The unflappable Tina Brown

Is there a formula to make America great and dominate the planet?

There is a woman and a man I have been reading and listening to for nearly a half-century. I have never had doubts about sincerity and brain power in writing about problems of our world and its slowly evolving inhabitants.

Tina Brown (incidentally, born in Maidenhead, England) was editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, where she cherished hard-hitting coverage of personal and political scandals. She has produced hundreds of programs and interviews for Public Broadcast Systems (PHS) and National Public Radio. She also writes and speaks for numerous podcasts and other internet shows. She does not pull her strongest punches.

In a recent interview, she admitted using the following descriptions of famous wealthy people: “I am so bored, frankly, with the uber-rich thinking that just because they’re rich, they know everything about everything. They’re so disrespectful of our business. They have absolutely no respect for us.  This is my major beef with digital barons. I’m probably burning with resentment about it at all times, actually.”

In her home base of New York City, and at age 71, she knew and knows most of the beautiful good and most of the bad ugly, including politicians, publicity seekers like Tucker Carlson and the Murdochs, the rich like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and sadistic cruel grifters like Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, and rapists like Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Harvey Weinstein. She interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, the sexual predator who sexually trafficked Epstein’s evil place on his private Caribbean island.

Tina also knew Robert Maxwell, an English newspaper baron and Ghillaine’s father, who had a reputation of being one of the world’s great crooks. She also knows and covered the not-so-smart Prince Harry, who quit the English monarchy and then had to work for a living.

Tina demonstrates a way with words. When Amazon’s Jeff Bezos took his turn at being the richest man in the world and dumped his wife Mackenzie Scott of 25 years for helicopter pilot-journalist Lauren Sanchez, Tina got to the meat of things quick: “Lauren has proved that landing the fourth-richest (at the time!) man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit.”

Tina had the temerity to name our jerk, prick, asshole, malignant narcissist, socio psychopath, pardoner, grifter, coupister, insurrectioner president “Tyrannosaurus Trump” after his desires to rule the world of rich dinosaurs.

I’m still trying to figure out why she called Prince Harry a “ginger whinger.” 

She called Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg a “slippery salamander” after seeing him slipping and sliding into the front row at the inauguration crowd of the world’s greatest grifter surrounded by gaggles and prides of lyin’ greedy billionaires.

Three fundamental answers from a Rhodes and Roads Scholar

Even when Nicholas Kristof was a lowly undergraduate student at Harvard, he was called the brightest man on campus — which included the university president and faculty. The legend still grows for the 66-year-old New York Times columnist who has been employed there for 41 years.

Nicholas grew up on a cherry orchard and sheep farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He was student body president and school paper editor at Yamhill Carlton High School while both his parents were professors at Portland State University. He graduated from Harvard studying government, was named a Rhodes Scholar, earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree at Oxford, a law degree at Magdalen College at Oxford, and was awarded a Master of Arts Degree for his extra work.

In his career he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, been stationed as a correspondent in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, and has spent years in Africa, reporting on the trials, tribulations and successes of many countries.
The famous Archbishop Demond Tut of South Africa named Kristof an “Honorary African” for his hard, encompassing work. He has been awarded  many honorary degrees — and spent a year at the American University in Cairo studying the Arabic language so he could cover the Middle East. Nicholas, no doubt, is one of the smartest guys in the world.

On Nov. 15 The New York Times published his latest column: “America’s Formula For Greatness Is Under Threat.”  I think it’s the most important analysis of Trumpistan ever published.
He points out three reasons why we are still the most dominant superpower — and why we are in the process of losing this position of power:

(1) A commitment to education at every level, resulting in global leadership in science and technology,

(2) An inclination toward free markets and free trade, supported by the rule of law, and

(3) Immigration and the absorption of some of the brightest minds from around the world.
(By the way, Nicolas’s father was named Wladyslaw Krzysztofowicz of Polish and Armenian descent, who immigrated to this country after World War II in 1952 and died in 2010. Thankfully, he dropped a few letters from his name when he entered the United States in 1952, now the Divided States of America.)

His answer to what is wrong in the world and America: Education

His key is superior education so we eliminate people who want to kill Socrates, who want to burn Galileo at the stakes after the Inquisition because the sun travels around the earth, billionaires sponsor Moms for Liberty who turn into Moms for Stupidity and ban and burn books, because Tylenol causes autism, vaccines spread disease, animal fats are better for you than olive oil, global warming is a climate change hoax, socialism is destructive and destroys dreams, solar power is more expensive than non-renewable fossil fuels, foreign aid food is too expensive, and the negative beat goes on, drummed by the ignorant and stupid.

Although American universities still lead the world in science, technology, Artificial Intelligence, medicine, and the humanities of art, music, literature and theater, we have Know-Nothings and ignorant authoritarians trying to control higher education.

Even a novel author or Hollywood movie director would not appoint a billionaire in financing and exploiting professional wrestling to lead the Department of Education.

Kristof believes Trump is assaulting critical thinking, free speech, science, and climate change, and by trying to blackmail public and private universities. “Hoax” is Trump’s most popular word.

Nickolas sums up the current higher education situation: “Any president should be proud of universities like Harvard and Columbia, not attempt to crush them. We stand up to China with not only aircraft carriers but, even more, by educating our own young people and leading in research in artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and materials science. Yet by some reckonings, China has already surpassed the United States in emerging technologies.”

As an example, Kristof opposed the Trump cuts of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting eliminating 544 TV and radio grants representing more than 1,500 locally managed stations nationwide that reach 99% of our total population with superior programming such as Masterpiece Theater, documentaries produced and directed by Ken Burns, Lawrence Welk concerts, Frontline, and hundreds of programs about American and world history, and broadcasts in other languages such as Haitian Creole, Navajo and Vietnamese.

The Trumplican Party took $1.1 billion that would pay for public TV and radio for two years and sent the money to those who have too-much enough so they could have more enough.

PBS estimates that 115 stations representing 43 million listeners and viewers will close by the middle of 2026 for lack of funding.

Media critic John Oliver said: “Public media provides incredible benefits to the communities that it serves, and it has just suffered a gigantic blow.”

No longer will local stations warn residents of floods, storms, fires and other major events in their broadcast area.

Bernie to billionaires: Do you think you can get by with $999 M?

When a very independent Democratic Socialist Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was criticized by a billionaire for saying the country didn’t need any, Bernie asked him: “Do you think you can get by on $999 million a year?”

When it comes to money, budgets, salaries, CEO compensation and income inequality, Nicholas doesn’t say much.

But I think he used an unusual word in writing his second fundamental for improving the common good. He has “An inclination toward free markets and free trade, supported by the rule of law.”

“Inclination” is an unusual word to use when discussing the economy. He seems to be saying “I lean a little toward what formula to use for a good economy, but……..”

I think he is somewhere between being a Democratic Capitalist and Democratic Socialist. He does think that 3,000 billionaires with more than 800 in the income inequality of the Divided States of America will destroy the world if they keep wasting fossil fuels and other resources in providing the “good life.”  They don’t pay much attention to the United Nation’s leader when he says they are killing a human a minute from excessive heat built up from climate change, superyachts, private jets and other playthings.

A strong majority ignores  the Paris Agreement.
Nicholas recognizes that Bernie at a “young” 84, is a truthful charismatic who, with the 37-year-young AOC, can draw 30,000 young potential voters when they both say more than 60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, have virtually no cash reserves for emergencies, and spend 30 to 50% of their income on rent. Local governments survey the homeless once a year and claim more than 730,000 Americans are homeless. Urban specialists say the actual figure has to be more than 5,000,000.

It would be interesting to know how many days Kristof spent in African countries writing about race wars, civil wars, revolutions, economic wars, mass kidnappings, gang wars, torture centers and African schools in the bush and big cities. He always seemed to spend a lot of time each year writing about “bad troubles.” I bet collectively it would be about half a decade.

We not only import strong bodies, we also import strong minds
Whenever I watch the National Basketball Association and National Football Association or colleges and universities play those sports, I often ask the old cheerleader sitting by me to count the number of blacks and whites on the floor or field.

In basketball it is often all black because their athleticism and ability to jump is often determined by their great-great-great-grandfathers and great-great-great-grandmothers who were often chosen to procreate strong tall powerful slaves.

We must remember that many cotton growers made more money selling black baby slaves than selling bales of cotton.

More than 80% of the players in the NBA and NFL are black. Notice all the black quarterbacks in both pro and college football?

Incidentally, the American Immigration Council has determined that 46% of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. The Nobel Prize in Economics this year went to three university scholars who proved that economic growth is sustained by three fundamentals: balanced immigration, great research universities performing from government grants, the rule of American law, and the recruitment of the world’s best minds to govern and teach in our public and private universities.