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.

A Catastrophic Failure of Philosophy

 Human beings are social creatures who have relied on each other to survive since the paleolithic era.

In fact, in those days, humans were so dependent on their group that banishment was literally a death sentence, because a human being could not survive on his own. 

This behavior is quite literally baked into our DNA.

Of course these days, we let wealthy sociopaths run our discourse, so man as the rugged individualist has become that to which we aspire to.  We are all John Galt, as Objectivist writer, and serial killer groupie Ayn Rand would say.

Unfortunately, Objectivism simply does not work, look at Sears, where Rand afficianado Eddie Lamper drove the company into the ground following the precepts of that miserable excuse for a philosophy, or any of the attempts by people with more money than brains to set up a, "Galt's Gulch," which have all collapsed in acrimony, fraud and lawsuits.

Unfortunately, this attitude has permeated the public health establishment in the United States, which has led to active hostility to the idea of universal masking, which is the remediation mechanism that has the highest cost/benefit ratio of any interventions.

This has happened because masking is a policy that is most geared toward preventing fellow members of our society, so even though we all benefit from this unselfish behavior, it is condemned and minimized because  the worship of selfishness has poisoned the public discourse so thoroughly:

This time last week, nearly all Americans were still being urged by the nation’s leadership to please, keep those darn masks on. Then the Great American Unmasking Part Deux began. On Friday, the CDC debuted a new set of COVID-19 guidelines that green-lit roughly 70 percent of us—effectively, anyone living in a place where hospitals are not being actively overrun by the coronavirus—to doff our masks in most indoor public settings. The stamina of mask policy had been flagging for quite some time: Governors and mayors had already been weeks deep into vanishing their own mask mandates (and other pandemic precautions), including in schools. But the CDC’s decision still marks a substantial cross-continental change, delivering a final blow to what little remained of the country’s collective approach to quashing the pandemic.

In the new playbook, recommendations for individual people, not communities, sit front and center, and mitigation frequently falls under the purview of medicine rather than public health—heaping more responsibility on the already dysfunctional American health-care system. “It is public health’s job to protect everybody, not just those people who are vaccinated, not just those people who are healthy,” says Theresa Chapple-McGruder, the director of the Department of Public Health in Oak Park, Illinois. I asked Chapple-McGruder if the CDC’s new guidelines meet that mark. “Not at all,” she said. (The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.) Throughout the pandemic, American leaders have given individuals more responsibility for keeping themselves safe than might be ideal; these revised guidelines codify that approach more openly than ever before. Each of us has yet again been tasked with controlling our own version of the pandemic, on our own terms. “The onus of public-health measures has really shifted away from public and toward vulnerable individuals,” Ramnath Subbaraman, an infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist at Tufts University, told me.

………

The CDC’s new stance on mitigation glosses over all that, Julia Raifman, a policy expert at Boston University, told me. In her ideal, the country might turn off mask mandates while making clear that they could turn back on if community threat levels warrant it. Mandates are tough to tolerate in the long term, but maybe enough Americans are still on board: A smattering of recent polls suggests that a slight majority of U.S. residents still favor certain pandemic-caliber protections while the virus continues to run rampant.

So maybe the CDC swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, experts told me. The agency also updated its risk guidelines to focus primarily on hospital burden rather than local transmission alone. By the old metrics, nearly all American counties should be masking; under the new standards, that recommendation applies to only about 37 percent, designated orange on the agency’s map, at a “high” COVID-19 community level. In another 23 percent of counties, at the “low,” green-colored level, no one needs to mask. Smack in between, in the 40 percent of American counties currently at the “medium,” yellow-tinted level, some people—if they’re “high risk” or immunocompromised—maybe should? The CDC’s best advice to those people: “Talk to your healthcare provider about whether you need to wear a mask and take other precautions (e.g., testing).”

………

A medical framework—almost resembling a prescription model—is not public-health guidance, which centers community-level benefits achieved through community-level action. People act in the collective interest, a tactic that benefits everyone, not just themselves. Where the CDC leaves us now feels especially disorienting when we consider where most mask-up messaging began: with the idea that masking was an act of communal good—“my mask protects you, your mask protects me.” Now masking is about, as the CDC puts it, “personal preference, informed by personal level of risk.”

(emphasis original)

We are sacrificing significant portions of our society to the cult of faux individualism.

Aggressive Enforcement of Metrics Lead to Cheating

Like at that Hospital where they kept a brain dead man on life support for months in order to boost their 1-year survival numbers.

Ayn Rand style completion works about as well in the healthcare industry as it did at Sears:

On a Thursday morning this past April, 61-year-old Darryl Young was lying unconscious in the eighth-floor intensive care unit of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. After suffering from congestive heart failure for years, Young, a Navy veteran and former truck driver with three children, had received a heart transplant on Sept. 21, 2018. He didn’t wake up after the operation and had been in a vegetative state ever since.

Machines whirred in his room, pumping air into his lungs. Nutrients and fluids dripped from a tube into his stomach. Young had always been fastidious, but now his hair and toenails had grown long. A nurse suctioned mucus from his throat several times a day to keep him from choking, according to employees familiar with his care. His medical record would note: “He follows no commands. He looks very encephalopathic” — brain damaged.

That day, in another wing of the hospital, where a group of surgeons, cardiologists, transplant coordinators, nurses and social workers gathered for their weekly meeting in a second-floor conference room, his name came up.

“Anything on Darryl Young?” asked cardiologist Dr. Darko Vucicevic, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by ProPublica.

………

The recordings show that the transplant team was fixated on keeping him alive, rather than his quality of life or his family’s wishes, because of worries about the transplant program’s survival rate, the proportion of people undergoing transplants who are still alive a year after their operations. Federal regulators rely on this statistic to evaluate — and sometimes penalize — transplant programs, giving hospitals across the country a reputational and financial incentive to game it. Newark Beth Israel’s one-year survival rate for heart transplants had dipped, and if Young were to die too soon, the program’s standing and even its own survival might be in jeopardy.

June 30, Zucker explained at the meeting, was the date of the next report by a federally funded organization that tracks transplant survival rates. “If he’s not dead in this report, even if he’s dead in the next report, it becomes an issue that moves out six more months,” he said in the recording.

………

In the ensuing months, the doctors continued to leave Young’s family in the dark, according to his sister Andrea and employees familiar with Young’s care. They didn’t want to run any risk that the people who loved him would interfere with their agenda: boosting the program’s numbers. “I’m not sure that this is ethical, moral or right,” Zucker told the team at the April meeting, but it’s “for the global good of the future transplant recipients.”

………

Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU School of Medicine, reviewed transcripts of the recordings, including discussions about Young. “The management of this patient is egregiously unethical,” he said. “Prolonging ‘dying’ to preserve a flawed transplant program makes a mockery of transplant medicine and is an assault on both ethics and compassion.”

This is unalloyed evil, and everyone who knew of it, and refused to report it, should be banned from the practice of medicine forever.

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:

This Also Explains Theranos

In this examination of toxic individualism to describe how Uber was a Silicon Valley success and a real world failure, (most disastrous IPO in history) it explains a lot about the general lawlessness that permeates the culture.

Essentially, this is Ayn Rand applied to the real world, and failing completely, as it did with Sears:

Uber is now a massive, publicly traded company. Anyone can buy Uber shares at a valuation of about $70 billion. This isn’t bad for a company losing billions of dollars a year, but it’s a fraction of the $120-billion valuation the IPO’s bankers initially floated. It’s roughly what private investors valued it at three years ago, when the company made $7.43 billion less revenue.

………

But some of it should go to Silicon Valley’s cultural divergence from the business reality. Investors loved the company not as an operating unit, but as an idea about how the world should be. Uber’s CEO was brash and would do whatever it took. His company’s attitude toward the government was dismissive and defiant. And its model of how society should work, especially how labor supply should meet consumer demand, valorized the individual, as if Milton Friedman’s dreams coalesced into a company. “It’s almost the perfect tech company, insofar as it allocates resources in the physical world and corrects some real inefficiencies,” the Uber investor Naval Ravikant told San Francisco magazine in 2014.

………

But plenty of companies have experienced founders and do things VCs like. What set Uber apart—and the reason it generated the Uber-for-X phenomenon—was its marketplace model.

The company used computers to restructure the driving labor market (“corrects some real inefficiencies”). Why have a dispatcher send cabs all over a city when an algorithm could do the same thing—with no labor cost or organizational infrastructure, and probably with better results? The cab companies, with their own complex institutional histories, were suddenly irrelevant. Drivers drove and riders rode—and the only thing necessary to connect them was an app on a phone. The model didn’t just make financial sense to people trained to think in Silicon Valley in the 2000s; it made ideological sense.

………

For early Uber investors, Uber was everything that disruption was supposed to be. You took an app, created by a small number of people in a San Francisco office, and used it to erase the institutions—formerly called businesses—that used to sit between the buyers and sellers of services. It wasn’t just a company; it was a company that destroyed the need for other companies. It was pure and uncut Economics 101, capitalism as it was meant to be. And if by eliminating much of the labor that it previously took to organize car services, the company would also generate billionaires … well, to the innovators go the spoils.

………

In Uber’s world, there is no such thing as collective action. Every person is an individual particle of the market, freely interacting with all the others, unless there is pesky government meddling. Uber really was about the triumph of individualism, an ethos that infuses Silicon Valley so thoroughly that it’s hard for most here to see. Companies that fit that pattern are more likely to garner VC attention, get funding, and find success. That’s how Silicon Valley shapes the world.

But they cannot sustain companies within their bubbles of influence forever. They must leave the nest for the public markets, where they are judged on their bottom lines. So far, the market says: This company is worth $50 billion less than its executives and bankers thought.

And in Uber’s world, the market is always right.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled," the same applies for business, only we need to replace "technology", with business, and "public relations" must replaced with "ill-conceived and juvenile philosophy".

Objectivism has failed wherever it has met reality, leaving misery in its wake.

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.

Linkage

• U.S. government ordered to solve 'Case of the Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat' (Reuters) The FAA is saying that shrinking airline seats are not a safety issue.  An advocacy group filed suit.
• Lawsuits could force feds to pay Obamacare insurers (Politico) Pass the popcorn.
• People Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Because They Can’t Afford Human Ones (Motherboard) Best healthcare system in the world.
• Original Shareholder Value Article – Milton Friedman to GM: Build Clunky Cars (Naked Capitalism) A straight line between Milton Friedman's theory of shareholder value and the implosion of GM. See also Sears and Ayn Rand.
• Why Are Drug Prices So High? The Fight Over A Price-Gouging Bill (International Business Times) The Democratic Governors Association, in particular contemptible Connecticut sh%$ heel Dan Malloy, are fighting against anti-price gouging laws. And the Dems wonder why people don't believe that they work for the rest of us.
• UPDATED: Siedle, Raimondo Critic, to be Awarded $48M in SEC Record Whistleblower Case (GoLocalProv) Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island Governor and former state Treasurer, shoveled money out of the pension fund to her hedge fund friends.  One of her biggest critics just got a lot of money for uncovering corruption.
• ‘Flash drought’ could devastate half the High Plains wheat harvest  (Grist) Clearly anthropogenic climate change is a myth.

Reader(s) of this blog may be aware of my fondness of the juxtaposition of engineering and history. Case in point, this military training film about mechanical ballistic computers from the early 1950s:

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.