is now a recovery operation. During the day, dozens of bodies were brought to the surface. A hole has been cut in the hull of the vessel and the grim work continues.

Allegedly a group of grieving relatives who got too nosy were beaten by local police and shuttled into a building and told they were not to talk to the press.

It is the 26th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Leaders of the protest are no closer to returning home than they were when they went into exile. I will pause for a moment of silence in memory.

Former FIFA Vice President, Jack Warner, of Trinidad and Tobago, has announced his is going to spill the beans about the wrong doing in the football organization. Let the chips fall where they may, he says. And it will be interesting to see where the chips do fall.

Also falling was the stock market, rattled by Greece missing a payment, down by almost 171 points. Greece and the EU are playing a game of chicken. Let’s hope no one gets hurt. Because if someone does, it is not going to be good for the rest of us.

It’s not a good day to be a Federal Employee. The records of four million US government employees got hacked today. No word on who done it but employees were warned to check their credit reports and keep a watchful eye out for fraudulent activity.

I am not a great fan of Piers Morgan but he did a devastating article about the Duggar molestation scandal, which can be found here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3111528/Piers-Morgan-19-disgusting-things-learned-Duggars-TV-interview-counting.html

It’s an evangelical mess.

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Letter From New York 03 06 15 Ranting on a sunny evening…

June 3, 2015

Returning to the office from a series of appointments and meetings, I met with one of the phenomenon of New York City, the partially crazy person we all learn to just ignore. As I exited the 1 line at 28th Street, a very large gentleman came down 7th Avenue carrying huge black nylon bag, swinging at his side. As he strode the Avenue like a colossus, he was not exactly shouting; it was more like braying. He sounded rather like a human imitation of a siren. As I reached my turn at 30th Street, he began to alternate the braying with shouts of “I hate effing everything and everyone!”

No one seemed to really notice him. He just went on his way, slicing through the pedestrian traffic, a human battleship on some kind of mission.

Almost any foray onto the streets of New York means an encounter with at least one person with a loose grip on reality.

The other morning, there was a well-dressed, middle-aged lady on West End Avenue, chattering away. I thought she was speaking to someone while wearing a Jawbone. But she wasn’t. No Jawbone. Just having a merry conversation with her best imaginary friend.

We don’t intervene or do much except to give them as wide a berth as we can. If they’re not doing any harm, they sail on down the streets. Such people are part of the fabric of any metropolitan area. It sometimes causes me to think on the social welfare net we don’t seem to have for these folks.

There are so many human needs all over the world. Hundreds of thousands are facing potential starvation in South Sudan. Migrants are dying while attempting to reach Italy from Africa or from Myanmar to Indonesia. Nepal is in ruins. Heat is killing them by the hundreds in India.

The huge man on 7th Avenue got me thinking about the state of humanity. We spend so much time and money on fighting each other rather than uniting in curing what ails us. Howard Bloom posits that is part of our nature in “The Lucifer Principle.” He’s probably right. But my hope is that we head toward a better future though I’m not banking on it so much right this moment.

Fierce fighting has broken out in Ukraine again. Boko Haram has slaughtered thousands and kidnapped at least hundreds while Amnesty International is claiming the Nigerian Army has managed to kill off at least 7000 and should be investigated for war crimes.

China, Russia and the United States are all jockeying for position. Saudi Arabia and Iran are duking it out to see who is going to be the big kid on the block in the Middle East. Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines along with the U.S. are skittering to keep China from controlling the South China Sea.

But at the end of the day it is all geo-political nonsense that has been going on since the beginning of empires. The Egyptians wanted to be the big guy on the block and they were for a while. So were the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, Alexander had his moment – and it was just a moment – then came the Romans and so on and on and on. All about conquering and crushing.

I must pick up a copy of Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Today it doesn’t feel like it.

While Mayor DeBlasio proclaims that New York is the safest big city in the country, murder rates have inched up the last two years.

Ah, I am ranting tonight but it’s what is on my mind tonight. And isn’t that what blogs are for? Our individual thoughts and rants and hopes and prayers?

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Letter From New York 06 02 15 Muddling through…

June 2, 2015

It’s been downright chill in New York City today and I wish I had worn a wool sweater instead of a cotton one. I am heading this evening up to Hudson; Alana, my friend who is the owner of my favorite bistro, The Red Dot, is having a special Japanese meal at the restaurant and asked me if I could be there for it. Hard to say no to such a good friend so I am up tonight and back tomorrow.

When I get to the cottage, I may have to turn on the heat, as it will be chiller there than it is in the city. If I weren’t coming back to the city in the morning, there’d be a Franklin stove fire in my future.

What is not in the future for Sepp Blatter, head of FIFA, is more time as head of FIFA. I subscribe to VICE News and its news of the resignation popped up on the upper right corner of my screen while I was on a conference call. The paper trail is moving closer to him in regards to the corruption scandal. His right hand man, Jerome Valcke, apparently was a recipient of a letter that links him to the alleged $10,000,000 bribe for the World Cup to be held in South Africa.

Bruce Jenner has now officially become Caitlyn Jenner, doing so with a splash in a Vanity Fair spread. She gained a million twitter followers more quickly than Obama did when he launched @potus. As someone who remembers her when she was Bruce and the triumphant Olympian, I can only imagine what a journey this has been for her. So public a life, so private a journey.

Last night on the Yangtze River, a river cruise ship named the Eastern Star or Oriental Star, depending on how you translate its Chinese name, was sailing through a storm when high winds struck and the ship capsized. So far, only fourteen people have been found alive of the 456 aboard. One survivor, a cruise director, floated fifty miles downriver before rescue.

There was no distress signal and the first realization of the disaster was when a few survivors reached shore and raised the cry.

Most of the passengers were elderly Chinese on holiday.

The Patriot Act, with some revisions, was resuscitated on the Hill today and will go to President Obama for his signature, which he has pledged to do. I have some mixed feelings about this. I have friends who rant that the Patriot Act has turned us into a police state while others are equally adamant that it is absolutely necessary for protection.

The process has elevated Rand Paul who worked against it and weakened Mitch McConnell, who thought it should be passed without revisions. Somewhere along the line he miscalculated the misgivings of his fellow Senators.

To me, whatever you think of Snowden, he revealed some unsavory aspects to our spying that have left, at least me, uncomfortable.

The situation in Syria is deteriorating. IS has begun to encroach upon Aleppo and non-IS affiliated rebels are accusing Assad of using his air force to support IS against them. Which in the convoluted realities of Syria today might actually be true.

A meeting of anti-IS countries concluded a meeting with Secretary of State Kerry attending by video link. Everyone agreed more needs to be done but didn’t seem to come up with any concrete steps beyond muddling along in the same way they currently are.

Which is what we’re doing, muddling along through one of the great crises of our time.

The EU seems to be muddling along through the Greek crisis, with more meetings scheduled for tomorrow. The EU financial ministers can’t seem to get their arms around the political realities on the ground in Greece.   Greece is living through a Great Depression experience and is desperate, which is why Tsipras was so overwhelmingly elected. He promised to change that and Greece needs some positive changes.

In a startling rewrite to biology books, the endangered smalltooth sawfish, has found away to avoid extinction. They have now seemed to have mastered “virgin births.” Seen occasionally in animals in captivity, it is not entirely unknown but what happens to men when women can experience “virgin births?”

On the train going up north, it has been a frustrating ride. North of where we were, a Metro North train had become disabled and we waited thirty minutes for the track to be cleared. I will probably arrive in time for dessert. But so it goes when you travel the rails, in America.

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Letter From New York 06 01 15 More musings from grey days…

June 1, 2015

It has been another dark and sullen day and I am a little cranky about that. We went from shorts to sweatshirts in about 18 hours. It was cold and dank at the cottage when I woke this morning, slightly before the alarm was to go off. I went and got my coffee and curled back on the bed, wrapped in my favorite robe, and read the news.

My first reading of the day was an alert that had come in from the BBC about the torture of a 14 year old by IS and I winced when I saw it, the barbarity of it was incomprehensible. IS is forcing children as young as thirteen into service as soldiers. An entire generation is being perverted and the world will be paying the consequences for generations.

Ahmed, the boy, was caught on video by a man who has since deserted IS and Ahmed himself has escaped. But hundreds, thousands, remain and are being taught to be creatures of hate. My mind dazzles.

In the meantime, 41 have died in another IS suicide attack. What draws individuals to suicide attacks? I want to know. I really do.

While IS creates its havoc with suicide attacks, al-Abadi, Prime Minister of Iraq, is plotting on how they will take back Ramadi. The meeting is being held in Paris, far from the suicide bombers and the disintegration that is Iraq. The land has run red with blood and it is nowhere near a solution.

And that haunts me nearly every night though it does not infest my dreams. In my last, very colorful dream I was working with Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep on a film that neither of them should have been in at the age they were. It was very complicated and I woke up amused.

In my dreams, I would be in Greece, which is where my friend Winn is, sharing photographs of places that I haunted in other times of my life and I remember them fondly. He posted just an hour ago a photo of himself outside of Franco’s, a bar and club on Santorini, a place where I spent many an evening watching the sun set, understanding in those moments of glorious sun fall, why the Greek myths have been so powerful It brings a smile to my face and I am so glad that I have experienced it and am so glad that Winn is experiencing it.

The sun is setting here in New York but you can’t see it because the sun is hidden behind the drab grey clouds that have dominated that last 48 hours. It makes me want to be home, cuddled on my couch with a fire in the Franklin stove with a good British mystery on the television.

Bruce Jenner is making his first appearance as a woman on the cover of Vanity Fair and has chosen the name of Caitlin for himself as he moves from man to woman. What a journey that person must have had in his/her life. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to take it. I saw some photos online today. He/she does not look bad and I wish her/him well as she/he continues this process.

Life is a process. I’m going through my own process right now and sometimes I find it exhilarating and sometimes I find it exhausting. But it is a part of a journey and that is what life is all about: it is a journey, from the moment we are born until the moment that we die.

As the night goes into the grey, I will wrap up. I am going to meet my friend Robert and we’ll have a bite to eat and then I am headed home to the little apartment, where I will read a bit and then fall asleep, to wake in the morning to the next round of news.

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Check Your Democracy at the Door

June 1, 2015

Check Your Democracy at the Door.

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Letter From New York 05 31 15 Musings on a dark and sullen day…

May 31, 2015

It is a dark and sullen day; at ten in the morning it looks as if night is about to fall. The sky is dark and leaden. Wind whips through the trees outside my bedroom windows. Rain fell in the night, puddling on the deck outside.

After a troubled night’s sleep, perhaps from caffeine too late in the day, I woke early and have begun to do household duties. The second load of laundry is already in the washer and I am deep into my reading of the Sunday NY Times. The chimes of the clock in the foyer have just sounded the top of the hour.

While I was in Delhi, I learned that its air was the worst of any city in the world, worse than Beijing. This morning’s Times had a story about the terrible Delhi air effect it has, particularly, on children. I thought of my friends there, Raja and Jag, whose daughter, Noor, is eight. She has trouble with the air sometimes and, as I recall, needs an inhaler.

Sidelines at soccer games are littered with inhalers, the report said. India has 13 of the top 25 polluted cities. Beijing, which I had always thought was number one, is actually 79th.

The cost to children in such polluted cities is hard to calculate but it is huge, with permanent damage being done to the most vulnerable in the population. It is a sobering fact.

While the day is dark and sullen, the air in the Hudson Valley is absolutely pristine compared to places such as Delhi.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of Narendra Modi’s election to Prime Minister of India. For the most part, he seems to be getting good marks though in the religious diversity arena he gets rather poor marks. His party, the BJP, is avidly pro-Hindu and after his election there were forced conversions and attacks on churches across India. He remained too quiet about the matter until prodded by President Obama during his State visit there earlier this year. The Ford Foundation has been put on a security watch list because it has funded an Indian group that has had conversations about religious violence. 9000 NGO’s have had their licenses cancelled.

Not a good way to project its mantle as the world’s largest democracy.

Beau Biden, son of Vice President Joe Biden, succumbed yesterday to brain cancer at the age of 46. He was a promising politician and was planning on running for Governor next year. He had served a tour of duty in Iraq with the National Guard. It feels as we have been deprived of what might have been a valuable future voice.

Secretary of State John Kerry broke his leg in France while bicycling and is now on his way to Boston for treatment by the same doctor who replaced his hip. The peripatetic Mr. Kerry has been on the road for 356 of the last 365 days. This will tie him down for a while and he will be attending at least one conference by video link.

In Nepal, the country is attempting to return to some form of normalcy. Schools have been reopening while remote villages still struggle to get supplies. Normalcy is a long way away for that country but the first steps are being made.

A magnitude 8.1 earthquake shook Japan yesterday with 12 injured but no major damage. Still it was the sixth largest earthquake since 1885.

“San Andreas” set off a tremor at the Box Office, bringing in $53 plus million over the weekend, while Bradley Cooper’s “Aloha” bombed. We love our disaster films, apparently, especially with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

The U.S. and China have toned the rhetoric down a bit about the artificial islands being created in the South China Sea but we’re a LONG way to any kind of resolution.

With my second load of laundry done, I am going to depart for the Red Dot and my usual Sunday brunch there, perhaps adding what I can to the weekly solving of the NY Times Crossword Puzzle – and that usually isn’t much.

Good Sunday, all!

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Letter From New York 05 29 15 Riding up the Hudson, ruminating on the world…

May 30, 2015

It is a stunningly beautiful day as I ride the train north, having slipped out of town early. To my left, the Hudson runs wide with sun glints coming off the silver grey surface of the water. It is sunny and warm, with a soft breeze blowing with low humidity. Saturday will probably be like this though there is rain in the forecast for Sunday with cooler temperatures.

My mood is better today; I feel less weighted by the world and its events. I feel more accepting that there is ONLY so much I can do individually and that as long as I feel I am doing that, I can breathe a little easier.

It is still a crazy world. In my home state of Minnesota, a Muslim couple was picking up their son at the home of one of his friends. While waiting for him in the car, they were approached by a woman with a rifle who forced them out of the car and marched them at gunpoint to the house where they told her their son was so that they could prove it to her.

The boy was there.

The woman is facing charges of assault, terroristic threats, terroristic threats-reckless endangerment and maybe some more.

This kind of occurrence just strikes me as so un-Minnesota like. You know, Minnesota nice, it’s baked into us.

She must have skipped that part of the cultural indoctrination.

Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is being charged with lying to the FBI about cash withdrawals from banks that allegedly were going to “Individual A.” Apparently, Hastert was paying hush money to a man for inappropriate behavior years ago when he was a schoolteacher and a wrestling coach. Everyone who knows the Former Speaker is shocked as he always was a “stand-up” kind of guy.

He has made no statements but has resigned from his law firm and from the Board of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

In reading about this I was reminded that the Speaker of the House is second in succession for the Presidency. The thought of John Boehner being two heartbeats away from the Presidency is sobering, at least to me.

In the midst of probably the worst sports scandal in the last century, FIFA President Sepp Blatter was re-elected. While it seems unbelievable to me, he had a lot of support from Africa and South America, enough to propel him back for another term. The aftershocks of this affair will continue for a long time and there may be more arrests.

Cuba has been taken off the list of states that sponsor terrorism, paving the way for the normalization of relations. Visiting Cuba is on my bucket list, has been since I read Hemingway who had a home there.

Dressed in a burka, an IS devotee blew himself up at a mosque in Saudi Arabia, killing four, including himself.

In Pakistan, gunmen hijacked buses and ended in a battle with security forces. Nineteen civilians were killed.

North Korea, widely suspected of the hack attack against Sony Pictures, has something called Bureau 121, a cadre of 6000 hackers devoted to discovering ways to create digital trouble. Apparently, many of them operate out of China, some in the basement of well-reviewed restaurant.

Not a happy thought.

Out in California Michael Jackson’s fantasyland named “Neverland“ is for sale for $100,000,000. But now it’s called Sycamore Valley Ranch. It’s a stunning place for those who have a spare hundred mil.

The rain ravaged states of Texas and Oklahoma are going to be receiving drinking water from the breweries of Anheuser-Busch, which halted production of beer at one plant in Georgia and switched to canning drinking water, which is desperately needed. At least thirty-seven are dead in the two states.

Amazon is planning to create its own private label for a variety of foods. Called Elements, its first products were diapers and baby wipes. It is also opening data centers in Ohio that will employ about a thousand people. Amazon just keeps on growing…

Ross Ulbricht, creator of Silk Road, a dark Internet site for the sale of drugs, was sentenced to life in prison today.

The train is rolling into Hudson and I need to gather my things up and make my way over to my car for the short drive home before dinner at the Dot!

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Letter From New York 05 28 15 Things that make me cringe and things that make me smile…

May 28, 2015

I both look forward to the moment in the day when I write my blog and also dread facing the blank digital piece of paper on my screen. Usually, it’s a time to wrap my head around the world and do a bit of sorting out.

Today I am feeling a bit more dread than usual and I’m not sure why. Is it because I have fears about the state of the world today and don’t want to face the news? I’m doing one post a week, at least, on my field, media. I post it on LinkedIn then, too, and it’s been getting some reads.

The media today is filled with the FIFA fallout. Some brands are nervous but no one has cancelled yet while everyone is watching to see what everyone else is going to do.

I wake up in the morning, most days in the city. I have my morning cup of coffee, having cut down from three to one and, with the background of city noises, read from the New York Times and generally take a look at the news on my BBC iPhone app.

Finding out that Boko Haram is using girls they have captured as suicide bombers doesn’t brighten my day – at all. Nor does the plight of women in most countries. Today there was an article on how Tunisian women have endured years of violence, cruelty and rape from the police of that country. The Indian rape problem is well known and well documented and mostly not spoken about there.

Though the Brits have just named the first female Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. Good for them.

There are things in the news that brighten my day. The French have passed a law that rooftops on new buildings must either have a garden or be equipped with solar panels. That makes me smile.

It doesn’t make me smile to know that Putin has declared military deaths a state secret – another step in his plans to keep the lid on Ukraine. Independent researchers using YouTube, Google Street View, Instagram, Twitter and Russia’s version of Facebook, have concluded that the Russians are conducting military moves in the rebellious east. It’s been done by the Atlantic Council, a Washington based research center. It’s all open source data and that’s the kind of thing that makes Vladimir seethe.

Not making me seethe was a glowing report in the U.K.’s Daily Mail, on today’s Royal Garden Party for 8000 held on the grounds of Buckingham Palace. The Queen, accompanied by a bevy of her family, wandered around greeting people, including a 92-year-old survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The Queen will visit there when she makes a state trip to Germany. It sounded so British and regal and so comforting and very, very far away from the fighting that is consuming other parts of the world.

500 bodies were exhumed from mass graves in Iraq while IS killed twenty more at the ruins of Palmyra.

Perhaps we should feel better that the Al Qaeda chief in Syria has no plans to attack the West? He has received instructions from Al Qaeda central, wherever that is, not to but if the bombing keeps up, who knows?

What is also fearsome out there in the world is Mother Nature. People are digging out in Texas even as it continues to rain. In India, 1500 have died in the current heat wave and hospitals are being asked to make victims of the heat their priority.

And lest we forget, aid has still not reached some of the remoter parts of Nepal, which is now trying to get back to some normalcy though it will take years. Classes are being held under tarps, with the first weeks devoted to play and talking about the earthquake that ravaged the country. Many schools were destroyed and those standing have been used as shelters. Three million people are homeless in Nepal. The World Food Program has hired 20,000 porters to carry supplies to where the roads have gone.

$423 million was pledged to Nepal but only a little over $9 million has arrived.

In the tech world, Yahoo will have to face a class action lawsuit for spying on people’s emails in order to better target advertising. Google is going deeper into Virtual Reality.

What is not virtually real but actually real is that I need to clear up and go off to a meeting.

It’s a wild world out there. I think a martini is in order.

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Letter From New York 05 27 15 FIFA in trouble with Germany “a bordello”

May 27, 2015

It is a warm day in New York City, a day that started cloudy and is ending with sun shining down. In not so very long, I’ll be off to a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen to meet my friend Caroline Ely for a drink. It’s been awhile since we have seen each other and time to catch up.

While drinking my morning coffee, the news was being splashed all over the place that FIFA officials had been arrested early in the morning in Zurich, Switzerland. The Swiss made the arrests in an understated way, giving the men time to dress and gather their belongings and, in at least one case, had the hotel staff hold up a sheet to shield the arrestee from the news people who had started to gather.

It’s another blow to FIFA, an organization that has been dogged by rumors of corruption for years. American officials are seeking the extradition of a number of FIFA officials for having taken over $150,000,000 in bribes, “year after year, tournament after tournament,” according to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

In Texas, hundreds have been ordered to evacuate after at least fifteen people have died in weather related accidents, as storms pounded the state with torrential rains. Oklahoma, too, is suffering from the pounding from Mother Nature, who, my friend and writer, Howard Bloom, has pointed can be a b**tch.

The Republican race for the Presidential nomination has become more crowded now that Rick Santorum, last seen in 2012, has thrown his hat into the ring also. There will be enough of them soon that they can form their own team though I don’t think they will want to as they’ve got some intense competition going on between them. Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana set off a storm when he tweeted that Rand Paul was unfit to be Commander in Chief.

I don’t see the two of them cooperating on the field of play.

Jindal is only thinking about joining the Republican fray but it’s likely he will. Rand Paul is already in.

The Vatican has declared that the Irish vote to constitutionalize same sex marriage is a “defeat for humanity.” I feel a little defeated that they feel that way.

The Queen, Elizabeth II of Great Britain, arrived today in great pomp and circumstance to deliver “The Queen’s Speech,” which she has done sixty times during her reign. Before she arrives, the Houses of Parliament have their basement swept by the Queen’s Guard to ensure there is no Guy Fawkes in waiting. He led the Gun Powder Plot in 1605 to blow up the Houses of Parliament.   He has a day named after him in England.

What the Queen said was dictated by what Cameron wants but it gets said with such grand style.

Tony Blair, once Great Britain’s Prime Minister, has been, for the last eight years, the envoy to the Middle East. He will step down next month. He resigned to Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the UN. He had been working on the behalf of the Quartet [Great Britain, the European Union, the United States and Russia]. Diplomacy gets complicated.

Angela Merkel is the most powerful woman in the world, according to Forbes, ruling a country that has now become known as “the bordello of Europe.” Germany legalized prostitution in 2002 and a huge sex trade has built up worth $16 billion a year. There are fancy places for the prostitutes to practice their trade and sex tourists load onto busses and head for Germany. It doesn’t seem to bother Angela much.

Also in Germany, there was an evacuation of part of Cologne today when WWII bombs were found undetonated while working on a construction project. Apparently happens not infrequently. Something like a thousand bombs were defused last year. They are a hazard out in the North Sea where wind farms are being built. Clearing bombs is more than a cottage industry in Germany.

I had coffee with a friend this morning who told me that Germany blew up two “dirty” nuclear bombs during the final days of the war. I had never heard that and when I attempted to research it, I found stories about it, including one that Hitler was a German traitor, actually an Illuminati and he did what he set out to do, break Germany’s back.

There is a lot out there on the Internet and it’s not all true or pretty. Beware.

And now I am going to publish this and head for drinks with my friend Caroline.

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Letter From New York 05 26 15 Of mergers and mania, notes from the media world…

May 26, 2015

The sun has darted in and out behind clouds all day. I woke up fairly early but had decided not to take my regular train into the city but the one after that; after a long Memorial Day weekend, much spent on the deck watching the creek flow by, I got up, had my morning cup of coffee and started perusing the news.

Pushing to the head of the news today was that Charter Communications will acquire Time-Warner Cable in a deal that is worth about 78 billion dollars, only a few weeks after Comcast withdrew its bid for Time Warner Cable because it looked like it would not receive regulatory approval.

This time the chances are better. Why? It’s not Comcast that is doing the acquiring but Charter. Comcast also holds lots of other assets besides its cable assets, including a small company called NBC Universal.

In the interesting and byzantine world of cable, Charter’s largest shareholder is Liberty Media, a company controlled by John Malone, a cable pioneer who built the nation’s largest cable company, TCI, and sold it to Bell Atlantic back in 1994 for $55 billion.

John Malone’s TCI financially backed and gave carriage to a number of struggling cable networks, including Discovery which has gone on to being its own small behemoth.

In those days, he earned the sobriquets of “Darth Vader” and the “King of Cable.” He dominated the cable business from his office in Denver. Liberty Media is a conglomerate with interests in lots of companies here and abroad. John Malone is personally worth about $8.6 billion and is the largest landowner in America.

The combined companies will be the number two cable and broadband supplier in the country, after Comcast. But the fact that it will only be number two and won’t control about 50% of broadband connections is what will make it easier for regulators to say yes to this while having said no to Comcast.

In the days when cable customers are beginning to shift their loyalty to streaming services such as Netflix, cable operators are seeking partners to bulk up to face the challenge.

Recently, European operator Altice purchased Suddenlink, a smaller cable company. It will be interesting to see who is where when the music stops.

The music stopped for ITV’s purchase of The Weinstein’s TV division. Too caught up in the movie business of the Weinstein brothers and ITV has no appetite for the film business.

This story is days old but keeps repeating. Media bosses make good paychecks, especially if you work with a company that has John Malone on the board. Several of the companies that Liberty is invested in have CEO’s who have rich compensation packages.

David Zaslav of Discovery Communications, in which Liberty has an interest, is the highest paid exec of a publicly traded company. He earned something like $156,000,000 last year, after extending his contract.

Breathtaking.

As we move into the negotiations for advertising next year, in what is called “the upfront” there are a couple of trends to be noted. One is that traditional TV dollars are down while digital is growing strongly, 21%.

Big brands are having a tough time in packaged goods. Consumers are beginning to gravitate to smaller brands that feel more “authentic” than say P&G or Clorox. It’s going to be a tough fight out there over the next few years for the hearts and minds of consumers, particularly in latching on to young consumers who are consuming media in such different ways.

Kellogg is pulling advertising from YouTube until they get better numbers, a blow for the service. They want someone like a Nielsen to come in and verify the numbers. The trend is growing and Kraft Foods is saying its probably going to follow suit with some platforms.

Branded entertainment is growing but is still a fraction of traditional advertising. It’s still hard to get some buyers to buy.

Cowen and Company, a research company, is predicting that by 2020 Netflix will have one hundred million subscribers and about 17 billion dollars in revenue, domestically and internationally.

They have just acquired all the 1990’s episodes of “Bill Nye The Science Guy.” Go Netflix.

Being a Netflix fan I will probably go home after a bite or two at a favorite place and watch something off the service.

Have a good evening everyone!

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