Bob Schwartz

May 8, 2018

Trump is only the 3rd most powerful person in the world. Let’s stop paying obsessive attention to him and pick someone else.

In America, and in much of the world, we pay attention to Trump every day, sometimes for hours on end. We do it because he is a powerful public executive who can affect many lives. We also do it because he is there, a major natural disaster or train wreck, fascinating even if it doesn’t affect us. This is exactly what Trump wants, the only thing he wants. If that attention used to be voluntary, he believes it is now mandatory because he is the most powerful person in America and the world.

Forbes just released its ranking of The World’s Most Powerful People:

This year’s list highlights the consolidation of power in the hands of an elite few. Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, seizes the top spot for the first time ever after China’s congress amended its constitution in March, broadening his influence and eliminating term limits. He enjoys a cult of personality not seen since Chairman Mao.

Xi’s elevation to the world’s most powerful person unseats Russian President Vladimir Putin (#2), who held the top spot for an unprecedented four consecutive years. Putin has ruled Russia since May of 2000, and this year he was re-elected to a fourth term with nearly 77 percent of the vote. That’s the largest margin of victory for any candidate for the office since the fall of the Soviet Union.

One year into his term, President Donald Trump falls to the No. 3 spot. Trump has seen limited success pushing his agenda through a Congress controlled by his own party, is under investigation by multiple law enforcement agencies, and can’t shake off scandals arising from his personal and business life –but he’s still Commander in Chief of the world’s greatest economic and military power….

To compile the ranking of The World’s Most Powerful People, we considered hundreds of candidates from various walks of life all around the globe, and measured their power along four dimensions. First, we asked whether the candidate has power over lots of people. Pope Francis, ranked #6, is the spiritual leader of more than a billion Catholics. Doug McMillon (#23), is the CEO of the world’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart Stores, with more than 2.3 million workers around the globe.

Next we assessed the financial resources controlled by each person. Are they relatively large compared to their peers? For heads of state we used GDP, while for CEOs, we looked at measures like their company’s assets and revenues. When candidates have a high personal net worth, like the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos (#5), we also took that into consideration. In certain instances we considered other valuable resources at the candidate’s disposal, like access to oil reserves.

Then we determined if the candidate is powerful in multiple spheres. There are only 75 slots on our list –one for approximately every 100 million people on the planet– so being powerful in just one area is often not enough. Our picks project their influence in myriad ways: Elon Musk (#25) has power in the auto business through Tesla Motors, in the aerospace industry through SpaceX, because he’s a billionaire, and because he’s a highly respected tech visionary.

Lastly, we made sure that the candidates actively used their power. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (#36) has near absolute control over the lives of the 25 million people who live in his country, and is known to punish dissent with death.

To calculate the final rankings, a panel of Forbes editors ranked all of our candidates in each of these four dimensions of power, and those individual rankings were averaged into a composite score. This year’s list comes at a time of rapid and profound change, and represents our best guess about who will matter in the year to come.

If you feel the need to pay constant or even obsessive attention to a powerful person, let it be someone—anyone—except Trump. Just about anybody on the list below may be smarter, more interesting, more accomplished, and in many cases more important than Trump.

Rank	Name	Organization	Age
#1	Xi Jinping	China	64
#2	Vladimir Putin	Russia	65
#3	Donald Trump	United States	71
#4	Angela Merkel	Germany	63
#5	Jeff Bezos	Amazon.com	54
#6	Pope Francis	Roman Catholic Church	81
#7	Bill Gates	Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation	62
#8	Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud	Saudi Arabia	32
#9	Narendra Modi	India	67
#10	Larry Page	Google	45
#11	Jerome H. Powell	United States	65
#12	Emmanuel Macron	France	40
#13	Mark Zuckerberg	Facebook	33
#14	Theresa May	United Kingdom	61
#15	Li Keqiang	China	62
#16	Warren Buffett	Berkshire Hathaway	87
#17	Ali Hoseini-Khamenei	Iran	78
#18	Mario Draghi	European Central Bank	70
#19	Jamie Dimon	JPMorgan Chase	62
#20	Carlos Slim Helu	America Movil SAB de CV (ADR)	78
#21	Jack Ma	Alibaba Group	53
#22	Christine Lagarde	International Monetary Fund	62
#23	Doug McMillon	Wal-Mart Stores	51
#24	Tim Cook	Apple	57
#25	Elon Musk	Tesla	46
#26	Benjamin Netanyahu	Israel	68
#27	Ma Huateng	Tencent Holdings	46
#28	Larry Fink	BlackRock	65
#29	Akio Toyoda	Toyota Motor	62
#30	John L. Flannery	General Electric	56
#31	Antonio Guterres	United Nations	69
#32	Mukesh Ambani	Reliance Industries Ltd.	61
#33	Jean-Claude Juncker	European Union	63
#34	Darren Woods	ExxonMobil	53
#35	Sergey Brin	Alphabet	44
#36	Kim Jong-un	North Korea	34
#37	Charles Koch	Koch Industries	82
#38	Shinzo Abe	Japan	63
#39	Rupert Murdoch	News Corp	87
#40	Satya Nadella	Microsoft	50
#41	Jim Yong Kim	World Bank	58
#42	Stephen Schwarzman	Blackstone Group	71
#43	Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan	United Arab Emirates	70
#44	Haruhiko Kuroda	Japan	73
#45	Abdel Fattah el-Sisi	Egypt	63
#46	Li Ka-shing	CK Hutchison Holdings	89
#47	Lloyd Blankfein	Goldman Sachs Group	63
#48	Recep Tayyip Erdogan	Turkey	64
#49	Bob Iger	Walt Disney	67
#50	Michel Temer	Brazil	77
#51	Michael Bloomberg	Bloomberg	76
#52	Wang Jianlin	Dalian Wanda Group	63
#53	Mary Barra	General Motors	56
#54	Moon Jae-in	South Korea	65
#55	Masayoshi Son	Softbank Corp.	60
#56	Bernard Arnault	LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton	69
#57	Justin Trudeau	Canada	46
#58	Robin Li	Baidu	49
#59	Michael Dell	Dell	53
#60	Hui Ka Yan	Evergrande Real Estate Group	59
#61	Lee Hsien Loong	Singapore	66
#62	Bashar al-Assad	Syria	52
#63	John Roberts	United States	63
#64	Enrique Pena Nieto	Mexico	51
#65	Ken Griffin	Citadel LLC	49
#66	Aliko Dangote	Dangote Group	61
#67	Mike Pence	United States	58
#68	Qamar Javed Bajwa	Pakistan	57
#69	Rodrigo Duterte	Philippines	73
#70	Abigail Johnson	Fidelity Investments	56
#71	Reed Hastings	Netflix	57
#72	Robert Mueller	United States	73
#73	Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi	Islamic State	46
#74	Joko Widodo	Indonesia	56
#75	Gianni Infantino	FIFA	48

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May 7, 2018

The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire

I cannot fully explain James Hillman in this space, not briefly, not at all. If there is a badge, it might say psychologist, or Jungian psychologist, but that would be misleading, limiting and wrong. Thomas Moore, in his Prologue to The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, begins with this:

James Hillman is an artist of psychology. If it sounds odd to call a psychologist an artist, then you, the reader, know your task as you take up this anthology. You will be challenged all along the way to rethink, to re-vision, and to reimagine. The difficulty in reading Hillman is not to learn a new bag of techniques or a new conceptual system. Hillman demands nothing short of a new way of thinking. He takes psychoanalysis out of the context of medicine and health, not only in the obvious ways, rejecting the medical model, but in subtle ways: asking us to give up fantasies of cure, repair, growth, self-improvement, understanding, and well-being as primary motives for psychological work. He is more a painter than a physician, more a musician than a social scientist, and more an alchemist than a traditional philosopher.

Hillman has written many books and articles, but A Blue Fire, made up of short passages from many works, is what to read to get the essence. Choosing a representative excerpt is impossible, since it is bound to miss most other points Hillman makes. But the excerpt below, covering the nature of illiteracy, silence and imagination, is close to my heart, and to some of our life in 2018: “An education that in any way neglects imagination is an education into psychopathy. It is an education that results in a sociopathic society of manipulations. We learn how to deal with others and become a society of dealers.”

Why have we as a nation become more and more illiterate? We blame television and the computer, but they are not causes. They are results of a prior condition that invited them in. They arrived to fill a gap. When imaginative ability declines, other ways to communicate appear. These ways work even though they too are dyslexic in structure: simultaneity of bits, odd juxtapositions, messages that do not move linearly from left to right. Yet television and personal computers communicate.

Evidently, reading does not depend solely on the ordering of words or the ordering of letters in the words. Indeed, poets use dyslexic structures deliberately. Reading depends on the psyche’s capacity to enter imagination. Reading is more like dreaming, which, too, goes on in silence. Our illiteracy reflects our educative process away from the silent grounds of reading: silent study halls and quiet periods, solitary homework, learning by heart, listening through a whole class without interruptions, writing an essay exam in longhand, drawing from nature instead of lab experiments. This long neglect of imaginational conditions that foster reading—Sputnik and the new math; social problems and social relatedness; mecentered motivation; the confusion of information with knowledge, of opinion with judgment, and trivia with sources; communications as messages by telephone calls and answering machines rather than as letter writing in silence; learning to speak up without first having something learned to say; multiple choice and scoring as a test of comprehension—has produced illiteracy.

The human person as a data bank does not need to read more than functionally. A data bank deciding yes or no on the basis of feedback (i.e., reinforcement) need not imagine beyond getting, storing, and spending. Just get the instructions right; never mind the content. Learn the how rather than the what with its qualities, values, and subtleties. Then the human agent becomes an incarnated credit card performing the religious rituals of consumerism. You need only be able to sign your name in the space marked Xy like an immigrant, like a slave, or a …

Or a psychopath. Descriptions of psychopathy, or sociopathic personalities, speak of their inability to imagine the other. Psychopaths are well able to size up situations and charm people. They perceive, assess, and relate, making use of any opportunity. Hence their successful manipulations of others. But the psychopath is far less able to imagine the other beyond a fantasy of usefulness, the other as a true interiority with his or her own needs, intentions, and feelings. An education that in any way neglects imagination is an education into psychopathy. It is an education that results in a sociopathic society of manipulations. We learn how to deal with others and become a society of dealers.

James Hillman
“Right to Remain Silent”
Journal of Humanistic Education and Development (1988)

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May 5, 2018

Excellence and Humility: Why Baseball’s Mike Trout Should Be President (of Our Hearts)

“As always, his personal stats continue to give off a beam of light.”
Mike Lupica, MLB.com

Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels is universally considered the best player in Major League Baseball. The only questions remaining are how much better he might get and whether he may be the best to ever play the game. Seriously, and seriously amazing since Trout is only 26 and has been in the majors only since 2011.

I’ll let veteran sportswriter Mike Lupica take over the story. But there is one more point to make about Trout. Along with overwhelming acknowledgment of his once-in-a-generation talent, he is universally regarded for his humility and lack of showmanship. He only wants to do three things: play baseball as well as he can for his team, get better every day at playing baseball, and be known and seen for playing baseball and not for anything else he says or does.

For those of us who are not nearly the best, let alone the best ever, that should be inspiring and aspirational.

Mike Lupica
MLB.com

The question for the Angels’ Mike Scioscia, who has seen it all from Mike Trout from the moment Trout hit the big leagues in 2011, was simple enough. It was about Trout’s capacity, if he has one, to still surprise his own manager, as Trout continues to be the greatest star of his sport and one of the great stars of American sports, even if he is not discussed nearly often enough outside baseball the way he ought to be, which means as baseball’s LeBron….

It doesn’t work that way in baseball, or for Trout, who is the best player of his time, on his way, if he is blessed by good health, to someday being called one of the most complete of all time. To this point, Trout has only played three postseason games in his career. He has just one postseason home run in the books. LeBron always has the postseason stage, and the brightest lights there are. So does someone like Tom Brady, who has played eight Super Bowls in his own career.

Not Trout, at least not so far.

It does not change who Trout is and what he has done in baseball and keeps doing, before his 27th birthday. From the time he played his first full season for the Angels in 2012, the only time he has finished worse than second in the American League’s MVP Award voting was last season, when he got hurt and only played 114 games. Even with all the missed time, Trout finished fourth in the voting. So he has two MVPs already, three seconds, a fourth. As always, his personal stats continue to give off a beam of light.

When I suggested to Reggie Jackson, who lives in southern California and has had his own ringside seat to the way Trout plays the game, that Trout is the superstar who sometimes seems to be hiding in plain sight, Reggie said, “No. We all know that he’s the best player.”

Added Reggie: “You know how we always talk about five-tool players [hitting for average, hitting for power, base running, throwing, and fielding]? You watch Trout play and sometimes you swear he’s got even more than that. He checks boxes that you didn’t even know were boxes.”

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May 4, 2018

Trump: King Midas in Reverse Works His Magic on Kanye

He’s King Midas with a curse.
He’s King Midas in reverse.
He’s not the man to hold your trust,
Everything he touches turns to dust in his hands.
King Midas in Reverse, The Hollies

From The Hill:

President Trump on Friday thanked Kanye West during his speech at the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) annual convention, giving the artist credit for his rising popularity in the polls among African Americans.

“And by the way, Kanye West must have some power, because you probably saw, I doubled my African-American support numbers,” the president told those gathered in Dallas, Texas. “I went from 11 to 22 in one week.”

“Thank you Kanye, thank you,” he added….

West has sparked outrage and intense debate among the hip-hop and African-American communities in recent days with tweets in support of Trump, with some celebrities expressing support for West while others, including many of his fans, have expressed disappointment.

“We are both dragon energy. He is my brother,” West tweeted in one of his pro-Trump messages starting April 25….

Trump has previously thanked West for the support on Twitter, tweeting that it was “very cool!”

Kanye is only the latest in a long series of those who have seen their careers or lives turn to “dirt” (to be polite) simply by having anything to do with Trump. Sometimes it happens relatively quickly, as in the case of Dr. Ronny Jackson. Sometimes it happens after years and years, as in the case of Michael Cohen. Besides being an exceptional artist—which he has been—Kanye seems to have a bunch of other problems, not totally related to his Trump thing. But he seems to have been able to overcome some of those difficulties—until this. Being thanked by Trump at the NRA Convention is almost certainly the coup de grace.

The moral of the story: If you think it necessary or advantageous to get in bed with a pathological narcissist, know that you will wake up alone and covered in dirt. Possibly under a bus. Which is never very cool.

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May 4, 2018

Trump After Two Terms as President

Imagine it is 2024. Trump is finishing out his second term as president. Eight years.

In a detailed and complex way, we may wonder what the lives of people in America and the world have been like during those years, day after day, thanks to his presidency. Wondering what we might do, what we might have done, to enjoy a different outcome.

But there is simple wondering too. Even at this point in 2018, it is hard to avoid seeing his face every day. Which led me to wonder: what face will we be looking at every day in 2024?

It turns out that a graphic designer at the Express newspaper in the UK has already helped us imagine that: “The intriguing image [see above] has been meticulously constructed by a professional graphic design artist, who specialises in biometric techniques to age the human face.”

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May 3, 2018

What If Trump Is God’s Answer to Somebody’s Prayers?

It is National Prayer Day. It is not worth repeating the hollow and hypocritical nonsense that Trump said today on the occasion.

A theological thought did cross my mind.

If God answers prayers, as many Trump supporters (and many non-supporters) believe, we can assume that a number of those supporters prayed for Trump’s election and for his continuing leadership of America. Those who do faithfully pray for outcomes know that sometimes those prayers appear to be answered and sometimes not. Almost all of those people will admit that how this works, whose prayers are answered and which prayers are answered, is a mystery.

What if Trump’s election and his continuing leadership of America are answers to somebody’s prayers?

Just a thought on this National Prayer Day. As many people, believers and non-believers, pray for this sad madness to end.

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May 3, 2018

A Nation of Grand Canyons

It is a cliché to talk about the gaps and divides separating Americans today across many dimensions. There’s money, of course. Education. Knowledge. Political ideology. Race. Religion. Value placed on truth, honesty, compassion, integrity, competence, equality, fairness, lawfulness, civility, decency. But there they all are, arrayed like a bunch of Grand Canyons, breathtaking in ways very different than the awesome inspiration of the actual Grand Canyon.

One great truth of our traditions is that it is a daily struggle to transcend whatever state of personal meanness, baseness and selfishness we are stuck in. Those traditions also tell us that we are capable of prevailing in that struggle precisely because we are, for the most part, naturally better than meanness, baseness and selfishness—if we can discover that. Those traditions also tell us that those gaps and divides—those Grand Canyons—can be bridged because those canyons don’t exist. Not that the differences aren’t there or that everyone is the same or situated the same. But that the differences that matter aren’t there and in ways that matter, everyone is the same and situated the same. Or haven’t you had someone be born in your family or die in your family? Or haven’t you been born and aren’t you going to die yourself?

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May 2, 2018

Why Trump May Not Fire Department of Justice Officials (It’s Not Impeachment, a Constitutional Crisis or the Rule of Law)

It increasingly sounds like Trump is ready to rush in and try to stop the Mueller investigation:

A Rigged System – They [Department of Justice] don’t want to turn over Documents to Congress. What are they afraid of? Why so much redacting? Why such unequal “justice?” At some point I will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved!

Trump actually has no idea what the constitutional powers of the three branches of government are. He may not even know there are three co-equal and balanced branches of government. The only thing he knows is that he is THE PRESIDENT and that is the most powerful position in the world, EVER.

Trump’s firing people responsible for investigating him is wrong, is incident to a constitutional crisis, and breaches the fundamentals of the American rule of law. That won’t stop him. But this might:

If Trump proceeds with his improper intervention, every responsible lawyer currently working on his behalf, and every responsible lawyer being asked to represent him, should and may leave and run the other way. Because by continuing or taking on that work in the aftermath of such action by Trump, they are complicit—even if tangentially and collaterally—in supporting those actions. There is a case to be made that by continuing in those circumstances, lawyers are in breach of their oaths (lawyers are all sworn officers of the court) and of the rules of professional conduct.

All of which is not meaningful or comprehensible to Trump. But he might notice that there are fewer quality lawyers willing to touch his legal problems, and that number will get infinitely smaller if he carries out his threats.

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May 1, 2018

Facebook Releases Oculus Go—Its First Self-contained VR Headset

This isn’t a review of the Oculus Go released today—Facebook’s first self-contained Virtual Reality headset, requiring no phone or computer.

This isn’t a review of the photo above of Mark Zuckerberg demonstrating the Oculus Go. (Note: you can use the Oculus Go wearing a t-shirt or the occasional business suit, if you are demonstrating it to a Congressional committee.)

This is a mention of the growing movement to travel to and colonize Mars, a movement Trump supports. Until that dream comes true, if we want to avoid and escape the depressing and often insoluble problems we are faced with, problems that some are daily making even worse, a self-contained VR headset—from Facebook!—seems like just the ticket.

“He’s in the bestselling show. Is there life on Mars?”

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May 1, 2018

Trump’s Shtarkers

There is news that the offices of Trump’s long-time New York doctor were raided in February 2017 by Trump associates. A great Yiddish word comes immediately to mind: shtarker.

The Hill reports:

President Trump’s longtime personal doctor in New York said a trio of Trump associates raided his office in February 2017, seizing the president’s medical records.

Dr. Harold Bornstein told NBC News that Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, a lawyer with the Trump Organization and a third man came to his office the morning of Feb. 3, 2017. They took lab reports and Trump’s medical charts, he said.

“They must have been here for 25 minutes or 30 minutes. It created a lot of chaos,” Bornstein said, adding that he felt “raped, frightened and sad.”

Stark in Yiddish means strong, and so one of the usages of shtarker is to mean “strong man” or “tough guy.” But it acquired another, more sinister meaning in the lexicon of crime. A shtarker is a strong-arm man, an enforcer, a thug.

It is a word definitely well-known to the Russian and Eastern European Jews who surrounded Michael Cohen in his family and business (see A Brief History of Michael Cohen’s Criminal Ties . It is a word that may not be known to all of Trump’s people, but it is a concept that some of them understand, endorse and are not afraid to use.

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