An Insight into the Mind of Ayn Rand

Mystery/thriller writer Michael Prescott has looked through the journals of Ayn Rand, and he finds her musing on one William Edward Hickman, who said, "What is good for me is right," which seems to pretty classical Randian Objectivism.

She is enthused about this person, and his philosophy, describing it as, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard."

While Mr. Hickman is fairly obscure these days, unless you are a lawyer, in which case it is one of the earliest attempts at an insanity defense, he was well known during his day, basically 1927 and 1928, because he kidnapped a 12 year old girl, ransomed her, and dismembered her.

And Ayn Rand calls what he did a, "Real man's philosophy."

If there were any doubt as to her being evil, it is ended. If there were any doubt as to her sanity, those doubts are reinforced.

I will leave you with the last two 'graphs, but please read the rest, but be warned, the specifics of the murder are grisly:

By the appraisal of any normal mind, there can be little doubt that William Edward Hickman was a vicious psychopath of the worst order. That Ayn Rand saw something heroic, brilliant, and romantic in this despicable creature is perhaps the single worst indictment of her that I have come across. It is enough to make me question not only her judgment, but her sanity.

At this point in my life, I did not think it was possible to significantly lower my estimate of Ayn Rand, or to regard her as even more of a psychological and moral mess than I had already taken her to be.

I stand corrected.

So Nu?

I am not surprised that Republican support for regulating big tech has nothing to do with consumer welfare or the common good, but instead intends to create punishment for firms that they think have not been nice enough to them.

If there is a narrative that runs though the modern right, it is the one created by psychopath and lover of serial killers Ayn Rand, which was in turn informed by the statements of child killer William Edward Hickman, "What is good for me is right."^*

If you do not believe in a common good,^† then the only reason for a law, or for that matter any collective action, is your own personal benefit:

Congressional Republicans released an antitrust plan for Big Tech yesterday with an announcement that made it clear their focus is not on boosting competition or reducing harms to online consumers but on alleged "censorship" of conservatives.

"Big Tech is out to get conservatives" is the first sentence in the "House Judiciary Republican Agenda for Taking on Big Tech." The "conservative response" to tech-industry problems "will speed up and strengthen antitrust enforcement, hold Big Tech accountable for its censorship, and increase transparency around Big Tech's decisions," the opening paragraph continues. The word "competition" never appears in the two-page plan. A separate plan previously released by House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) does mention competition, but McCarthy's plan also focuses mostly on supposed bias against conservatives.

………

The GOP said the "accountability" portion of its plan "subjects Big Tech to legal accountability for its censorship. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are functionally the public square of the digital age. It is wrong that these platforms control and censor speech with impunity." Republicans said they propose to "create a statutory basis for Americans to directly challenge Big Tech in court for its censorship and silencing of conservatives."

………

The GOP is also trying to sideline FTC Chair Lina Khan, who was just appointed to the agency's top spot by President Joe Biden. Claiming that the "current system of splitting antitrust enforcement between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission... empowers radical Biden bureaucrats at the expense of Americans," the GOP said it wants to "consolidate antitrust enforcement within the Department of Justice so that it is more effective and accountable."

Translation, "We want rich monopolists to donate to our campaigns." 

Even self described Paleoconservative Jerry thought that aggressive enforcement of antitrust law was essential to freedom.

………

By contrast, House Democrats' antitrust agenda focuses mostly on boosting competition to help small businesses and give consumers more choice. For example, the Democrats' Ending Platform Monopolies Act could break up tech companies like Amazon to eliminate "the ability of dominant platforms to leverage their control over across multiple business lines to self-preference and disadvantage competitors in ways that undermine free and fair competition."

Of course, this will crash on the filibuster, which is how many Democrats try to split the difference to suck up to their donors.

If there were a realistic chance of this passing, some Democrats in the house would be far less inclined to support these measures.

………

Republicans were angry that Democrats' antitrust agenda focused on boosting competition instead of trying to stamp out alleged anticonservative bias. After the June 24 votes, House Judiciary Committee Republicans issued a statement from Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), saying, "Big Tech is out to get conservatives. But rather than address Republican concerns of bias and censorship on the Internet, Democrats spent the last two days pushing radical antitrust legislation that will systematically change the United States economy as we know it... We look forward to introducing legislation in the coming days that holds Big Tech accountable and actually addresses censorship of conservatives online."

Oh, you delicate snowflakes.  

People are acting like you are bad just because you attempted a putsch.

^*As I have mentioned before, William Edward Hickman also kidnapped a 12 year old girl, held her for ransome, and then dismembered her

^†Margaret Thatcher stated this with view typical English rhetorical thrift when she said, "There's no such thing as society."

Trump's Lawyers Are Not the Most Contemptible Attorneys of this Season

Neither is it Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton whose plea for a pardon attempt to invalidate all the votes in 4 states was dismissed by the Supreme Court. 

In fact, the lawyer in question wasn't working on the election at all.

Rather it was Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) stalwart and Clinton confidant Neal Katyal who aggressively supported the use of slaves by Nestle on chocolate farms, explicitly stating that companies that participated in the Holocaust should not be held to account for their actions.

Every one has a right to a lawyer, no mater how contemptible that client is, and the lawyer has an obligation to provide a competent and rigorous defense, but there is a ethical requirement that you not simply argue on behalf on evil.

Lawyers are not just advocates, they are officers of the court, and there is a requirement for basic human decency, and Neal Katyal has failed that test. (I need to note that I am an engineer, not a lawyer, or ethecist, dammit!^*)

The United States has a political class that mistakes its professional norms for ethics. Mainstream political journalists mindlessly grant anonymity to professional liars. Elected officials put collegiality and institutional procedure over the needs and interests of their constituents. And as for lawyers, they have refined this tendency into what amounts to a religion of self-justification.

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution establishes that every American has the right to “the Assistance of Counsel” if they are prosecuted for a crime. This was a pointed rejection of English common law, which barred felony defendants from hiring counsel to represent them. Over time, the Assistance of Counsel clause came to mean that everyone prosecuted for a crime had the right to competent and effective representation, even if they could not afford it. From that right, the American legal community developed a core tenet: Everyone deserves representation.

But once the American legal community invented corporate law and the large firm, it continued developing that tenet until it became so divorced from notions of liberty or equality under the law that it now works as a kind of force field preventing lawyers from facing any social or professional repercussions for their actions on behalf of their clients. Everyone has a right to counsel, and every lawyer has a right to earn a buck.

It is that mutated creed that explains why Neal Katyal went to the Supreme Court last Tuesday to argue that children enslaved to work on cocoa plantations should not be allowed to sue the corporations that abetted their enslavement.

Katyal is among the most prominent and decorated attorneys in the country. He is a Democrat who has been in and out of government since Bill Clinton’s second term. He returned to his private firm, Hogan Lovells, after serving as acting solicitor general for Barack Obama’s Justice Department. He is omnipresent on television and newspaper op-ed pages as a voice of “The Resistance” to Donald Trump. He is about as close as you could come to the embodiment of Big Law’s connection to the institutional Democratic Party.

And last week he argued that because the corporation that supplied Zyklon B to the Nazis for use in their extermination camps was not indicted at Nuremberg, Nestle and Cargill should not be held liable for their use of child slave labor. In his argument before the court, Katyal espoused a view of corporate immunity so expansive that even the conservative judges seemed skeptical. If you took him at his word, he was effectively asking the Supreme Court to make it impossible for any foreigner to sue any company for any harm done to them, up to and including kidnapping and enslavement.

An argument that repulsive coming from such a high-profile attorney—someone who could very likely serve in the incoming Biden administration or end up a judge—naturally caught the attention of left-of-center critics of corporate power. Most of them were not very impressed with the argument and expressed some less-than-flattering opinions about the person making it.

As always, public criticism of a successful attorney led inevitably to the creation and publication of a new version of the inexhaustible opinion piece classic: It is simply unfair to criticize a lawyer for making any argument on behalf of any client.

………

The point is not that Katyal should be disbarred or something for representing a client. The point is that the cases Katyal chooses to take, the arguments he chooses to make, even the firm he chooses to work for, all speak to his values. He cannot separate his politics, whatever he thinks they are, and whatever he wants everyone else to think they are, from his decision to defend Nestle against the threat of potential lawsuits from enslaved children. That is a statement about how one believes the world should be organized and on whose behalf the legal system should operate.

To defend an accused murderer or rapist in a criminal trial is a straightforward endorsement of the idea of the presumption of innocence, not an endorsement of murder or rape. That’s the act enshrined in our Bill of Rights. To make a career out of defending and expanding corporate power at the expense of employee and consumer power, on the other hand, is simply to endorse those things.

………

Instead of continuing to argue about these ideas in public, the American legal community largely decided to close ranks around a highly ideological understanding of professionalism and independence that happens to support the right of an elite attorney to make a fortune. Now any time someone—take, for example, Richard Kahlenberg, who went to Harvard Law and wrote a book about how that institution turns would-be idealists into corporate stooges in training—broaches concerns like Berle’s, they are met immediately with derisive sneers from law professors about not understanding the majesty of the legal profession.

People like those law professors and Neal Katyal illustrate something I wish more professional Democrats understood: The professional norms of the political class are not only not a substitute for actual values, they are, frequently, actively harmful to the project of liberalism these people claim to be advancing.

………

Neal Katyal’s professional project—one that I believe to be sincerely ideological and not simply mercenary—has been to protect corporations from the consequences of harming consumers and workers. Liberals should find that horrifying. If you want to make a fairer society or more equitable economy, Katyal is not your ally, no matter how many good deeds he has done. The professional norms that allow people like Katyal to get a pass on their lucrative private sector work are not actually essential components of our political system; they exist because no one in revolving-door Washington wants to feel bad about how they pay the bills.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is a product of this amoral calculus.

They are subscribing to the philosophy of Ayn Rand crush William Edward Hickman, who said, "What is good for me is right."

William Edward Hickman also  kidnapped a 12 year old girl, ransomed her, and dismembered her, which is pretty much what the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has done to both the party, and the American people.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Oh, You Poor Delicate Snowflake

Tony Podesta has a sad, because he's a corrupt lobbyist, and people call him a corrupt lobbyist, because he did corrupt things. (Yeah, I know, technically legal, but the real scandal is what is legal with these rat-f%$#s.)

He had to stop lobbying for a while, because his (frequently unregistered) lobbying for foreign dictators, oligarchs, and mobsters came out as a part of the investigations of Trumps dealings with same in Russia and the former Soviet Union nations.

The collapse of Tony Podesta’s $42-million-a-year lobbying and public relations firm in 2017 amid a federal investigation shook K Street and rendered him toxic — a rare Democratic victim of the Trump-era scandals.

But that was only the beginning of his troubles.

Mr. Podesta, long an outsized character in the influence industry and Democratic fund-raising, turned to his enormous collection of modern art for solace and income. But when the pandemic sent the art market reeling, he sold the penthouse condo in Washington he had been using to show and sell his collection, and secured a loan from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program for struggling small businesses.

Discussions about consulting gigs and a return to a fund-raising circuit that had turned its back on him were halted by a combination of his declining income, pandemic restrictions and an infection from knee surgery that left him hooked to an intravenous antibiotic drip for months.

To top it off, he said, his email accounts and website were frozen after Chinese cyberthieves launched a wide-ranging phishing campaign using one of his domain names.

“It’s not been an easy time,” Mr. Podesta said in an interview, recalling a low point when he was being attacked on Twitter by former President Donald J. Trump and a television crew was on his block anticipating an indictment.

………

Now Mr. Podesta is exploring a return to a landscape he once dominated.

You have been a corrupt influence peddler for years, cashing in on your brother John's political positions.  Just go.

………

The reception he gets could help answer some questions about life in Washington after Mr. Trump. Did the backlash to the open access-peddling and corporate influence of the Trump era result in brighter lines between corporate lobbying, fund-raising and governing? Or has the capital simply returned to the clubby culture in which lobbyist fund-raisers like Mr. Podesta held sway?

It's probably returned to the clubby culture, but given that John is no longer proximate to the levers of power, your done, dude.

………

Mr. Podesta, who has known Mr. Biden and some of his closest aides for decades, noted approvingly that the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee had accepted a combined $2,750 in donations from him last year, and that he had been welcomed at a virtual fund-raiser hosted by the campaign’s chairman, Steve Ricchetti, a longtime friend who once sold his lobbying firm to Mr. Podesta.

Mr. Ricchetti is now a counselor to Mr. Biden in the White House, while his brother Jeff Ricchetti, a former employee of Mr. Podesta’s lobbying firm, has seen his lobbying income increase significantly.

“They hire all these former lobbyists,” Mr. Podesta said. “They shouldn’t not take money from another former lobbyist.”

(Emphasis mine)

Do you understand just how f%$#ing toxic you and your whole clique of grifters are? 

You are toxic to the Democratic Party, and toxic to the nation, but the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) wants a share of the proceeds from your corruption, so you continue to be a fixture inside the Beltway.

………

Over the course of three decades, he built one of the highest-grossing firms in Washington, representing companies and interests across industries and ideologies, including military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, big banks, a tobacco company, pharmaceutical makers and foreign governments including that of Hosni Mubarak, the authoritarian former Egyptian leader, Myanmar’s military junta and entities connected to the Saudi government.

His firm benefited from the perception that he had access to Democratic administrations and congressional offices — a perception enhanced by his fund-raising and personal connections to top Democrats. In 2016, Mr. Podesta donated or raised nearly $900,000 for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton.

Her presidential campaign chairman was Mr. Podesta’s younger brother John, himself a stalwart of Washington’s Democratic establishment.

Both Podesta brothers became characters in the Russia investigation that loomed over much of Mr. Trump’s presidency. Emails stolen from John Podesta’s personal Gmail account by Russian intelligence revealed embarrassing rifts roiling Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and Washington’s Democratic establishment.

……….

His primary residence now, a 7,000-square-foot house in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood, houses a rotating display of his art, as well a wine cellar with thousands of bottles.

7,000 square feet? Al Capone should be so "poor".

………

His firm’s demise stemmed primarily from its involvement in one strand of the special counsel’s investigation. The firm took on a client with ties to Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was president of Ukraine, in 2012, but initially failed to register with the Justice Department under foreign lobbying laws and found itself in the midst of a tangled investigation involving the Republican lobbyists Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who had worked for Mr. Yanukovych’s political party before joining the Trump campaign and becoming central targets of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

………

Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates were charged with unregistered foreign lobbying, tax fraud and other crimes in October 2017. The indictment identified the Podesta Group and a firm with which it worked on the Ukraine effort, Mercury Public Affairs, though not by name, as having worked as part of a “scheme” with Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates to gain support for Mr. Yanukovych, while evading foreign lobbying disclosure requirements.

………

“We lost some clients over this, but the bank stuff was the killer,” Mr. Podesta recalled.

………

Mr. Podesta said he was relying on art sales as his primary source of income, supplemented by Social Security and some investment income.

But when the pandemic hit, “the buyers all sort of left,” he said.

He sold the penthouse condo at a slight loss, unloaded his Flatiron district condo and secured a P.P.P. loan of nearly $43,000 to help cover his own salary, Ms. Corrie’s [his professional art curator] and that of a part-time employee, as well as rental fees and utilities at a professional art storage facility.

Even after all that, you are a corrupt SOB, and you went and sucked up taxpayer money.

He said he did not think the loan ran afoul of the program’s mission of helping small struggling businesses. “Lots of people much bigger than I got loans,” he said, including Washington lobbying shops, high-priced law firms and special-interest groups like those with which he used to work.

Basically, he is subscribing to the life philosophy of subscribing to the philosophy of Ayn Rand crush William Edward Hickman, who said, "What is good for me is right." (William Edward Hickman also  kidnapped a 12 year old girl, ransomed her, and dismembered her)

You art a profoundly contemptible contemptible excuse for a human being, and any misfortune that you have experienced is of your won making.

Please, Mr. Podesta, could you do me the kind favor of dining on excrement and expiring?

A Microcosm of What is Wrong with the Narcissistic Left

Brooklyn friends school in New York is a Quaker institution which posits as its central value, its "brand" if you will, is creating students who will fight for social justice.

However, it appears that when it is their ox that is gored, they will go above and beyond to screw their own workers.

They are trying to decertify their union because it is "Incompatible" with their Quaker faith.

Just in case you are wondering, Quakers have a long history of pro organized labor activism.

It's just that this this school rat-f%$# administrator does a not want to be inconvenienced:

Everyone knew there would be layoffs at Brooklyn Friends School. Not even a school where tuition is the cost of a new car is safe from a major recession. The letters, though, were a shock. A couple weeks into severance negotiations with the staff union, head of school Crissy Cáceres made an announcement. The school had filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board asking it to decertify, or disband, its union. The presence of a union violated the school’s Quaker character, she wrote in two August 14 notes to teachers and families. “If we are to fully practice our Quaker values of respecting others and celebrating every individual’s inner light while compassionately responding to existing needs,” she said, “we must be legally free to do so.”

In this intimate school community, the news was an earthquake. It “came out of the blue,” remembers Sarah Gordon, who teaches third grade at Brooklyn Friends and belongs to the union’s negotiation committee. Nobody knew the school was even considering such an extreme decision. “It was like ‘wait, this is what you were doing?’ We had no idea,” echoes Laura Hulbert, a learning specialist.

At a different institution, that sense of surprise might be less profound. Employers usually don’t welcome unions, and they can adopt ugly tactics to prevent workers from organizing. But Brooklyn Friends isn’t the average workplace. The school is famously progressive. Parents hear of its commitment to social justice on orientation tours. Second-graders study the lives of labor leaders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez as part of a curriculum on “change-makers.” The school’s union — which includes about 200 teachers, maintenance staff, and office workers, and is represented by United Auto Workers Local 2110 — seemed like a natural extension of its left-wing ethos. At least to staff.………

………

But look deeper, and a question presents itself: Is this spiritual warfare, or something more profane?

Spolier, Cáceres isn't a member of the Quaker meeting, and she is making sweeping generalization that unionization runs counter to the religion.

This corrupt, profane, narcissistic, and sociopathic.

This is not William Penn, this is William Edward Hickman,^* "What is good for me is right."

………

Conservative Christians and right-to-work groups hailed the Bethany decision, [Which said that a religious school was not covered by the NLRB] which means that liberal Brooklyn Friends could soon have some uncomfortable company. It may also find itself at odds with other Quaker institutions. The Friends Council on Education told Intelligencer in an email that it has no formal position on unionization at its member schools, including Brooklyn Friends. But other Quaker organizations have unionized without incident. Teachers at Friends Seminary in Manhattan have a union. So do the employees of the American Friends Service Committee, which a source described as being “like the Peace Corps for Quakers.” A 2016 statement on the Committee’s website praises Walter Reuther — a storied leader of the United Auto Workers — in effusive terms. Brooklyn Friends itself has acknowledged Quakerism’s links to labor in the past. A blog post on its website celebrates Bayard Rustin, who in addition to being a Quaker and a civil-rights activist also co-founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute of the AFL-CIO.

………

“This school is incredibly diverse on so many levels, and I think that they care a lot about diversity and social justice. They can talk about that quite a bit,” McMackin said. “But the one thing that’s really lacking is economic diversity, and that contributes to the culture of the school.” She and Roddick receive financial aid to send their son to Brooklyn Friends, as do many other families. But overall, she added, “there is a very affluent culture there,” populated by “art dealers and finance bros” and other pillars of Brooklyn high culture. That influences the school’s rhetoric, she concluded: “When they talk about diversity, when they talk about social justice, they’re really talking about every other type besides economics.”

There is no social justice without economics.

Everything else is just virtue signaling.

It is also amazingly self-destructive and stupid:

………

“Brooklyn Friends is never going to have the tradition and gravitas of Packer. It’s never going to have the toniness of St. Ann’s, or the campus and athletic spirit of Poly Prep. But what Brooklyn Friends does have is social justice,” the former faculty member said. “When the board makes decisions like currying the favor of the Trump-dominated NLRB to try to decertify a union, in addition to feeling dishonest it seems like one of the stupidest things the school could do.”

If someone asks you why "The Left" hates comfortable liberals, it's hypocrisy, and this is about as good an example of that as you could hope to find.

^*Hickman is a serial killer much admired by Ayn Rand who kidnapped and dismembered a 12 year old girl.

I Can Understand How a Nobel Prize for Corruption Might Appear to Contradict the Organization's Goals

OK, it's isn't technically a Nobel for Corruption, it's the Nobel Prize for Economics, and I agree with Bo Rothstein, who has concluded that the "Nobel Prize for Economics" is completely at odds with the vision of Alfred Nobel:

Bo Rothstein, an important member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, has today in Sweden’s most widely read newspaper called for an immediate declaration of a moratorium on the awarding of Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economics in the name of Nobel and the Nobel Foundation.

Rothstein’s article argues that today with increasing success, economics as commonly taught in universities and endorsed by most winners of the economics prize promotes corruption in societies around the world. Therefore he concludes that the Nobel Foundation’s awarding the economics prize is “in direct conflict with what Alfred Nobel decreed in his will.”

“I will,” writes Rothstein, “therefore now take the initiative in this matter.”

It's actually more than that.

There is evidence that the study economics are actually results in corrupt behavior, and that this applies to politicians who have left academe as well.

It's not surprising: Whatever you think of the study of law, it clearly buys into a system of morality which is presented as being independent of personal benefit.

Modern "Free Market Mousketeer" economics, by contrast sees personal interest as the alpha and omega of morality. Their world view is mirrored by the William Edward Hickman quote, "What is good for me is right."

It may not be fair to say this, but it behooves us to note that Mr. Hickman, who was described by Ayn Rand as having, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard,," was a psychopath who kidnapped and dismembered a 12 year old girl.

The cult of the market, and shareholder value, is by definition sociopathic, and as such, it is a corrupting field as study.

Of course, my view does not apply to all economists, just generally to what one would call Neoclassical Economics^*

Basically, they favor gross oversimplification of the human condition so as to allow for the creation elegant economic models made, and these simplifications give us a worldview that is both inaccurate and amoral.


At most universities, Econ 101, even as it notes that the models are over-simplified, provides no alternative means beyond neoclassical models.

It's a petri dish for corruption.

^*Krugman uses the term "Freshwater Economics" because the schools that most lionize the idea of the rational and fully informed actor in the market place come from schools located inland, particularly in Chicago.

Proving That Ayn Rand Is to Business What Ebola Is to the Exchange of Bodily Fluids

Sears, which used to have a tall building and a catalogue, is now taking a butcher knife to its own flesh, so that it can sell them to to keep the lights on:

Sears Holdings will sell its well-known Craftsman tools brand to Stanley Black & Decker, the latest in a recent flurry of moves the retailer is making to generate cash after at least five money-losing years.

The agreement announced Thursday calls for Stanley to pay $525 million when the deal closes — expected later this year — and another $250 million after three years, the companies said. New Britain, Conn.-based Stanley will pay Sears a percentage of its new sales of Craftsman products for 15 years, and during that time, Sears will be able to continue selling Craftsman products royalty-free.

What happened over the past 5 years?

This guy:

Hoffman Estates-based Sears estimated the deal's value could top $1 billion.
CEO Lampert remains committed to bankrolling Sears

Sears’ stock jumped as much as 8.7% following a recent statement issued Dec. 29. (Dec. 29, 2016)

Separately Thursday, Sears said it's trying to raise another $1 billion by selling off real estate. On Wednesday, affiliates of the hedge fund managed by Sears' chairman, CEO and biggest investor, Edward Lampert, lent Sears up to $500 million to fund operations while it negotiates those sales.

You see, Eddie is a big fan of Ayn Rand and her poorly written philosophy, Objectivism.

He took over Sears, and promptly implemented the prescriptions put forth by Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, which predictably created a complete disaster: (From that Communist rag Inc. magazine)

For those in business who idealize the philosophy of Ayn Rand, maybe it's time to forget books read during the teen years and start thinking about better ways to run a company. Put me in the same camp with Geoffrey James when it comes to saying that Ayn Rand is bad for business. Too bad for the investors in Sears that its CEO, Eddie Lampert, seems to remain a true believer.

Any person who demands the fealty of acolytes while preaching individualism is already off to a bad start with inherent contradictions. Apply the principles of Business-By-Rand and the start goes south pretty quickly.

It might be one thing to invest ruthlessly, but running a company is an entirely different occupation. That's the possible difference between structuring the takeover of Sears by Kmart when you’re the head of a hedge fund and being the CEO. Looking out for No. 1 is a bankrupt strategy when the basics of great business require you to look out for your customers and employees. 

It’s division-eat-division out there.

Lampert has never hidden his affection for Rand and has taken actions to implement its ideas. For example, as Bloomberg reported back in 2013, he broke the company up into dozens of autonomous groups that have to compete for attention and resources. Only the strong will survive.

The problem that quickly develops in such a structure is suboptimization. It's a term that was once used frequently, particularly during the 1990s when companies were trying to reengineer themselves into more efficient and effective organizations. In any system, there are parts that may have to perform in suboptimum ways to get the entire venture to act optimally. If you were engineering a car, for example, you wouldn't optimize the drive train independently of braking and steering. If the car can run away from the ability to control it, you wind up with dead customers and massive lawsuits and regulatory intervention.

But with multiple executives fighting it out to get what they need, you end up running the company backward. Overall strategy takes a back seat to what individual groups can pull off. That was the problem that handicapped Microsoft in the mobile world. Windows and Office were the cash cows, and a future of the company, mobile, was left to wither. Apple and Google took away the significant market share that Microsoft once had.

This is no surprise. After the Rand is someone who wrote that the philosophy of a serial killer who strangled and dismembered a little girl, was an inspiration to her.

There is a certain symmetry here:  Lampert is doing to Sears what William Edward Hickman did to 12 year old Marion Parker.

An important political aside:  One of Rand's biggest fans in the Congress is House Speaker Paul Ryan.

That sadistic bastard makes his staffers read Atlas Shrugged.<sup>*

*</sup>Full disclosure: I have not read Atlas Shrugged.^† I see no reason to plow through a thousand pages of poorly written allegory to understand her philosophy, when I can (and did) read her actual treatise on her philosophy, The Virtue of Selfishness, which is less than 1/5^th the length.^‡
†Honestly, I tried to read it, but it is horrifically piss poor poor writing.
^‡The Virtue of Selfishness is completely awful as well. I read it for a philosophy of literature class, and Immanuel Kant was more readable, and would probably be more readable in the original German.

Headline of the Day

Uber Drivers Protest Their Dick Boss

Innovation in the area of taxicabs is not a bad thing, but Uber is run by a bunch of self important, randroid assholes who subscribe to the philosophy of murderer, sociopath, and proto-Objectivist William Edward Hickman, "What is good for me is right."

This is not a philosophy of a good employer or an ethical businessman.

You Have Got To Be Kidding

Guess what, the heavy duty Randroids out there are now going after their enemy du jour, George Bailey, president of the Bailey building and loan:

It’s been a standing joke for ages to claim that some free-market Randroid was so clueless that he or she would watch “It’s A Wonderful Life” and cheer for Mr. Potter while hissing at George Bailey. It would be the equivalent, say, of someone hoping that Scrooge would tell the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future to sod off or that Spielberg would leave E.T. to die alone in a ditch in Southern California or that Dorothy would be stranded in Oz for the rest of her life as the Wizard’s concubine.

But, of course, this, or so everyone thought, was all just cute and snarky hyperbole. No one, not even the High Priestess Ayn Rand herself, could possibly actually watch “It’s A Wonderful Life” and come away not sobbing like a child but instead thinking that George Bailey was a social parasite spouting vile commie propaganda against the heroic Mr. Potter, the job creator who knew what was really best for the people of Bedford Falls.

Yes, they are demonizing the hero, played by honest to God war hero Jimmy Stewart, of Frank Capra's treacly bit of cinema, It's a Wonderful Life, which is considered by many (not me) to be an American cinematic icon.^*

Seriously, what the f%$# are wrong with these folks?

I'm beginning to understand what led Ayn Rand to have a doting crush on one William Edward Hickman, a monster who kidnapped and dismembered a twelve year old girl, it's because Randian libertarianism is not so much a philosophy as it is a beard to conceal from the rest of the world that they are sociopaths.

^*Personally, I'm not a big fan of the movie, and it was viewed as a resounding failure when released.  My interest was in the fact that it became popular when it passed out of copyright, and TV stations showed it repeatedly in the holiday season, creating a classic.  My interest is how a series of court rulings allowed it to be snatched out of the public domain.

I Did Nazi That Coming

It looks like there are a bunch of tech bros out there want to have huge numbers of children so that their (perceived) genetic superiority can be spread throughout the world.

This sh%$ is straight out of the pre-WWII eugenics movement, beloved by Francis Galton, Winston Churchill, J.H. Kellogg, and that unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache.

I am not surprised.  Much like the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the "science" of eugenics is beloved by ordinary people who through luck and privilege achieve some success in life:

Sitting in their toy-filled family room on a sunny September afternoon, Simone and Malcolm Collins were forced to compete with the wails of two toddlers as they mapped out their plans for humankind.

"I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn't fix the problem, we could be gone," Malcolm half-shouted as he pushed his sniffling 18-month-old, Torsten, back and forth in a child-size Tonka truck.

Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

If they succeed, Malcolm continued, "we could set the future of our species."

So this guy does not have the vaguest notion of how this all works.

First, they have not factored in deaths which will reduce the number who will reproduce, and second, you are going to start seeing intermarrying at the second, (legal in all US states) third, or fourth cousin level.

This becomes even more likely when one realizes that families tend to live closer to each other than random people, and in this case, they would all be living in the same cult compound.

Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are "pronatalists," part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. It's a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times' opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bantered about on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It's also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "You will not replace us" to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates."

And, of course, that, "Unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache."

This is all about the idea that non-white people are untermenchen, and so white people must have many children to prevent said, "Mud People," from taking over.

The reason that this sounds like a fever dream inspired by The Turner Diaries, is because, this is where eugenics of humanity inexorably takes you.

………

I reached out to the Collinses after I received a tip about a company called Genomic Prediction, where Musk's OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman was an early investor. (Altman, who is gay, also invests in a company called Conception. The startup plans to grow viable human eggs out of stem cells and could allow two biological males to reproduce. "I think having a lot of kids is great," Altman recently told an audience at Greylock's Intelligent Future event. "I want to do that now even more than I did when I was younger.")

Genomic Prediction is one of the first companies to offer PGT-P, a controversial new type of genetic testing that allows parents who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to select the "best" available embryos based on a variety of polygenic risk factors.

Rather ironically, if there is a genetic connection found to homosexuality, preventing gay children will become one of the, if not the, most common uses of the technology, because people are bigots.

That Altman does not "Get It" is a mark of his sense of privilege, and his deep stupidity.

………

They [the Collinses] both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. And then there's the fact that our primary cultural reference point for a pronatalist society is the brutally misogynist world of "The Handmaid's Tale."

If your movement is associated with Jeffrey Epstein and that, "Unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache," you might want to reexamine your life.

………

The payoff won't be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will "become the new dominant leading classes in the world."

Wow, I did Nazi that coming.

………

While pronatalism is often associated with religious extremism, the version now trending in this community has more in common with dystopian sci-fi. The Collinses, who identify as secular Calvinists, are particularly drawn to the tenet of predestination, which suggests that certain people are chosen to be superior on earth and that free will is an illusion. They believe pronatalism is a natural extension of the philosophical movements sweeping tech hubs like the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. Our conversations frequently return to transhumanism (efforts to merge human and machine capabilities to create superior beings), longtermism (a philosophy that argues the true cost of human extinction wouldn't be the death of billions today but the preemptive loss of trillions, or more, unborn future people), and effective altruism (or EA, a philanthropic system currently focused on preventing artificial intelligence from wiping out the human population).

No, EA is a way of justifying enormous wealth and making it appear virtuous, because you will be making donations (in the distant future) to help people in the far more distant future.  It is morally bankrupt, or as one Twitter wag put it, "It's a prosperity gospel for agnostics."

It is camouflage for greed and bigotry.

………

According to tech-industry insiders, this type of rhetoric is spreading at intimate gatherings among some of the most powerful figures in America. It's "big here in Austin," the 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey told me. Raffi Grinberg, a pronatalist who is the executive director of Dialog, said population decline was a common topic among the CEOs, elected officials, and other powerful figures who attended the group's off-the-record retreats. In February, the PayPal cofounder Luke Nosek, a close Musk ally, hosted a gathering at his home on Austin's Lake Travis to discuss "The End of Western Civilization," another common catchphrase in the birth-rate discourse.

Here, once again, I have to go back to the real world experiment that some call history, and note that after the Black Death killed half of Europe, living standards rose further and faster than at any time in history.

The elites did not see the benefits of the increased productivity, because they had to pay their workers more, and passed laws to suppress wages, but in some cases (Poland) where contemporaneous records of the Black Death are absent, we know that the plague hit them because of the post plague wage spikes.

A declining population, one where the average Joe pays 10% more in old age benefit taxes, but earns 40% more is good for everyone, except the holders of capital, like Musk or Nosek.

………

These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon's father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called "productive nations." The Collinses call it "cosmopolitan society." Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie "Idiocracy," in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.

"Productive nations," and "cosmopolitan society," huh?  What they mean is "Wipipo".  They might as well just say that they are worried about N*****s taking over.

As to basing your philosophy on Idiocracy, I would suggest that you go with a far better movie from Mike Judge, Office Space.  Elon Musk already has the role of William Lundberg, so marvelously played by Gary Cole in the original, down pat.

………

Once pronatalists reach critical mass, the Collinses hope, they can begin to shape society around their needs.

"You have to create cultures that reward" and have structures for large families, Simone explained. Pronatalist pet issues include everything from increasing housing development to changing laws around car-seat regulation (one study found that people would stop having children when they couldn't fit any more car seats in their vehicle). During the coronavirus pandemic, the Collinses tried to raise money for a family-friendly "startup town" they called Project Eureka, where all community rules would be "ultimately set — all disputes resolved" by the Collinses.

When fundraising stalled, they redirected their focus to the Collins Institute for the Gifted, a specialized online lab school that is partnering with the Bari Weiss-cofounded University of Austin and the Thiel-backed 1517 Fund. (Musk similarly created a boutique education program, Ad Astra, for his family and employees' children that has since expanded into the online school Astra Nova.)

The logic behind the Collins Institute reflects their thinking at large: "If you want to make the future better for everyone and you could choose to dramatically increase the educational outcomes of the bottom 10% of people or the top 0.1% of people," the Collinses say to choose the 0.1%. 

The Collinses are paraphrasing William Edward Hickman, who kidnapped and dismembered a little girl in 1927, and said "What is good for me is right."

They benefit from lobbying for a future in which all of society's resources are directed toward them, because this is all that they concieve of.

It should be noted that Ayn Rand described that Hickman quote as, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard."

To be fair, Hickman's victim, Marion Parker, was born October 11, 1915, which means that she would be dead now, so according to the ethics put forward by "Effective Altruism," it's all good.

Read Jane Mayer

She follows the money on the Republican attempts to gin up allegations of voter fraud, with the ultimate goal of giving Republican legislatures the power to routinely overturn elections.

This is not just politics, this is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the government.

This is far worse than vote suppression:

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election. Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

………

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

………

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

………

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

………

Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”

………

What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require

Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.” proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

……… 

It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board. 

………

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

These folks will literally betray the Republic in order to win, because they are psychopaths who are driven by the philosophy of child murderer (and Ayn Rand crush) William Edward Hickman, "What is good for me is right."

These people are not a the opposition, they are the enemy, and they need to fought every step of the way.