Ayn Rand
In my childhood, around 12, I became enraptured by the pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose Fountainhead hero Howard Roark (played by Gary Cooper in the movie) raped the female lead, and in the book and the film, she ended up enjoying the rape because Howard was such a pure superman.
Apparently, she has become hugely influential, so I want to pass along this article about her personal hero in real life:
Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of “ideal man” that Rand promoted in her more famous books — ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America’s most recent economic catastrophe — former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox — along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
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Michael Anderson:
Read this one the other day….we need to look at some “whys” about psychological implications of a philosophy that takes as its main justification the premise that essentially states “because we dare to do whatever we want, we are therefore justified in whatever we do.” Historically, I don’t believe this is a phenomenon that is particular to our age…
I find myself thinking about Lobaczewski’s book “Political Ponerology” again…is there a pathological component somewhere? I know there is a gender component….but what else? As a species, we seem to be getting screwier than a bunch of shithouse rats.
1 March 2010, 1:29 pmMark:
I think it might be important to note that those who use the term “Teabagger” to refer to members of the Tea Party movement are attempting to denigrate them by association with a degrading sexual act typically performed on an unwilling (sleeping or passed out) person.
1 March 2010, 1:59 pmDeAnander:
This sounds really truly shocking on first glance. And then I think of all the mad serial murderers whom I was taught to admire in school — Napoleon, Alexander the Great, the Caesars of Rome, the Conquistadores…
1 March 2010, 2:30 pmDeAnander:
… Stan once memorably wrote that “Perfect masculinity is sociopathic” and I think we need to look at Ayn Rand and her fans through the lens of gender, very carefully. Her rapist/industrialist/hero is a cartoonish exaggeration of an archetype widely and respectably admired: the ruthless, dominant alpha male. The serial killer performs murder and dismemberment in civilian life with the sangfroid, ingenuity, callousness and panache which are admired in warriors and called toughness, resolve, courage, etc…
This “courageous” archetype however in my view is in more realistic and practical terms a coward; the cowardice of the masculine archetype and of its worshippers like Rand is the quivering squeamish terror of real connection, of the permeability of boundaries, of being less than an utterly isolated, barricaded and buffered Ego… the terror of the recognition of the Other as oneself in another skin. What could we call it? empathophobia? or more generally an obsession with the enforcement of rigid borders and boundaries (a theme to which I keep recurring, as it imperils our survival in its several aspects as armed nationalism, biophobia, misogyny, etc)… it’s a bizarre development as it flies in the face of our human evolutionary history as kingroup/tribal critters, surviving despite our relatively weak physical form by cleverness and collective action. Given that we’re so obviously a community creature, how is it that we keep throwing up these pathological communophobes? Where do we get this recurring thread of Apartheid, purity-mania, rigid taxonomies, killing people over arbitrary lines in the sand?
I’ll try to think more coherently about this later. But imho the need to *destroy* the Other — as an extreme method of proving how Other the Other really is and how complete and totally hermetic is the boundary between Self and Other — seems to recur, to be a signature of a cultural drift and/or a personality type. And perhaps the primal border to be defended is the gender line: the panicky flailing of males to prove repeatedly that they are not — gasp, ick, eee-yew! — anything even vaguely resembling females.
1 March 2010, 3:19 pmStan:
Once again recommending two books together: Bonds of Love, by Jessica Benjamin, and Money, Sex, and Power, by Nancy CM Hartsock. Hartsock explores the gendered origins of fear of fusion – citing the warrior-hero epic; and Benjamin examines the gendered origins of dominance that begin with boys being socialized to erect an impermeable barrier between themselves and women (beginning with mom).
1 March 2010, 7:18 pmJuannie:
I have known for years now that Rand’s philosophy and novels were responsible for the sharp turn to the hard and brutal right that is manifest in today’s political and business arena but was never quite able to articulate this concept. Her novels sold in the millions in the 50′s and 60′s and there was a incredibly dedicated cadre of followers that ‘knew’ that they had discovered the true and only philosophy of righteousness. The libertarian philosophy and Libertarian party were originally populated by Randians. I know because I was one of them. I adhered to Rand’s explicit philosophy to a T. She had rescued me from the gutter throws of social thought and had instilled in me the cock sure ideas of individualism and selfishness. So too for all those young minds back then that had bought into her ideas lock stock and barrel. Today we are experiencing the travesty of those minds who have reached the apex of their lives in holding the reigns of power and control.
For me I had always had a soft spot for the feelings of others and slowly through the years had drifted away from Rand but still held firm to some of her more plausible ideas. I still say (maybe not now after reading the Hickman mentality influence on her) that I have owed her a huge intellectual debt and to some extent that is still true. When I discovered her in “The Fountainhead” and followed up immediately with “Atlas Shrugged” I was an young 19 year old self estranged youth with a chip on my shoulder and a belief that the world owed me a living. I changed 180 degrees in both thought and action immediately and started making my way through the world based on my own honest efforts and talents. And I grew continually in these regards from that day onward. I developed an ego and a sense of self esteem and was proud of it and was efficacious in the world I inhabited.
Today, although still possessing an ego in this realm, I feel I have pretty much transcended it as the be all and end all sense of being and understand my connection to others and the universe which I inhabit. I have dropped my regard for the selfish motive and I also recognize my debt to my those who came before me and paved the way and developed the infrastructures of both the physical and social. And I recognize my inclusion in and debt to my family and community. Mark Ames’ article had added a new understanding to my conflicting thoughts and loyalties to Rand and more importantly has added the ‘intellectual ammunition’ (a Randian phrase) to debunk those who still cling to her philosophy and are acting accordingly and destructively in today’s social and political arena.
Again, I thank you Stan, for bringing these important gems into my awareness.
John
1 March 2010, 7:43 pmRobert Karaffa:
Maybe its just something that is so easy in terms of letting some of us be the nasty things that we want to justify ourselves as being re: a personality type that for some egotistical reason/disorder we want to be. The fear can’t be admitted and so we find this as an easy way to jump into “Bravado”….”Dude,that’s me” or…something….for those that can’t brave a real two-way giving relationship and have too much fear or incapability of compassion or connection; so we make some stuff up and this (archetype,does it deserve to be called that??) comes along and is a convenient descriptor of how we think we feel. And somebody uses this to control us but we don’t get it and the insanity continues and grows as we find “like-minded” individuals to feel good with about our total isolation. Guess I’m driving really fast with a cat on my head and while wearing dark glasses, but I would agree with De that gender is the absolute core of the operative factors here. We have to reach pretty,(oops, did I say pretty what does that imply? OK i’ll punch myself gently in a thick place. Kidding!)REALLY far here to find justification for a mechanism that flies so much in the face of everything that makes us community creatures.
1 March 2010, 9:26 pmxenia:
notably, she is almost completely unknown in continental europe.
1 March 2010, 9:35 pmm.c.:
I had to read The Fountainhead for an Intro. to Architecture class I took at the Univ. of Maryland 20 years ago. Later on, on my own I read about the first half of Atlas Shrugged before I tired of her insipid and vapid generalities and gaps in plot development as well as lack of authentic characters. As an amateur literary critic, I’m amazed that people like her stuff at all. As a writer, she doesn’t even meet the criteria of middlebrow literature, imo.
1 March 2010, 9:45 pmDeAnander:
Perhaps this is why so many people become Rand fans in the early teens — 12 to 16 years of age — when literary discrimination is not yet well developed? And when disempowerment and authoritarian constraint (as a juvenile in a gerontocracy) make the fantasy of unbounded individualism sound grand and adventurous?
2 March 2010, 12:37 amDeAnander:
@ Robert K
Thank you for that! my first real laugh of the evening, and a phrase I will treasure and use often. beautiful. did you make it up, or are you quoting someone I haven’t yet discovered?
2 March 2010, 12:38 amRose:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
2 March 2010, 1:52 amaskod:
“Where do we get this recurring thread of Apartheid, purity-mania, rigid taxonomies, killing people over arbitrary lines in the sand?”
Is this not embedded in our need for categories and sorting? Related perhaps to the magic power of language itself?
If I remember basic anthropology right taboos are often found where stuff does not match the categories a cultures holds. See for example the mosaic purity laws with its strict bans on mixing stuff (cloth, grains, tou name it). One way of dealing with the unclean is destroying it.
2 March 2010, 5:28 amaskod:
Speaking of disturbed masculinities, there were two recent articles about how Blair pitied himself after the Iraq invasion had proven not to be sunshine and roses.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/27/andrew-rawnsley-tony-blair-iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/28/tony-blair-iraq-spirit-broke
2 March 2010, 5:33 amJim:
Rand is a horrific individual. And what is really disturbing is that, even though being patently sociopathic–I mean, really, just look at the protagonists in her novels–she is popular in this country–a country full of people who are borderline sociopaths owing to the degenerate mythologies that hold sway over so many mentalities.
2 March 2010, 6:33 amStan:
@ De. Bingo! I would go so far as to say that suburban US culture is an adolescent hothouse for her fantasies, because powerlessness and plain boredom are so characteristic of that milieu. What’s happened with US consumer culture, however, is that the features of metropolitan adolescence have become philosophical/ethical norms… again, the mine-more-now culture. This may account for the explosive popularity of her stuff.
Ayn Rand played a significant role in my entering military service, and the track I took once in. Her cheap, and unattributed, ripoffs of Neitzche and Herbert Spencer do create an attractive archetype for alienated (especially but not exclusively male), which then becomes an ideal… a story of the superman. I confess to having been driven through many of the Army’s harsh courses and fearsome initiations precisely by this superman story, a story which one feels compelled to live into.
2 March 2010, 8:11 amVJP:
I came across this today, re. assassination of Hamas member:
2 March 2010, 10:17 amIt is an unfashionable thing to say, but I have a considerable admiration for the Israeli way of doing things. They want something, they get it. They perceive someone as their deadly enemy, they kill them. They get hit, they hit back. They don’t waste time explaining or justifying or agonising; nor do they allow their detractors to enter their country and then afford them generous welfare payments. They just act. No messing. No scruples. Not even a shrug and a denial, just a rather magnificent refusal to debate anything.
…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/melanie_reid/article7031188.ece
Susan/catlady:
Stan writes “a story which one feels compelled to live into.” That nails my impression of the books (particularly Atlas Shrugged) which I read during that Randian golden age of about 17. Rand left me so little choice, it seemed. I either had to count myself one of those superheroes, or be left behind to shrivel up and die like the moochers. I’m sure I alienated some friends by spouting the virtues of selfishness. I remember being dumbfounded by my grandmother’s assessment of AS: “I don’t agree with anything she says, but she writes a great story.”
I managed to extract myself from Randroidism with the help of “Telemachus Sneezed” (who is John Guilt?) from Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s “Illuminatus!” and also “The Passion of Ayn Rand” by Barbara Branden. Branden’s account of the affair between Rand and Nathaniel Branden left me gaping at utter hypocrisy, coming from one whose values were supposedly so pure.
2 March 2010, 11:45 amSkol:
Holy…
I just want to say that’s a very visceral piece, and might change a few minds if it’s spread around. I know a couple of people — all self-identifying as liberal or even “radical” — who are great fans of Rand.
This is one of those “distribute widely” pieces. I just wish it weren’t as partisan (plenty on the US left who are fans, anyway, so the conservative movement isn’t the necessary context).
2 March 2010, 12:34 pmRobert Karaffa:
@De
2 March 2010, 1:02 pmWas just feeling guilty about rambling and that visualization popped into my head. My son did call me while bringing a howler back from the vet yesterday. Im sure that helped. Glad to spread laughter!
DeAnander:
@Jim — any country where people read Bret Easton Ellis for pleasure is definitely into fandom for sociopaths… but I wonder where that border is crossed. We seem to have progressed gradually from an era when certain aspects of human behaviour were “too shocking to write about” to an era when they are almost celebrated. Where was a line crossed? With P Highsmith’s “Talented Mr Ripley”? With Nabokov?
I’ve been thinking for a while now about those mirror neurons. And thinking that when we are exposed to an event (or the image of an event) of violence or domination — like a rape scene in a movie or porn tableau, a battle scene, a torture scene — our mirror neurons could mimic *either role* in that scene. We could mirror the victim’s pain, or the perp’s dominance and (presumed) enjoyment of dominating. Is empathy — the ability to “feel with” another — something to do with mirror neurons? Can we *choose* to activate our perp-sympathy and deactivate our victim-sympathy in an attempt to keep ourselves “safe”?
Is an ideology like Randism a way of self-conditioning to turn off the mirroring of empathy with victims, by learning to despise “losers” and admire brutal, overbearing “winners”? How did a woman — Rand — learn to admire and identify with the murderer of a 12 year old girl, rather than empathising with the victim (who was of her own gender, sharing the experience of femaleness at risk from male violence)?
2 March 2010, 1:19 pmCurt:
DeAnander; That is an interesting observation about mirror nuerons.
2 March 2010, 2:09 pmI did not read anything by Ayn Rand until I was 18 or 19. Her fiction work I found boring. Her non fiction did have some infuence on me in that it helped me refine my thoughts at the time. In high school I was very anti communist, and very political. Around 18 years of age I thought to myself, it is not enough to be against something one has to be for something. Well I am against government control so the obvious choice is to be for freedom from government control. Of course I never got in to admireing people who hurt other innocent people becasue I saw that as government like behavior. For years my attitude towards government was that it was incapable of doing anything right. (I wonder where such an idea came from??)
When I was 12 I suppose I was watching Kung Fu. It used to make me mad that “Grasshopper” never killed the bullies at the end of the show. I thought that the bullies were escaping justice. It was not until I was 53 years old that I could come to accept the idea that allowing the bullies to escape justice, so that they would have a chance to reform themselves and be a witness to others and to make resitution, is the greater good.
xenia:
oh, the joke which also occurs to me is that she is plagiarizing.
so, even in her own terms, she is not a producer. she is too weak to create, and barely strong enough to steal.
you might also call her a kind of collectivist, because she wants to create a collective which would worship her. that kind of collectives she doesn’t mind.
what a fake!
2 March 2010, 2:24 pmJuannie:
Michael asks: “is there a pathological component somewhere?”. I haven’t read “Political Ponerology” but I have explored the web site and read “the sociopath next door” by Martha Stout. In it she claims, and I think it is generally accepted by psychology academics, that 4% of the general population are psychopathic. The theory is that this trait was perpetuated in our species because it was a handy trait when some were called upon to preform the violence necessary for self protection from outside invaders.
The trait is certainly a benefit for those who want to rise in the any hierarchy, especially competitive ones such as political or business structures, as lack of conscience, empathy, remorse or guilt allow for most any strategy as long as one’s actions are relatively invisible.
It is possible to develop psychopathic traits and tendencies even though one may not have the neurological wiring to be a full fledged clinical psychopath. I know this from my own personal experience after imbuing Rand’s philosophy. I hardened myself to worrying about others well being or feelings and could isolate myself to not allow my deeper human emotions to come back into play (in DE’s words I was an “utterly isolated, barricaded and buffered Ego”). It was a useful skill in the cutthroat environment for both military and corporate promotion.
So my thesis boils down to:
The true psychopaths, who were useful for the more violent requirements of civilized cultures, have been gaining the upper hand throughout the control structures of our society. And while not true psychopaths, many in the culture have adopted the traits both to compete and because it is the ethos that has become more and more popularized to a large degree because of Rand.
So what to do about it? What actions will help reverse the growing popularity of Rand again? I agree with Skol that spreading this article by Mark Ames around to more of our friends who may still be enraptured by Rand is a first and necessary step. Exposing her for this aspect of her character will go a long way in deconstructing her popularity and putting the psychopaths back into recognizable clinical aberrations.
As an interesting and ironic aside, it was a workshop by Nathaniel Brandon, “Self Esteem and the Art of Being” in the mid 70′s that opened the way for my escape from the thralls of Rand’s philosophy. Also, Rand was correct in asserting that philosophy is a necessary guide for human actions and interactions so it is important that we continue to espouse a more inclusive, connected and altruistic philosophy of our existence in this plane to counter her isolation and selfish individualistic bullshit.
2 March 2010, 3:29 pmMichael Anderson:
“How did a woman — Rand — learn to admire and identify with the murderer of a 12 year old girl, rather than empathising with the victim (who was of her own gender, sharing the experience of femaleness at risk from male violence)?”
A darn good question. Perhaps answered by Andrea Dworkin in “Right Wing Women”—she has made her “deal with the devil”, as far as living in a masculine (or hyper-masculine) world—accepting and embracing it in return for a place in it that is relatively free of danger.
I notice she had no children, either….some of the WORST victims of “objectivism” as practiced by Corporatism and its military retainers. Irregardless of sex, we were all children once.
2 March 2010, 3:39 pmm.c.:
I know they don’t corespond directly but is everyone familiar with the Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow forms of Culture campared to the Greek concept of Logos, Ethos, and Pathos? They are mentioned in Aristotle’s Three Modes of Persuasion from his “On Rhetoric”. The Greeks were pretty shrewd. Of course I’m generalizing here.
Logos = Logic
Ethos = Ethics
Pathos = Emotion
If you’ve seen the original Star Trek with the three main characters; Spock represents the Logos POV; Kirk represent the Ethos POV; and McCoy(the doctor) represents the Pathos POV.
2 March 2010, 4:04 pmJim:
Re: How did a woman — Rand — learn to admire and identify with the murderer of a 12 year old girl, rather than empathising with the victim.
I don’t think she had to learn it. As a dyed-in-the-wool sociopath, she had the “vocational” requisites for the admiration and identification. I think the key word here is “empathize.” That, precisely, is what sociopaths lack entirely (although they can learn to feign it)–apparently from birth.
2 March 2010, 4:19 pmShaukat:
@Deander. I don’t want to derail the discussion, but I think it is a mistake to lump an author like Bret Easton Ellis in with Ayn Rand. The latter’s repugnant works have an overt political agenda, whereas many of Ellis’ novels serve as masterful satires of late capitalist consumer society, with all its decadence and amorality. This point comes through the text when one reflects on his vacuos characters, for whom freedom is defined in purely liberal, individual terms, and who are driven to madness and savagery by their deep alienation.
I find it troubling when people who are trained in the Marxist methodology attack Ellis’ novels for their brutality, when our toolkit is used in any other context to dig below the surface reality to grasp the actual essence of what is being done/said.
2 March 2010, 5:21 pmStan:
On the 4% psychpath hypothesis, I can’t help being doubly alerted that (1) this is a medicalized notion, which is (2) biologically deterministic.
Forigve me if I cleave closer to De’s mirror neuron notion, which if deterministic at all, is culturally so, even when derived from biological research. We are biologically determined not to be biologically determined. Plastic.
I keep coming back to delocalizationa and specialization, patriarchy, war, ideology.
That’s as lucid as I get right now. Stomache virus, and no food for two days.
Thanks for the particiaption in the thread, and thanks again at Viv. Agree with the ‘distribute widely’ suggestion.
2 March 2010, 5:45 pmaskod:
@Shaukat
3 March 2010, 9:02 amIs there a true meaning to a piece of literature? I see it as communication between writer and reader, and as each reader brings their own baggage they make their own interpretation and is affected by that interpretation. One reader might identify with a character that another reader sees as a critique of society.
1st Lt. L. Diablo:
Stan, you and your Blank Slate conceits are Skinnerism all dressed up with no where to go.
Can gay people be taught to be straight (there is more evidence that a gay gene has been found btw)? Well, can high-testosterone males with concomitant aggro personalities be taught to be mellow fellows? I can tell you as someone who has augmented my T levels that these endocrine secretions matter. I felt radically different on low and then high levels of testosterone. Radically different.
DNA, the Endocrine system, etc– matter. It’s partly why male and females are so radically different in every culture at every age (especially after the endocrine system kicks in). Our (men and women’s) brains develop within a very different endocrine soup. Stan, this is a fact. Neo-Behaviorism is as anti-nature and fatuous as your new-found christianity (whose ontological claims cannot be proven and are ridiculous on their face btw). Both philosophies (christianity and behaviorism) are pathologically anti-nature. Think about it. You deny our essential human natures; you tell us we are aggro, passive, gay, straight, sanguine, stygian, athletic, awkward, intellectually inclined towards mechanical or musical fields only because we are taught to be this way? It’s atavistic and discredited nonsense.
We are indeed plastic, but only within the constraints of our biology. Men are partly, maybe even mainly, more aggressive due to testosterone. This is indisputable. Do post-genetic factors like our fascist, war-like culture augment this tendency? Yes. But let’s not pretend each individual can feel and behave any way they choose once they are shaped by their culture. Some people are gay, they cannot be taught to be straight. Well, some of us are aggro, misanthropic, and sociopathic. Have you even read the studies on twins separated at birth? Seen the evidence that shows the removed twin develops a personality so similar to the genetic donors (donors that have ZERO contact with the child and thus no cultural influence) and so radically different than their adoptive families (who provide 100% of the cultural influences)? Look, there are 1000 more empirical and theoretical arguments to buttress these claims. Go read the literature brother. Genes matter (not 100%, but 25% or 35% or 50% or ???%) . Period.
It’s actually good for the diversity of the species that we are all not the same. We need empathic people, and psychopathic people. It’s better is we have 95% empathic and only 5% sociopathic (as opposed to the obverse), but genetic diversity is good in the big picture. But, I suspect this is beyond the pale for your politics (which I share by the way, being an Anarcho-Syndicalist type). Truth first, politics second. We can be leftists, feminists, egalitarian in every way and still accept the fact that DNA and the endocrine system shape us…
READ: Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate
3 March 2010, 1:47 pmStan:
Straw man, diablo. Is that from t-levels?
-The Fatuous Moderator
3 March 2010, 3:03 pmRichard:
I see nothing behaviorist in what Stan’s saying here. In the other thread (on mental disorder), I mentioned “gene expression”. Gene expression is the result of complex interaction with the evironment; genes by themselves are not everything; our biology, including the formation of our brains, i.e., who we are “by nature”, is “bi-directional” (the “bi-directionality of causal relations”; see this post for an excellent discussion of the idea.)
The post linked to in the parenthetical quotes the following passage from biologist Gilbert Gottlieb:
3 March 2010, 3:49 pmm.c.:
Bathos is overdone or false Pathos, i.e. an overly melodramatic style.
I haven’t read any Ellis, but two books of his made into films, “Less Than Zero” & “The Rules of Attraction” are out on video. I remember them as Generation X wasteland pieces.
3 March 2010, 3:58 pmshaukat:
@askod. Perhaps, but I suppose such a discussion would require us to speculate on the true intentions of the author which can often be futile. Undoubtedly some people might read Ellis and identify with or admire his alienated characters, but I don’t think we can blame the author for this. I do feel inclined to actually quote (paraphrase) Ellis regarding his book American Psycho, which has been the target of much unfair criticism: “The book is about a misogynist; it is not written by a misogynist, and it far more insulting to white, upper class males than to women.” Such a point would be beyond dispute to anyone who has actually read the book. I always considered it to be a masterful satire of consumerism and yuppie culture.
3 March 2010, 7:12 pmStan:
or sadistic voyeurism
3 March 2010, 7:35 pmrootlesscosmo:
Ames writes:
The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere.
The only way/ Our hemisphere?
During the Cold war a US writer discovered that some of Marx’s comments in the early philosophical writings sounded very much like familiar anti-Semitic slurs. (He called Yiddish a “barbarous jargon.”) This information didn’t discredit Marx on the Left; either the dodgy comments were dismissed as youthful excess, or they were heavily contextualized in Marx’s early dialectical theorizing. By analogy, I think it’s unlikely that Rand’s appeal to right-wingers will suffer much on account of her expressions of admiration for a sociopathic killer.
Ideologies merge with, or (especially among young people) furnish a template for, people’s pre-existing notions about the world and their place in it. In a movement where violence and sadism are encouraged–as among the Tea Party right–the revelation that an admired figure like Rand once said “daring,” “transgressive” things about a serial killer isn’t likely to make much of a dent; movements don’t get switched on by one headline and switched off by another, they grow out of, and respond satisfactorily to, the needs and fears and suspicions and hostilities of real people. (In a sensible intervention on the subject of “false consciousness” the British Marxist Stuart Hall suggested that a critical examination of ideology should include an effort to understand why people believe it to be the truth.) I don’t think you have to be a strict historical materialist to see that the basic outlook of the Tea Party people–racism, xenophobia, misogyny–is deep in the historical marrow of our society; it was with us since long before Rand set pen to paper, and will survive even if she and her work are pushed to the margin. George Wallace apologized, near the end of his life, for having built his political career on race-baiting; race-baiting swallowed the news without a hiccup.
And as for Ames’ rip-roaring call to run Rand’s followers–and presumably her views and her books–”out of town,” this would be offensive if it weren’t just more adolescent posturing.
3 March 2010, 10:04 pmMs Kitty:
Ayn Rand was a social darwinist which is why she is the darling of the libertarian right. They all truly believe that they have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and every poor person deserves what they get.
4 March 2010, 11:29 pmeoinmonkey:
If it makes you feel any better, no-one outside the US neither knows nor cares who Ayn Rand is, let alone studies her cod-philosophy. The worship of her particular selfish bullshit is an almost solely American phenomenon.
5 March 2010, 11:43 ampeggy:
I guess it should make me feel better that Ayn Rand is strictly an American phenomenon, despite the circumstances of her childhood and youth. But it does not make me feel better. Those whose favorite she is think of themselves as intellectuals. Many others take some of the notions she championed, even though they have never heard her name, and think they have everything sussed. Like this country doesn’t have enough problems already.
8 March 2010, 3:25 amm.c.:
She was chilhood friends with Vladimir Nabakov’s sister. St. Petersburg aristocracy.
8 March 2010, 3:15 pmcabdriver:
Pleading “biological determinism” can facilitate an excuse for anything. Anything.
20 March 2010, 12:42 pmCurt:
Pleading environmental determinism can be an excuse for anything too, a very good one. That is why everyone has to be forgiven………in the next world.
21 March 2010, 10:10 amcabdriver:
We exist as material beings within frameworks of limitation. Limitation, not determinism.
Some people I’ve met insist that there’s no such thing as actual, authentic free will- simply because our options are always in some sense restricted, often severely so. I think that’s a misreading of our situation.
Free will and personal responsibility can and do exist within limitation, and pre-determined limits- even severe limitation, and severely pre-determined limits. I think that human consciousness has a unique responsibility within the context of the sentient beings of this planet.
Both cats and humans have to eat, for instance. But I can’t imagine a cat forbearing from stalking and killing a bird because it’s threatened with extinction- or a conclave of cats getting together to agree on protections for endangered species that formerly served as prey. Humans possess the unique power to actually put themselves n check like that, as the result of a process of conscious decision-making.
Of course, “determinism” can come into play if humans fail to utilize such conscious capability. The food situation may become so desperate, and environmental stresses so severe, that the NEED to kill the last surviving members of an endangered species for food is presented as a fait accomplit.
But to my reading, that’s often due to profound inattention and un-consciousness about the gravity of the situation, until it’s too late…and human consciousness- individual and/or collective has squandered the options.
This is a modern world, we often have access to the facts, or to capabilities for determining the facts. And all too frequently, humans CHOOSE to exercise the option to not access those facts, or to make the best decisions on the basis of those facts.
And it seems to me that much of that willful ignorance and inaction is the result of what are traditionally called “deadly sins”- like greed, gluttony, pride, and laziness, for instance. Those tendencies undoubtedly exist within human beings. They’re arguably innately linked (as animal “drives”/tropisms) with the facility of human consciousness- as a potential, perhaps even inextricably so. But- do they DETERMINE?
22 March 2010, 12:36 pmm.c.:
I lost track of the Sarah Pallin thread so I’ll tack this on here. This morning on MSNBC there was a poll of the self-proclaimed Tea Baggers (Party)? crowd. 55% of them are women. This was surprizing to me who would have thought they were 2/3rds or so men. This makes people like Pallin & Rep. Michelle Bachmann(R-MN) potentially rather strong politically.
Does everyone know the term Circle Queen?
24 March 2010, 3:42 pmm.c.:
On May 6th, the UK is scheduled to hold a General Election which will determine the Prime Minister & ruling party in Parliament for the next 5 years. There isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two largest parties IMO, but….
Last week a Guardian poll had the following voter ID preference:
Conservative: 40% (Cameron)
Labour: 31% (Brown)
Liberal Democrats: 20% (Clegg)
Other: 9% {BNP; UKIP; Greens; Scottish Nat.; Welsh Nat.}
Now Party ID & Leader ID are not exactly the same, the article said that among potential men voters, the Tories & Labour were virtually tied. I don’t know the gender breakdown among LibDems but historically their average voter tends to have a slightly higher education level than the average Labour voter. The backstory is that Cameron is younger and looks better on TV(like a movie star/or Scott Brown) than Brown and that Labour has been in power for 13 straight years. Now six weeks is a fairly long time and if the BNP pulls more votes from the Tories & Lib Dem leaning vote Labour Brown might keep the PM chair. the Tories aren’t as right wing as the U.S. Republicans but would be more likely to play junior fiddle if there was another war in the middle east.
26 March 2010, 12:37 pmCurt:
m.c.
27 March 2010, 7:28 amWe, I mean me, in the rest of the world have little reason to believe that either of the big English parties will not play a junior fiddle to the US in a new war in the ME or in Latin America. English Officers seem to be very proud of thier colonial expertise. They are even more incorrigible than the Amercians, IMAO. Like the Americans the English seem to have nearly an 80% insanity rate based on the poll that you posted.
Michael Anderson:
@ Juannie (and Stan):
I don’t believe Juannie is adopting a particularly “medicalized” notion about psychopathic humans, considering his resolution/solution consisting of spreading a more altruistic philosophy. THAT is where “Political Ponerology” gets into more instituionalized, perhaps ominous, solutions—considering it was written by people who were existing in a system (Polish Communism) that was known for institutionalizing opponents of the system. The author makes general references to having professionals deal with the problem—what is the philosophical/ideological agenda of these “professionals”?
I do believe that tendencies must be identified, and somehow dealt with. In Stan’s book “Sex and War”, he talks about a guy he served with in Special Forces who morphed into a serial rapist through a twisted chain of reasoning about keeping in “training”. I don’t know if a 12-step program would’ve helping this guy at all, considering he had the acculturation of the military (and God knows what kind of childhood and genetic makeup) to deal with. What do you do with an individual like this? Just asking….
27 March 2010, 2:04 pmStan:
I am naturally suspicious of statistics, I admit; and I also naturally turn into a dick sometimes in the way I present arguments (boy training, sorry).
On medical institutionalization, my mentor DeAnander once told me that there will be a day when we look back on the DSM-IV with the same horrified fascination we now experience in museums full of ancient torture devices. The special emphasis on this form of social control inside Communist Bloc nations was one of those exposures (like flagrant environmental destruction) of the modernist devil that compromnised all their original goodwill.
Here is the link to the original Marshall Brown account (the serial rapist who I served with in Delta). I’d be curious about interest in a thread, now I’ve looked at it again. Not for my fine authorship, but for the various feminist perspectives that I managed to dredge up that shed more light on Marshall’s devolution into a serial rapist than any criminal science major or psychiatrist.
28 March 2010, 8:23 amMichael Anderson:
I also read that (some of) Ayn Rand’s formative years were in Russia under the Czar. Wonder what kind of outlook THAT would encourage…
28 March 2010, 2:46 pmm.c.:
Speaking of movie star Prime Ministers, I’m going to see The Ghost Writer this week at the cinema. Has anyone seen it? Amazon’s reviews look pretty favorable.
28 March 2010, 3:48 pm(Boer) Tom:
Could such a thread include a discussion on how (in a given ethnic/regional context) to confront fellow men on the question of rape, so as to make sex and rape acceptable matters of discussion? When I did my higher level schooling (in North America), two of my classmates had a frank discussion of how they had essentially compelled drunk women at a party to have sex with them, and I didn’t (I still don’t) have the sense of how to raise the issue, as people around here (Sask.) are often very hostile to discussions of sex (compare the bollywood non-rape display of sex-is-unacceptable-for-show vs frank depictions of rape mindset). Just getting angry doesn’t get them to stop, and one needs the continued relationship (friendship) to exert any influence, in my experience.
28 March 2010, 3:50 pmm.c.:
Bob Rubin’s ol’ buddy Roger Altman was on MSNBC this morning defending Goldman Sachs, i’m sorry, Government Sachs. Altman more recently was an advisor for Kerry’s ’04 Pres. Camp. He’s a grad of the U Chicago School of Business btw.
For those who haven’t been keeping up; Get control of the Econ Dept.(milton friedman) and from there the B School. Also get control of the philosophy dept & poli sci dept(leo strauss & co.) This leads to the Law School through the Federalist Society. Voila!!!
27 April 2010, 12:48 pmm.c.:
It has been said that John Kenneth Galbraith brought Keynesianism back to Harvard in the ’30′s after a fellowship in Cambridge; but Joan Robinson later called American Keynesianism “A Bastardization”{De, you might like her writing. I’d also thought of Germaine Greer’s “The Madwoman’s Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings”}
The working hypothesis here is that the Neoliberals/NeoConservatives had the Harvard econ. dept. as a primary target along with the Harvard B school & school of govt. Closer to home, the Keynesians were fighting the free marketers at LSE & Oxford(Adam Smith was at Oxford way back), although E.F. Schumacher might be called an Oxford Keynesian. So its been a long hard battle with the true marxists as useful idiots.
4 May 2010, 11:47 amm.c.:
I’ve simplified. Cambridge has had its Neoliberals/NeoCons: Milton Friedman was there for a year or two(Gonville & Caius) & Norman Podhoretz was at Clare for a while. Oxford and LSE have had their Keynsians & Neo-Keynsians but my point is the Free Market Orthodoxy(Chicago and Austrian) has gradually taken over everywhere.
5 May 2010, 2:33 pmm.c.:
Now that 4 of the big 5 Euro countries(UK, France, Germany, Italy) have center-right governments, this leaves Spain & also Portugal & Greece with leftish or center-left governments. Guess where the IMF and World Bank will aim their policies next?
14 May 2010, 12:41 pmm.c.:
Thomas Friedman has another Neoliberal Doozy in the NYT. “Narcos, No’s and Nafta”; May 1st(5/2/2010 in the print edition). I don’t have the link but you can google it. He applauds the growth of Walmart in Mexico(about 300 so far) and urges the privatization of state controlled companies, notably Pemex the oil giant, and schools. I guess in his mind the deserving middle-class need charter schools while everyone else can suffer. The No’s are those opposed to privitization. What wonderful choices we have!!!
18 May 2010, 12:09 pmm.c.:
Harvard was a particularly important academic battleground because Joseph Schumpeter(the creative destruction guy) started teaching there in 1927. Galbraith didn’t arrive until 1934. BTW, Friedrich Hayek was at LSE & Chicago for a little historical perspective.
2 June 2010, 2:32 pmDeAnander:
Ayn Rand is being subjected to long-overdue critique of late. This reviewer compares her — not entirely unjustly — to Glenn Beck!
The movie industry tie-in is just … perfect, somehow.
9 June 2010, 2:21 amm.c.:
Robin defines her art as kitsch. I called it lowbrow. Both of her novels were bestsellers. The Fountainhead imo is worth reading at least for some decent ideas without being worshipped.
9 June 2010, 2:51 pmStan:
Yes, the scene where Dominique Francon, iirc, enjoys being raped by Howard Roark, the protagonist, is especially decent.
9 June 2010, 4:44 pmm.c.:
Check out Alan Keyes on Wikipedia: He’s a Beaut.
16 June 2010, 12:27 pm1) Studied with Allan Bloom(Leo Strauss’ top lieutenant) at Cornell, as did Paul Wolfowitz & Francis Fukuyama.
2) Bill Kristol’s roommate at Harvard.
3) Another NeoCon Harvard mentor(up there with Samuel P. Huntington): Harvey Mansfield.
4) Protege of Jeane Kirkpatrick at the State Dept.
m.c.:
Another fellow traveller is Bill Bennett, former drug czar & signer of the 1998 PNAC letter. He’s also a member of the Claremont Inst, the Straussian’s west coast outfit(Stephen Cambone received his formal education there) which rivals the Hoover Inst. for west coast conservative think tank dominance.
17 June 2010, 12:13 pmm.c.:
Wikipedia Michael Malbin. Speechwriter for then SecDef Cheney(1989-90), before that worked in congressional Iran-Contra issue, formerly with AEI, educated at Cornell & Chicago.
8 July 2010, 12:04 pmm.c.:
Google & Wiki Barnett Rubin. Another Chicago PhD State Dept./CFR Afghan expert.
8 July 2010, 12:15 pmm.c.:
If Western Civilization really was facing an existencial crisis with {Islamo-Fascism} it would be great if say, all the children of the Board of Directors of the CFR or other Upper East Side/Georgetown SWAGS for example marched right on down tomorrow morning and enlisted at their local Marine Corp. recruiter. No wait. Paris Island at this time of year is sandy & too many bugs to go along with the high humidity….
9 July 2010, 1:25 pmm.c.:
Rubin’s most important job at the moment is senior advisor to Amb. Holbrooke.
13 July 2010, 12:25 pmm.c.:
Four More:
Liz Cheney(Univ. Chicago Law School)
25 July 2010, 4:04 pmDavid Rubenstein(Univ. Chicago Law School), co-founder Carlyle Group
William Conway Jr.(Univ. Chicago MBA), co-founder Carlyle Group
Bret Stephens(Univ. Chicago, LSE) Foreign_affairs Columnist, Wall St. Journal
m.c.:
Fred Ikle, another Univ. Chicago PhD. Was at the Rand Corp. in the 50′s w/ Andrew Marshall(remember him?); involved heavily with the anti-soviet Afghan campaign of the 1980s. Suceeded at DoD by Paul Wolfowitz.
10 August 2010, 12:30 pmm.c.:
While I’m on this topic, Wikipedia Abram Shulsky. Read his bio & concentrate on his disagreement with Sherman Kent about the role of intelligence analysis.
12 August 2010, 11:55 amm.c.:
Gary Schmitt, too.
12 August 2010, 11:58 amJohn P. Walters was Bill Bennett’s Chief of Staff at one time.
m.c.:
Eric Edelman & Stephen Hadley are two more more Cornell Bloom/Wolfowitz mafia.
BTW: Does anyone know the origin of the Rockefeller Drug Laws of the 1960′s/70′s? I bet a dollar that Irving Kristol & Norman Podhorez’s fingerprints are around…
13 August 2010, 12:15 pmm.c.:
Frank Carlucci, former SecDef, was roommate of Donald Rumsfeld at Princeton, & former Chairman of the Carlyle Group.
18 August 2010, 6:55 pmThree more Univ. Chicago guys:
George Shultz(professor, then dean of the B School)
Ahmed Chalabi(PhD)
Zalmay Khalilzad(PhD, & Rand Corp.)
m.c.:
This is from the Aug. 17 Counterpunch by Joe Bageant, “Honk If You Love Caviar!
Where it is understood that, as John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out near the end of his life, when it was safe to tell the truth, “stockholders are just appendages, someone to hold the bag for the corporations, and stocks are just gambling chips for hedge funds and Wall Street,” and for the suckers who think they can actually outwit High Frequency Trading — a.k.a. High Speed Fraud. (Thanks to reader Brent B. for sending me that one).
{No Wonder he never won a Nobel Prize! Wiki states that the Univ. of Chicago has 10 winners associated with their econ dept. for the Nobel Prize, the most of any university.}
24 August 2010, 11:43 amm.c.:
Four more NeoCons:
1 September 2010, 8:57 pmDaniel Pipes. Taught at the Univ. Chicago.
His dad, Richard Pipes headed Team B, which Paul Wolfowitz was a member.
Peter Wehner. Speechwriter & Asst. for George W. Bush. Before that worked for Bill Kristol when he was Chief of Staff to then Sec of Education Bill Bennett.
Dennis Ross. Worked for Wolfowitz at DoD during Carter Admin. During Reagan admin. deputy dir. of Office of Net Assessment.
Charles:
[Patricia Neal] went on to appear in a string of films and live TV
productions over the next decade, including the 1949 film adaptation
of Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead” (co-starring Cooper), …”
^^^
[This is at a google place that seems to be a collection of obituaries
about Neal. The quote seems to be attributed to her -CB]
“I loved Ronald Reagan,” … “He was a very good friend and very good to me.”
^^^^^
CB: To my mind’s eye, Neal was sort of Rand in the way that Hollywood
puts a face on public figures , but I guess Rand was a Hollywood
person. Was Rand _in_ any movies ?
^^^^^^^
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/10/local/la-me-patricia-neal-20100810
Patricia Neal dies at 84; Oscar-winning actress found triumphs in a
life of tragedies
‘Frequently my life has been likened to a Greek tragedy, and the
actress in me cannot deny that comparison,’ she wrote in her 1988
autobiography, ‘As I Am.’
August 10, 2010|By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times
Her life was marked by professional triumphs, including a Tony
Award-winning debut on Broadway in Lillian Hellman’s 1946 drama
“Another Part of the Forest” and a best actress Oscar for her role in
the 1963 drama “Hud.”
But for Patricia Neal, the husky-voiced actress with a strong screen
presence, life also was marked by personal tragedies: the death of one
of her children and brain damage to another, and her own battle to
overcome the debilitating effects of a ruptured aneurysm in her brain
in 1965 that temporarily halted her career.
Advertisement
Ads by Google
“Frequently my life has been likened to a Greek tragedy, and the
actress in me cannot deny that comparison,” Neal wrote in her 1988
autobiography, “As I Am.”
Neal, 84, died of lung cancer Sunday at her home in Edgartown, Mass.,
on Martha’s Vineyard. But in the end, she told family members who had
gathered around her the night before: “I’ve had a lovely time.”
Neal’s daughter Ophelia Dahl said her mother, who was divorced from
British writer Roald Dahl and once had an affair with married actor
Gary Cooper, “recognized the extraordinary opportunities she had, and
she also recognized that she was dealt a bad hand at times.”
“The thing about my mother, it would seem she was really able to make
the most of when times were good, and she’d find things to be positive
about,” Dahl told The Times on Monday.
After her Tony Award for best featured actress in a play for “Another
Part of the Forest,” Neal was signed to a contract with Warner Bros.,
where she was cast in “John Loves Mary,” a 1949 comedy starring Ronald
Reagan and Jack Carson.
She went on to appear in a string of films and live TV productions
over the next decade, including the 1949 film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s
novel “The Fountainhead” (co-starring Cooper), the 1951 science
fiction classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and director Elia
Kazan’s 1957 drama “A Face in the Crowd.”
“There was a directness and honesty to her approach to acting that was
kind of inspiring,” movie historian Richard Schickel told The Times on
Monday. “As a young actress, she had kind of a quiet ferocity. She was
a woman of great quality and emotionally very truthful.”
Neal’s Oscar-winning role as the weary housekeeper in “Hud,” starring
2 September 2010, 3:49 pmPaul Newman as the ruthless son of a Texas rancher, came in the wake
of two family tragedies.
Charles:
Check this out
http://worldsbiggestwriting.com/
2 September 2010, 4:01 pmm.c.:
Maybe Modern Society, including the spread of Technology, has been speeded up intentionally so that the Average Citizen (remember Jesus was a carpenter, no fancy degrees as far as I know)cannot keep themselves adequately informed. War, more importantly Endless War and the Apparatus–Apparat–Apparatchiks who go along with it is about the fastest way to do this. Then the Autocratic/Plutocratic Elite who have substancial leisure time on their hands for travel & reading some of the more high brow newspapers{WSJ, Times of London, NYT, Economist, FT, Investor Business Daily etc.} or hire people to read these papers and look at their monitors to check their stock prices then can casually turn and comment snarkily that the masses are dumb and can’t be taken seriously. Wasn’t the Industrial Revolution suppossed to create food & material surplus so that we didn’t have to slave away like rats until we dropped dead? Dunno, perhaps I got the wrong memo.
3 September 2010, 1:05 pmm.c.:
Joke: An economist is someone who is reputedly good with numbers but does not have the personality to be an accountant.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some more academic inside baseball. Peterhouse is the oldest, smallest of the tradional Cambridge colleges, as well as one of the wealthiest. It has at least since the Thatcher/Major years had a strong Tory reputation. During WWII due to the bombing of London, the London School of Economics was temporarily housed there furthering the Keynesian/LSE divide. Since 2005, it has housed the Henry Jackson Society, one of the NeoCon camps with many of the usual suspects including links with the Euston Manifesto. I guess its closest comtemporary counterpart at Oxford would be St. Anthony’s College if I were to generalize.
7 September 2010, 11:57 amCharles:
Wasn’t the Industrial Revolution suppossed to create food & material surplus so that we didn’t have to slave away like rats until we dropped dead? Dunno, perhaps I got the wrong memo.
^^^^^
7 September 2010, 3:13 pmFrom the standpoint of the Industrialists , it was supposed to make them rich(er).
m.c.:
I was looking at the list of people on the liberal/left that Saul Alinsky influenced. Jesse Jackson, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta(I met and talked to her for a couple of minutes in college. I answered the phone for Muhammad Yunus once too before he won his prize. I’ve been in the same room as him too.) Anyway; the point is: what if the right used his playbook too? Not too hard for the Univ. Chicago Poli Sci boys to teach case studies for their pet projects….
9 September 2010, 12:30 pmm.c.:
Another good Ayn Rand essay in the Aug. 30th 2010 National Review; pp.43-48(a magazine I very rarely read) by Jason Lee Steorts, their managing editor. It’s nice to see Rand’s superficial & unrealistic Nietzcheanism being taken to task from a Conservative viewpoint. I didn’t know that Whittaker Chambers called her a fascist in the 1950′s.
10 September 2010, 12:48 pmm.c.:
I forgot to mention the Adam Smith Institute(ASI) based in London.
10 September 2010, 1:18 pmm.c.:
I googled “Whittaker Chambers + Atlas Shrugged” and found his book review. ‘Big Sister is Watching You’, Dec. 28, 1957 National Review. It’s rather good reading and very comtemporary in my opinion. Her books, like Dianetics by the scientology guy were best-sellers back in the day. Who could explain?
10 September 2010, 5:30 pmm.c.:
In response to Alexander Cockburn’s latest essay; I’m not a MIHOP perhaps like Fidel Castro, but LIHOP is possibly easier to support & rather very convenient to the situation the world faces now. Somewhere maybe Alex Jones or Webster Griffin Tarpley claims that al-Zawahiri had links(maybe tenuous) to Brit Intel possibly going back to the 60s or 70s?
17 September 2010, 1:27 pmm.c.:
Simon Jenkins did a great job in the Sept. 2 Guardian about the falseness of Tony Blair. Google ‘Simon Jenkins + Guardian + Tony Blair’
20 September 2010, 9:17 pmHe did Maggie Thatcher’s job better than she did.
m.c.:
Jacob Viner. Another Univ. Chicago economist. Mentor to Milton Friedman. Strong critic of Keynes during the Great Depression and an early proponent of nuclear weaponry.[wikipedia]
6 October 2010, 5:46 pmm.c.:
“Of all the quacks that ever quacked, political economists are the loudest. Instead of telling us what is meant by one’s country, by what causes men are happy, moral, religious, or the contrary, they tell us how flannel jackets are exchanged for pork hams.”
~ Thomas Carlyle
A Swiss visitor to England in 1726 wrote the following: “All Englishmen are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news. I have often seen shoeblacks and other persons of that class club together to purchase a farthing paper. Nothing is more entertaining than hearing men of this class discussing politics and topics of interest concerning royalty and nobility.”
8 October 2010, 12:16 pmm.c.:
Harold Lasswell, Univ. Chicago Political Scientist. Moved to teach Law & PS at Yale in 1946. Precursor to the Federalist Society.
Quiz: Having mentioned the Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton chain(and probably assuming that everyone already knows this like me); What are Yale University’s 3 Main Spinoffs? O.K. I’ve already given one of the answers.
Dartmouth, founded by a Yale guy and long considered a Yale backup college(conservative rep.) Chicago, although funded by the Rockefellers, was founded by William Rainey Harper, and also later by Robert Maynard Hutchins, both Yalies.
13 October 2010, 2:50 pmm.c.:
I just finished Harold Lasswell’s Politics, Who Gets What When How(1936)and found two use points.
1) The dichotomy between Systematists & Impressionists. Systematizers like elaborate and logically consistent structure, i.e. treatise writers like Marx and Engels. Impressionists favor less rigidity in form and materialize as essayists, popular lecturers, conversationalists, and editorial writers. Academia generally promotes systematism.
17 October 2010, 3:11 pm2) Difference between naturalistic and normative styles. The former states conditions rather than preferences. The latter focuses on value judgements. Lasswell claims Political Science/Sociology etc. are naturalistic, Political Philosophy/Ethics etc. are normative.
m.c.:
American or U.S. Exceptionalism is what I’m getting at in a nutshell. The United States has a population of ~300 million out of a world population of ~7 billion. Has everyone heard the expression, “For God, for Country, and for Yale.” Maybe Yale has become a fervent or fanatical version of Christ’s Church Oxford(being the religious seat of Oxford as well as a college.)
24 October 2010, 3:15 pmm.c.:
Angelo Codevilla: PhD-Claremont Graduate School, Claremont Inst., Hoover Inst., member of Reagan’s 1980 State Dept. & Intel. Transition Teams, Senior Staffer on Senate Intel. Committee, Foreign Service Officer. Expert in rhetorical obfuscation.
2 January 2011, 4:10 pmm.c.:
from wikipedia:
30 January 2011, 4:16 pmWarren Manshel(1924-1990) Born in Germany and went to school with Henry Kissinger. Became a naturalized US citizen and graduated from Harvard University.
He was U.S. Ambassador to Denmark from 1978–1981.
Manshel was an investment banker and co-founded Foreign Policy with Samuel P. Huntington and The Public Interest with Irving Kristol. Manshel was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
m.c.:
I had lost track of Howard Wolfson. Not surprising he’s now working for Mike Bloomberg as deputy mayor & counselor. Check out his profile on wiki. Notice that he worked for Ned Lamont’s poor senate campaign in ’06 & like David Axelrod is a Univ. Chicago alum.
13 February 2011, 4:13 pmm.c.:
Alexander Zaitchik: Studied at Univ. Chicago according to his bio, worked at SPLC in the past. The new Rolling Stone has his article(worth reading) about Alex Jones, who’s radio show has an audience larger than Rush Limbaugh & Glenn Beck combined.
David Broder: Dean of the Washington Press Corps. 45 years at Wash Post. Appeared on TV talk shows over 400 times, much more than anyone else during that time period except the shows hosts. Undergraduate & Graduate(M.A.) degrees in Political Science from Univ. Chicago. IMO the boringest person ever on TV.
10 March 2011, 12:42 pmm.c.:
Sandy Berger was in Quill & Dagger at Cornell(Cornell’s Skull & Bones) with Wolfowitz & Stephen Hadley. No mention if he took any classes with Allan Bloom.
11 March 2011, 1:03 pmm.c.:
Scooter Libby: (Marc Rich lawyer at one point, Chief of Staff/National Security Advisor to Cheney) met Wolfowitz when the latter was teaching Political Science at Yale. He took at least one class with him there. Later he worked with Wolfowitz at the State Dept. Policy Planning Staff and later at the Dept. Defense.
William Galston: B.A.Cornell-1967(Bloom); M.A.-1969, Univ. Chicago, PhD. Univ. Chicago-1973(Strauss); Domestic Policy Advisor Clinton White House, Brookings Inst. Self-Confessed Straussian.
14 March 2011, 3:07 pmm.c.:
From the Freedom for the Defense of Democracies website(FDD)
21 March 2011, 6:56 pmThomas Josceyln: B.A. Economics from the Univ. Chicago.
Author of recent Congressional White Paper on the Muslim Brotherhood; Senior terrorism advisor for 2008 Giuliani Presidential Campaign; 2006 named a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute(remember Straussian’s west coast camp); regular contributor to the Weekly Standard and has written for the NY Post.
m.c.:
Jane Harman(Dem), Neocon and former chair of the House Intel Committee, recently resigned to be head of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Center. Her husband, Sidney Harman is owner/publisher of Newsweek which recently bought The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s online magazine. Those who were wrong/unethical in the past don’t get censured, they get promoted. Just like Caligula’s Rome.
22 March 2011, 11:43 amm.c.:
James Dobbins(B.S. Georgetown School of Foreign Service), currently head of International Security and Defense Policy at RAND Corp. Was US Special Envoy to Afghanistan 2001-02; before that he had been Envoy to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. A Fix-it man like John Negroponte & Paul(Jerry) Bremer.
Do the general public ever get to vote for Think Tank Officials? They constitute an almost entirely separate branch of government. I guess All Souls College Oxford was the world’s first “Think Tank”, a college composed only of professors & graduate students but at least there they have to take an Examination and do extremely well on it. Modern think tanks what hand out jobs by who kissed the most butt?
23 March 2011, 6:48 pmm.c.:
I’m sometimes prone to generalize. Wikipedia the Rand Corp. and scroll down to their list of people past & present. It was founded in 1948(the first modern US think tank?) as a military think tank. Now imagine the Univ. Chicago Economics & Political Science departments as the theoretical side of the page, and the Rand Corp. as either the first or one of the first applied side of what was prescribed in Chicago.
25 March 2011, 1:15 pmm.c.:
Rand Corp. publishes the Rand Journal of Economics(formerly the Bell Journal of Economics) since 1970. I did’t look at the CVs of the entire Editorial Board but the Editor-in-Chief, James Hosek received his M.A. & Ph.D. in economics from the Univ. Chicago. His Rand Bio says his Research Focus includes Labor economics; Military Recruiting, including Reserve Recruiting & Retention; Compensation; Deployment; Personnel Quality.
I bet a dollar that if you go back and look at the Editorial Board membership of all the issues starting with the Bell Journal, there will be strong links with the Univ. Chicago School and Milton Friedman followers. I don’t have Lexus-Nexus or access to a Research Univ. library.
25 March 2011, 6:04 pmm.c.:
The Royal Society(The Invisible College) was founded in 1660 maybe predates All Souls as an Expert Social Group.
25 March 2011, 6:37 pmm.c.:
Austan Goolsbee, currently Chair of Council of Economic Advisors & member of the Cabinet, is on leave from the Univ. Chicago where he is currently a prof. at the Booth School of Business. Former senior economic advisor 2008 Obama for Pres.
27 March 2011, 3:31 pmm.c.:
Paul MacAvoy, first Editor of the Bell Journal of Economics & Management Science.(1970-1975) Co-editor after that. According to his CV via Google: Asst. Prof. Business Economics Univ. Chicago Graduate Business School & Ford Foundation Faculty Fellowship Univ. Chicago Law School(1960-1963)
Ronald Coase, Univ. Chicago 1964–. Professor of Economics in Law School & Graduate School of Business. Editor of the Journal of Law & Economics. Nobel Prize winner in 1991.
27 March 2011, 4:24 pmm.c.:
Another foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Obama for Pres., Mark Brzezinski, and before that worked in the Clinton WH on the National Security Council(yep, that’s his dad and his sister.)
27 March 2011, 5:13 pmFrank:
Some fun Ayn Rand bits:
The “Ladies of Liberty Alliance” is sending copies of Atlas Shrugged in care packages to the troops (apparently in the hope that this will turn them against the war):
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2011/03/25/spreading-the-love-of-liberty-to-the-troops/
John Gray on Ayn Rand:
“Back in the 1980s, there was a story circulating on the American right, according to which the Russian émigré novelist and thinker Ayn Rand had pronounced on the correct way of dancing. Only one dance form was truly rational, she was supposed to have declared. Some dances she viewed as semi-instinctual physical performances lacking intellectual content: the tango, perhaps. Others – the foxtrot, possibly – she condemned as too contrived and abstract.”
“One of the few writers of fiction to succeed in making the Bolsheviks seem attractive, Rand did not hate the new Soviet regime because it oppressed the masses. She hated it because she believed it did not oppress the masses enough.”
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/07/ayn-rand-greenspan-influence
29 March 2011, 3:13 pmm.c.:
James Steinberg; currently Deputy Secretary of State(#2, if you get around to watching the miniseries The Sandbaggers, Sir Geoffrey Wellingham plays the #2 at The Foreign Office.)
4 April 2011, 7:54 pmSenior Analyst Rand Corp 1989-93, Dir. of Policy Planning State Dept. 1994-96, Deputy Natl. Security Advisor 1996-2001.
m.c.:
I don’t know if a combination of Keynesian economic policy And Socialist Democratic govt.(Socialist Workers Party -SWP if you like) will save the Planet but its a better idea than those who are currently at the Controls.
6 April 2011, 5:59 pmm.c.:
The Policy Planning Staff is to the State Dept. what the Office of Legal Counsel is to the Justice Dept and the Office of White House Counsel. A springboard for the brains to leap to bigger jobs. Wikipedia the list of Directors of Policy Planning, starting with George Kennan. William Renquist and Antonin Scalia were former heads of OLC for example.
7 April 2011, 12:07 pmm.c.:
John Robert got his ticket punched at the WH Legal Counsel’s office for example.
Hey, I don’t make the rules, I’m just providing some of the Crib Notes….
7 April 2011, 12:34 pmStan:
FULL
13 April 2011, 12:16 pmm.c.:
Two More Major Players:
TRW is another RAND-like Aerospace Company/Think Tank whose mission creep extended into Credit Reporting, Crime, Health Care, etc.
Bechtel is involved in Nuclear Technology, Project Management, Engineering, Oil Refineries, Water Systems, Airports, etc. George Shultz & Caspar Weinberger are a couple of Bechtel alums.
14 April 2011, 12:03 pmm.c.:
The Falcon and the Snowman is based on the life of a TRW employee. 41/2 stars on amazon. I think they(TRW) went out of business though.
14 April 2011, 5:35 pmStan:
On the upcoming film, Atlas Shrugged.
This flick will be a cultural litmus test, I expect.
15 April 2011, 7:26 amm.c.:
A little more on the Joseph McCarthy hearings backstory. His Chief Counsel was Roy Cohn, the brains of the duo. Cohn was recommended to McCarthy by J. Edgar Hoover, according to wikipedia. In the 1960′s Cohn became a member of the John Birch Society.
For those of you who know that McCarthy and Joseph Kennedy Sr. were old & good friends(irish catholic mafia) you will know that Bobby Kennedy’s first job out of law school was Junior Counsel, Cohn’s asst. I don’t think the two got along, and Joe Kennedy Sr. seeing the tea leaves got his boy to quit before old McCarthy’s political career started to implode.
15 April 2011, 11:46 amJames M:
I’ve been sitting on this for a while, but since this thread’s gotten pretty active lately: here’s a mini-psychological profile I wrote last year about Rand for grad school, in case anyone’s interested. It examines her through the lens of a certain developmental theory … which you can learn more about here.
I’ve been hesitant to post it because, honestly, I’m afraid I’ll be perceived as having been too kind to her. But keep in mind, finding empathy for even odious people is kind of my job description, as a therapist.
15 April 2011, 5:09 pmStan:
My job too, as an enemy lover. (:
15 April 2011, 5:13 pmStan:
Here’s more (take note, brother James).
FULL
15 April 2011, 5:29 pmDeAnander:
QUOTE She opposed democracy on the grounds that “the masses”—her readers—were “lice” and “parasites” who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States… /QUOTE
Now that’s strange. What could make so many people — the masses — love reading someone who thought of them, described them, as worthless parasites? It must be a similar mechanism to the American working/middleclass habit of cheering for the wealthy elite, a fantasy (held by each and every little nebbish reader) that s/he really, secretly belongs to the Uebermensch class.
Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where *all* the children are above average…
15 April 2011, 10:06 pmDeAnander:
QUOTE Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: “I came to look on her as a killer of people.” The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand’s claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me./QUOTE
The author comments later on the obvious irony that struck me immediately: that Rand replicated in microcosm the same autopathic tendencies that poisoned the communist revolution in Russia: the paranoia, the draconian enforcement of the party line, the cruelty, the loyalty tests, the emotional abuse. Thank goodness she was no Eva Peron, wielding actual State power; if she had had a secret police at her command (like the KGB) I’m sure there would have been tortures and disappearances.
A real Till Eulenspiegel story, in which Rand becomes more and more like the worst aspects of the thing she loathes (the Bolsheviks). Bizarre. Bizarrely human.
Depressing.
15 April 2011, 10:13 pmStan:
As someone who was captivated by her stuff at the age of 12, her name-calling was effective at intimidating a reader into feeling s/he had to prove that s/he was not one of the lice. It actually makes for more fanatical acolytes… you try very hard to be one of the self-elect.
16 April 2011, 6:05 amDeAnander:
Name calling and peer pressure are very effective against 12-year-olds…
… and so is the lonely, wistful fantasy that the whole world is against me, no one understands me, I don’t fit in — and it’s all because all *those people* are inferior morons and I’m just so damn special. The fantasy that Rand peddles in all her works: my alienation and loneliness are not the result of circumstance or my limited social skills, but because I’m so superior to all those losers who are not cool enough to hang with me.
16 April 2011, 12:23 pmSteve:
Ayn Rand is one of America’s great mysteries
Well, I don’t see the mystery at all. She inflates your ego–if you agree with her and are “into” her perspective. Self-esteem on steroids. The zeal of bitterness leads to hell, but there is a kind of infernal joy in being able to curse the fates and the gods and lift your fist to heaven.
16 April 2011, 4:44 pmRobert Karaffa:
Points to the volatile disparities between human capacities. We can build just about anything we can think of and make it work…. or kill us all…..We can drive ourselves to strive collectively for massive campaigns for justice or genocide. Just mix in a little emotion and any good or bad idea or movement can be rendered into senseless chaos. Its why we are where we are in any sense; why we repeat and why we don’t “learn.”
16 April 2011, 7:45 pmWinston Warfield:
Yeah. I was into Rand for awhile in college, sort of got swept away by the personal empowerment thing. Lasted about 6 weeks. Then started reading Malcolm X, about empowering collectively the wretched of the earth (yes, Fanon too). Then dropped out and went to Vietnam where discovered firsthand how the rubber meets the road as an imperial enforcer, although I was luckier than many who are still struggling with the nightmares. You might say it was a field trip in a contnueing education sense. Developed a visceral dislike for Randian philosophy and all related power trips, including its current manifestation, capitalism. The twisted thing about her disciples, is that they scorn empathy, which is the bedrock of anything that makes life worth living.
17 April 2011, 1:38 amStan:
Bouncing off you, Robert.
Obsessively thinking lately about how specialization and monoculture (the cultural kind, not agricultural… tho they are closely related) leave us as free-floating identities, without any sense of belonging or history or moral root. Speer was apolitical. His most cherished identity was that he was an architect. The offer that enticed him was that he could have a free hand to design and implement his designs, and the things he didn’t want to know – little things at first – allowed him to say yes, he would work as the Reich’s architect. Ignoring those things that were unrelated to his identity, then, became easier and easier, because he practiced this compartmentalization every day, focusing on actualizing himself as his identity – architect. This was the process by which he became architect-modified, that is, Hitler’s architect.
“My position as Hitler’s architect.” Speer wrote, “soon became indispensable to me. Not yet thirty, I saw before me the most exciting prospects an architect can dream of.” (emphasis added)
and you Winston
from the same essay:
How this maps onto the discussion of Ayn Rand exactly is hard to explain, but I have to note that she adopted a messianic persona, reaching out through her stories to the most alienated, and even composed her own Bible, Atlas Shrugged. Twisted, even demonic by my measure, her harsh ideology was a perverse attempt to substitute her story for all those (communism, religious faiths, anything that was ‘collectivist’) other stories. That she was intellectually a cheap Nietzsche rip-off is one thing; her choice of fiction as a vehicle – of stories, like Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged – shows that she understood the story’s unique power.
This film is going to be a litmus test, and I suspect it will be an alarming one.
Atlas Shrugged
17 April 2011, 10:31 amStan:
FULL… Roger Ebert underwhelmed.
17 April 2011, 1:00 pmJosiah:
Regarding why American culture is particularly conducive to Rand’s popularity, I think you all would be really interested in this article by three psychologists at the University of British Columbia: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf. Jonathan Haidt has a good summary of it, which you can read here: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/morality10/morality.haidt.html. Haidt’s points are highly relevant to the “why is Rand such a phenomenon in the US?” question.
As Haidt summarizes, the article “begins by noting that psychology as a discipline is an outlier in being the most American of all the scientific fields. Seventy percent of all citations in major psych journals refer to articles published by Americans. In chemistry, by contrast, the figure is just 37 percent. This is a serious problem, because psychology varies across cultures, and chemistry doesn’t.
So, in the article, they start by reviewing all the studies they can find that contrast people in industrial societies with small-scale societies. And they show that industrialized people are different, even at some fairly low-level perceptual processing, spatial cognition. Industrialized societies think differently.
The next contrast is Western versus non-Western, within large-scale societies. And there, too, they find that Westerners are different from non-Westerners, in particular on some issues that are relevant for moral psychology, such as individualism and the sense of self. Their third contrast is America versus the rest of the West. And there, too, Americans are the outliers, the most individualistic, the most analytical in their thinking styles. And the final contrast is, within the United States, they compare highly educated Americans to those who are not. Same pattern.
All four comparisons point in the same direction, and lead them to the same conclusion, which I’ve put here on your handout. I’ll just read it. “Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.” The acronym there being WEIRD. “Our findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature, on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin and rather unusual slice of humanity.”
As I read through the article, in terms of summarizing the content, in what way are WEIRD people different, my summary is this: The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships, and the more you use an analytical thinking style, focusing on categories and laws, rather than a holistic style, focusing on patterns and contexts.”
Do “we” really understand how WEIRD “we” are, in a larger cultural and historical context?
17 April 2011, 2:18 pmHenry:
Exactly, Steve. It’s all in this sentence praising Hickman: “…shimmering with “immense, explicit egotism.” It used to be called luciferian pride. But of course we don’t believe in such things anymore. In a sociopathic culture, it’s not surprising that someone who articulates it so well becomes a cult heroine.
17 April 2011, 2:20 pmm.c.:
Serfdom in Russia wasn’t abolished until 1861. The well-off of St. Petersburg & Moscow were more at home vacationing in Monaco than in fuedalistic Russia. The Russian Revolution represented to Rand the most undesirous of outcomes. Her politics IMO is the worst/strongest of Reactionism dressed up in noble & flowery(and poor) storytelling.
18 April 2011, 8:12 pmDeAnander:
The reviews are less than glowing for the new Atlas Shrugged movie.
Well, it looks it it’s an easy target for satire. And the box office (despite a big PR push) is nothing to write home about. So perhaps it will not become a viral success for the Philosophers of Sociopathic Greed. One can hope.
19 April 2011, 2:15 amStan:
amen
19 April 2011, 6:10 amCharles:
“Rand’s ideal man, Howard Roark, the architect of skyscrapers who
violently refuses to exist for others…
…Indeed, Congressman Ryan has said the reason he got involved in
public service was “by and large” because of Rand, and he has
encouraged his staffers to read ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/opinion/17dowd.html?_r=1
Op-Ed Columnist
Atlas Without Angelina
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 16, 2011
WASHINGTON
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
It was Ayn Rand’s nightmare: the president who gave hundreds of
19 April 2011, 12:01 pmbillions in hand-outs to homeowners, banks, car executives and various
others she would have labeled “moochers” was explaining his vision of
why America is great.
Susan/catlady:
Robert Scheer, New Corporate World Order.
I keep reading Tea Partiers’ glowing viewer reviews of Atlas Shrugged, and wonder how they map their AS world onto our current situation. Just which noble businesspeople are they wanting to free from the shackles of which government regulations?
20 April 2011, 12:33 pmFrank:
The problem with the movie(s), unlike the novel, is that you actually have to watch the whole thing. Atlas Shrugged is said to be the second most influential book after the bible, and like the bible it a book very few owners ever actually read.
20 April 2011, 4:14 pmCurt:
I just watched this TED video talk by David C. called the Big History. Watching it reminded me of one thing that I learned from Ayn Rand. It is certianly possible that other people said before her but exactly who did I am unaware of right now. So what that one thing is is, Nothing is an impossibility. Astronomers and physisists make me laugh when they say that the Universe BEGAN with a big bang. I think what they mean but do not say is that the universe that we can see or perhaps measure began with a big bang. I myself even have doubts about that but it is a good enough theory for me at 12:30 am the day before Good Friday. David C. says that the big bang happened 13.7 billion years ago. Well why did it not happen 14.7 billion years ago? Why not 23.7 billion years ago? What made that time 13.7 billion years ago so darned special? If conditions were ripe at that time for the big bang but not one moment sooner something must have exsisted prior to that to have changed so that the big bang could occur. Ohhh Ohhh Ohhh I know the big bangers will say that prior to the big bang there was no time. But how do they know. Science does not even really have a theory of time? Ahh but then we Faroe Scholars are Seemen we are not really astronomers-physists so they will probably say that there is something faulty with my logic. David did say that before the bigbang there was darkness. Uhhhhh how spooky. Well obviously there was at least darkness with a point of energy in it waiting to explode. That point of energy had to get there somehow. So by my estimation the universe is older than the big bang. It is as Ayn Rand says. The universe is eternal. There is no logical escape from that conclusion. Introducing the Judeo Christian Islamic concept of God just introduces a 0 in to the equation when it comes to understanding our original origin. Furthermore I even suspect that what human scientist call a vacum is really filled with things. I heard about this thing called the Plank scale. That exsists even in a vacum.
20 April 2011, 6:21 pmWell none of cosmolgy stuff helps put food on the table. As far as I can tell none of it helps cure the sick or prevent global warming or put zombies behind bars.
It might teach us though that we should have a birth rate lower than 2 even if we had plentiful resources. Go foth and multiply the Bible says, hahahahahahaha.
Right, so we can put our kids through what we have gone through. Hey lets torture someone becasue we got tortured. They should know what it feels like too.
OK maybe your life was not torture. You might have even had quite a bit of fun. The thing is life has an inevitable down side for everyone. I used to think that the point of life was to aquire points. You get positive points for positive experiences and negative points for negative expeirences. Yet it came to me not so very long ago that the points that one might accumulate for positive experiences and the points one might accumulate for negative experiences are different kinds of points so the points can not be compared. Several years ago I remember writing that in the end we would all be better off dead. We should not comitt suicide however because we are all part of a larger fabric of families and suicide leaves a hole in that fabric which causes other people to suffer. Now that I understand that the good and bad of life can not be compared becasue they are so different I can not say that we would all be better off dead. There is not anything that anyone can objectivly say about the subject. It is still my subjective opinion that we should have an overall birth rate of under 2 to close this experiment down in an orderly manner. We should all cross the finish line (of Nirvana) together. Busted Pork Chops anyone?
Michael Anderson:
From a friend, from another blog:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world…. The other, of course, involves Orcs.”
24 April 2011, 10:13 pmStan:
Good one.
26 April 2011, 6:51 amm.c.:
I just came across a book on Amazon.com by Univ. Notre Dame Political Science Profs. Catherine & Michael Zuckert; The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy(2006, Univ. Chicago Press) They are both former students of Strauss & Allan Bloom. They both have taught at the Claremont Men’s College and/or Claremont Institute. From their Notre Dame CV’s.
Catherine: B.A. Cornell-1964; M.A. Chicago-1967, Ph.D. Chicago-1970
Michael: B.A. Cornell-1964; M.A. Chicago-1967, Ph.D. Chicago-1974
I’ve mentioned before Anne Norton’s book, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire(2005, Yale Univ. Press) She’s also a former student of Strauss & Allan Bloom and currently a Political Science Prof. at the Univ. Pennslyvania. From her Penn CV: B.A. Chicago-1977, M.A. Chicago-1979, Ph.D. Chicago-1982
The best of the bunch is Shadia Drury’s, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss(2005, paperback w/ updated New Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan press) She’s currently at the Univ. Regina, formerly with the Univ. Calgary.
I would classify Norton’s book as semi-official and the Zuckert’s book as 200 proof Univ. Chicago ideology. If I were a law school or political science/history prof. these books would be on my reading lists. I wish I could bring Plato to life and ask him how our 3/4? wars in the middle east are going. Maybe Plato could pass around the hat for philosopher donations to pay for it all.
27 April 2011, 7:26 pmm.c.:
To be fair I should mention my Honorary Mention of Univ. Chicago associated people who have tried to get OFF the Crazy Train.
* Eugene Rabinowitch- Co-Founder & First Editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists(though the Image of the Doomesday Clock was maybe a little on the scary side.)
* Greg Palast-B.A., M.B.A; Good Journalist. I guess it takes one on the inside to know what’s going on.
* Robert Pirsig- Good Writer & former Grad. Student in Philosophy who went crazy by the place.
* Thomas Frank- Ph.D. History; Good Writer.
* Ana Marie Cox- B.A. History; Good Writer
I might have forgotton a couple…
29 April 2011, 6:17 pmm.c.:
* Earl Shorris- Undergraduate degree I believe(Who’s Harper’s article got me onto this.)
* Seymour Hersh- B.A History, failed Law School. I notice he was more eager to indict an army 2nd. lt. than his former college roommates who comprise much of the leadership of the circus. How about an expose Sy?
1 May 2011, 3:13 pmm.c.:
Hillel Fradkin- Currently director of Hudson Institute’s Center on Islam; formerly with AEI; links to the Claremont Institute; Signer of 9/21/2001 PNAC Letter; B.A. Government, Cornell; Ph.D. Univ. Chicago 1978.
1 May 2011, 5:40 pmm.c.:
Two more Univ. Chicago==Rand Corp. Foreign Policy Experts:
Christine Fair, currently prof. at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. Univ. Chicago-B.S. 1991, M.A. 1997, Ph.D. 2004; Senior Political Scientist with Rand Corp.1997-2007; Senior Fellow with West Point’s Counter Terrorism Center. Senior Research Assistant with United States Institute of Peace.
Seth Jones, Univ. Chicago-M.A., Ph.D. Political Science. Senior Political Scientist Rand Corp. Adjunct prof. Georgetwon’s School of Foreign Service. Wrote Study with James Dobbins(See Above, another Rand Corp. employee) for Paul Bremer for Iraq(See his Rand Bio & Wiki page for details)
5 May 2011, 12:05 pmCurt:
A lot of has been written on FS about Ayn Rand and Ron Paul. I wonder if anyone would want to say anything about Jesse Ventura.
6 May 2011, 2:47 amNo one? You are all so shy?
Ok, I will start.
I think that Jesse is much more suportable than Ron Paul. Considering his background in the Marine Corp he is down right enlightened. It no doubt has something to do with the fact that he was in the Marines during the early 1970s.
Ok do not be shy now. Make your voice heard.
Curt:
I might be mistaken about his branch of service.
6 May 2011, 2:49 amWas he in the Navy or the Marines? Is there a difference?
m.c.:
Barnett Rubin(see above), Yale-B.A. 1972; Univ. Chicago-M.A. 1976, Ph.D. 1982(Political Science); former senior advisor to Amb. Holbrooke; State Dept.; CFR; United States Institute of Peace; political science prof. at Columbia & Yale.
6 May 2011, 5:36 pmm.c.:
Richard H. Solomon, President of the United States Inst. of Peace since 1993; Director of Political Science Dept. at Rand Corp. 1976-86; Director Policy Planning Staff State Dept. 1986-89.
6 May 2011, 5:52 pmCurt:
Jesse Ventura claims to have been a Navy SEAL.
6 May 2011, 6:47 pmBased on a story I read off the internet through Google written by a Man who claims to have been a Navy Seal which is a claim that I believe. It seems that this claim of having been a Navy SEAL is not true.
It seems that Jesse claims this becasue the initial training that he went through to become an UDT member was at least at that time, in the early 70s the same as the SEAL training. After that training was completed the personel were either assigned to a SEAL Team or an UDT team. Jesse was assigned to a UDT team. So it seems that not only did Jesse exagurate it seems highly probable that he knows that he has exagurated. He just know doubt thinks that 99% of the people will not know the difference and most of the remaining 1% will not care.
So I wonder myself should this transgression be overlooked or does it indicate some kind of a charachter flaw. Jesse seems to be genuine politcal rebel. His willingness to meet with Fidel Castro gives him at least temporarily some credibility with me. Was it done just to get that crediblity now to abuse later?
Did Jesse exagurate just to make money? To have claimed to have been a SEAL for politcal gain seems strange because even being on a UDT team is not something that even John McCain would dare belittle for political purposes.
I had been a supporter of school vouchers until I read Jesse’s defense of public schools in one of his books. I find him a very intriguing person. Personally I do not give a shit about this Stolen Valor issue. As far as I am concerned members of the US military have none. People who would go half way around the world to kill peasants are 100% cowards in my book.
The article written by the SEAL tries to point out how couragouse the SEALS in Vietnam were. One example that he gives is about a boat of Navy Seals that was ambushed and every one baord except for one man was either killed or incapable of offering resistance except for one wounded man who fought off an enemy platoon from boarding the boat and capturiing the boat and crew. This man is held up as heroic. Yet what if the story were written from the other side. It would be a story of people for the most part half the size of those navy seals dressed in sandals and pjs armed with light weapons charging not only across open ground but in this case open water against a mad man armed with a machine gun capable of firing hundreds of rounds a minute at the men trying to reach his boat. That would be about 10 rounds for each of the enemy each minute. The SEAL was obviously supplied with enough ammunition to sustain his fire until all of the attackers had been killed. Yet the determination of the attackers wa so great many of these attackeers continued to charge the boat even though they had been shot numerous times with 7.62mm rounds. They all selflessly gave thier lives to free their country from foriegn occupation leaving behind widows and sons and daoughters and parents and brothers amd sisters. Some of those that died might have been assholes who beat their wives or raped thier sisters. But the good died with the bad on both sides.
I would not go so far as to call the Vietnam Vets war criminals. The times were different than today. I would go so far as to call them fools but half as foolish than the 21st century US military member who has learned nothing, nada, zikch, from 40 plus years of history, or do not really give a damn. OH sure Afghan is a tad bit more understandable than Iraq but who in the US military today has not served in Iraq? For those who have recently joined who would refuse to serve in Iraq?
I wonder if there is one man in America who has won the Medal of Honor, or Distinguished Service Cross, or Silver or Bronze Star after 1960 who can now look back and say if I really wanted to be honest with myself I do not deserve this recognition. If I really want to be couragous and truely Patriotic I sould take these damned awards and flush them down the toilet becasue they are for so many reasons disgraceful.
Any new reader who is checking out this site might be really turned off by what I just wrote.
Such a reader might think that I would not dare tell that to a medal winners face. I dare them to test me.
I am not really interested in whether or not Jesse has physical courage. I am interested in his motivations. His use of the SEAL rather than the UDT angle to promote himself could be a warning sign.
Curt:
New Reader? Feral Scholar? No way Jose.
6 May 2011, 6:48 pmm.c.:
Abram Shulsky, Cornell-undergratuate; Univ. Chicago-M.A., Ph.D.-1972 student of Leo Strauss & roommate of Paul Wolfowitz at Cornell & Chicago. PNAC; former Rand Corp. researcher; worked for Wolfowitz at Defense Dept.; Hudson Inst.; former Senate Intel. Committee staffer.
Gary Schmitt, Univ. Chicago-Ph.D.-1980; PNAC; AEI; Weekly Standard; former Staff Director Senate Intel. Committee; former Director Foreign Intel. Advisory Board; Defense Dept. consultant; Brookings Inst.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
8 May 2011, 5:28 pmif you want to know where you’re going, it helps to know where you’ve been…
Curt:
Curt you are totally unrealalistic. You never seem to remember that you are a freak of nature. You started thinking about political issues when you were just 8 years old. Most people do not start thinking about these things until they are over 17 years of age.
9 May 2011, 3:02 amWhen you consider that most soldiers are only human how why should you expect them to behave any differently than they do? Most join the military when they are young. How can they possibily have learned anything about world at such a young age? Then when they start learning they are learning the military version of events.
Where as you loook at Iraq and see many similarities to Yugoslavia in the 1940s the people in the military do not dwell on the similarities they dwell on the differences. Where as you look at Afghanistan and see many similarities to Vietnam the NATO soldiers if they do not see any differences at least imagine them.
Some people see humans making the same mistakes over and over again becasue they see history as repeating itself. But history does not reapeat itself exactly.
There are differences in the details that the powerful can use to manipulate the gulible.
Another calculation that you always ignore in creating your expectations is fear. While the number of people who will charge in to the teeth of death for a loosing cause is not very large, the number of people who will take a real vow of poverty is even much much smaller. Catholic priests for example do not take a real vow of poverty. It would take quite an imagination for a catholic priest to think that the church would leave him somewhere that their needs were not met.
Yet disobidiance to the military could for many lead to long term unemployment which would lead to a situation in which the needs of the person or their family members could not be met. Many people would rather die than leave their family in need. Spouses will get paid life insurance and can then remarry should that happen.
Rather than trying to change others, learn something productive, like aquaculture, so when the matrix collapses you do not need to behave like a barbarian to feed your family.
Sincerely,
Curt Vector
Charles:
Have u seen this ?http://thecomingcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/04/jesse-venturas-letter-to-ruling-class.html
My opinion of Jesse V has gone up.
9 May 2011, 2:40 pmm.c.:
David Brooks, Univ. Chicago-B.A. 1983 History. Start out working for Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker.
John Podhoretz, Univ. Chicago-B.A. 1982. Speechwriter for Pres. Ronald Reagan, Special Asst. to WH Drug Czar, William Bennett, Cofounder of Weekly Standard, Commentary, New York Post, Washington Times, Hudson Inst., Hoover Inst.
Samuel P. Huntington(Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order-1996 author) Univ. Chicago-M.A. 1948 Political Science. CFR, AEI, Brookings Inst.
John Ashcroft, Yale-B.A. 1964; Univ. Chicago-Law School 1967(six student deferments & one occupational deferrment), Federalist Society, one of major architects of the Patriot Act.
Kenneth Adelman, longtime asst. to SecDef Rumsfeld 1976-77, Defense Policy Board 2001-06, PNAC, Rand Corp., Committee on the Present Danger, Deputy Ambassador to UN 1981-83 working for Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
11 May 2011, 3:33 pmm.c.:
Select List of Vietnam Draft Deferments from NNDB website:
Elliott Abrams
11 May 2011, 9:25 pmJohn Ashcroft
William Bennett
Paul Bremer
Dick Cheney
Tom Delay
Newt Gingrich
Phil Gramm(Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act fame)
George Bush
Scooter Libby
Mitch McConnell
Mitt Romney
Karl Rove
Clarence Thomas
Paul Wolfowitz
Curt:
Charles,
12 May 2011, 2:58 amI just skimmed over summaries of the episoedes of Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theories. It was very disappointing. It was like the the World Wide Wrestling Federation for Political Analysis produced the prgrams. My opinion of him just went down about 3 notches. Perhaps I can hope that there is a private Jesse that better than the public Jesse.
Curt:
Charles,
12 May 2011, 9:53 amI just thought that I should add that in the first two seasons that program (J.V.’s Conspiracy Theories) covers many of the usual suspects but it misses the really important conspiracy. The one in which Mathamaticians are trying to use the (magical) power of numbers to rule the world. Hahahahahahahha. In case you could not hear it, that was an evil sounding Hahahahahahaha.
m.c.:
David Addington, 2001-05 General Counsel to VP Cheney(Cheney’s legal bodyguard), 2005-09 Chief of Staff to VP Cheney after Scooter Libby resigned.
John Hannah, former aide to John Bolton, Policy Planning Staff State Dept. 1991-96, Deputy National Security Advisor VP Cheney 2001-05, National Security Advisor VP Cheney 2005-09 after Scooter Libby resigned.
Eric Edelman, Deputy Asst. National Security Advisor(Hannah’s Lt.) VP Cheney 2001-03, replaced Doug Feith as #3 at Defense Department 2005-09, Weekly Standard, Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
12 May 2011, 12:11 pmm.c.:
One thing that helped me was going to high school in the D.C. suburbs. A girl in one of my history classes dad worked at the French Embassy. I also worked for three nonprofit NGOs & two months as a temp contractor for the U.N. in NYC. So when I studied Political Science in college I merged the theoretical(2/3rds of which has no relation to the real world) with the practical. I also worked part-time for the better part of a decade for a medium sized newspaper and though I didn’t study journalism I did write for my college newspaper on and off. Combining Journalism with Above gave me an above average grasp on what is possible in the Political/Social/Cultural arena in the U.S. The Generalist who brings useful information to the general public is quite underrated IMO. Too many experts start Illegal Wars and Crap like that.
13 May 2011, 12:15 pmDeAnander:
Holy Cow!
*Requires* his staff to read this drek?
Ummm, given that the book idealises a rapist, if he has any female staff then shouldn’t that be actionable under some kind of antidiscrimination law? I mean, if a chief honcho in some department or other required his Black employees to watch Birth of a Nation as part of their job description, lawyers would fly…
18 May 2011, 9:43 amStan:
The Fountainhead was the novel with the rapist protagonist.
18 May 2011, 9:47 amDeAnander:
Oh, I thought I remembered Dagny being raped by whatsisname in Atlas at one point. Must be conflating the two book, sorry. It was many years ago that I read it, and only a dim “Yuck!” remains in memory.
Correction taken, thanks. But I tell ya, if any employer of mine *required* me to read AS again, I think I’d seriously look for a different job.
18 May 2011, 10:08 amm.c.:
I had forgot that Condi Rice got her B.A. & Ph.D. in Political Science at the Univ. Denver. As an undergraduate she took classes with Josef Korbel and as a graduate student Korbel himself was her senior Ph.D. advisor. BTW, the graduate PS/Intl. Studies School at the Univ. Denver is named after Josef Korbel. Groomed for greatness???
24 May 2011, 11:43 amm.c.:
From Wikipedia. Franklin Miller, Jan. 2001 White House Special Asst. to Pres. Bush & Senior Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control on the National Security Staff. Later joined the Cohen Group in 2005. Worked at the State Dept until 1989 where he switched to DOD civilian leadership until 2001.
10 June 2011, 12:00 pmm.c.:
To simplify, Franklin Miller was a senior aide to Condi Rice & Scooter Libby all through 2001 including on 9/11. When Richard Clarke’s book came out in 2004, he refuted some of his claims.
10 June 2011, 1:11 pmm.c.:
The documentary Nuremberg is out in select locations. I want to see it. If the top 25-30 Nazis knew say in 1935-40 that roughly 10 years later they would be on trial, would they have brazenly committed all those war crimes? I’m kind of guessing no. BTW, most of the top guys were captured. Here’s a short list of those who weren’t. Hitler, Himmler, Martin Bormann(Hitler’s chief of staff), Heinrich Muller the Gestapo head, he may have gone over to the Russians giving them info. Some say he came to the U.S. working for the west; and Adolf Eichmann who was caught later. Of course there were many lesser Nazis who were pardoned or served lesser sentences.
10 June 2011, 1:30 pmm.c.:
Franklin Miller’s direct boss in 2001 was Stephen Hadley. They’re both at the Scowcroft Group now.
I forgot Joseph Goebbels.
12 June 2011, 3:27 pmDeAnander:
Alternet article on the Ayn Rand faction w/in the GOP and their potential overreach.
14 June 2011, 9:54 amm.c.:
Including Robert Ley, labor leader head of the National Labour Front, 1933-45 who hanged himself in captivity( a prototypical Beafsteak Nazi “Brown on the outside Red on the inside”), brings the Nazi High Command total to 28.
14 June 2011, 11:43 amm.c.:
Robert Alt, another Univ. Chicago Law School grad(2002). Currently Senior Legal Fellow & Deputy Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. He has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, National Review Online, Fox News, CNN, numerous radio programs; and is an expert on National Security Law, Law of War, Antiterrorism Laws/War on Terror including the Terrorist Surveillance Program and has testified before Congress. One of his websites says he spent 5 months in Iraq in 2004 where he observed and wrote about the shift to the Transitional Administrative Law and transfer of government control.
He is also a fellow of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.I recall above once I referred to the Claremont Inst. at the west coast camp of the Straussians. In one of his postings there from Oct. 2009 there he wanted Rudy Giuliani to run for the U.S. Senate from New Jersey!?
5 July 2011, 12:07 pmm.c.:
Oct. 2002, not Oct. 2009.
5 July 2011, 12:08 pmm.c.:
I gues the one form of Keynesianism that Milton Friedman & Leo Strauss believed in was Military Keynesianism, right down to the Privatization of Contracting duties and capabilities. Get rid of the Military Draft and let the Free Marketplace and Division of Labor work. The economic forces that drive young men to look for work there.
5 July 2011, 5:11 pmm.c.:
For that matter, Todd Gaziano, the Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation is another Univ. Chicago Law School grad. He got his start in the Reagan Administration Justice Dept. and has worked as a lawyer for Baker & Botts(Jim Baker’s law firm) in Houston. George W. Bush was a former mailroom employee way back when, and Scooter Libby is a former lawyer of theirs.
6 July 2011, 6:55 pmm.c.:
Just because we believe or wish or imagine that there are no drivers of this bus of the world(policy makers, shapers of opinion, global leaders, etc.) in the 21st century, or if we close our eyes and mumble some incoherent prayers, the sob’s who run stuff now are going to keep doing what they’re doing and keep going on.
6 July 2011, 7:28 pmm.c.:
This is a George Kennan quote from the cold war:
13 July 2011, 6:06 pm“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented.”
m.c.:
Aaron Friedberg, June 2003-June 2005 Deputy Asst. for National Security Affairs and Director of Policy Planning, Office of the Vice President. Currently teaching back at Princeton.
Lawrence(Larry) Harris, Chief Economist for the Securities & Exchange Commission July 2002-June 2004 appointed by Chairman Harvey Pitt. M.A. Economics 1980, Ph.D. Economics 1982 Univ. Chicago. Currently Business and Economics Prof. at USC.
5 August 2011, 1:07 pmm.c.:
I grew up on NPR’s Scott Simon. A native Chicagoan, he joined NPR in 1977 as Chicago bureau chief. This I didn’t know. According to his official NPR bio, he attended the Univ. Chicago. He was born in 1952 so he would have been there late 1960′s-early 70′s.
From Wikipedia:[Links accessible from Wikipedia.] I think CHICKENHAWKS are more credible when they send their own Children off to fight Wars. Damn, I wish I knew when I was 20 what I know now. What did P.T Barnum say?
After September 11, 2001, Simon spoke and wrote in support of the “war on terror.” Simon wrote an op-ed for the October 11, 2001 Wall Street Journal, “Even Pacifists Must Support This War.”[9] Simon questioned nonviolence at greater length in the Quaker publication Friends Journal in December 2001, provoking many angry letters, to which Simon replied in the May 2003 edition.
5 August 2011, 5:39 pmm.c.:
Walter Berns, Constitutional Law & Political Philosophy Prof. In 2005 received National Humanities Medal from George W. Bush. Received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under Leo Strauss where he became lifelong friends with Herbert Storing another student of Strauss (Murray Dry, a student of both Storing and Strauss; B.A., M.A., Ph.D. in Political Science from Univ. Chicago has taught former Governor of Vermont Jim Douglas, Rep. Frank Pallone, and former WH Press Secretary Ali Fleischer. Got to have a reliable man in front of the cameras in the crunch.) Back to Berns: Taught at Yale(recall the Federalist Society) 1956-59, 1959-69 Cornell where he was colleagues with Allan Bloom(we assume they knew each other at Chicago) 1969-79 Univ. Toronto(another Straussian outpost, maybe the Harvard of Canada), since then has taught at Georgetown and conduct research at AEI.
8 August 2011, 6:27 pmm.c.:
Charles Hitch(1910-1995). 1948-61 Head of Rand Corp. Economics Division. While at Rand, he co-authored “The Economics of Defense Spending in the Nuclear Age (1960), described by the New York Times as the ‘bible’ for defense budgeting. 1961-65 Asst. Sec. of Defense; president of the Univ. California 1967-75.
Roland McKean(1917) He received his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Chicago. From 1951 to 1963, he was a research economist with the RAND Corporation. He was professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles until 1968, and was the Paul Goodloe Macintire professor of economics at the University of Virginia until his retirement in 1988.[1]
His books include Efficiency in Government Through Systems Analysis, Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (with Charles Hitch),[2] and Teacher Shortages and Salary Schedules (with Joseph A. Kershaw).
Alain C. Enthoven (born September 10, 1930)[1] is an American economist. He was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1965(asst. to Hitch), and from 1965 to 1969 he was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis. Currently he is Marriner S. Eccles Professor of Public and Private Management, Emeritus, at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Enthoven received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1952, an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1954, and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1956. He was a RAND Corporation economist between 1956 and 1960.
Charles Wolf. Wolf served as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State (1945–1947, 1949–1953). He joined RAND in 1955 and headed the Economics Department from 1967 to 1982. He served as founding dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School from 1970 to 1997.
9 September 2011, 12:29 pmm.c.:
John Makin, currently with AEI. Members of CFR, Economic Club of New York. M.A. & Ph.D. Economics from Univ. Chicago. He writes AEI’s monthly Economic Outlook. 1968-69 Chicago Fed. Reserve. 1981-83 IMF; 1984-94 Congressional Budget Office(CBO).
21 October 2011, 12:14 pmm.c.:
Makin before AEI was with Caxton Associates, a global macro Hedge Fund(top 10 worldwide) according to Wikipedia. It’s founder and Chair is a billionaire named Bruce Kovner. A former Chair of AEI, he avoided the Vietnam Draft like Dick Cheney, studied under conservative scholar Edward Banfield(who while a scholar at Chicago was a close friend of Leo Strauss & Milton Friedman) at Harvard, and considers Cheney, and Richard Pearle close friends. The NY Sun and Manhattan Inst. are also big recipients of his money.
21 October 2011, 12:32 pmm.c.:
Google Bruce Kovner + NNDB. It gives a list of some of his political connections.
21 October 2011, 5:38 pmm.c.:
Aaron Director, Milton Friedman’s brother-in-law was an important figue at the Univ. Chicago. A trained Ecomomist & Lawyer, he founded the Journal of Law & Economics in 1958 which he co-edited with Ronald Coase, taught at the Univ. Chicago Law School, eventually becoming its Dean, then Pres. of the Univ. and Attorney General in the Ford Admin. He ended up at the Hoover Inst. at Stanford.(wikipedia)
27 October 2011, 12:17 pmm.c.:
Sorry, Edward Levi was Dean of the Law School, Univ. Pres. & AG in the Ford Admin.
28 October 2011, 12:18 pmm.c.:
Just finished Sylvia Nasar’s book. George Stigler was another Nobel Prize winning Univ. Chicago Economist who was critical of Keynes and his disciples, particularly Joan Robinson.
28 October 2011, 12:20 pmm.c.:
To Clarify: The Congressional Budget Office(CBO) answers to Congress; the Government Accountability Office(GAO) is the Audit, Evaluation, and Investigation arm of Congress; the Office of Management & Budget(OMB) answers to the White House; Treasury and the Federal Reserve have their own internal Budget staffs.
1 November 2011, 11:59 amm.c.:
Paul Heaton: Dir. Research Institute for Civil Justice, RAND Corporation
EMPLOYMENT
23 November 2011, 5:35 pmEconomist, RAND Corporation Nov. 2010-
Associate Economist June 2007-Nov. 2010
Director for Research, RAND Institute for Civil Justice Oct. 2010-
Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School Sep. 2008-
EDUCATION
Ph.D, Economics, University of Chicago June 2007
Thesis Title: Essays on Crime and Corruption
Thesis Committee: Steven Levitt (chair), Gary Becker, Kevin M. Murphy
M.A, Economics, University of Chicago Dec. 2003
B.A, Economics, Summa Cum Laude and University Honors, Brigham Young University(Mormon Yale; Wealthy, Establishment, Who you know is more important than what you know, Politically Powerful) Dec. 2001
m.c.:
James David Barber. One of those famous mediocre Political Scientists I was forced to buy and highlight one of his books(The Presidential Character; as political history/science it’s tertiary in importance IMHO) in college to prove I was halfway intelligent.
From Wikipedia:
Barber was born on July 31, 1930, In the 1950s he served in the United States Army as a counter-intelligence agent before attending the University of Chicago. He earned a bachelor’s & master’s degree in political science while he was there, and he moved on to receive a(B.A.,M.A.) a PhD in the same field at Yale University.
He joined the faculty at Duke University in 1972, and he became a fully fledged professor at that institute in 1977.[2]
29 November 2011, 12:47 pmm.c.:
If numbskulls like Barber are to be believed, events like the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and the Watergate Burgulary are nothing more than fantastic figments of imagination in the mind of the present sitting President of the United States.
p.s. I think The Presidential Character is in something like its 4/5th edition.
29 November 2011, 1:09 pmm.c.:
A little while ago on CNN, Right-Wing Smug Know-It-All, Wall Street Journal & Weekly Standard writer among others, Ben Stein called the OWS Movement, “Punks,” Trivial, and Insignificant.
Funny, about a month ago the House Majority Leader called the OWS People “A Mob.” He didn’t seem to have a similar viewpoint when the Tea Party was rolling hot.
BTW– His dad, Herbert Stein was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was on the board of contributors of The Wall Street Journal. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers(1969-74; Chair 1972-74) under President Nixon and President Ford. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1958. He was the author of The Fiscal Revolution in America.
3 December 2011, 4:58 pmIn his article, “Adam Smith did not wear an Adam Smith necktie,” Stein wrote that the people who wear the Adam Smith tie do it “to make a statement of their devotion to the idea of free markets and limited government. What stands out in Wealth of Nations, however, is that their patron saint was not pure or doctrinaire about this idea. He viewed government intervention in the market with great skepticism. He regarded his exposition of the virtues of the free market as his main contribution to policy, and the purpose for which his economic analysis was developed.
m.c.:
I forgot. The younger Stein worked in the Nixon & Ford WH as a Speechwriter.
3 December 2011, 5:01 pmm.c.:
Hat tip to Naomi Klein’s Nation article. Joseph Bast, Founder(1984), President & CEO of the Heartland Inst. a Conservative/Global Warming Sceptic Thinktank located in Chicago. Sourcewatch claims he studied Economics as an Undergraduate at the Univ. Chicago but did not graduate.
5 December 2011, 7:16 pmm.c.:
Another RAND Guy,
5 December 2011, 8:40 pmFrom Wiki:
James Schlesinger was born in New York City,and educated at the Horace Mann School and Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. (1950), M.A. (1952), and Ph.D. (1956) in economics. Between 1955 and 1963 he taught economics at the University of Virginia and in 1960 published The Political Economy of National Security. In 1963, he moved to the Rand Corporation, where he worked until 1969, in the later years as director of strategic studies.
In 1969, Schlesinger joined the Nixon administration as assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget, devoting most of his time to Defense matters. In 1971 President Nixon appointed Schlesinger a member of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and designated him as chairman. Serving in this position for about a year and a half, Schlesinger instituted extensive organizational and management changes in an effort to improve the AEC’s regulatory performance.
On February 2, 1973 he became Director of Central Intelligence, after Richard Helms, the previous director, had been fired for his refusal to block the Watergate investigation. He had no experience of intelligence at that time. Schlesinger’s first words upon becoming DCI were, reportedly, “I’m here to make sure you don’t screw Richard Nixon.”
Schlesinger left the CIA to become Secretary of Defense on July 2, 1973 aged 44 until Nov. 19, 1975. Jimmy Carter later appointed him to be the first Secretary of Energy in 1977. In July 1979, Carter replaced him as part of a broader Cabinet shakeup. According to journalist Paul Glastris, “Carter fired Schlesinger in 1979 in part for the same reason Gerald Ford had—he was unbearably arrogant and impatient with lesser minds who disagreed with him, and hence inept at dealing with Congress.”
Afterwards Schlesinger joined Lehman Brothers as a senior advisor.
m.c.:
I’d never heard of him before.
6 December 2011, 12:45 pmRobert Myers(1924-2011):
(from http://www.powerbase.info/index & NYT, the good bits are down at the bottom)
Myers attended Depauw University before joining the United States army in June 1943. He enrolled in the ASTP program in Japanese language and area studies at the University of Chicago in November 1943. In 1944, he was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services and sent to China in March 1945. There he was assigned to the Eagle Project for Korean independence. He earned an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago in 1948 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1960 whilst working at the CIA under Hans Morgenthau(at Chicago).
Myers joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1949. He was assigned to Japan and Taiwan from 1950 to 1952, serving briefly in Korea during that time. After a second tour in Japan, Myers was assigned to Indonesia from 1956 to 1958. From 1960 to 1962 he was Cambodia chief of station. From 1963 to 1965 he was deputy chief of FE division.
After leaving the CIA Myers co-founded the Washingtonian magazine. He was the publisher of The New Republic from 1968 until 1979, a right wing magazine which was critical of the ‘New Left’ and highly supportive of Israel. Myers was good friends with fellow CIA-man and right wing activist Ray Cline. They appeared together before a January 1978 congressional hearing on the CIA and the media where Myers stated: “The reciprocal relationship between the CIA and the American press has been of value to both parties and often to the individuals themselves whose careers may have mutually benefited by such connections.”
From 1980 to 1994 Myers was president of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. Myers was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. According to his profile he is working on a new book, Traditional Virtues and Values in American Foreign Policy: The Dilemma of Intervention.
From 1980-1994, he was president of the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs in New York. During his tenure, the Council developed dynamic programs examining questions of human rights, ethics and moral philosophy in partnership with diverse institutions throughout the world. Upon retirement, he and his wife Betty moved to California, where he was a fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1995-2007, completing two books; U.S. Policy in the 21st Century: The Relevance of Realism (1999) and Korea in the Cross Currents: A Century of Struggle and the Crisis of Reunification (2001). He enjoyed tennis and golf, was a White Sox fan and a jazz aficionado. Family, friends and colleagues benefited from his encouragement and ability to connect people through his wide-ranging interests and creativity. We will miss his wit and humor and incisive analyses. He was preceded in death by his wife, Elizabeth Watson Myers, in 1998, and a son, Timothy John Myers, in 2003. He is survived by his daughters, Holly Myers, of Portola Valley, CA and Lauchlin Myers, of Berkeley; his sons in law, Kirk Neely and Mark Liebman; and seven grandchildren.
m.c.:
Blackwater inc. changed its name today for the second time. I just looked on their website now via wikipedia. On the right hand side of the wiki page is the link to their official site. Listed on their Board of Directors, the most famous name there is former US Senator & Bush AG, John Ashcroft.
12 December 2011, 9:23 pmm.c.:
Adam Davidson, Intl. Business & Economics Correspondent, NPR, B.A. from Univ. Chicago.
22 January 2012, 4:59 pmm.c.:
Davidson caught my attention Saturday on CNN where he shamelessly defended the Big Banks, making even Chrystia Freeland who loves everyone who loves Business back away from his stance: claiming regulation got in their way as well as not being effective; his secondary argument was that Big Banks find ways to get around government regulation so its a waste of time. BTW, he is co-founder & co-host of a show called Planet Money(I’m not making this sh– up. Its too funny)
23 January 2012, 7:59 pmHenry:
Another great article by Bill Black:
The New York Times’ Ode to Foxconn and Anti-Employee Control Fraud
By William K. Black
http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2012/01/new-york-times-ode-to-foxconn-and-anti.html
================================
Hope you don’t mind, but since we’re in the realm of economics, here are a few interesting piece:
Michael Hudson interview:
http://ianmasters.com/sites/default/files/mp3/bbriefing_2012_01_17b_michael%20hudson.mp3
Food speculation should be (mostly) banned
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=17794
Central bank independence – another faux agenda
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=9922
The Cathechism of the IMF
23 January 2012, 11:59 pmhttp://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=17855