Braune and Rice: 2006

Newest Book: Fiction/Literary:

Braune and Rice: 2006

Calvasco Braune has taken the chance on love and has gone to Chicago in 2006. His unconventional lifestyle and his high ideals face many challenges of sustaining his love, just as unemployment hits. Will his love survive, will his friendship with the narrator endure, or will time decide his fate?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1979713324/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511366748&sr=1-3

The Pariah, The Parrhesiast, And The Tireless Flies

Newest Book to reach Amazon: The Pariah, The Parrhesiast, And The Tireless Flies: 2007

In 2007, the author journeyed to South Korea and taught at the standard after-school English academy. The education model significantly clashed with his own ideals. This is his advice and warning to individuals eager to teach in Korea. The narrator also traveled to Japan, China, Vietnam and Malaysia in 2007. He saw how interconnected the United States and East Asia are, and how much the US had shaped the politics in acceptance or resistance over the last eighty years. The US had significantly harmed each nation, and the lessons we learn as Capitalism has made each a significant trade partner, can help the global citizen understand the complexity of the human condition. Can we learn from the 20th Century to make a better 21st?

by Michael Neiman https://www.amazon.com/dp/1979283206/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_kC7bAb8KNS1V1

Funneling to Junta: 2008

My Newest Book to hit Amazon:

Funneling to Junta: 2008: Political Fiction

Jack is a self-doubting CIA agent back in Washington DC during the last year of the Bush Administration and the first year of the Obama Administration. As he decides on how best to come to terms with the truth...all that is left is...Funneling to Junta!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/197923728X/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509487997&sr=1-4

Desiring Something Radical

Another New Book worth reading: "Desiring Something Radical: 2004" by Michael Neiman https://www.amazon.com/dp/1979074852/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_Z088zbZD7A13S

This is the story of Ruby Lee, who in 2004 had to deal with the reacclimatizing to the American culture after living in Mozambique. She comes back to the brutal re-election of George W Bush, and she heads from the east coast to San Francisco, just in time for Governor Shwarzennegger to take office. Seeking an answer to political frustration, over consumerism, and anti-intellectual madness, she heads to a forest in Oregon fighting forest fires to then challenging economists in Holland.

Apoplexy: My Year in Malawi: 2002-2003

Apoplexy: On A Thin Line Of Grass With Waves of Color by Michael Neiman https://www.amazon.com/dp/1978262884/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_FpZ6zb5FBK08M via @amazon

In 2002, while President George W Bush pushed for war in Afghanistan and was soon to invade Iraq, I went off to join the US Peace Corps to show the world a different side of America that was not promoting violence, but promoted compassion and respect. This was the literary memoir that I wrote that year in Malawi. This is a story of a volunteer who Early Terminated his service and was unable to say, 'mission accomplished.'

Pick up your copy today!!!

Gravity of the Mouth: A Political Rant

IF YOU HAVE BEEN READING MY BLOG AND YOU LIKE WHAT YOU READ, MY NEW BOOK FROM MY JOURNEY DURNING 2010 TO INDONESIA, THAILAND, INDIA, TURKEY, KOSOVO AND UKRAINE JUST CAME OUT!!!!

Gravity of The Mouth: 2010 by Michael Neiman

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1977879314/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_gIP3zbT59VWPX via @amazon

Benefits of Factual Chisme...Gossip

Whether one is in the United States or in Mexico, and probably many other cultures, factual gossip has a beneficial outcome. Many may disagree, but this is because negative behavior and so many do it is not healthy. Gossip or the Spanish 'chisme' makes people understand ethical and moral behavior. What is acceptable and healthy behavior and what behavior people in society actually participate and get away with that is harmful to progress: corruption of power, stealing, lying and institutional negligence.

The fine line of positive gossip and negative gossip can be very thin but that does not mean one should avoid it completely then. This line is two-fold: 1) is it factual or fictional; 2) does it harm someone and put them in physical danger. Well, is what the person doing actually harming others physically? Then it should be stopped. An example of unnecessary chisme is talking about who is sleeping with who.

Sex is not important gossip for change or healthy behavior. For example, when a Director of a university office is sleeping with his secretary behind his wife's back or has an illegitimate child from a previous affair that everyone knows about. That is not beneficial gossip. Or that his new lover is already sleeping with another teacher; this is not important gossip. It is their personal life and it reflects that they are untrustworthy people in their personal lives. It could give you a healthy warning not to trust them. But everyone knows that already. The important public fact here is that because one is another's direct supervisor, this is a manipulation of power. A positive leader in a university or corporation does not abuse his power to sleep with people that they directly supervise. This unethical behavior is understood across cultures. It is a sad fact that it continues, interrupts daily work in the offices, and it makes everyone else in offices uncomfortable when they have to witness it. Just as is the reverse, someone of a lower ranking in an administrative position sleeping with a supervisor or former president of the school, so that she can get her own office. This too, reflects on a behavior that one learns to think is acceptable, but everyone sharing the gossip understands that this behavior does not lead to actual respect from others or individual self-respect.

Aside from scandal and affair, a healthy benefit of chisme is learning about who has respectable behavior that will help the institution progress and when this is a university, any forms of obstruction to student education is harmful and irresponsible. For example, a previous Director, who luckily left the university he was at, was clearly a sexist pig with no respect for women. He would talk crudely about females when they were not around, in open meetings about academic issues he would cast off female students as not worthy of being educated, and he would openly disrespect his female counterparts. This behavior is highly unprofessional and outdated. When people spread chisme about him, this information can warn others about what is not appropriate, and as well can be a useful tool for the benefits of shame.

Shame is positive outcome from factual gossip. It can teach the individual, if they are mature, to process their wrongful behavior and be more responsible and not repeat negative acts. Gossip can make people when they are exposed to a public eye know what they are doing is unethical and unproductive. When in a pack of wolves, one wolf acts out harmfully, the rest of the wolf pack excommunicates the wolf from the others; that wolf becomes ashamed and knows that he has misbehaved in a way that is unprogressive for the benefit of the whole pack. Shame can be effective with people too.

When a person is shamed they can follow with self-reflection and positive change or they can be immature, find scapegoats for their behavior, make excuses and even resort to violence. When a university has a protest by teachers and students because of corruption; this exposes to the greater public, citywide or statewide, that the president of the school is not doing her job. The shame of the president's lack of work to make a university progress could make her change her behavior.

Like shame, constructive feedback can also be an effective outcome from gossip. It can also clarify how mature an individual is when responding to the shared information. For example, when a newly appointed Director tells students and staff to be punctual, but then allows other teachers, whom she favors, or students to be late and absent, she is showing a double standard. When she tells her teachers that they are the problem for lazy student grades and outcomes, she shows no support. And when she is intimidated by her staff trying to improve their skills and appear smarter than her, she tells them not to go to any more professional development courses. Now when she is confronted with her actions that everyone has been discussing, she could have been respectful and responsible with balanced behavior and learned from her faults. But instead, she punished others and proved that she was not a mature, effective leader. That is why she continues to fail in the eyes of an ethical majority. Positive Gossip, the sharing of facts, will persist.

Not all gossip is negative. Positive chisme can be beneficial in moving a larger collective ethical understanding. Those who are acting corruptively, partaking in lies, cheating or exploiting others from higher positions or to get higher positions, will be made ashamed or will set the standard of behavior that is inappropriate. Gossip or chisme with factual and informative data can help set a standard that could lead towards progress in institutions, whether in academics, government or corporate climates. It is a tool that has survived in the oldest cultures and contemporary spaces.