How Ayn Rand Tanked The Economy
Ayn Rand was a godawful writer, and in ironic fashion her philosophy failed disastrously in her personal life. Yet decades after her death, her work’s destructive influence has never been stronger. The Awl rips apart the “Objectivist” doctrine championed by Rand and one of her most adoring disciples, former Fed chief Alan Greenspan:
That pill-popping, boy-crazy nincompoop Ayn Rand has got a lot to answer for. Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that we owe at least part of the recent economic crisis to her and her philosophy of Objectivism, since former Fed chief Alan Greenspan was a lifelong disciple of both.
The two first met in the ’50s. Back then, a gang of acolytes, calling themselves the Collective, used to gather at Rand’s apartment on East 36th Street every Saturday night so they could tell each other how smart they all were. Along came Greenspan one evening, shy…
Defense Contractors Sponsor Sesame Street Programming Special
If you fill out and send in this form, you can remove you or your ward’s name from a list of prospective American military recruits. Its completion moves a name into a “suppression file” in the Department of Defense’s Joint Advertising and Marketing Research & Studies. This makes it much harder for military recruiters to reach out to a prospective recruit whose contact information they may have acquired in various ways. Federal law actually requires that they have as much access to high school students as any other prospective employer.
Sesame Street has become loved and reviled for its socially-conscious programming; in one famous example from 1983, after an actor on the show died, Sesame Street took the chance to impart to very young children the temporal nature of human existence by marking his character’s death on the show. The forward-thinking episode invited some degree of opposition because even adults 
themselves continue to find death very uncomfortable or even impossible to psychologically confront.
Premiering tonight on PBS at 8 p.m. EDT is a program, “When Families Grieve,” that features four families, two of which features fathers from the American military…
Darth Vader Opens Wall Street
Gee, anything think this might not be the best photo-op for Wall Street right now?
Show Me the Money
By Robert Singer
We have been conditioned from birth to believe that everything wrong in our society is about Greed: The inordinate desire to acquire or possess more than one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.
However, my research concludes the earth’s environmental damage and pollution was not the result of greed and the unintended consequences of our capitalistic consumer society, but was the goal.
Until the common man became “civilized” he had almost no environmental impact on the earth. Hunters, foragers and gatherers are unable to upset the ecological structures of the planet. [1]
The first civilized societies and their agrarian economies had an environmental impact but the damage was negligible because only 3% of the population, Kings and Lords were consumers.
The earth wasn’t in trouble until the House of Rothschild unleashed the middle class on the planet when they financed and fomented the American and French Revolutions. [2]
Now the…
Why We Think It’s OK to Cheat and Steal (Sometimes)
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it’s OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we’re predictably irrational — and can be influenced in ways we can’t grasp.
I’m doing ‘God’s work’. Meet Mr Goldman Sachs
Can you believe this guy? The Sunday Times gains unprecedented access to the world’s most powerful, and most secretive, investment bank:
“Aha! You catch us plotting in real time,” says Lloyd Blankfein, breaking away from a cabal of senior executives discussing his trip to Washington the previous day. Blankfein, 55, Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, is wearing a grey suit with a jaunty Hermès tie with little red bicycles on it. In his hand, he’s carrying one of those cups of coffee that look bigger than the human stomach. Maybe it’s the caffeine, maybe it’s the tie — a birthday present from his daughter — but he’s in a remarkably jolly mood for a man everyone seems to hate. “It’s like a safari here,” he jokes. “You’ve come in to look at the animals.”
Blankfein may be Wall Street’s Sun God, but, with the economic outlook stormy, he doesn’t want to advertise it,…
