Who Says Irony Is Dead?

Do you remember the theatrical release of the Atlas Shrugged Movie, imaginatively named Atlas Shrugged Part I? It was first movie of a 3 part series based on Ayn Rand's magnum opus.

Yeah, I didn't think so. It left theaters so fast that I don't think that they had time to finishing the lettering on the sign.

Well, in their attempt to further
rip-off
monetize their gullible objectivist fanboi base, they made a fairly substantial DVD release that they are now having to recall:

100,000 "Atlas Shrugged" DVDs have been recalled for an important danger they posed to unwary consumers: the title sheet suggested that viewers help someone out besides themselves.

Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand that tells the story of an alternate reality version of America where all the millionaires get sick of the government taking over their inventions so they go on strike. The original title sheet for the movie said that in it, "AYN RAND's timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life..." This grave error posed a risk of fire. As in, it would make Ayn Rand fan's heads spontaneously immolate upon reading it. So the producers recalled the 100,000 DVDs to replace the sheet.

The new sheet will read, "AYN RAND's timeless novel of rational self-interest comes to life..." (Emphasis added.)

Needless to say, the idea that the overpaid^* self-styled supermen succeeded in refuting Ayn Rand's core message and now feel ethically compelled to correct this, at significant personal cost, is just chock full of Irony.

^*If they are paid at all they are overpaid.

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.

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.

Google Ads: There Are Still a Few Bugs in the System

OK, so a few days ago, I serve up an excerpt from a parody of Atlas Shrugged, so what does Google ads serve up?


Gifts for Proud Producers and Capitalists Everywhere!^*

Ummmm....OK...I have nothing but contempt for Ayn Rand and routinely mock her and her followers, calling them "Randroids", and in this case, I am spreading mockery of what she and her "Randroids" consider to be her magnum opus, and I get an ad serving a company dedicated to lionizing a horrible person and a lousy writer.^†

Then again, perhaps the proprietor is mocking her too. There is a notice at the bottom of the page:

JohnGaltGifts.com is not in any way affiliated with or sponsored by the estate of Ayn Rand ®, the Ayn Rand ® Institute (ARI), Dr. Leonard Peikoff, or any other organization or company.

It appears to me that this means that the T-shirt and sticker maker is using the fruit of Ayn Rand's intellectual output to enrich himself, which is specifically what Rand condemned.

If that's the case, it's a very subtle and sophisticated parody.

^*I'm linking because I'm complaining, it's only fair.
^†While I have never read Atlas Shrugged, nor do I intend to, I have read The Virtue of Selfishness in 1980 as part of a philosophy of literature class in high school, and it was awful. Emanuel Kant was more readable.

A Great Takedown of Ayn Rand

Contained in a book review of Alan Greenspan's new book, of all things. It's a wonderfully snarky review, in the tradition of Rex Reed.

It wasn't a rhetorical question, apparently. This was in the late 1950s. By then, Rand had published her two thick, preposterous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and stood poised on the brink of international stardom. Her creepy philosophy of Objectivism, placing the self at the center of the moral universe, was being enthusiastically embraced, as it still is, by tens of thousands of pimply teenage boys in the dreamy moments between fits of social insecurity and furious bouts of masturbation. As her cultish fame spread, Rand wanted to keep tabs on her most intimate acolytes. Of these Greenspan was the most promising and, by all appearances, the most normal. Which worried her.

He had, for example, a life; most of the members of the Collective--the name her dozen closest followers attached to themselves--did not, devoting themselves to her welfare exclusively. Greenspan was making good money, soon to be great money, as a savvy economics consultant. He lunched with bond traders, corporate leaders, even titans of industry, real-life versions of the planet-girding capitalists Rand fantasized about and invented for her books. On Saturday nights Greenspan, then in his early thirties, would gather with his fellow Collective members in Rand's dim, shuttered apartment in midtown Manhattan (she kept the windows closed and the blinds drawn for many years, after one of her beloved cats tumbled tragically to its death). There in the grim presence of their idol they would sit on folding chairs and release expletives of thrilled admiration as her writings were read aloud. One memoir from the Collective, My Years with Ayn Rand by Nathaniel Branden, shows that even then Greenspan's mode of communication was Greenspanian.

"Ayn," Alan would say, overcome by some Randian insight, "upon reading this, one tends to feel exhilarated!"

heh. Spot on.

All emphasis mine.

Rand Could Not Write Her Way Out of a Paper Bag

So says Harold Bloom, a professor of humanities and English at Yale, in response to an interview about the increasing number of grants from various titans of industry making grants requiring the study of, or chairs in, the studies of the works of Ayn Rand.

I would have to agree. I took an elective course in high school, Philosophy of Literature, and as a part of an extra credit assignment, I read, The Virtue of Selfishness, which I found to be less comprehensible, and more poorly written than Emmanuel Kant.

I've come to realize that in addition to piss-poor writing, it was incomprehensible because it was piss-poor thinking.

I recognized it as bullsh#@ as a 16 year old, and it was painful enough that I wanted nothing to do with her fiction.

Full disclosure, to the degree that I place myself in a philosophical school, and I try not to, I find it a waste of time, I consider myself to be a Jewish Existentialist Utilitarian with a rather Deist view of the universe.

As Daniel at Crooked Timber notes:

Although the Ayn Rand Institute is quoted as being basically approving of the trend, I think that a decent case can be made to the effect that the article is wrong to say that “While Rand, an advocate of free markets, would support a university’s getting paid to teach her works”. This is essentially a bribe to the university and as far as I can see, taking a bribe to compromise your own vision of an undergraduate reading list doesn’t fit in particularly well with Rand’s particular ethics of self-reliance and independent thought. I don’t even really think that having a university professorship endowed by a charitable foundation is particularly consistent Objectivism but there you go.

I'm a bit more cynical though.

She was a self parody in life, and now her philosophy is a self parody.

FWIW, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has some names and programs their report.

End Stage Looting by an Ayn Rand Fan

About a year and a half ago, I observed how the hedge fund operator who is running Sears according to the principles of Ayn Rand is running the venerable retail institution into the ground.

After many years of mismanagement and looting, he is now looking to buy its remaining assets at a cut-rate price.

To use Ayn Rand's language, he is a looter, not a creator:

Edward S. Lampert, the chief executive of Sears, offered on Monday to buy real estate assets and the Kenmore brand from the troubled retailer in what would be his latest attempt to save it.

In a letter to the Sears board, Mr. Lampert, whose ESL Investments hedge fund owns a controlling stake in the company, said ESL would be also be willing to buy the retailer’s home-services and its appliance-parts units.

Any deal involving Sears and Mr. Lampert is complicated by his dual roles running both the retailer and the hedge fund, which is also a major Sears lender.

………

In his letter to the board, Mr. Lampert offered to pay Sears $500 million for the home-services and appliance-parts units, but did not mention a price for the Kenmore brand or the real estate. He noted that the company had been trying to sell the assets for nearly two years, but had failed to find other buyers.

He failed to find another buyer because he has completely destroyed the company.

I will leave it to the reader to determine whether this is because he indented to drive its value down so that he could snap up its parts for a song all along, which is a fairly typical hedge fund behavior, or if he was simply wedded to a philosophy (Objectivism) which is completely antithetical to a business that actually makes, or does, something of value.

This is Delicious

The Ayn Rand Foundation took about $½ million dollars in federal bailout money.

A lot of people criticize this but complaining about government spending while directly benefiting from it is the only true way to honor Ayn Rand's legacy. https://t.co/TlUxiPAUX2

— sean (@SeanMcElwee) July 6, 2020

When one considers that Ayn Rand collected Social Security and Medicare at the end of her life, this is entirely consistent.

Wasp

Here is the windup


And here is the unforced error

For those of you who don't know, Wasp is a book by Eric Frank Russell. It's conceit is that a man is sent to infiltrate and subvert a planet held by the enemy.

Rather than conventional methods of espionage, like sabotage, the goal of the agents is to engender over-reactions from the authorities which would have them weakening themselves, much like a driver distracted by a wasp can kill himself and his passengers by driving into a bridge abutment.

Well, in the Kentucky Senate Race, Democrat Jack Conway ran an ad against Randroid nut job Republican Rand Paul bringing up his involvement in an anti-religious group at Baylor, and his frat hazing style "kidnapping" of a coed who he made to bow down to the "Aqua Buddha."

I cannot claim to have a deep understanding of the politics, or the religiosity, of Kentucky, so I cannot speak to the direct effects of the advertisement (1^st video), but I can speak to the secondary effects of the ad (2^nd video) and it ain't pretty.

Rand Paul is acting like a complete bitch, and his bit at the end where he huffily declares that he won't shake hands at the end of the debate.

I'm with Theda Skocpol on the nervous Nellies who are wringing their hands over this:

One reason that Dems do not seem to be able to play hardball -- in a viciously hardball political world -- is that Dems often lack conviction or the will to be eloquently honest (for example, on taxes). But an equal problem is that when someone does play hardball, the rest of the prissy liberal Mugwumps tut-tut them about it.

The professional losing class can go Cheney themselves.

Honestly, I don't care about Rand Paul's religion. My guess is that his protestations of religion are a less than honest, since his idol Ayn Rand loathed religion, but politically, the important bit of electoral politics here here is that Rand Paul seriously lost his sh%$ on camera, and that was the real success of this ad.

BTW, if you wanted to use a cinematic reference rather than a literary reference, I would suggest that Jack Conway just Gaslighted Rand Paul.

This Actually Reveals a Deeper Truth

There is a distinctly Randroid branch of the Republican party, who follows Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum's (Ayn Rand) philosophy of Objectivism, and as such, see activities like giving candies to trick or treaters as actually being evil, because any sort of activity which benefits the community is evil.

To their mind, the only good is self interest, hence the title of the only Ayn Rand book that I have ever read, The Virtue of Selfishness, which I found juvenile, as well as horribly written,^* when I reviewed it as an extra credit assignment in my Philosophy of Literature class in high school.

It must be remembered that a significant portion of Republicans are actually philosophically opposed to the very idea of community.

H/t Cthulhu^† for the cartoon.


^*Seriously, really badly written. It was worse than reading Immanuel Kant, and that sh%$ was painful to read.
^†No, not the unspeakably malevolent super-being, the contributor to the Shortskoolbus BBS.^‡
‡OK, I've never seen the two of them together, so Cthulhu might actually be the Cthulhu, but the mere fact that he is on a BBS, interacting with humans^§ would seem to mitigate against this.
^§Yes, I know, this is the internet, where no one knows if you are a dog.

JD Vance Is Worse than You Think

Short version is two words, "Peter Thiel."

The longer version is that Vance is entirely a creation of Peter Thiel, a right winger enamored with the delusions of Ayn Rand, part of the "PayPal Mafia," and a literal vampire.

When one looks at at Vance's pre-Senate career it is a nearly record of failure where he has continued onto new projects only because of the support of his patron.

Peter Thiel is one of the few public figures out there who is indisputably worse than Donald Trump:

When political observers describe J.D. Vance as “weird,” what they usually mean is the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s ranting about childless people, his extremism on questions like abortion and divorce, or perhaps his choice of eye makeup.

But there is a deeper level to Vance’s political weirdness that places him amid the most sinister forces in the nation today – and calls into question the supposed patriotism that motivates him and the “America First” movement he and Donald Trump now represent. To understand what Vance really stands for, and why his ideology is so distant from the Constitutional democracy he has sworn to uphold as a United States senator, it is necessary to examine the chief sponsor of his political and business career: a Silicon Valley billionaire named Peter Thiel.

Born in Germany and raised in South Africa, Thiel made his enormous fortune as a venture capitalist and executive in tech companies such as PayPal and Palantir. Attracted from an early age to far-right ideologues like the addled author Ayn Rand, the tech mogul has identified himself as a “conservative libertarian” and a critic of democratic systems. Not so long ago, he was heard to say that democracy and freedom – or at least his idea of “freedom” – are no longer compatible.

………

It isn’t hard to imagine that Thiel, who has financed research aimed at human immortality, [Thiel has funded the use of young people's blood to extend human life, literal vampirism] envisions himself as one of those godlike rulers. Does Vance agree with Thiel’s jaundiced view of democracy? Does he push crypto because digital finance will allow billionaires and their businesses to evade taxes and launder money? Does he look forward to a plutocratic dystopia replacing our republic?

No doubt the embattled Republican veep nominee would deny any such disturbing views. Yet Thiel isn’t the only ultra-reactionary influence on Vance. The Ohio senator has also endorsed Curtis Yarvin, a cranky computer programmer who says America needs “a national CEO, or what’s called a dictator,” and embraced Rod Dreher, an American writer who now serves the illiberal regime of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban.

JD Vance is a real horror show.

The only question is how to couch his awfulness in appropriate terms.  (Pun intended)

Books I Need To Read: Greenspan's Bubbles

I read an interest review of Greenspan's Bubbles by William A. Fleckenstein:

... He sets out to deflate Alan Greenspan's reputation by parsing Greenspan's own comments during his tenure as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. His conclusion?

"Greenspan bailed out the world's largest equity bubble with the world's largest real-estate bubble," he writes. "That combination easily equates to the biggest orgy of speculation and debt creation the United States (and the world) has ever seen."

Bernanke was left to sweep up after the debauch while Greenspan rewrote history in The Age of Turbulence.

I'm not sure that there is a whole bunch to learn from his book, so I'll wait until it hits the library.

What I find interesting, and well deserved, is that Greenspan will find himself increasingly reviled in the final years of his life.

In a very real way, this is more than a repudiation of Greenspan, but it is also a repudiation of Ayn Rand's Objectivism.

The fact that Greenspan endorsed the worst excesses of the market for ordinary people, but rushed to bail out the "noble entrepreneur", is a direct consequence of his experience of Ayn Rand's acolytes.

Psychopathic Is as Psychopathic Does

I'm sure that you have heard some of the stories about Uber, such as their simply refusing to pay taxes in the UK, and their relationship with the city of Pittsburgh, where after defending them against state regulators, ignoring the fact that they were pillaging the Carnegie-Mellon robotics lab, and allowing the ride service to roll out robotic cars on city streets, told the "City of Bridges" to pound sand when they requested help competing in the 2016 Smart City Challenge, Uber responded with a list of new demands.

And now, we have the case of Susan Fowler, and employee (full time programmer, not a driver) how documented the toxic and hostile workplace environment for women.

• Her manager propositioned her on her first day of work.
• HR said it was the first time that this had happened, and that he would get a stern talking to ……… The kicker is that they said this to her and at least a half dozen other complainants.
• She transferred to a rather dysfunctional and chaotic division, and then was not allowed to transfer again because her performance review was downgraded because, "Performance problems aren't always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life." (Translation, "Women are to be seen, not heard.")
• It is then revealed that her performance review was retroactively downgraded because, it prevented her transfer, "It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good, and I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team." (Women in the division went from 25% to 6%[!] while she was there)
• HR asked if, "I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem."
• She was threatened with firing for making complaints by her boss.

Note that she is no slouch, she has written what has been described as the de-facto standard on designing standard microservices, but she still got treated like crap, because treating employees, drivers, and customers like crap is what Uber does.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is a big fan of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and I've said before, "That Ayn Rand Is to Business What Ebola Is to the Exchange of Bodily Fluids."

#DeleteUber.

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.

Linkage

• AT&T Breaks Another Merger Promise In Making 'Friends' Exclusive (Techdirt) Yes, it's just "Friends", but it underscores the point:  These companies are monopolists, and relying on their good nature is idiotic.
• New Zealand penguins drop in for sushi (BBC) Too cute.  Shades of the movie Madagascar.
• Banks Again Hoist on Their Cost-Cutting Petard: Burgeoning Credit Card Fraud (Naked Capitalism) Penny wise, and pound foolish.
• Failing to Plan: How Ayn Rand Destroyed Sears (Verso) Ayn Rand doesn't work for capitalists either.
• This is Going to Get Worse (The Baffler) Money quote, "It will get worse because the leadership of the Democratic Party is not built, temperamentally or constitutionally, for this fight. It is built for 1996, ready to debate the V-chip or whether the top tax bracket should be 36 percent or 39 percent. It is a party built to negotiate, to concede, and to see “getting something done” as the value-neutral definition of victory." 
• U.S. Shale Is Doomed No Matter What They Do (OilPrice.com) It's been obvious for years that the fracking boom was unsustainable from a business perspective.
• Bad governance: How privatization increases corruption in the developing world (Regulation and Governance) Corruption in privatization is a feature, not a bug:  It is private entities looting public assets. [PDF]
• Your Data Were ‘Anonymized’? These Scientists Can Still Identify You (The New York Times) This has been known for over a decade.
• How a data detective exposed suspicious medical trials (Nature) Basic shoe leather journalism:  He looks at the raw data and flags the studies when the samples have significant statistical anomalies.

The Movie version of Penguins and sushi:

My Bizarre Take on the Veepstakes

While she is a long shot to be Joe Biden's choice for running mate, I consider Stacy Abrams to be the worst of all the candiates whose names have been mooted thus far.

I find Stacy Abrams is completely unacceptable because of her choices in literature.

If you think that I am joking, I am NOT joking, as Abrams is a big fan of Ayn Rand's allegorical novel Atlas Shrugged, which I consider to be a major red flag:

One other unexpected detail: In an interview with Womenetics, a B2B services firm that specializes in helping women professionals, Ms. Abrams named three favorite books: The Institutionist, Ender’s Game and… Atlas Shrugged, not exactly a book at the top of most Democrat reading lists. Womenetics called her a “serial entrepreneur” and clearly she has a passion for business. As to how does that translate to the tough business of navigating the politics of Georgia as a Democrat legislator, she seems to have found quick success.

See also here:

When Abrams was little, visiting her grandmother, with her some 16 first cousins running around, she was the one in the corner, holed up with a book. She loved Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, The Count of Monte Cristo, Silas Marner, Little Women, Jane Eyre, Ender’s Game, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Atlas Shrugged (“But not for the Paul Ryan reasons. . . . There was something about how [Ayn Rand] highlighted the capacity of a person to be more than.”) She loved mythology. “Greek, Norse, Roman, Cherokee. If I could reach it, I would read it,” Abrams says.

Being a fan of Atlas Shrugged is on a par with taking Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal as a serious policy proposal.

It is a sign that you are a psychopath.

A Very Good Point on Obamacare

The folks at Naked Capitalism have never been big fans of the PPACA, because they feel that it has far too many sops to the evildoers in the US healthcare system, in particular the insurance companies. (I agree)

Now Lambert Strether makes what is an obvious point, that the "Cadillac Tax" on high value healthcare plans are pretty clearly a tactic developed to union bust:

I haven’t written about much about ObamaCare’s “Cadillac Tax” mostly because it seemed (as we shall see) such an obvious union-busting measure that there wouldn’t be much of interest to say. However, a recent Kaiser briefing on how many employers will be affected by it has generated a lot of coverage, and, as it turns out, the Cadillac tax — not that anybody could have predicted this — turns out to be insanely complex, based on a crazypants neo-liberal economic assumption, and will screw over a lot more working people than originally thought. (There’s actually some pressure on the Hill for reform or repeal, and not just by the usual suspects, but I won’t cover the politics of it here).

………

And if the unions can’t deliver wages, and now they can’t deliver benefits — or prevent existing benefits from being taken away — what exactly do they deliver? So who is to determine what is “generous”? Workers, or pencil-necked< neo-liberal economists? Who never mention whether CEO health insurance -- or top 20% health insurance, for that matter -- is "too generous"? That said, let's turn to the crapification. From the Kaiser briefing:

The potential of facing an HCPT assessment as soon as 2018 is encouraging employers to assess their current health benefits and consider cost reductions to avoid triggering the tax. Some employers announced that they made changes in 2014 in anticipation of the HCPT, and more are likely to do so as the implementation date gets closer. By making modifications now, employers can phase-in changes to avoid a bigger disruption later on.

………

So, a race to the bottom that starts out affecting “overly generous” health insurance, and ends up affecting more and more of the rest of us. Typical. I doubt this can be fixed by Congress this year or next, since the Democrats will not be able to admit that Obama has ever made a mistake in any aspect of his sorry administration, and Republicans have no choice but to throw red meat to their base by trying to repeal it all together. Pass the popcorn.

This is not a bug.  It's a feature.

If you were come up with a way to get the truth for any people behind Obamacare, whether Obama, Gruber, or whoever, they all would say that they want to eliminate employer sponsored health insurance by making various claims about how having open insurance markets and "skin in the game" will make healthcare more efficient.  (All the available evidence shows otherwise)

Obama has been (at best) lukewarm on unions, with no effort to push card-check, his hiring of union-busting heiress Penny Pritzker, his aggressive support of union-busting mayor Rahm Emanuel, his tepid opposition to "Right to Work" legislation proposals put forward in many states, etc.

There are way too many people among Obama's "Chicago School" policy advisers who see an Ayn Rand inspired dystopia as a model for a good society.  (As an aside, it turned out that even Ayn Rand could not live in the world which she hoped to create.)

Our country is looking more and more like the USSR circa 1987.

Yeah, It's Randroids

You may have noticed in the comments, when I suggested that the aggressive push-back against masking was pushed by toxic individualism in general, and the incoherent philosophy of Ayn Rand in particular, a self-described, "Bear of very little brain," sarcastically noted that, he was impressed with my, "Ability to read the minds of others this thoroughly."

Well, now we know that the most prominent, contemptible, and rich people in America, the remaining Koch brother, have been aggressively funding premature in person schooling and the end of mask mandates.

Just so you know, I cannot read minds, and thankfully, neither can Sharon,^* which is good. If she could read my mind she would never stop slapping me, because my soul has the equivalent of Backpfeifengesicht.^†

Whether it's public health, or Sears Roebuck, these people are menaces to society.

They also, unfortunately, are very much a part of the US zeitgeist:

At the end of last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new guidance on wearing masks, significantly easing recommendations for most of the country, including in schools. In response to the CDC’s new rules, many blue states that still mandated masks in schools announced they would end the requirement, including New York, California, Oregon, and Washington. Now, the only state not planning to end its school mask mandate by mid-march is Hawaii.

The development may have been confusing for parents of schoolchildren, since the American Academy of Pediatrics and the president of the American Medical Association continue to recommend masking in schools — and a week before the CDC’s announcement, the agency’s director had said the CDC had no immediate plans to update its guidance. Polls have shown strong support for school mask mandates, and in January, teachers and students all over the country led demonstrations calling for even stronger COVID safety protocols. Strong opinions on the issue and conflicting directives put further pressure on the country’s already overwhelmed teaching staff. A recent survey of U.S. teachers found that more than half were on the brink of leaving their jobs over pandemic stress.

Even more worrisome for many parents and teachers: Last week, new data revealed the Pfizer vaccine, the only option approved for children ages 5 to 11, protected against hospitalization but offered almost no protection against infection for this age group.

The updated CDC guidance signals the Democratic party’s shift from beating the virus to surrendering to it as a fact of life — including in schools. The new approach was likely shaped by a number of factors, including declining COVID numbers, concerns about far-reaching public COVID fatigue, and the fact that many of those now most at risk of severe disease have refused to get vaccinated for non-medical reasons.

But the end of school masking is also in part due to a campaign by right-wing business interests, including the dark money network of oil billionaire Charles Koch, to keep the country open for the sake of maintaining corporate profits. These interests have been meddling in the education debate, first pushing to reopen schools and then fighting in-school safety measures, even as COVID case numbers were rising and children were ending up in hospitals. For nearly two years, these groups have been promoting questionable science and creating wedges between parents, teachers, and administrators in order to get America back to work — even at the risk of the nation’s children.

………

On March 13, 2020, Yes Every Kid — a front group founded by the Koch network in 2019 as part of a larger effort to shape K-12 education in the states — launched a #LearnEverywhere campaign promoting remote learning and homeschooling. Three days later, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank co-founded and heavily subsidized by Koch, published a commentary declaring that the U.S. could “tap into” charter, private, and homeschooling “if brick-and-​mortar schooling is substantially disrupted.”

The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing nonprofit heavily funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Institute, also published articles in March 2020 in favor of using public school funds to pay parents to homeschool their kids. Heritage senior policy analyst Jonathan Butcher wrote a policy brief for the Koch-founded-and-funded Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank based at George Mason University, calling to funnel state funds into for-profit charter school companies providing virtual learning.

The message was blasted out by other groups in Koch’s orbit, including his flagship political advocacy outfit, Americans For Prosperity (AFP); the Independent Women’s Forum, a dark money group bankrolled by Koch organizations and the heirs to the Walmart fortune; and the State Policy Network, a web of libertarian state-based policy organizations.

But within a few months, the school narrative out of Koch world began to shift, coinciding with growing concerns about labor shortages and changing workplace dynamics caused by nationwide school closures. According to Education Week, a staggering 55.1 million students were impacted by the closures at their peak.

………

The tight labor market changed the relationship between employers and their workers, who began demanding more flexibility and better work-life balance. Companies were forced to respond by raising wages — albeit inadequately — in order to attract workers.

………

In May 2020, two months after the World Health Organization declared COVID a global pandemic, the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank based at Stanford University that has received substantial backing from Koch over the years, held a virtual conference at which senior fellow Eric Hanushek argued that remote learning was causing learning loss among low-resourced students and damaging “teacher accountability” through the elimination of standardized testing.

………

Big industry groups also fought school closures, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s premier corporate lobby group. In September 2021, Chamber executive vice president and chief policy officer Neil Bradley said that “we have to have the schools fully reopen” in order to help solve the labor shortage.

Quick translation here, "Help solve the labor shortage," means, "Treat our employees like crap again."

As schools started reopening under the new Democratic administration, Koch-affiliated groups adopted a harder line. In the lead-up to the 2021 state elections, the organizations began opposing in-school mask requirements for students and teachers in addition to closures.

Observers say business interests likely saw masks as a damper on the return to pre-pandemic economic normalcy, given that they are a reminder of the ongoing public health crisis. Although the economy was recovering in 2021, it would still fall short of pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year, in terms of the number of workers and jobs. As of January 2022, the economy had 4.4 million fewer jobs and 2.7 million fewer workers.

………

Meanwhile, Koch groups and their affiliates have also quietly worked to support grassroots efforts to end mask mandates.

………

“While potential risks and benefits have been postulated, the most likely scenario is that masking during outings or school sessions will have a minimal impact on childhood development,” said child and adolescent psychiatrist Tyler Black, medical director of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Emergency Department at British Columbia Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, who has long been a vocal critic of mental health justifications for easing pandemic protections.

Many pediatricians are alarmed at the end of school mask mandates.

“It’s sort of surprising to us that people want to remove some of these layered protection measures that we know work,” said veteran pediatric emergency physician Christina Johns, senior medical advisor and vice president of communications for PM Pediatrics, the country’s largest provider of specialized pediatric urgent care.

………

Kansas-based pediatrician Natasha Burgert shares Johns’ concerns about abandoning masks and other safety measures. “You can’t just drop one of the cheapest, easiest, and quite honestly — at the larger scale — probably one of the most effective measures when you’re talking about the volume of schoolchildren that it’s protecting,” she said.

(emphasis mine)

………

The business-backed school normalcy campaign has proven to be remarkably successful. The CDC’s recent about-face on masks followed weeks of pressure from media declaring it was time to return to pre-pandemic schooling. In January, outlets like The Atlantic, New York Times, and Washington Post published op-eds calling to end school masking requirements. Cable news contributors joined in as well, like physician Leana Wen, who declared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 that “the science has changed.”

These people are a cancer on society, and you cannot negotiate with cancer.

Also, at some point, I really want to go to Valhalla, New York, get drunk, and piss on Ayn Rand's grave, if the line is not too long.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
^†A face that begs to be slapped in German.

All You Need to Understand About Republicans

It should be noted that Paul Ryan, the soon to be head of the House Budget Committee, is requiring his staff to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

While I've not read this book, I did her (mercifully shorter) treatise on her philosophy The Virtue of Selfishness in high school, and Kung Fu monkey has the final word on Rand and her Randroid followers:

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.

Indeed, and he will be drafting our budgets. <Facepalm>

H/t Paul Krugman.

Signs of the Apocalypse

Alan "Bubbles" Greenspan is saying that regulators should consider breaking up the large banks:

Those banks have an implicit subsidy allowing them to borrow at lower cost because lenders believe the government will always step in to guarantee their obligations. That squeezes out competition and creates a danger to the financial system, Greenspan told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

“If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” Greenspan said today. “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil -- so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.”

I would note that Greenspan's mentor, Ayn Rand, saw the breakup of Standard Oil as evil, with the wealth of the "prime movers" being confiscated by the "parasites," "looters," and "moochers", to use her terms (from the Wiki on Atlas Shrugged, I read Virtue of Selfishness, and that 's quite enough Rand for me...It was worse than reading Emanuel kant)