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Who is this boy born in 1971 growing up in Dutch Apartheid South Africa who studied at Pretoria Boys School in 1988? The head teacher at Pretoria Boys was Armstrong who reflected the English values that came from the British settlement of South Africa in the 19th century till the Boer War period- the English fighting what they see as the less cultured Dutch settlers in Natal state around 1900.  The answer -Elon Musk, who went back to Canada, his mother's country. His father Errol Musk still lives in Cape Town, South Africa. Till 2016 Elon and his brother were alienated from their father over Apartheid and the relations between blacks and whites of that period.  The illegal immigration since 2016, fentanyl crisis causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US from illegal flows of drugs from Mexico and Canada with sourcing from China, the collapse of Venezuela and gang crime in central American states has changed the thinking of the Musk family since 2020, says this story in The Guardian. ...

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Father Hesburgh became president of Notre Dame in 1952, at the age of 35, when Notre Dame was a small university known for football and theological studies. He greatly increased the size of the university, hiring new faculty, increasing the endowment fund from $9 million to $350 million, and changed polcies so that women were admitted in 1972. The endowment fund is now $9 billion. Father Hesburgh played a prominent role in the U.S. and was close to presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, Carter and Clinton. By the time he retired in 1986 after 35 years as president of Notre Dame, he was considered the most effective university president in the country, and the most influential priest in the U.S. He fought for civil rights, for peaceful protest on campus, and brought lay control through a secular board to run Notre Dame. In all these issues he stood up for his progressive views when faced by opposition from the Vatican and the U.S. government. Following the Second Vatican Council of the mid 1960's, Father Hesburgh initiated greater involvement of lay Catholics in the Mass and practices of the Church. At a meeting in Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin, 1967, a group of Catholic educators led by Hesburgh put forward the position that the pursuit of truth should be the ultimate aim of Catholic higher education in the U.S., not religious indoctrination. In this way Father Hesburgh created a new level of credibility and respect for Catholic based education in the U.S. Ironically Father Hesburgh was not a big football fan and refused to pose for a picture of him with a football, insisting that collegiate sports not influence higher education. His passion from his early years was to be a chaplain in the U.S. Navy. In fact he had to be dissuaded from going to the Navy as a chaplain in 1943, to stay on campus at Notre Dame to train naval officers during the war. Hesburgh was born in Syracuse in 1917 to an executive at Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, and studied at the seminary on Notre Dame campus and in Rome for advanced degrees in philosophy and theology. He died in 2015 at the age of 97, having placed a large imprint on the shape of American higher education in the twentieth century. ...

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Okere city, Uganda is revived with a school, solar energy, health clinic, and economy built on shea tree products. All done by someone who left the area as a child during the war decades ago and lost his father, a civil servant in Uganda. The graduate of London School of Economics, Mr. Ojok Okello, says he wanted it to generate its own income and grow from the ground up with local people building a better future. He did not want it to depend on the goodwill of some white person without the locals involved. To do this he put in his own money- $39,000. This is a heart warming story of what is possible in parts of British East Africa that are being revived with the good sense, hard work and, and positive spirit that was part of its history. It shows that with the will, self confidence and implementation a lot can be done that was thought to be impossible. A story that is seen in Indian villages and other parts of the world after decades of stagnation- clean water, electricity, schools, health care.   ...

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India protests actions by Canada's Trudeau for his support of separatists in Canada. India is a nation of many communities and languages and it does not approve of efforts to separate parts of the country in the way the US has done from the period of the Civi War and Lincoln, and as seen today in Spain, or in the efforts to reintegrate East Germany into West Germany after the cold War. Trudeau belongs to Quebec, a French Canadian province that is part of majority English Canada. Canada's very existence as a federation depends on this nonacceptance of separation of Quebec. It was not long ago that General De Gaulle used the language Vive La Quebec on a visit to Canada leading to protest all over the world and Canadian provinces respecting the integrity of Canada. Mr. Trudeau is president of Canada for that very reason that he and his father Pierre before him respect the idea of Canada as an independent sovereign nation, something he fails to do for political advantage to stay in power with a coalition because of diminished support for his Liberals party.  ...

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NYT columnist David Brooks says Biden will be judged in the long run by what he has done to bring the two parts of America together that have drifted apart -one educated, affluent, city based and the other less educated, poorer, living in smaller towns and rural areas. One from the professional classes, and college educated that benefited from the tech boom, the other from working classes that felt the brunt of the shift of jobs to China. Biden is old enough to remember his emotional mentor Franklin Delano Roosevelt who faced a similar split America with farmers in small towns and workers who lost jobs in the Depression on one side and the smaller affluent classes of professional workers, small business owners in the earlier tech boom of the 1920's. Biden's father experienced unemployment and had experiences as a blue collar worker in Pennsylvania after business failures. It is an experience that has shaped Biden's views on America and the need to bring back hope after the pandemic that followed decades of neglect of working class Americans.   ...

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Potential escape routes for Boris Johnson who as British prime minister said he would never ask for an extension of the Brexit deadline of October 31, 2019, rather die or be in a ditch. One escape route is for him to resign and for the Queen to appoint Mr. Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister of Britain. But even this is not certain, someone else could be chosen. It is now in parliament's hands what deadline to set for Brexit, likely one for January 2019, and one that Boris Johnson would then have to take to Brussels.

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Kyodo News poll shows over half of voters under 40 years voted for Sanseito and Democratic Party of the  People, two nationalist parties started in the last 5 years. These parties base their appeal on "Japan first" and reject the idea that Japan should have to bring in so many foreign workers to run its industry and economy. They also oppose the country's quiet neighborhoods being overrun by the 40 million tourists in 2024 that the government wants to increase to 60 million to support small businesses that depend on tourists. Half of voters over 60 years vote for the LDP, and this is true also for the socialist party the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) which is the opposition party. This makes the nationalist parties a new voice in Japanese politics. Part of the resentment in Japan is that figures like Shigeru Ishiba. the leader of LDP, are from an older generation that has for the 75 years since 1950 excluded others from party politics. The DPJ was around for just 24 months in Japan in 2009-2010 when its young leader prime minister Yukio Hatoyama was ousted. American leaders and it's party politics establishment before 2016 also encouraged this, with Obama making Okinawa an issue over which Hatoyama was ousted rather than work with the young Japanese prime minister. ...

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See the full text of the speech by president Biden on the "Battle for the Soul of the Nation" which was delivered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on September 1, 2022. It is the place where the Declaration of Independence was debated and written by Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers. See  the Lyrarc Gist for the speech given by president Abraham Lincoln in the same Hall on Feb. 22, 1861, on his way to the White House as the Civil War began. 2022 marks a turning point for the nation as it seeks to remain the beacon to the world that it was under Jefferson and Washington, and it was under Lincoln and Stanton.

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A major problem for parents and the schools may be knowing this and use this knowledge to keep increasing prices is that the true value of education is about your own effort and the quality of teachers, that the major state universities provide everything one needs for a good education, one just has to work hard at it. There is nothing about a Northwestern or a Brown that cannot be done by studying in the UC state system universities or state universities across the Nation, yet paradoxically the idea is kept up of the added value of a prestige name when much of a good education can be achieved at state universities costing $13,000 a year or $52,000 for 4 years at a UC Riverside or UC Santa Barbara. Michigan state instate at $16,000 and Arizona State at $13,000 a year are similar to other options.Upper middle class families struggling to pay for colleges that charge anywhere from $38,000 a year to $96,000 a year for so called elite. A shocking 40% increase in college tution is not justified by the colleges who seem to be impervious to the impact of these price increases when no such price increases were seen in the post war decades that followed 1950. Here a father who works as a director of a manufacturing company with incomes in the range of $200,000-$250,000 a year faces the difficult decisions of letting children make the decision and yet having to make sober choices about affordability. With about $200,000 set aside for tution expenses for 2 children parents face tution that can cost for 4 years $160,000 to $250,000 for 1 child. In this situation Brown cost $93,000 a year but reduced it to $65,000, Northwestern and Cornell wanted $96,000 and $81,000 a year, Notre Dame $38,000 a year and UC Berkeley $52,000 for instate tution. This means there is little left for the second child's college tution when the first child 4 year cost is in this case $65,000 a year for Brown University and $260,000 for 4 years.  ...

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Google antitrust decision in Mehta's Court for over 5 years since lawsuit by DJT in first term. During these 5 years much of the behaviours of monopolies and oligopolies in tech is further entrenched and new technology has created new ripples. The result is an ineffectual ruling that does little to address the original concerns of the Justice Department. Lost in all this commotion is the fact that there are real and present dangers in the situation presented by Google as a gatekeeper for knowledge and information which are a real and present danger to democratic forms of government as Google or social media tech companies can act as arbiters of information, a role that is not given to them under the US Constitution or any of the principles laid down by our founding fathers. Instead of being well informed under such tech monopolies and oligopolies the vast majority of the people will not get the information they need to make decisions to the detriment of the Nation. ...

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Margrethe Vestager, Danish regulator returns as head of the anti-trust division of the European Commission for a second five year term, just as tech companies are increasingly seen as having unfair business practices that do not benefit society as a whole. One change she hopes to make this time is to use "interim measures" a cease and desist order for companies to stop improper behaviour immediately, rather than go on with investigations for years. These investigations end up with fines but not the structural changes to enforce competition that are immediately needed.

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More details about Akio Toyoda and his father Shoichiro Toyoda. Yoshi Inaba is expected to be akey advisor and Shoichiro will be advising his son, as the idea is to mentor him for the new position while the elder Shoichiro still is in good health. Akio is hands on, and likes to drop in without any publicity, anonymously, to look into how things are going and see for himself. He did this at an Ann Arbor dealership last summer, and has dropped in on Jim Lentz, a senior executive in the Americanoperations in the same way. He is unpretentious and can mix with younger exectutives and talks directly in English. He is expected to be more involved in the global operations of Toyota, to travel widely and introduce diversity into Toyota's executive ranks, which have remained Japan centric all these years for a company that is so global.

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Issues about getting the American narrative right in America's museums. The American continent was settled in the 1500's by the Spanish, and in the 1600's and 1700's by the French and the British with the founding fathers coming from the generation of British settlers families in the 1700's. Much of this early period is covered by the classic history of this period by Francis Parkman. This history much of it unknown to most Americans in 2025 starts with Count Frontenac in 1620 and ends with the contest between Montcalm and Wolfe of the French and English Empires, long before the founding fathers of the United States, which contest Parkman says could have gone either way but for some flaw in the French. From this emerged two nations Canada keeping it's French heritage in Quebec and the United States. South Carolina and Georgia formed only a small fragment of this vast continent and its history, starting with the Indian tribes that had first settled this continent going back to 1000. ...

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A second estimate by the OECD increases the revenues generated from the global minimum tax of 15% on corporations by as much as $150 billion. The original estimate was of $150 billion, so the real amount generate could be twice that. It means it will help countries build the infrastructure they need to revive their economies.The international tax agreement of 2021 sets the rate based on where companies sell to consumers rather than where they are based. It is the most important tax agreement in a century with 137 countries participating. 

The original estimate estimated revenues to be $150 billion- it raised this to $200 billion. It sees $200 billion in existing revenues that will be reallocated up from $125 billion. Taxing rights will generate additional $36 billion.

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A Brooklyn, New York resident who created his own job during the pandemic. A neighbor gave him a used bike she was getting rid of. He sold it online for $400. This gave him an idea- he now pulls bikes from garages and barns all over the U.S. and restores them to new. Because of the virus related manufacturing slowdowns for bicycles, and people preferring bikes to trains demand has jumped. U.S. bicycle sales at $2.6 billion up 81% and use of city bicycles up 141% in New York city for Citibike- with single trip pass buyer at 516,000. Mr. Van Scyvoc a 33 year old Brooklyn resident collects bikes around Cleveland where his father a retired firefighter lives and takes them by pickup truck to a bike stand he has at Fort Green park in Brooklyn. There he sells bikes bought for $80 to $250 for $300 to 500. First he has to have them washed clean and then serviced in Brooklyn by an IT engineer who now repairs bikes.

 

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A disservice by DW.com to conservative Julia Klockner  when Europe and the US are moving in a conservative direction, and people have lost patience with illegal migration and lack of integration in society. Julia Klockner is Bundestag president and is close to chancellor Merz. She is a senior politician of the CDU, from Rhineland Palatinate. Her father is a wine grower in that region. She started out as a journalist and from 2010 -2022 led the CDU in her home state. She has taken a position on the destabilization of German politics by the AfD party after Merkel's failures in illegal immigration that has stretched public resources. Similar to the premier of Denmark Mette Fredericksen, a Social Democrat, Klockner as a Christian Democrat understands that illegal migration is bad for social cohesion in Germany. Klocker and Merz both understand that the public's patience has been tested to the limits by millions of illegal migrants as in the US. Her view early on in Merkel's cabinet was that legal immigrants have to be integrated into German society. She sees no need for AfD, when the CDU/CSU conservatives in Germany and in Bavaria can prevent illegal migrants from entering the country. She says-"You don't have to vote AfD for what you want. There is a democratic alternative: The CDU."  ...

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"What did it do in Green County?" this is the question voters are asking in counties across Wisconsin, and also in Michigan and Pennsylvania. These are states with lower number of minority voters and a higher number of white working class voters without college degrees. Even in rural areas around Madison voters remember their fathers and mothers voted for Kennedy, grandfathers and grandmothers voted for Roosevelt. The Washington Post looks at the white voters without college degrees in Wisconsin . How does one take the visionary actions in the Biden bipartisan Infrastructure laws and show what happens at the micro level? Lyrarc.com shows how the laws are changing America bit by bit every week in the Movement for Renewal of America as covered in NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, and other media.

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US housing prices are seeing a decline in 2022 as a result of the Fed's interest rate increases even though there is no extra supply of housing. Renters are staying away from high mortgage payments at the higher rates, and families with a 3% mortgage are staying put rather than risk making larger mortgage payments for a new home. Fed's Jerome Powell has this to say- "You had housing markets go up at very unsustainable levels and overheating. Now the housing market is going through the other side of that and hopefully coming out at abetter place." This is more like the drop in demand for housing in 1979 which revived in 1983 after the Fed eased up on increasing rates, says the WSJ.

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American singer Linda Ronstadt looks back to her roots in the Rio Sonora region of Mexico in this AARP excerpt about her years growing up in that region before her father moved to Tucson, Arizona. Her album Canciones de mi Padre, is the best selling non English music album in the US of all time. Her book is called- Feels Like Home- Song for the Sonoran Borderlands. It looks at the emotional and physical links between the US southwest and Mexico and the hold that this region has on the popular imagination. She says that wherever she has lived, wherever she has travelled, her soul is always winging it down the road, to the land south of the border. A stretch of desert she calls her foothold to the world. Today millions of Mexican Americans share this heritage and this kind of genetic memory. When the Spanish landed in the 1500's there was no border. The land and its physical aspects have not changed through waves of immigration- this story in the AARP magazine shows the agaves in the backdrop of the Huachuca mountains. Apple Music has Ronstadt's album and The Arbolitas, a song of the trees, etched in the Sonoran sunlight.  ...

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Bernie Sanders launches his 2020 presidential campaign at Brooklyn College by sharing his personal story of parents who were immigrants from Germany during the Nazi period. His father made a living selling paint to hardware stores and the family struggled in the early years.  He tells students he lived only a short distance away growing up "in a three and half room rent controlled apartment, and going to quality public schools." Mr. Sanders is the top choice in the early primaries including New Hampshire, competing with former vice president Mr. Biden. His campaign raised $10 million in just two weeks at the beginning of the campaign. He is campaigning for Medicare for All, $15 minimum wage, tution free public college. With Mr. Corbyn leading the Labor party in Britain in a new direction, Mr. Sanders is leading the Democratic Party in a new direction, both supporting the pro-working class traditional policies of their parties for most of the twentieth century. ...

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Barrack Obama made his speech on May 21 on national security, the war on terrorism and Guantanomo on May 21, 2009. The speech referred again and agin to the Constitution and documents of founding of the United States by the founding fathers. It was held in the hall of the National Archives Building, with the founding fathers in the background on a wall painting.

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An intimate biographical account of new Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his connections with Muscatine Iowa, where he visited as a head of a Chinese farm delegation in 1985. Xi Jinping remembers the trip vivdly and plans to spend time with friends from that visit during a visit to the U.S. in 2012. He spent two nights during that visit in the bedroom of two college age boys of the Dvorchak family. This revealing account of Jinping's life shows that the actual story of his life is quite different from the title of "princelings" or privileged sons of former communist leaders that is suggested by this reference in the media. Because of the volatile nature of Chinese politics, his father Xi Zhongxun, who led communist partisans in the struggle of the pre World War II years, was rehabilitated twice after falling out of favor. The first period was in 1962 and it was not till 1979 when he was fully rehabilitated. During this period which coincides with the growing up period of Xi from 9-26 years of age, Xi experienced many hardships. During the years of the Cultural revoultion Xi was sent at age 15 to Shanxi province where his father had led partisans. He lived there for 7 years in a traditional cave dwelling in the village of Liangjahe doing farm work. He was denied admission to Tsinghua University twice before being accepted in 1974. There he graduated with a degree in organic chemistry. This was followed by three years working as an assistant to Geng Biao, defense minister and a partisan who was a colleague of his father. The next job was deputy Communist party chief of Zhengding county in Hebei province. Iowa Governor Branstad visited Hebei in 1984, and Branstad played host to a animal-feed delegation led by Jinping in 1985- the visit to Muscatine was part of this trip and which Jinping has told others he enjoyed more than his visits to Oregon or California that year. The second time Xinping's father went out of favor was after his criticism of the crackdown of protests at Tienanmen Square. These experiences have given Xinping a confidence and experience in different situations that other Chinese leaders including the current leaders lacked. If Jinping has inherited some characteristics from his father he may also have the courage to take China in a new direction, and make the kind of changes China needs as it shifts away from an export based economy. At the same time rule in China is by consensus of leaders on the communist party's standing committee. His father helped initiate the special economic zone in Guangdong province in 1978, and Xi Xinping held senior posts in the provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang and in Shanghai, giving him close ties with industry and local government in areas that led the export based economy. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore puts Jinping in the" class of Nelson Mandela type leaders, who has great emotional stability to not let his personal misfortunes and sufferings cloud his personal judgement." Of political positions Jinping has a certain wariness. He once responded to mention of him as the potential leader with the words: "Are you trying to give me a fright."...

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John Githongo is appointed in 2002 by Mwai Kibeki, an an anti corruption official, but his efforts only bring him grief. Kibeki is from the Kikuyu tribe, and like Jomo Kenyatta before him in the years after 1963 he is engaged in ramopnt corruption. In the intervening years between Kenyatta and Kibeki, Daniel Arap Moi from the Kalenjin speaking group of tribes aslo was engaged in enriching officials from his tribe. So Githongo, who once reported for the Economist in Kenya, concludes that the election of Odinga would have changed nothing, as he like Obama's father is a Luo, and the Luo's would have in Githongo's words have seen the election as making it "their time to eat". Its interesting to note that Obama's father was like Githongo standing up for something to his great grief that was never to be because of the lack of education among the elites and the leaders of the tribes of their true role in nationbuilding.

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An exceptional plea by the Foreign Minister of Russia, and his version of what happened and when and why Russia acted, and how it relates to norms of international behaviour that have been followed by the nations of Western Europe and by the United States. See the related article on the views of Foreign Minister Milliband of Britian and how he is supporting Germany and France to seek dialogue and engagement with Russia rather than the position of the USA that seeks to disengage with Russia on this issue. Sergey Lavrov says his country wants cooperation with Europe and the USA, and the world's interests are bigger than those of Georgia and South Ossetia.

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The mandatory social distancing required to overcome the coronavirus epidemic is leading to more parents working from home. With about half the schools in the U.S. closed and entirely closed in other countries, kids are also at home. Traditional options of child care provided by grandparents, family friends are now not acceptable with the required social distancing. This report looks at how parents are coping by setting time aside when kids are asleep for work. Advice to parents offered here is to accept that the day will be broken by interruptions, to take a break at these times and relax rather than try to follow the organized routine of a workday when things were normal.