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Mentoring the Second Generation

I’ve had the pleasure of mentoring many young people throughout my career. With family members, it’s been mostly about watching them grow into responsible and productive adults. With employees, it’s been about helping them grow into business leaders on their own.

I can’t think of anything that has been more rewarding than watching those young people listen to my advice and put it into action.

But lately, I’ve been mentoring a different group of people, and it has turned into a source of extra special pleasure for me. I’m talking about mentoring my partners’ and colleagues’ kids. Sometimes, even their grandkids.

I got a call from DL, who said, “I’m off to Madrid for a few months, but I’d like your help with D, my son.” It turns out that, after a successful career as a yoga instructor in LA, D moved east and was trying to decide whether to start again in the yoga business or do something else. I’d seen D a handful of times in the last 30 years, but we barely knew one another. Because of my relationship with DL, though, I wanted to do everything I could to help him. And I did.

RR called my office to set up an appointment. I remembered him as the first son of NR, our partner in a publishing company in Germany. Several years ago, his dad retired, putting him in charge. RR said that he was going to be in Florida and wanted to hang out with me and talk business. I was honored to spend a day with this young man, as a tribute to the relationship I had with his dad. I took him out to Paradise Palms,  where we spent several hours talking as we moved through the gardens. This kid is the spitting image of his father. And he has his dad’s intellectual and emotional intelligence. He even has the same smile and hand gestures. Can you imagine what a privilege and a pleasure this was for me?

AV, a partner in our Nicaraguan development, asked me to spend some time with his son who’s starting school in the US this year. AV wanted me to encourage the boy to keep his nose to the grindstone. To spread his wings, but remember that success in life is all about doing the work that others won’t. I was happy to do it.

And that’s to say nothing of the relationships that have been developed over the years between businesses I’ve started that are run by my children and businesses my colleagues and partners have started that are now run by their children. Can you imagine how much fun it is to be copied on correspondence between your children and the children of someone you’ve spent years working with?

I’ve had relationships like this in the past. But they are becoming common now, due no doubt to my age and the age of my partners and colleagues. It’s all good. All very good. I feel so lucky.

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Cops Monitoring Cops 

I’ve been following this guy lately. He’s a cop. His YouTube bailiwick is police misconduct, and his thing is to call out the bad behavior of cops, whether it is verbal intimidation, bullying, or breaking the law.

Click here to see him criticizing a cop for a tactic that you can see a dozen times a day on social media: trying to intimidate someone into submission when he has no legal right to treat the person that way.

I have several cop and ex-cop friends and acquaintances. One has told me stories about how, when he was new to the force, he was shunned by his fellow officers after he made it clear to them that refused to play this sort of game.

What’s interesting about the above exchange is that the layman is standing up for himself, quite strongly. By refusing to move as the cop presses up against him. And by raising his voice as the cop raises his. He is certainly within his rights to do so. But IMHO, this isn’t something I would do or advise anyone else to do. Keep in mind: If a cop feels justified in bullying you this way when you’ve done nothing wrong, you don’t want to find out what he feels justified in doing after you’ve pissed him off… if, for whatever reason, his body cam shuts off.

Another Example of Bad Policing… 

Click here.

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The Fabelmans 

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner

Starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, and Seth Rogan

Released in theaters (US) Nov. 11, 2022

Available to rent or buy on most platforms, including Amazon Prime and Apple TV

Another one on our (K’s and my) Academy Award Bucket List. I knew it was written and produced by Steven Spielberg. I didn’t realize that Tony Kushner was the cowriter. They are both very good at creating engaging narratives with big and important ideas, but bowdlerized for popular consumption. So, I thought, “This won’t be great. But it will probably be good.”
And that’s what it was. Good. Even quite good in some ways. But not great.

What I Liked About It 

* The story itself. The early interest in moviemaking. The support of Spielberg’s father. The infidelity of his mother. The denouement.

* The character played by Seth Rogan. A great take on a weak and despicable man.

* The character played by Michelle Williams, as Spielberg’s mom. It wasn’t quite as convincing as Rogan’s, but still fascinating.

What I Didn’t Like So Much 

Everything Spielberg. Spielberg is a great movie maker. There is no doubt about that. But his movies, the stories themselves, are surface level. This was even true of this story, which had more potential.

Critical Reception 

* “The Fabelmans is a film that shifts something inside you. Working through one of the most crushing events of his own life, Spielberg exhorts us to discover, yet again, the enduring magic of the movies.” (Anupama Chopra, Film Companion)

* “Possibly the most lavishly mounted home movie ever made. Appropriately enough, that is its great strength and its fatal weakness.” (Mark Kermode, Observer/UK)

* “The tone gets complicated. Adolescence often is. Flippancy aside, that is the movie’s signature: the acceptance that two things can be going on at once.” (Danny Leigh, Financial Times)

You can watch the trailer here.

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Speaking of Oscar-Nominated Movies… 

After praising Cate Blanchett for her acting in Tár, I happened to see this essay by Calum Russell in Far Out: “The 10 Worst Oscar-bait Performances of All Time.”

I’m not sure I agree with all of Russell’s criticisms of these movies. But his thesis makes sense to me. It occurred to me, though, that Tár fits his definition of Oscar-bait.

So now, I’m not sure how good the film was. Nor how good Blanchett’s performance was. I’m going to think about it. You should too!

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The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part XIV: Do Booster Shots Cause Strokes?! 

I wonder…

Was the stroke I had in September caused by the Pfizer vaccines I took?

In January, the CDC released a warning, saying that they have evidence that getting a Pfizer booster shot puts people 65 and older (Me!) at an increased risk for stroke.

From Reuters:

“A safety monitoring system flagged that US drugmaker Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech’s updated COVID-19 shot could be linked to a type of brain stroke in older adults, according to preliminary data analyzed by US health authorities.

“The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Friday that a CDC vaccine database had uncovered a possible safety issue in which people 65 and older were more likely to have an ischemic stroke… after receiving the vaccine booster.”

And from Bloomberg, the same story.

Now, “increased risk” doesn’t mean “definitely risky.” But still. Sometime after I got my shots, including two boosters, I had a stroke. The same sort of stroke, with the same symptoms reported by the CDC in that announcement.

What’s more interesting (to me, at least) is how the different media reported this. Reuters and Bloomberg reported the CDC statement literally, as in there is some additional risk of stroke. Whereas, The New York Times took the opposite approach. (Note the italics below.)

“Fears that the COVID booster shots made by Pfizer-BioNTech may increase the risk of strokes in people aged 65 and older were not borne out by an intensive scientific investigation…”

Read the whole NYT article here.

What to make of this?

It’s too early to draw definitive conclusions. The study was relatively small, and the differences recorded were small, too. But the reportage by the NYT reminds me that we cannot rely on the mainstream media to tell us the truth about anything that has political overtones.

If you are really concerned about COVID or our role in the Ukraine, you should go to primary sources to gather your information. Then draw your own conclusions.

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COVID Update: England Reduces Vaccine Mandate 

As I’ve been reporting since the beginning of the COVID shutdown, it’s clear that the virus was a serious (i.e., lethal) threat to people older than 65 that are also overweight and diabetic. For everyone else, the threat was about the same as the common flu.

And yet, the WHO, the CDC, and the FDA recommended vaccines for everyone. Despite the fact that the testing of the vaccines was rushed and limited, and that there were reports of harmful side effect soon after their initial distribution.

There’s no question now that their recommendations should have been tentative. And recently, they have been gradually revising them, making them more narrow and more tentative.

The same thing has been happening with government mandates. The latest example is from England, where it was announced early this week that healthy people under 50 in the country can no longer get seasonal booster shots as part of the government’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign.

Click here.

And here’s an interview with a doctor that’s been sounding the alarm about all the COVID falsehoods since the beginning.

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The conservancy that I’m developing in West Delray Beach, FL, has one of the largest and best-curated palm tree collections in the world, as well as a growing collection of outdoor sculptures, a traditionally styled Japanese tea house, a stock of African cycads, and dozens of other exotic plants and trees.

Here’s one of the cycads:

Sclavo’s Cycad

Binomial name: Encephalartos sclavoi

This critically endangered cycad (only 50 mature plants remain in their natural habitat) is endemic to Tanzania. It was named in honor of Jean Pierre Sclavo, a French collector of cycads who discovered it. Several species of Encephalartosare commonly referred to as bread trees, because a bread-like food can be prepared from the pith of the stem. In fact, the genus name is derived from the Greek words en (“within”), kephalē (“head”), and artos (“bread”).

For more information about Paradise Palms, click here.

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I been following Amala. She’s smart and funny. Click here for her take on Stanford University’s new guide for the elimination of “harmful language.”

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"Were it not for hypocrisy I’d have no advice to give."
"Were it not for sciolism I’d have no ideas to share."
"Were it not for arrogance, I’d have no ambition."
"Were it not for forgetfulness, I would have no new ideas to write about."