Category Archives: Ayn Rand

In summer last year, Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, posted a selfie on Twitter modelling her new Hannah Arendt face mask:

Preparefor the worst:expect the best:andtake what comes

Not a Hannah Arendt quote! :/ Samantha Rose Hill, then the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College in New York State, tweeted back, across the hours and the Atlantic Ocean. I know! Twas sweet gift, Stonebridge replied, then added: We should make our own.

One doesnt always have to speak, Hill suggested a real Arendt quote, from the long television interview she did in the 1960s with Gnter Gaus, and one of the many Hill keeps in rotation on her Twitter feed, along with Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding and Speaking is also a form of action and Evil comes from a failure to think. She also posts pictures of the contents of Arendts library all the old friends Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, Rilke, in the words of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendts former student and first biographer as well as her manuscripts, typed then scribbled on and sometimes cut up and stuck back together: One can almost see [her] with enormous silver scissors and a roll of Scotch tape in her hand, making an image as much as a text, alive with desire for understanding, Hill writes in her new biography.

I too have merch with the dodgy quote on it a ceramic tile not a face mask, and twas gift from my sister-in-law, working in league with my teenage son and I too have tweeted an image that links me to Hannah Arendt. In Aberdeen in May 1974, Arendt had her picture taken along with her great friend Mary McCarthy less than a mile away from where I would have been sitting at that very moment in school. What on earth were those two doing in Scotland? Well, Arendt had been delivering the second part of the Gifford Lectures, which she would write up as her final, unfinished work, The Life of the Mind, when she had a heart attack walking to the podium. McCarthy rushed over from Paris to help, then was joined from New York by Lotte Khler, Arendts longtime assistant. The following year McCarthy and Khler were appointed joint executors after Arendt suffered a second heart attack and died in her Riverside Drive apartment.

The Arendt cult is a riddle, Walter Laqueur sighed in the 1990s, as Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire had sighed before him. So much reverent attention for someone so devoid of originality, depth and a systematic character. Was it because women like reading other women, Laqueur wondered, and was this the reason Arendt herself, a highly emotional person with a strong inclination towards impressionistic, romantic and even metaphysical influences admired the second-rate Rosa Luxemburg? Its probably true, as far as it goes, that increasing awareness among scholars of feminist citational practice has something to do with the current prominence of both. Yes, women do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.

But its also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendts life, which is why Ken Krimsteins comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroines Three Escapes. Arendt did not arrive in the US until 1941, by which time she had been on the run from Nazis of one sort or another for many years. The first escape in the 1920s, when Arendt was a teenager was from a predatory, soon-to-turn-Nazi lover; the second, in the 1930s, was from a Gestapo cell in Berlin. The third was from the Gurs internment camp in France just before the Germans took it over and started sending its inmates east; Arendt was one of only a handful of prisoners to grab at the chance offered by the French surrender to walk away with only a toothbrush, to spend the rest of their lives with the knowledge of what had happened to those who had not. One irony of the merch quote is that taking what comes is just what Arendt didnt do. Friends saw her as a person overinclined to embrace conspiracy theories, Young-Bruehl reports, although the friends who listened were often glad they had. It is in the very nature of things human that once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been, Arendt wrote in the epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). The destructive potential of postwar technological developments might yet make what Hitler did look like an evil childs fumbling toys.

A prophetess, then, a high-class soothsayer? Its true that Arendt quotes, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in particular, were conspicuous in the cheese dreams of the US media during the Trump presidency. Was it or wasnt it totalitarian? Was he or wasnt he a fascist? Heres another nice Arendt quote: No matter how much we may be capable of learning from the past it will not enable us to know the future. So there we are. In any case, no, Trump was not totalitarian, as Rebecca Panovka pointed out recently in Harpers: one clue being in the morpheme total. Trump never made the defining totalitarian effort to bend reality to his fictional world. Alternative facts, though, and their stitching together into alternative realities: it didnt start with Trump, as Panovka shows. One reason Trumps lies were so successful was that he was able to exploit a lack of public trust already evident when Arendt was writing her essays Truth and Politics (1967) No one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues and Lying in Politics (1971), about the Pentagon Papers and the alternative reality they presented of the war in Vietnam.

Arendts American essays are widely read and debated, but a lot of her ideas about the US were odd. She didnt get there until she was in her mid-thirties, and when she did, spent most of her time with other German migr intellectuals (one reason so many Jewish Americans found her Eichmann reporting so offensive was because of its unconcealed German-Jewish snootiness towards Jews from other places) and Americans who, wherever their families had come from, had long since made themselves over as aristocrats of the left. On Revolution (1963), for example, stages a peculiar encounter between the French Revolution a bad thing because it let the existence of poverty inspire it, drive it onward, and eventually [send] it to its doom and the American, which went well because the Founding Fathers refused to let the abject and degrading misery present everywhere in the form of slavery and Negro labour distract them from drafting the constitution. Arendts lifelong effort to keep the social question out of politics reached an apogee with Reflections on Little Rock (1959), in which the Lady Arrogant as enemies sometimes called her took one look at the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford, the lone Black girl on her way into school being yelled at by a line of hate-filled whites, and decided that the most important thing going on in it was what it said about negligent Black parents and the equally absent representatives of the NAACP: Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?

As late as the 1970s, academic colleagues considered Arendt a journalist, not a philosopher, a midcult Mitteleuropean media performer, an intellectually more respectable version of Ayn Rand. Its absolutely true that much of Arendts best-known writing was done for magazines, not academic journals, and much Englished, as she called the vigorous polishings to which her work was submitted by editors and friends: and its certainly strange to look up her Eichmann reports in the New Yorker and find this mighty obligation I owe my past as she called it surrounded by ads for Super Masque, Cartier diamond hairclips, the Tomlinson chair (cushioned in Fortrel polyester fibre-fill and covered in Celaperm acetate sealed-in colour), the RCA Victor New Vista Color TV. But theres worse than strange and worse than writing for the New Yorker. For twelve years the peace necessary to do intellectual work is something Ive known only from hearsay, she wrote to her mentor Karl Jaspers in 1945, after years in which each of them had believed the other dead. Ive become a kind of freelance writer, something between a historian and a political journalist. She had published her first Partisan Review piece about Kafka the year before.

Did she even care that much whether her work made a splash, or whether the splash was for the good or the bad? Her best-known writings were essentially inward-looking, the political theorist Margaret Canovan explained in 1992. The motive behind her work was her own effort to understand Misreadings of her books left her largely unmoved. For Canovan who wrote two separate Arendt books eighteen years apart, with two quite different accounts of what she was about the way Arendt sliced and shaped her thought-trains was not random or careless exactly, but neither was it as laboriously intentional as it is for many writers. Her books are best read, Canovan thinks, as part of the deposit laid down by her endless process of reflection and writing like islands out of a partly submerged continent of thought. Even in the most famous, apparently well-made Arendt books, key arguments are obscured by noodles and doodles: What her work most resembles is some medieval manuscript on the pages of which dragons and griffins climb in and out of the letters, and leaves and tendrils twine about the words: a marvellous work of art, wonderfully bejewelled, but in which the text is illuminated in a way that is liable to distract attention.

Ive read your book, absorbed, for the past two weeks, in the bathtub, riding in the car, McCarthy wrote to Arendt in 1951, on reading The Origins of Totalitarianism, which had just come out. The McCarthy-Arendt correspondence quickly developed, via lunches, parrot talk about politics, sex, Norman Mailer, an exchange of gifts (a silk scarf, a Pottery Barn casserole), into an extraordinarily rich friendship. When friends and foes alike turned on Arendts Eichmann book, it was McCarthy who leaped in to defend her: I freely confess that I too heard a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of Figaro or the Messiah. It was McCarthy, too, who ended The Group, her bestselling proto-feminist romp of 1963, with the charismatic Lakey driving her stocky German baroness off into the sunset, the rest of the girls fretting that Lakey, who had always been frightening and superior, would now look down on them for not being Lesbians.

And it was McCarthy, finally, who was left to organise and English what there was of Arendts last book after her death. She chafed against our language and its awesome, mysterious constraints, McCarthy wrote in an afterword, though she had a natural gift, which would have made itself felt in Sioux or Sanskrit, for eloquent, forceful, sometimes pungent expression. The Banality of Evil, for example, the dirge-like subtitle the Eichmann report was given on publication, is a powerful phrase that illuminates much about the way lies, carelessness, technology and logistics combine in certain individuals and organisations to wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man. But that phrase on the cover of a book about the Holocaust in the early 1960s? Maybe not the best way to elicit a calm and reasoned response.

The banality of evil is not the only flashy phrase in the Eichmann book, one problem with which is the way it combines sober, deadly serious reporting with a weirdly aerated streak of satire: the accused in the dock like a Spitting Image puppet, with his scraggy neck and ill-fitting dentures; the sheer comedy of the court interpreters, translating from German into Hebrew and back into much worse German; the heroic fight in which the accused seemed locked with the German language, which invariably defeats him; the hideous hilarity of hearing him use phrases such as like pulling teeth, about the struggle to get people to do what they were told, and Kadavergehorsam, obedience of corpses, when they did. McCarthy quickly regretted her line about Mozart and Handel, but Arendt secretly thought she had a point: You were the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria. Irony, Hill comments, allows for distance and reveals logical absurdity with a sense of humour. Like so many who write ironically, Young-Bruehl says, she was at her most cutting when most intensely involved.

Cura posterior, Arendt called her coverage of the Eichmann trial. Ever since, she confessed to McCarthy, I feel after twenty years light-hearted about the whole matter. Dont tell anybody, is it not proof positive that I have no soul? Shed left it behind, perhaps, in the Berlin library, or the Gurs internment camp, or on the ship crossing the Atlantic, reading out the notes shed been given by Walter Benjamin to the huddled masses on the deck. Feelings of being alien, homeless and alone characterised her existence, Khler wrote about Arendt in America. The only person she ever felt spoke the same language was her second husband, Heinrich Blcher, to whom she remained devoted up to and perhaps beyond his death in 1970.

Even Constance could see that, in some real sense, the Rosenbaums lives were over, the poet Randall Jarrell a close friend and frequent Englisher wrote in his novel Pictures from an Institution (1954), in which Constance is taken to be an authorial stand-in, with Gottfried and Irene Rosenbaum as Blcher and Arendt. His automatic acceptance of everybody, the novel says of Gottfried, was a judgment of mankind crueller, perhaps, than impatient rejection The thought of how he had acquired these expectations was a disagreeable one. Irene, on the other hand, Jarrell depicts as disinterested, but also rather uninterested. She spends whole days just sitting, looking silently, seeing nothing except what she did not see.

Thinking is what Arendt probably claimed to have been spending whole days doing: the two in one, the soundless dialogue between me and myself. She would be thinking, and she would be smoking; activities, as A.O. Scott remarked in his review of Margarethe von Trottas 2012 biopic, that from the outside look much the same. There is something very Kant-like, I used to think, about smoking, the analytics and architectonics you build when you inhale, exhale, yet all of it ultimately springing from a single point; and smoking can be so useful for women and especially for women writers, sharpening your focus, giving you a smokescreen, acting as a repellent to keep the buzzing pests away.

Arendt liked smoking while giving lectures, McCarthy noted, when the fire laws permitted, and McCarthy and Khler, Young-Bruehl reports, were both impressed by her recalcitrance as a patient in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. She took up her cigarettes as soon as the oxygen tent was removed from her room, refused to eat sensibly or cut down on her daily coffee intake and mustered an irritated bravado which thwarted all efforts to keep her calm. The picture Hill has chosen for the cover of her book is lovely, a classic from the 1930s: you can easily miss the cigarette and the big glass ashtray at the bottom right. But you wont in a more revealing picture from the same session, taken a minute before or after, which Hill has put inside. The eyes have bags, the face is puffy, the hands are wringing, almost, and the cigarette is in the mouth, being sucked. The ashtray already has stubs in it. Theres something that looks like a Rizla packet on the tabletop nearby.

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover in 1906, the cherished only child of highly educated, non-religious Jewish parents. Her father, Paul, was an electrical engineer with an amazing home library she first read Kant, Arendt told Gaus, at fourteen. The Arendts were socialist fellow-travellers, Hannahs mother, Martha, in particular. The impressionistic, romantic admiration of Luxemburg may have begun when Martha took her to a meeting about the Spartacist uprising in 1919.

In 1909 or 1910, when Hannah was three, her family moved back to Knigsberg, where both parents had grown up, as Paul was progressively weakened by the syphilis that killed him in 1913. Hannah did not take to the widower her mother married in 1920, or to his slightly older daughters, and in 1922 was expelled from Gymnasium for organising a boycott of a teacher she disliked. She finished her Abitur in Berlin.

I can only say that I always knew I would study philosophy, she said in the Gaus interview. For me, the question was somehow: I can either study philosophy or I can drown myself, so to speak. She started hearing a rumour about a brilliant young teacher at the university in Marburg: Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak. And so she went to Marburg and enrolled in two of Heideggers classes, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy and a seminar on Platos Sophist: For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression being. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed. Arendt and Heidegger a brilliant young woman of eighteen and a charismatic, married professor twice her age began a sexual relationship then tried to end it, with Arendt leaving Marburg first for Freiburg, where she studied with Edmund Husserl, then Heidelberg, where she worked on St Augustine with Karl Jaspers. The entanglement came and went Heidegger, McCarthy thought, was the great love affair for Arendt for the rest of their lives.

Arendt was horrified, obviously, when Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and obeyed the decrees by sacking his non-Aryan colleagues. She cut all contact for many years. But it seems that she picked up with him again in 1949, on her first trip back to Germany after the Nazis had been defeated, and that she felt almost sorry for him, on account of the poverty of his ethics and political judgment: Once upon a time there was a fox who was so lacking in slyness he not only kept getting caught in traps but couldnt even tell the difference between a trap and a non-trap He hit on an idea completely new and unheard-of among foxes. He built a trap as his burrow. Her own more phenomenological writings The Human Condition; the exercises in how to think in Between Past and Future replace the heroic struggle with existence with worlds that are shared and human, inhabited by Men and with human-made space between them. The emphasis she put in her own work on what she called natality, new beginnings, must be intended at least partly to give the finger to Heidegger and his fascination with Being-towards-Death.

In 1929, Arendt took up with Gnther Stern, a young German-Jewish writer-intellectual. One reason she married him was that her mother liked him, another was that she liked his mother. Stern was working on his Habilitationschrift in Frankfurt, though his progress was blocked by Theodor Adorno. (This was one reason for Arendts lifelong loathing of Teddy, another being his use of his mothers Italian and non-Jewish surname instead of his fathers, which was Wiesengrund. Infamy, in Arendts view: an unsuccessful attempt at co-operation.) She, meanwhile, found funding to start researching German Romanticism, a project that became the remarkable Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, largely finished by 1938, then lost, and finally published only in 1957.

Rahel Varnhagen (ne Levin) never published a book herself how could she have done, being Jewish, and a woman, in the Berlin of the early 19th century? But she read Goethe, and wrote thousands of letters, and in her attic salon hosted conversations between great poets, mighty diplomats and mere nobodies such as herself, during the age of Frederick II, in which Jews could live, which gave room for every plant in his sun-welcoming land. But then the World Spirit crashed through Jena, fashions changed, and social prejudices were intensified to the point of crass, brutal exclusion. In 1814, she married Karl August Varnhagen, a Prussian diplomat, and converted to Christianity: 19th-century Jews, if they wanted to play a part in society, had no choice but to become parvenus par excellence. Rahel, however, turned out to be too sensitive, too thoughtful, too fine a person really, to be an entirely successful social climber, and on her deathbed embraced Jewishness the thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame as an experience I should on no account now wish to have missed. Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt form Gillian Roses central trio of outsider women thinkers in The Broken Middle (1992), excluded from all clubs by ethnicity and gender, but who learned to use that exclusion as a coign of vantage, in letters as in life. It was, as Arendt put it, the very loophole through which the pariah, precisely because he is an outcast, can see life as a whole.

By 1956, when Arendt was tidying her Rahel book for publication, the physical annihilation which ended the history of the Jews in Germany was known to all. Even in the early 1930s, however, Arendt felt she had some awareness of the doom of German Judaism. When the Reichstag burned in 1933, she immediately felt responsible, and was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander. Stern fled to Paris, but she stayed in Berlin with her mother, hiding communists and doing research for the Zionists in the Prussian State Library. One day later in 1933 she was arrested by an inexperienced Gestapo man. She was detained for several days, but she buttered him up and he let her go. Hannah and Martha left Germany the next day, travelling via Prague and Geneva to Paris. Arendt remained in Paris until 1940, working for a series of Zionist organisations that supported Jewish refugees from Nazism and prepared them for settlement in Palestine. She and Stern divorced in 1937.

Arendt had met Benjamin in Berlin he was a distant cousin of Sterns. But she got to know him much better in Paris through refugee networks, which was also the way she met Blcher, a non-Jewish former Spartacist and sex-club bouncer, whom she married in January 1940. In September 1939, Blcher and Benjamin were interned together at Nevers, though Blcher was released early, only to be interned again a few months later. This time the order included women. On 15 May 1940 Arendt showed up at the Vlodrome dHiver, near the Eiffel Tower, to be transported after a week to the camp at Gurs. Shed been there for five weeks when France fell to the Nazis, discipline collapsed, and she just walked out. By chance, she later wrote to Gershom Scholem, she ran into Benjamin at Lourdes, where he was waiting for visa papers, and spent a few weeks with him, playing chess, before leaving for Montauban, where she was reunited with her husband. Arendt and Blcher last saw Benjamin in Marseilles on 19 September 1940, when he gave them a suitcase of papers to look after. Six days later he killed himself at Portbou on the Spanish border.

Arendt and Blcher left France for Lisbon early in 1941, then in May boarded the SS Guin for New York. They opened Benjamins suitcase and entertained their fellow passengers by reading the Theses on the Philosophy of History out loud: the homunculus in the chess set, the storm from paradise, the state of emergency that is simply the normal condition of the oppressed. After processing on Ellis Island they found two furnished rooms to rent on West 95th Street, which they shared with Arendts mother when she arrived a few weeks later.

All three of them were well past the age at which its easy to pick up new languages: but they had to, and they did. Arendt spent six weeks working as an au pair with a vegetarian family in Massachusetts and was thinking of training as a social worker until Blcher nixed it: Only a dervish or a gifted imbecile could survive that kind of study. Blcher struggled terribly with English. Young-Bruehl quotes pages of cheesy idioms from his notebooks: tickled to death, hit the jackpot, make a mess of it, nifty chick. Arendt too relished a flavourful saying, a habit McCarthy tried in future years to correct: horned dilemmas, spades called spades, willy-nilly and pell-mell. Young-Bruehl, who studied with Arendt at the New School in the 1970s, remembers her as especially fond of when the chips are down, pronounced cheeps; when McCarthy edited the posthumous Life of the Mind for publication, she altered this to when the stakes are on the table. The cheeps get the last laugh, however, in Benjamins 13th thesis, included in Harry Zohns translation of Illuminations, edited by Arendt in the late 1960s. Wenn es hart auf hart kommt, Benjamin wrote in German, often translated as when it comes to the crunch. Zohn and Arendt give us: However, when the chips are down.

Arendt found her feet in New York much more quickly than Blcher. One job she got was to research the whereabouts of lost and ruined Jewish artefacts a position that allowed her to mourn through action, in the words of a friend. Another was for Schocken, the Jewish migr publisher, bringing editions of Kafka, Scholem, Bernard Lazare to the American market. And she wrote polemical essay-columns, in German at first, for the German-speaking New York Jewish press, and then in the spirited, sardonic English of a beer-hall fiddler who hasnt forgotten her old life in the string quartet: Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends, she wrote in one small, harsh masterpiece, We Refugees (1943). There are those odd optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way.

By 1945 Arendt was talking to publishers about the book that would appear in 1951 as The Origins of Totalitarianism. Our book, she called it in private with Blcher, who did a lot of the reading for her in the New York Public Library while she was at work and Martha was doing the cooking and cleaning. Without premonition and probably against their conscious inclinations, they had come to constitute willy-nilly a public realm, Arendt later wrote about the previously unpolitical French intellectuals who were suddenly sucked into the Resistance when their government capitulated to the Nazis. Individuals using their initiative and working together to build open debate and freedom: that, to Arendt, was a treasure that appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different mysterious conditions, as though it were a fata morgana. Arendt and Blcher built something like this between them in The Origins of Totalitarianism in particular, an epic work, as Hill says, crammed with historical takes and angles, bits and bobs about Disraeli and Dreyfus, Rhodes and Kipling and other gamers of the great game of incalculable bigness, all squashed together because you never know which bit youre going to need and when.

The Origins of Totalitarianism changed shape and thrust many times over the years of its composition. The first plan, Hill explains, was for a book called The Elements of Shame: Antisemitism Imperialism Racism. That shifted to The Three Pillars of Hell, with sections entitled The Jewish Road to the Storm-Centre of Politics, The Disintegration of the National State, Expansion and Race, Full-Fledged Imperialism. The changes in scale and approach presumably had a lot to do with the stop-start nature of work on the book, but as Arendt went on, the ways she slotted her fragments together became a method of organisation in its own right: Elements by themselves probably never cause anything. They become origins of events if and when they crystallise into fixed and definite forms. Then and only then can we trace their history backwards. The event illuminates its own past but can never be deduced from it.

By 1948, the project had taken on a shape recognisable to readers of the current version, in three parts, headed Antisemitism, Imperialism, Nazism. But then, as news of Stalinist tactics emerged and Arendt began to read through materials from the Soviet Union, she decided to revise the final section, and what had been tightly focused on Nazi Germany began to stretch and spread. The Penguin Modern Classics edition contains a short preface from 1950 that presents the top level of her analysis: two world wars in a generation leading to homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth, and the likelihood of a third world war any minute; the irritating incompatibility between all the amazing things modern humanity can do and its apparent inability to live in and understand the sense of the world it has brought about; the desperate need for a new political principle to protect humanity from the destructive forces its own ingenuity and foolishness have unleashed.

Then come three more prefaces, one for each section of the 1968 edition, along with a final chapter, Ideology and Terror, that was first added to the second edition in 1958. The third section is now about totalitarianism in general: masses not classes, conspiratorialism and terror, loyalty to the leader, secret police. This part can read like the slightly pulpy, mid-century-modern Cold War bestseller it kind of was, but its also righteously horrific. The crisis of the century, Arendt thinks, has at its storm centre the problem of superfluousness, the millions and millions of people abandoned by modernity and its brutal accelerations. This is a political, not a populationist, argument. Its about the way modern governments sort between the people they have a use for and the much larger number they dont: utilitarian is one term Arendt uses of this process and radical evil is another. Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.

The Origins of Totalitarianism is such a massive book, so dense and so disorganised, that Canovans idea of approaching it like a group of islands is good. Each reader needs to find her own route through it, and I like to split the trip in two. Antisemitism and Imperialism together form a brilliant historical account of the way the development and disintegration of the 19th-century European nation-state gave birth to two new kinds of human being, cousins-germane in more ways than one: the refugee outside the border, the national minority within. At the same time, the colonial search for new ways to make profit shrank the world and brought fantasies about its domination ever closer to reality. Back in Europe, meanwhile, wealth and population, emancipation and enfranchisement, were increasing unevenly and often explosively breaking old habits and institutions, and leading to outpourings of nastiness against vulnerable minorities, no matter that members of these minorities might be assimilated and rich. Thus the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, where totalitarianism took off, Arendt thinks, because it looked like it really did offer a one-stop solution to all the problems of the time.

I would linger a bit longer on the final chapter of the Imperialism section, which tells the sorry story of the Rights of Man since they were first declared in 1789; in Arendts view they have never and nowhere been properly enforced. The idea of universal human rights has, she thinks, always been muddled up with nationalism, the wars and revolutions of modern Europe like a gigantic game of musical chairs. When the music stops and borders get fixed again, the lucky people find themselves in nation-states that want them and have the wherewithal to look after them. The unlucky ones, on either side of the border, find their inalienable rights as human beings of no use to them at all.

The League of Nations? That really proved itself, didnt it, in the years between the wars. The United Nations, with its Declaration of Human Rights in 1948? Arendt mentions it once, in a footnote, to say that it convened a mere gesture of a conference in the early 1950s with the explicit reassurance that participation would entail no obligations whatsoever. The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships, except that they were still human as had happened with the Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Then, the postwar solution of the Jewish question namely, by means of a colonised and then conquered territory, succeeded only by producing a new category of refugees, the Arabs. And so the game goes on.

At the same moment that exile flourished as a cultural and literary trope in the Cold War West, Stonebridge wrote in Placeless People (2018), the rightless (who kept on coming) receded into the mist of a humanism attempting to reinvent some kind of moral authority for the European tradition even as its geopolitical power wilted. The reinvented moral authority, in recent years, has not been going well.

The second half of my island-hopping would pursue a route through the third section, understanding totalitarianism as a terrible answer to the perfectly sensible question Arendt puts at the end. How might one go about resolving the crisis of the century, be that century the 20th or the 21st? The history her argument traces is an infernal version of Pilgrims Progress, through terror, camps, pits and holes of oblivion, before petering out at a cliff edge: It may even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form though not necessarily the cruellest only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past. The crisis of the century may eventually burn through the totalitarian formation to be replaced by something else.

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), Shoshana Zuboff writes that she was haunted for decades by Arendts remarks about totalitarianism being the curse of the 20th century only because it so terrifyingly took care of its problems: loneliness, superfluity, the collapsing of institutions and the sense they gave their members of purpose and connection. I cant imagine why shed be thinking about Facebook and Google here. Instrumentarianism is what Zuboff calls the stealthier sort of total domination she sees as characteristic of surveillance capitalism: her argument would be clearer and her book blessedly shorter if shed put in a pinch more Marx and Foucault, but I cant deny the chill I get from the way she uses Arendt.

In Arendts book, terror, camps and torture enable domination by destroying spontaneity, reducing the human specimen to a bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way. Zuboffs instrumentarianism is gentler and more entertaining, but it eats away at the possibility of human freedom from within. B.F. Skinner, Zuboff writes, did not live to see the real power of his techniques for behavioural modification actuated in humans, via phones and networks, at enormous scale. The trouble with modern theories of behaviourism, Arendt wrote in the 1950s, is not that they are wrong but that they could become true it is quite conceivable that the modern age which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.

The political theory line on The Origins of Totalitarianism is that it is, as Canovan puts it, lopsided. The Antisemitism and Imperialism parts are fairly solid, but the subsequent deduction of an entirely new form of government might as well be fiction, for all the evidence and method there is in its construction. Which is true enough, as far as it goes, though I think you can learn more by going with Arendt. The other big imbalance is the hundreds of pages about racism and antisemitism and the subterranean stream of the cranky and the resentful, but nothing about socialism utopian or scientific, Marx or Lenin or the movements to which they gave their names. Marx, Arendt was in no doubt, was a great scholar with a passion for justice; yet it was, she felt, also clear that Marxism led to immiseration and gulags. How much was it down to Marx that socialism in the Soviet Union had gone so dreadfully wrong?

Arendt planned to deal with this question in a little study of Marx to be split into three sections. The first would look at Marx philosophically, as the inheritor of a tradition of muddled thinking about work and labour stretching back at least to Plato. The second would be a history of Marxism from Marx to Lenin, Lenin to Stalin, and the work she did towards the third became the Ideology and Terror addendum to The Origins of Totalitarianism. But the study was never finished. The more Arendt explored Marxs place in the wider tradition of Western philosophy, the more the difficulties spread. The study grew into the sections Labour and Work in The Human Condition (1958), the first and best two essays in Between Past and Future (1961), the anti-social question strand in On Revolution and a cache of drafts and lectures, in English and German, that remained unpublished until after her death. These were published in 2018 as The Modern Challenge to Tradition, Vol. VI of Wallsteins edition in progress of Arendts complete works, and it was Canovans discovery of these papers in the archives in the 1980s that led her to change her mind about the overall direction of Arendts thought.

It has become fashionable, Arendt wrote in a 1953 manuscript, to assume an unbroken line between Marx and Lenin and Stalin, thereby accusing Marx of being the father of totalitarian domination, but actually this is wrong. I think it could be shown that the line from Aristotle to Marx shows both fewer and far less decisive breaks than the line from Marx to Stalin. It follows, then, that if youre going to blame the monstrosity of Stalin on philosophical influences, you cant blame Marx in isolation: you need to take on the entirety of our own tradition, including those real questions and perplexities within it that Marx had to struggle with himself.

One problem was the philosopher-king idea that the vita contemplativa, as Arendt called it, led to better politics than the vita activa. Another was the view of history as a human artefact, followed by the unsurprising discovery of pattern in that artefact: Class struggle to Marx this formula seemed to unlock all the secrets of history, just as the law of gravity had appeared to unlock all the secrets of nature. The biggest of Marxs perplexities, however, were the confused ideas about work and labour he had inherited from the philosopher kings before him, but which became a particular problem for his thinking, given the explosive growth and changes both activities were undergoing. It is as though Marx tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools. He was far from the only writer in his time to come up against this: the modern age in general, Arendt writes, found itself overwhelmed by the unprecedented actual productivity of Western mankind. All this new wealth all of a sudden, all produced by human labour, but robbed from the labourers to make others rich: the injustice made Marx furious, and the fury led him to a series of fundamental and flagrant contradictions, the biggest of which is the one between labour as the activity that makes humans human and labour as bondage, the chains that must be broken so humans can be free.

Readers come to The Human Condition expecting clarity, definition, a statement, perhaps, of Arendts central principles. Canovan herself approached it this way in her first Arendt book, then gave in and wrote her second, a reinterpretation of Arendts thought, in which she acknowledges that much of it looks bafflingly perverse. The vocabulary, for example, is plain, but Arendt does not warn her readers before using ordinary terms in special senses and these special senses have a way of piling up: She often tries to say more (and particularly to make more conceptual distinctions) than can be comfortably digested.

Riffling through The Human Condition, youll see a great deal about the Athenian polis and its distinction from the oikos, and about action, which is Arendts usual rendition of what Aristotle called praxis, and which she defines as the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, and thus the political activity par excellence. The emphasis on Athenians has led many to misread the book as an exercise in nostalgia, Canovan writes, but if anything its the opposite. It begins with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 an event second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, yet only the latest sally in modernitys rebellion against human existence as it has been given, something we really need to talk about, surely, before were all blown up. Except that we cant talk about it, because science moves so fast that most people will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. Theres thus a danger that we are becoming thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget that is technically possible, no matter how murderous. The book ends with the evocation that disturbed Zuboff, of the deadliest and most sterile passivity the world has ever known.

In between, its true, there are a lot of Greek and Latin terms, but Arendt is not reviving classical theories so much as prodding and reflecting, examining concepts and their histories, in an urgent search as Canovan sees it for important bits that may have been missed out. One missing link is Aristotles distinction between zoe and bios: zoe being the sort of life you get everywhere in nature, in animals and plants as well as people, whereas bios is always human-shaped, biographical, limited by the two supreme events of appearance and disappearance within the world. Another is the work-labour distinction that befuddled Marx. From the time of Aristotle, European languages have maintained two etymologically unrelated words for what we have come to think of as the same activity: work and labour, oeuvrer and travailler, werken and arbeiten, ergazesthai and ponein. Happy meanings, to do with craft, achievement, stability, tend to cluster around one member of each pair, and sad ones, concerning pain, trouble, waste, sheer unending graft and repetition, around the other. Labour was exhausting, dirty, unending, a constant battle to beat off death and decay, which is the reason the citizen kept slaves at home, along with the women, to do it for him: The slaves degradation was a fate worse than death. Work, on the other hand, makes the stuff that constitutes what Arendt calls the world, the coating of human artifice we build over the earth and nature, without which the common world of human civilisation could not exist.

Philosophers, however, always overlooked the work-labour distinction, for reasons Arendt considers obvious enough. Labour especially was a non-subject, a matter to be kept hidden away in the shadowy interior of the household where women produced children and slaves cleared up the mess. That was just the way it was; they had nothing to compare it to. Christianity, when it came along, also kept itself well away from all the nasty, dirty stuff in the privy. And so the confusions multiplied with the centuries, between labour and work and action, the private life and the public; and then along came Marx, the first great scholar really to care that the labour that makes value does so at the expense of the suffering of human beings.

By Marxs time, however, the oikos had burst out of the household and become economics, a nationwide housekeeping, an unnatural growth of the natural; and the common world that gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other had succumbed to the entropy of mass society. The tragedy of Marx, Canovan sums up in her second book, is that although he aimed at freedom what he actually achieved was to encourage his followers to put themselves at the service of compulsive processes behaviourism, automation, totalitarianism even. Or thats what Canovan thinks was Arendts view.

To read such a book, by a woman of large spirit and great erudition, can be painful, Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976 of The Human Condition, because it embodies the tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideologies. It was obvious to Rich that its women who do most of the work in human reproduction, and most of the unpaid labour in the home; and yet for Arendt the withholding of women from participation in the common world was something from which she does not so much turn her eyes as stare straight through unseeing. Rich is quite right to read Arendt as anti-feminist. Its well known that she had no patience with what she saw of Womens Liberation among her students in the 1970s: This is not serious, one of them recalls her saying, poking at the Chicago Womens Liberation Union badge the student was wearing on her lapel.

Rich laments the power of male ideology to possess such a female mind, to disconnect it, as it were, from the female body which encloses it and which it encloses; but that disconnection may open up important new coigns and angles. Jacqueline Rose, for example, finds in Arendts emphasis on the privative trait of privacy viciousness in the kitchen! a suggestive starting point for male fantasies of despotic domination, and hence domestic violence: Women become the scapegoats for mans unconscious knowledge of his own human, which means shared frailty. The strenuousness with which Arendts thinking avoided both the realm of necessity which includes everything to do with keeping people alive and preferably thriving and pity, kindness, grief, the darkness of the human heart, serves as a useful reminder that mortality is even nowadays unmanageable, which may be the reason that the work done by care-givers to alleviate pain and humiliation is so often stared straight through unseeing, paid badly when it is paid at all.

For Jacquelines sister Gillian, the question was not about male violence as such but the connection between liberalism and fascism in modern European political history. Rahel, Luxemburg and Arendt span three crises of state and civil society in Prussia and Germany and are, as women and as Jews especially qualified witnesses of the equivocation of the middle. As women and as members of a pariah nation, they could see the emptiness and delusion at the heart of all the big talk about the rights of man, and that trying to avoid the problem by retreating to community or nation or race or gender merely repeated it on a different scale. All the same, you have to keep on trying. Its a tension of middlewomanship, a cultivation of aporetic universalism that refuses the cosy collapse into any ethical immediacy of love.

But, actually, the reason I started reading Arendt was because of something Donna Haraway wrote in Staying with the Trouble (2016) about Eichmann and the surrender of thinking of the particular sort that could make the disaster of the Anthropocene, with its ramped-up speciecides and genocides, come true. You know its happening and I know its happening: so why do we go on letting it? This outcome is still at stake, Haraway wrote. Think we must; we must think! I thought Haraway was right about this, and I thought Arendt might be good to think with, against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair, as she put it at the beginning of The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Arendt added a chapter to that book in 1958 then removed it. In it, she writes about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 as another of those moments, like the birth of the French Resistance, when scattered groups of people, without premonition and probably against their conscious inclinations come together to build public happiness, as she sometimes called it, or public freedom the treasure that appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, like the Flying Dutchman. Its something a bit like this treasure that Arendt calls natality, the fact of human birth and the possibility of new beginnings, and I have to say that I dont buy it and always feel a bit embarrassed when Arendt tries to palm it off. Then again, I remember that Naomi Klein used to cite the work of Brad Werner, the geophysicist who in 2012 gave a talk called Is Earth Fucked? in which he talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations, and concluded that

global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that earth-human systems are becoming dangerously unstable in response There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it resistance movements of people or groups of people environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists So it stands to reason that, if were thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics.

And yet, any period to which its own past has become as questionable as it has to us must eventually come up against the phenomenon of language, for in it the past is contained ineradicably, thwarting all attempts to get rid of it, as Arendt wrote in her beautiful essay on Benjamin. For as long as we use the word politics, she continues, the Greek polis will continue to exist at the bottom of our political existence that is, at the bottom of the sea.

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Jenny Turner We must think! Hannah Arendt's Islands LRB 4 November 2021 - London Review of Books

Im currently reflecting on the nature of the spiritual life. This pushes me into a consideration of whether there is a common thread to religions, or whether its a bunch of wildly different religions, each contending to be the only true

The smart money seems to be that its all chaos.

But, I dont think so. For several reasons. One is the Golden Rule.

Now, most, maybe none consider it their primary teaching. But they all have it, near as I can tell. And they all consider it pretty important.

Most of us here in English speaking North America know in its formulation in the Gospel of Luke, in the King James version, as do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The golden rule goes way back and, as Ive observed, it is found all around. As far as written records go some see it as far back as two thousand years before the common era in the Egyptian story the Eloquent Peasant. Reading that story, frankly, I find that a stretch. The Odyssey, which might trace as far back as seven hundred years before the common era, has the goddess Calypso tell Odysseus shell be as careful for him as for herself, because she knows what is right and fair. Among the pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece both Thales and Pittacus of Mytilene, call us to not do that which we would not have done to us. And, while the rule isnt particularly obvious in Socrates, Plato or Aristotle (although I thank them deeply for that other bit of gold, the Golden Mean), the current continues to pop up among the Greeks here and there.

The Hebrew scriptures with strata that approach the Eloquent Peasants composition although as we understand the text more likely written closer to four or five hundred years before the common era in Exodus we are admonished to not oppress the foreigner, and in Leviticus to straight out love your neighbor as yourself. It is found in the hadith, the recorded sayings of the prophet Mohammed, and throughout muslim and particularly Sufi literature.We can find the Golden Rule in the Dhamapada, a collection of sayings attributed to Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha of history. Confucius, from about the same period, tells us in his Analects not to do to others, what you would not want them to do to you. And the list just goes on and on. There are Muslim, Jewish, and Christian version, there are Hindu, Jain, and Buddhism versions, there is a Zoroastrian version. The gold rule abides among them all.

Even in our more secular era, we see it continue to be presented. For instance, some see a philosophical variation in Immanuel Kants categorical imperative, Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. And for me, even more intriguing, Charles Darwin, writing in the Descent of Man opines that the social instincts the prime principle of mans moral condition with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule. As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise, and this lies at the foundation of morality.

And it may be even reflect natural patterning. Donald Pfaff, author of the Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule, tells how he read a paper by William Hamilton and Robert Axelrod showing that they could teach computers to behave in a according to what you could call reciprocal altruism, a fair-play principle.

Im moderately confident that the intuition that gives us the Golden Rule, and incidentally the Golden Mean, are built in, about as close to the hard wiring of our humanity as it gets. I am pretty sure it has something to do with our being mamas and herd animals. Although there is more to it, as the fact a computer can find a fair-play principle, suggests. Cooperation is critical to our survival.

All rather wonderful.

And, yes, shall we say, of course theres a fly in the ointment. This sense of fair does indeed seem to be built into our human consciousness. Generally we dont need an admonishment for something we all do. And, at about an equal level of strength so is a predilection to cheat, to advance ourselves over others. Human beings constantly are doing things that hurt others.

And, of course, we need that sense of self and that impulse for survival and advancement. Both of these goods, taken to extremes become destructive. Although, frankly, while absolutely see people who miss that the care for one another also means themselves, the excess that is more common, and dangerous in many directions is the preservation of ones self at all costs.

So, of course, the reality is we human beings live within a tension between these poles of our hearts.

And I suspect we may be looking at the deep structures of something else common among religions here. That is the problem of evil. Here we see something else common among the religions, a condemnation of the strong preying upon the weak.

While there have always been a handful of people who value selfishness, Im looking at you Ayn Rand, these have always been outliers. The overwhelming majority of human beings and our religions rest upon a foundation of cooperation, of looking out for ones neighbors, of treating the other as we would treat ourselves.

Even as we have an urge to cheat. This conflict between selfishness and altruism seems to endure within the human heart. In some religions it becomes a cosmic war. And while in most good eventually prevails, I can think of at least one example where the forces of chaos eventually wins. The tension runs deep.

A common thread for us all

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A Meditation on the Golden Rule | James Ford - Patheos

Visiting fellow Daniel Schwartz, PhD, will offer a course on the seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Francis Bacon.

One of the few philosophers Ayn Rand quoted approvingly was Francis Bacon, a seventeenth-century English philosopher known for developing methods of scientific induction. In a discussion of mans creative powers in The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made, Rand describes Bacons aphorism (Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed) as the best and briefest identification of mans power in regard to nature.

As part of ARIs expanded educational offerings in the 2021-2022 academic year, the Ayn Rand University is offering several classes in the history of philosophy, the first of which is on the philosophy of Francis Bacon. Guiding students through this material is Dan Schwartz, PhD, a visiting fellow at ARI. Schwartz completed his dissertation on Bacons philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, in 2014 and has published papers on Bacons thought. He also lectured on Bacon at the 2013 Objectivist Summer Conference.

The course will cover Bacons epistemology and philosophy of science through a close and critical reading of his most important work, the New Organon. Says Schwartz: Francis Bacon was a source of intellectual and spiritual inspiration for many of the scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he can still serve as a source of inspiration for us today. Of special interest to ARU students is Bacons this-worldly approach to questions of scientific method, an approach which is evinced by the aphorism Rand quoted. Anyone interested in how to think about science, says Schwartz, can learn a great deal by studying Bacon.

Francis Bacon is being offered to second-year Objectivist Academic Center students and advanced students as part of the relaunched Objectivist Graduate Center of the Ayn Rand University. The course remains open to auditors. To register as an auditor, visit the ARU course catalog.

If you value the ideas presented here, please become an ARI Member today.

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New from Ayn Rand University: Bacon's Philosophy of Science - New Ideal

Popularity does not mean the idea is politically feasible, as Mr. Manchins opposition demonstrated. And Mr. Wydens plan also prompted discussion of a constitutional challenge.

This would be the first real attempt to tax unrealized gains, which would be a significant shift in how we view income, said Joe Bishop-Henchman, vice president of tax policy and litigation at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Theres a big suspicion of direct taxes, of giving the central government this power.

Recently, as officials in Hong Kong signaled new regulations for cryptocurrency exchanges, Mr. Bankman-Fried set up shop in the Bahamas, where there is a legal framework that he says meets his businesss needs. Still, he is active in the United States. FTX has a U.S. exchange and has sponsorship deals with American sports leagues and players to promote its brand. Its founder donated about $5 million to a group supporting Joe Bidens presidential campaign last year.

In comments denouncing the proposed billionaire tax, Mr. Manchin described the ultrawealthy as people who create a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits.

That was an implicit endorsement of the idea, often repeated in discussions around high-net worth giving, that regular people pay taxes while rich people pursue philanthropy, giving not to the Treasury but to their preferred causes. My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness, Mr. Musk said in a subsequent tweet in response to the tax proposal.

That idea that its my money and I should decide what to do with it is very dominant, and it goes along with the culture of individualism that allows people to feel that theyve done this on their own and havent benefited from social goods like roads and education and laws, Professor Sherman said.

Ms. Disney, who is an active member of the Patriotic Millionaires, said she sees that thinking as a primary obstacle to raising taxes on the richest Americans. Billionaires may be brilliant and I dont doubt Elon Musks I.Q. but they dont do anything on their own, she said. She also questioned the prevailing wisdom among the countrys wealthiest that they know best and the government shouldnt be trusted with their money.

The last time I was in the Bay Area, I went walking in the marina and saw seven consecutive boats named after characters from Ayn Rand, Ms. Disney said. They need to come to their senses.

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Who Are Americas Billionaires, Anyway? - The New York Times

We should be freaking out more about Russell Westbrook. By we I mean you. I am already freaking out about Russell Westbrook quite a bit. For some of us, its a way of life. Freaking out about Russell Westbrook is to me what horse whispering is to a horse whisperer. Its the thread that connects me to the universal essence. Robert Redford will (possibly) never play me in a movie, but if he does, he will be wearing a cowboy hat and staring at the severe beauty of the pale Montana sky while he murmurs, 26 points 11 assists 12 rebounds on 37 percent shooting my God, creation is marvelous.

The rest of you, though? I dont know. I feel like we could bump the national freakout up a notch. Im not saying theres no freaking out happening. Its just been mild. Its as ifto keep our metaphors corralled within the larger Horse Whisperer universeyoure all concentrating on the whispering part and Im going, What if we went outside on the ranch and yelled at the top of our lungs? Russell Westbrook, arguably the most divisive star in modern NBA history, is playing in a situation perfectly calibrated to bring all his maddening, beautiful, self-defeating, and transcendent qualities to a crisis point. Hes embarking on a kind of third-act trial by fire of radical basketball iconoclasm, one that will either validate his whole career or convince his doubters they were always right. Exciting and confusing deeds are being accomplished by and near him. Please join me now in the sage grass, where we will shriek at some chickens.

Consider: Like all former MVPs who hit 30 without winning a championship, Russ has spent his later career dogged by the suspicion that hell never land the big one, that some inherent flaw in his game or his personality makes him unfit to contribute to a title team. In Russs case, these suspicions have accrued an added intensity due to the high probability that they are correct. His game is wildly inefficient; as capable as he is of moments of astounding brilliance, he also stands furiously ready to, say, fire off a 30-foot air ball with 19 seconds left in a game in which his team trails by one. There are so many ways an NBA player can make you clutch your head; he might be the career leader in all of them. Is he a genius? Undeniably; but its also easy to see him as perverse, willful, a star for whom every midrange bucket is a Pyrrhic victory, a player eternally on the wrong side of an It he simply does not get. For thy sake, Tobacco, I / Would do anything but die, Charles Lamb wrote in 1805. I sometimes meditate on the ironies of that sentence while I watch NBA franchises take deep puffs of Russ in the fourth quarter.

And yet! This player, this wacko-jacko firebrand of system-killing mood-ball, this living embodiment of the question what if Ayn Rand went to Studio 54 and the whole dance floor got drafted by the SuperSonics?this dude, who once recorded 42 triple-doubles in a single season, who has the worst 3-point shooting percentage in the history of human beings with more than 2,500 NBA-level attempts, this dude has been hand-selected by LeBron James as an essential cog in the machine hes building to return the title to Los Angeles.

Im sorry, what?

Picture me in a Robert Redford shearling-lined trucker jacket, gazing stoically upon the majesty of the West as my face starts doing Beetlejuice-style tentacle-squiggles.

I mean, its perfect. Terrifying but perfect. Rarely does life set you up with such a clear set of stakes. Option A: Russ thrives under the wing of the first leader hes ever played with whos capable of compelling his full obedience (Kevin Durant and James Harden being at best problematic quasi-alphas, not fully licensed by the Michael Jordan Despotism Academy), buys in, plays smart, meshes with Anthony Davis and Carmelo Anthony, helps the Lakers win the championship, and proves he had it in him all along. Option B: Hotter heads prevail, Russ plays like hes on a completely different team, L.A. loses in the second round, and he confirms himself as an influence so toxic to ultimate victory that not even LeBron, the winner among winners, is immune to him.

Is there a middle ground between these two options? Yes, in the sense that a giant asteroid hurtling toward Earth could technically destroy half, rather than all, of the planet. No, in the sense that the asteroid either hits us or doesnt.

Why arent more people extremely excited about this story? There might be (he said icily) a bit of Westbrook fatigue in the NBA communitya player who demands so much attention, with so little perceived return, will eventually start to seem frustrating to your less quixotic sort of fan. But Id guess the main reason is LeBron himself. LeBron is such an outsize presence in the NBA that everyone who plays with him ends up being enclosed in the Matryoshka doll of his own narrative. Theres no room for another protagonist. The question is never what will Russell Westbrook do in L.A.?; its always has LeBron Jamesmedia mogul, star player and de facto GM of the Lakersbuilt a product that can deliver his sixth championship (we are all witnesses)? Whatever Russ does, LeBron is seen as the prime mover. Thats silly, but only in the way that all of this is silly. Sports narratives are generally silly. They work the way they work.

The soul-deep second-tier status that goes along with being LeBrons teammate has made it hard, in the past, for other offbeat megalomaniacs to play with him. Kyrie Irving, for instance, could not stand to dwell in the shadow; Kyrie wants the brightest possible spotlight, the biggest possible podium from which to explain to the world what he read on Wikipedia last night. In a weird way, though, I can see it working for Russ. Hes always played at a remove from mainstream NBA logic. So why not outsource the mainstream-NBA-logic stuff to LeBron and stop having to worry about it? It can be freeing, cant it, not to be the frontman? Let the singer write the chart hits; concentrate on your own mind-melting guitar solos.

Its too early to say whether its working, of course. I have my doubts, but I have doubts about my doubts. People say hes settling in. The Lakers are a work in progress, with a lot of new parts to assimilate, and LeBron has missed some games with an ankle injury. The team currently has a negative point differential with Russ on the court; hes shooting very, very badly from 322 percent!even by his standards. On the other hand, hes shooting well from 2-point range, and hes taking fewer 15-footers. LeBron is saying nice things about him, encouraging him to fit out rather than fit in, which is an extremely smart way to work the word fit into a non-fashion-related sentence about Russell Westbrook. L.A. is 5-3, 1.5 games out of first place in the West. Carmelo Anthony has looked great off the bench. Its a long season.

Theres already been time, however, for some surreal moments. Last week, Russ managed to get ejected from a game against his former team, the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Lakers, playing without LeBron, had choked away a 26-point first-half lead against their then-winless opponents. With 1.5 seconds left and the Thunder leading, OKCs Darius Bazley elected to throw down a breakaway dunk rather than dribbling out the clock. Russ, stung by this violation of the protocols of good sportsmanshipnot a code I had ever strongly associated with him, but the heart knows its own sense of honorwent after him, got his second technical, and was tossed. The whole thing felt bizarre. A few times in every NBA season theres a game that makes you think, Is this League Pass or am I dreaming? I remember 1,377 missed 3-pointers. Afterward, Russ described himself as old school, and the amazing thing is hes not even wrong; for all that I tend to view him as an avant-garde art project, there is a very specific sense in which pride, grit, and comprehensive indifference to advanced statistics do make him something of a throwback player. Dennis Rodman was old-school, too, in his way.

And so here we are: Weve been thinking about Russell Westbrook for nine minutes, and Ive already put The Horse Whisperer on my Apple TV watchlist and reversed my understanding of what several words mean. Basketball remains the best. The Lakers play the Thunder again tonight. Anything could happen. But among all the stories unfolding over this young season, dont sleep on the new Russ arc. It could be the defining moment for the most electrically non-defining player of his generation. I wont say Im ready for it, because how could you be ready? But I cant wait.

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Its Time to Talk About Russell Westbrook (Again) - The Ringer

My fathers Republican Party is now the modern-day Confederacy, and Republicans defense of Steve Bannon defying subpoenas this week pretty much proves it. If it keeps moving in the same direction, our American republic may soon be fully transformed into a racist, strongman oligarchy.

The racist and big-money poisons began to take over the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s after the Supreme Court ordered an end to school segregation with Brown v Board, and LBJ and the Democrats embraced the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Medicare Acts.

In aggregate, Johnsons Great Society offended both the nations billionaire oligarchs, who saw Medicare and other programs as socialism, and the White racists who were horrified that theyd now have to share schools, hospitals and polling places with African Americans and other minorities.

Those White racists, particularly in the South where the majority of Americas Black people lived, fled the Democratic Party and flocked instead to the GOP. Richard Nixon saw this as the key to his presidential victory in 1968, openly inviting racists in with his Southern Strategy.

Thus began the transformation of the party founded by Abraham Lincoln.

At the same time, the Libertarian and Objectivist movements found common cause with the anti-communist movement led by the John Birch Society that saw every effort to help working class or poor Americas as a step towards full-blown Soviet-style socialism. They all marched into the GOP.

The mob, as Ayn Rand used to call us American voters, couldnot be trusted any longer to determine who held power in America, these early leaders of the GOP determined, so they worked out ways to get around a multiracial and politically active populace.

The leading conservative light of the era, William F. Buckley, wrote for his National Review magazine an article titled Why The South Must Prevail:

The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote, Buckley wrote. In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.

His article was grounded in a discussion of the jury system, but he couldnt help veering off-course (or on-course):

The central question that emerges is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?

The sobering answer is Yes the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

Itis exactly the philosophy that today animates the new voting laws put into place over the past six months in Florida, Georgia, Texas and multiple other states. Racists and big money seized the GOP, and the GOP then drained 40 years of wealth from the Middle Class.

The merger of racism and big money reached its first peak in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, who openly ran on states rights and the argument that government was the cause, not the solution, to the nations problems. Just leave everything to the morbidly rich and their magical free market and America, Saint Ronnie promised us, would become a paradise. At least for White people.

But it didnt work out that way for White people or anybody else; instead, the top 1 percent of Americans succeeded in grabbing well over $10 trillion from the middle class over the next forty years and have now largely ringfenced their wealth with bought-off Republicans declaring theyll never, ever vote to raise taxes on the morbidly rich.

And the billionaires and racists who seized the GOP are now turning it into something not seen in a major American political party since the Civil War. Its become an anti-American insurgency, along the lines of the Confederacy.

Many of the same wealthy individuals and corporations that brought Reagan to power continue to pour billions into the GOP, an effort that in 2016 brought authoritarian Donald Trump to the White House and threatens to do so again in 3 years.

But this isnot even the GOP of Reagans time: todays GOP has now transformed itself into a full-blown anti-democratic neofascist party.

Itis no longer the business-loving White-middle-class GOP of the 20th century: its now the party of Nazis and the Klan, although theyve turned in their cartoonish swastikas and white robes for red caps and camo.

Which is presenting the funder class in the GOP with a stark decision. Are their tax cuts and deregulation of pollution so important to them that theyll continue to fund a neofascist party in order to keep them? Early signs are not good.

Billionaire-owned rightwing radio and TV are rewriting the history of January 6th and continue spreading Trumps Big Lie about the 2020 election. Rightwing think tanks and billionaire-founded and -funded Astroturf activist groups continue their mischaracterizations and outright lies about President Bidens agenda.

Social media sites continue to use algorithms that drive increasingly extremist views and have become organizing platforms for lies, racism and political actions like intimidating school boards and election officials.

They have been so successful that the majority of Republican voters no longer trust our electoral system and are willing to have Republican-controlled legislatures decide how elections came out rather than voters.

While a small but vocal and credible group of former Republicans from politicians like Jeff Flake and George W. Bush, to GOP operatives like Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, to media figures like Jennifer Rubin and Joe Scarborough are speaking out and doing so in terms often far more blunt than even Democratic politicians, the oligarchs who own the Party are not listening.

The Republican base, meanwhile, is completely in thrall to Trump and he is showing every sign of running and possibly taking over the country using the 12th Amendment trick I was warning of more than a year ago, this time running John Eastmans scheme in 2024.

And if not Trump, there is no shortage of ambitious fascist-leaning Republican politicians in the mold of Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott who are more than willing to stand-in for him with the same strategy.

The stage is thus set now for the final, irrevocable transformation of Eisenhowers Party and American democracy. The turning point will be the 2022 election if Republicans can retake the House and Senate.

Nineteen states have already changed thirty-three voting laws to accommodate Trumps and John Eastmans 6-point-plan to ignore the popular vote and throw the electoral college vote into the House of Representatives to put a Republican loser of the 2024 election into the White House.

This will work if Justice Sam Alito and his rightwing extremist friends on the Supreme Court give the scheme their stamp of approval; Trump lawyer Sydney Powell said this week Alito was prepared to do just that. It is decision time.

Numerous corporations said that theyd stop funding the so-called treason caucus of 140+ Republicans who voted to decertify the 2020 election after the January 6th attempted assassination of the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.

Almost all of those corporations, as Judd Legum and David Sirota regularly document at popular.info and DailyPoster.com, have gone back on that pledge.

Eisenhowers GOP no longer exists: it has been replaced by an authoritarian shell that is home to open racists and billionaire oligarchs who dont want their businesses regulated or taxed. They are willing to end democracy in America to get what they want.

German industrialist Fritz Thyssen famously backed Hitler and lived to regret it, penning an awkward but portentous autobiography titled I Paid Hitler.

Will todays rightwing billionaires and the CEOs of our largest corporations one day be writing similar books? Or, if Trump prevails, will American democracy be so totally wiped out that no future publisher would dare sell such a book?

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How racists and big money transformed the party of Abraham Lincoln into a modern-day Confederacy - Milwaukee Independent

Good Day.. And a Tom Terrific Tuesday to you! A very chilly, gray, and windy day here yesterday, was definitely not conducive to sitting outside and reading But having days like yesterday, make the sun filled days with warmth, even more enjoyable! It was a Blues hockey night last nightAnd Our Blues won again this time 3-0! And I got caught up on all my reading during the day, which left me free to take in the hockey game! Im into wearing a sweatshirt/ hoodie around the house every day now Theres still two more months before I head to my winter home in S. Florida Im sure Ill get there, but, right now I dont know how Ill get there without whining and complaining about the cold weather! Aerosmith greets me this morning with their song: Dream On

Thats what I was doing yesterday, dreaming on, about how it would be nice for the boys in the band to call in sick and leave Gold alone to gain throughout the day And looky there! Thats what Gold did! There was some back and forth movements during the day, but at the end of the day Gold was up $15.40, and closed above the $1,800 level! Silver chimed in to and gained a shiny quarter (25-cents) on the day. Gold closed the day at $1,808.40, and Silver closed the day at $24.65

When I left you yesterday morning the dollar had been bought in the overnight markets, and looked like it was on one of those days, when it makes no sense to anyone with an ounce of brains why traders would buy dollars But as the day went along, the dollar slipped a bit, albeit still ending the day up from Fridays close, but not has high as it was earlier in the day The BBDXY started the day at 1,154.36, and ended the day at 1,155.76 Earlier in the day the BBDXY was 1,156.16 So, the downward move wasnt HUGE, but the dollars rise was stemmed

In the overnight markets The dollar got sold in the overnight markets, again not by a HUGE margin, but sold nonetheless... The BBDXY is trading this morning at 1,154.39, after closing yesterday at 1,155.72.. The Aussie dollar (A$) has climbed above 75-cents this morning, and with the price of Oil trading with a $84 handle, the Russian ruble has dropped below 70 for the first time in two months of Sundays! The ruble trades this morning with a 69 handle... The Norwegian krone appears to be well bid this morning, along with sterling, and kiwi...

Gold is off on the wrong foot in the early trading today, and is down at this moment by $4.76, and Silver is down 19-cents... These are levels that could easily be erased and turned to gains today. We've seen these reversals go both ways so it could happen, especially if the dollar continues to get sold in the U.S. session today... We don't have major data prints today, but the 2nd Tier data prints could push the dollar even lower today...

I read this morning that the two big deficit spending bills that have been hemmed and hawed about in Congress for weeks now, are getting closer to becoming reality... and with that the U.S. 's debt will climb once again by leaps and bounds... I just don't see how traders can live with themselves knowing all this debt is a really bad thing for the dollar, but still buy dollars...

And I've got Egon Von Greyerz of Matterhorn Asset Management with his thoughts this morning on what's going on... "Cargo ships are piling up on the US' west coast, automakers are slashing production amid soaring prices for cars, and even food shortages are starting to rear their head, creating a real possibility of widespread and persistent social unrest in the near future. The world has changed, and it is never going back to normal."

Chuck again... I agree with him 100%, here folks... Got Gold?

Well.. it was bound to happen sooner or later What Im talking about is the Fed/ Cabal/ Cartel chairman, Powell, finally admitting that inflation is a problem and likely to continue to be I took this quote from him off of Bloomberg.com Global supply-chain constraints and shortages that have led to elevated inflation are likely to last longer than previously expected, likely well into next year, Powell said, while adding that it is still the most likely case that as those constraints ease.

Sure, theyre likely to ease once you get off your duff and hike rates! But we all know what will happen if you hike rates enough to combat inflation, dont we? Is Jerome Powell the new Mr. Obvious Since we already knew that inflation was high and it was going to run into next year! If he had only listened to me, and not those other bozos at the Eccles Bldg. that called it Transitory

In another item that was bound to happen sooner or later, we have the SEC proposing rules on cryptocurrencies Lets listen in on the Bloomberg.com article: Wall Streets top watchdog won concessions in a debate between U.S. regulators over how to police stablecoins, clearing a path for the Securities and Exchange Commission to crack down on the $131 billion market.

The Treasury Department and other agencies will specify in a highly-anticipated report -- expected to be published this week -- that the SEC has significant authority over tokens like Tether, said people familiar with the matter. The report will also urge Congress to pass legislation specifying coins should be regulated similarly to bank deposits, one of the people said, asking not to be named because discussions are private.

Chuck again Well, you cant say that I didnt warn you that this was coming down the pike

OK, onward and upward Remember Ayn Rand? The author of Atlas Shrugged, which was required reading in college But back when I went to college (night school) the school was there to teach you to think, use your brain, and think outside the box These days, schools are into teaching your kids that they dont know anything, and that what they will be taught is the truth (not really the truth, just how their cancel culture views things, like 2+2 = whatever you want it to equal!) Ok, I digress I came across this quote from Ayn Rand from Atlas Shrugged, and thought that it applies now to us here in the U.S. than ever before Read the words carefully.. When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothingwhen you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favorswhen you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws dont protect you against them, but protect them against youwhen you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrificeyou may know that your society is doomed.

Ayn Rand; Atlas Shrugged, 1957.

The U.S. Data Cupboard as I told you yesterday, was empty, but today, well see the August print of the Case/ Shiller Home Price Index, and the stupid Consumer Confidence report for the current month These are both 2nd Tier data prints that may or may not weigh on the dollar today... I expect the stupid Consumer Confidence number to drop this month But that might not mean a hill of beans to traders, Or it could... so well have to wait-n-see...

To recap The currencies reversed the dollar buying yesterday, not by much, but reversed it nonetheless. Gold was able to add to its early morning gain and end up $15.40 on the day, to close above the $1,800 level, which recently had been a line in the sand drawn by the price manipulators. The Fed/ Cabal/ Cartel has decided to announce that inflation is running high and it could keep running high into next year And thank you Mr. Obvious! And Ayn Rand visits us in todays Pfennig with some very poignant thoughts Gold is down in the early trading today, along with Silver, but the dollar got sold overnight, so Chuck thinks the selling of Gold this morning could very easily be reversed... We shall see, eh?

For What Its Worth Well, a week or so ago, I told you about the scandal with the Fed/ Cabal/ Cartel members and their stock trading In a case of closing the barn door after the cows are all out, it is now forbidden for these members to owning individual stocks spoiler alert, they can still buy mutual funds, bonds, etc. just not individual stocks.

Heres your snippet: After revelations of several scandals involving potential insider trading within the Federal Reserve have emerged over the past weeks, the agency has banned its officials from trading individual stocks as it scrambles to mitigate a legitimacy crisis and distrust of the public.

Policymakers and senior staff within the Fed are now barred from buying individual securities and will have to adhere to shorter reporting guidelines, according to a press release by the agency. Senior Fed officials will only be allowed to trade diversified assets like mutual funds.

However, the kind of scandal that likely sparked the new rules would still be likely to take place. Last week, The American Prospect revealed that Fed Chair Jerome Powell sold between $1 million and $5 million from an index fund a mutual fund that mirrors the performance of the market just before a large market crash in October of last year. And with rules still allowing top officials to trade mutual funds, the type of trade that precipitated the rule change would still be legal.

Progressive lawmakers and economists have called for Powell to be ousted from the Fed, saying that hes weak on climate issues and regulation of the financial sector. Economist Gerald Epstein wrote for Truthout that Powells financial regime and de-regulation moves have likely exacerbated financial inequality and weakened economic growth that would support the working class.

Chuck again.. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu, Adieu, adieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu. So long, farewell, au revoir, auf wiedersehen forgiveness is needed here to the kids in the Sound of Music, but I wanted to send Jerome Powell off with a song Ahead of time, I know, but I wanted to be the first to day adios amigo, we hardly knew ya!

Market prices 10/26/2021: American Style: A$ .7515, kiwi .7188, C$ .8091, euro 1.1521, sterling 1.3820, Swiss $1.0882, European Style: rand 14.7165, krone 8.3380, SEK 8.5949, forint 314.47, zloty 3.9555, koruna 22.1181, RUB 69.99, yen 113.91, sing 1.3456, HKD 7.7751, INR 74.93, China 6.3842, peso 20.14, BRL 5.6111, BBDXY 1,154.33, Dollar Index 93.73, Oil $84.02, 10-year 1.61%, Silver $24.38, Platinum $1,054.00, Palladium $2,041, Copper 4.51, and Gold... $1,802.97.

Thats it for today I have to wonder if Congress has the cajones to not reup Jerome Powell There may be lots of talk about it, but, Congress has a way of not walking the walk I guess, well see, eh? I didnt get the back to back games with the Kings that the Blues played Saturday and again last night, but it is what it is, eh? And the Blues won the game with their backup goalie pitching a shutout! Things sure are going right for the Blues as they start their season 5-0... My beloved Cardinals named their new manager yesterday, Oliver Marmol, will be the "yes man" for the GM Mozeliak... At least that's how I see it happening... The Cardinals GM has gone power crazy, as if he's a tsar, oligarch... I hope it all works out, but this all looks to me like a disaster waiting to happen... UGH! Styx takes us to the finish line today, with Chris Gaffney's fave song that isn't disco, Come Sail Away... I hope you have a Tom Terrific Tuesday today, and pleae Be Good To Yourself!

See the original post here:

Closing the barn door too late - FXStreet

Good morning, Mission, and welcome to Virus Village, your (somewhat regular) Covid-19 data dump.

Numbers are not falling as fast as we would like but they are going down (which is better than going up). We are not yet at the levels we were at last October before the winter surge.

As reported in the Chron, the usual suspects (aka the experts) now pretty much agree that for the foreseeable future, covid will continue to circulate in the community, although at lower levels thanks to The Vaccine, and is unlikely to cramp our for-profit hospitals.

SF docs are not the only cautious ebullient experts these days. Ashish K. Jha gives a fairly upbeat view, although he notes that last year cases increased 100 percent between September and October. In SF during that time, cases declined approximately 60 percent. This Fall cases and hospitalizations have dropped about 55 percent during the same period

If endemicity works out as predicted, this should benefit those without covid who have been crowded out from care since the pandemic began.

The booster debate may have been a debacle for the nations prominent public health institutions, but others could not be more pleased. The companies got what they wanted, said Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the F.D.A.s vaccine advisory committee.Which is not to say, especially with the holidays approaching, that the elderly and immunocompromised should forego the booster.

Good news may be in short supply these days, but not for billionaires. Since the pandemic began, the combined wealth of the countrys billionaires rose by 70 percent. Some, like celebrity billionaire Elon Musk, did a lot (a lot) better. Although Ayn Rand and acolytes equate uncompunctuous greed with hard work, risk-taking and innovation, etc. it looks like the billionaire class got more than a little help from their friends at the Fed.

Speaking of innovation, where would Big Pharma be without its penchant for boundless blackmail? Corporations like Pfizer didnt rest with the benefit they received from public funds. Not only did they withhold technology to restrict global vaccination, but they also used their monopoly power to extract concessions from desperate governments.

Are prisons covid incubators? Check out these photos from New York Citys Rikers Island.

Scroll down for todays covid numbers.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control data used for the chart lags behind the data supplied from the San Francisco Department of Public Health. As of Oct. 24, DPH reports more than80 percent of all San Francisco residents have received one dose, and 76 percentare completely vaccinated. For those over 12, better than 89 percent have received one dose and 84 percent are fully vaccinated. New vaccinations, though low, keep on truckin. On Oct. 24, the seven-day rolling average of shots per day was 223. For information on where to get vaccinated in and around the Mission, visit ourVaccination Page.

On Oct. 21, DPH reports there were 45 covid hospitalizations,or about5.1 per 100,000 (based on an 874,000 population). Only 10 of those were in ICU. DPH has not reported breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths since Sept. 17. According to the CDC, there were 38 new admissions for the seven days ending Oct. 22 (-11.63 percent from the previous seven days). For the week ending Oct. 22, covid patients accounted for 2.58percentof hospital beds (no change from the previous week) and5.01 percentof ICU beds (-1.38 percent from the previous week). As of Oct. 18, the CDC says that, of more than 189 million vaccinated U.S. residents, 41,127 patients with a covid vaccine breakthrough infection were hospitalized or died (though 26 percent were either aymptomatic or not covid related). Note: 85 percent of the deaths and 66 percent of the non-fatal hospitalizations were among those 65 and older.

The latest report from the federal Department of Health and Human Services shows Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital with 6 covid patients and 7 ICU beds available, while across the Mission, CPMC had 5 covid patients and 5 ICU beds available. Of 59 reported covid patients,30 were at either SFGH or UCSF, with at least 76 ICU beds available among reporting hospitals. The California DPH says on October 23, there were 56 ICU beds available in San Francisco. SFDPH wont say.

Note: DPH uses dated population figures for neighborhoods. Between Aug. 21 and Oct. 20, DPH recorded 334 new cases in the Mission for a rate of 57 new cases per 10,000 residents. Over that period, DPH recorded 407 new cases in Bayview Hunters Point or 107 new cases per 10,000 residents, the only neighborhood with a rate in excess of 100 per 10,000 residents. SOMA, Chinatowna and Tenderloin have rates over 80 per 10,000 residents and another 22 neighborhoods have rates over 50 per 10,000.

On October 17, the 7-day average of daily new cases in the City was 50, or approximately 5.7 new cases per day per 100,000 residents (based on an 874,000 population). The 7-day average case rate among vaccinated residents was 5.1 per 100,000 fully vaccinated residents and for unvaccinated residents 8.5 per unvaccinated 100,000 residents.

As of October 20, White San Franciscans had 464 recorded October infections, or 39.9 percent of October cases; Asians 254 or 21.8 percent, Latinxs 204 or 17.5 percent, Blacks 78or 6.7 percent, Multi-racials 28 or 2.4 percent, Pacific Islanders 10 or .9 percent and Native Americans had 2 recorded infections or .2 percent of the months cases so far.

Between August 21 and October 20, the Mission had a positivity rate of 2 percent. During that time Chinatown had the Citys highest positivity rate at 4.2 percent, Baview Hunters Point 2.8 percent, Castro 1.8 percent, and Glen Park had the Citys lowest rate with 1.1 percent. Chinatown, which did relatively well during 2020, has been hard hit by Delta.

Covid-related deaths in San Francisco have always been among the most ambiguous numbers. Its even worse now as the City no longer provides a definition of what constitutes a covid (or covid-related) death. Four new deaths have been recorded in October bringing the Delta total so far (August October) to 74 and the cumulative covid-related death toll to 650. September and October numbers should be considered less reliable meaning updates are likely. For over a month, DPH has temporarily paused reporting the vaccination status of covid-related deaths.

Covid R Estimation kept its San Francisco R Number at .90 and revised its estimate for the California R number back down to .79. The ensemble slightly lowered its average for the San Francisco R number to 76and its California R Number average to .84.

As of October 20, San Franciscans 0-4 years of age have recorded 34 new cases for 2.9 percent of new cases this month; 5-10: 73 new cases, 6.3 percent, 11-13: 24 new cases, 2.1 percent, 14-17: 20 new cases, 1.7 percent, 18-20:12 new cases, 1 percent, 21-24: 58 new cases, 5 percent, 25-29: 165 new cases 14.2 percent, 30-39: 292 new cases, 25.1 percent, 40-49: 160 new cases, 13.8 percent, 50-59: 141 new cases, 12.1 percent, 60-69: 109 new cases, 9.4 percent, 70-79: 51 new cases, 4.4 percent, 80 +: 24 new cases or 2.1 percent of the months cases so far.

Link:

Covid-19 Tracker: This is it? - Mission Local

Live Theatre Workshop launches the weekend with a new production of DRY POWDER, a brisk and damming commentary on the world of high finance and leveraged buyouts. It's a crash course, if you will, on the savage underbelly of predatory capitalism.

Playwright Sarah Burgess writes an urgent corporate drama propelled by a high-octane dialogue, at once pedantic and crude. Don't expect much in the way of catharsis, given Ms. Burgess's disposition to thrash out a bleak American economy that sees little hope for the future of the average American worker.

It's not all doom and gloom. There's ample humor to go around -- that snarky and cutting sort apropos of the fierce wheeling and dealing on Wall Street.

In DRY POWDER (uninvested capital), Ms. Burgess acknowledges income inequality from the vantage point of elite power brokers, the oft-maligned "one percenters" driving the nation's economic bus to a cliff's edge. As stagnant wages and unemployment take front and center in our political discourse, the playwright amplifies the reality by exposing the sinister forces behind the flailing American manufacturing industry and a crumbling labor market.

The play opens with Rick, the CEO of a New York private equity firm (KMM Capital Management), reeling from a vicious public-relations fallout caused by his lavish engagement party (with elephants, no less) while protesters take to the streets to decry his recent acquisition of a grocery chain that forced hundreds of employees out of work. The New York Times is on top of every development, and his firm's investors are growing uneasy. To say the least, his image has taken a huge hit.

Enter Seth and Jenny, two high-powered assistants with opposing views on practically every business prospect. The former suggests a PR makeover with a proposal to buy out Landmark Luggage, an iconic all-American company with money woes. Seth is well-acquainted with Jeff, Landmark's CEO, and has secured his verbal commitment to sell the company for a bargain price of $491 million. Very attractive, Rick admits; keep the manufacturing jobs in Sacramento and help the company regain its profitability and voila -- Rick's reputation is restored and KMM is a bigger star than ever.

Jenny, on the other hand, sees little value in maudlin attempts at public relations and favors a more disciplined approach that leads to real and measurable profit: Buy Landmark Luggage, outsource production offshore, and target China's growing middle class. She's unconcerned about internal job losses as she aims for the singular goal of making the highest profit possible, ethics be damned. She thinks feelings are unreliable and assures Rick the opprobrium he's worried about is bound to wash over, as public opinion tends to do. Jenny abhors altruism and would do Ayn Rand proud.

Seth and Jenny drive much of the play's trajectory as they compete for Rick's decision and, ultimately, for the company's long-term success. The last piece of this high-strung ensemble is Jeff, the only one (or so it seems) to show a modicum of goodwill as he tries desperately to ensure a contractual clause to keep luggage production in California, keeping his employees on the job. But there lies the rub; Rick is torn between Seth's advice to keep the optics respectable and Jenny's mathematical alternative to slim down and force workers to deal with an honest reality.

With due respect, the rest of the narrative shall remain undisclosed as it needs to be seen to be appreciated. Suffice it to say that Ms. Burgess ought to be glad to have her play well represented by LTW's solid cast. These are fine actors who get the stakes -- that is, life in the top tier is survival of the most ruthless. Actors must find just enough space to dabble in humanity, perfunctory it may be, then set it aside long enough to serve and fulfill one's selfish ambition. It's true even for Jeff, who faces the eventual choice between personal solvency and keeping his workers employed.

Cliff Madison's Rick is feisty and given to fits of rage. He is actually quite lovable when showing a small sign of regard for public good, even though we know better. He claims to be a philanthropist by erecting a school in Bali; in the end, it's a superficial case of noblesse oblige and a desire to be validated in spite of his worst tendencies. Stephen Frankenfeld is an empathetic Seth, Mr. Nice Guy gone slick and savvy. He does elicit our empathy as he struggles to do the right thing for his friend Jeff, but again -- too much money is at stake and he can't afford to disobey his superior. And when he comes around to acknowledge his guilt, he's a little too late. Jeff is played with genuine sensitivity by Tyler Gastelum. We root for him to get what he wants and can't blame him in the end when he fails to meet our expectations. Jeff is Ms. Burgess's liberal foil in a world dominated by allegedly conservative oligarchs.

Lori Hunt's Jenny takes the cake. In a somewhat Brechtian twist, the perceived villain is a victor, as it were, and breaks the fourth wall to address the audience. Jenny appears to have no weakness, which makes for bad drama, and yet Lori Hunt treats her with searing honesty that we just might take her side in spite of our better instincts.

LTW's main stage, usually treated as an arena space, adapts to a more fitting geometrical scenic design with a translucent grid upstage, allowing for a thrust perspective that works rather well. Minimal, movable set pieces are employed effectively to suggest scene changes. Perhaps a simple adherence to the playwright's prescription, but director Sam Rush ought to be commended just the same. His direction paints a nuanced texture that allows actors to drive the pace and shape their appropriate arc. These characters are the last people I'd want to hang out with, but they're a rich source for psychological inquiry, not to mention entertaining as hell to watch.

Photo Credit: Ryan Fagan

DRY POWDER continues its run Friday through Saturday at 7:30 PM and Sunday at 3 PM through November 20, 2021. For tickets, call Live Theatre Workshop at 520-327-4242 or visit: https://www.livetheatreworkshop.org/.

The rest is here:

BWW Review: Wall Street Takes Center Stage at Live Theatre Workshop - Broadway World

Letters to the editor, Oct. 23, 2021

Producers lose while processors gain

I am not sure if our urban readers under or are aware of what has been transpiring in the agricultural industry in recent decades.Specifically the beef industry, where up to 85% of our cattle are processed and controlled by only 4 beef processing companies. This affects everyone, not just the rural communities and businesses that depend on local agriculture.

Look at the mergers and acquisitions that are occurring in other industries such as your local feed/grain coops, implement dealers, banks, health insurance companies, utility companies, gas/petroleum companies, cell phone companies, car dealerships, grocery stores, insurance companies, etc.

How important is it to have healthy competition in these industries. What if only one gas company, grocery store or cell phone company was supplying all the service to your area? No more price checking or negotiating power.

Whether you realize it or not this affects everyone. Look at the beef prices in the grocery store and the record profits the 4 beef processors are making while at the same time, the take home pay continues to decline for our independent cattle ranchers and feeders. Especially when you factor in inflation. Most are operating at or below break even margins.

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Eric Iversen, White River

Clean energy helps veterans

One of the biggest hurdles for veterans is returning to civilian life after serving our country. The legacy of protecting national security is ingrained into the very hearts and minds of former service members. While it may not seem obvious, Americas clean energy industry offers the opportunity for veterans to reintegrate into civilian life while still supporting the mission of national security through energy independence.

Every single day, clean energy brings our nation closer to energy independence, whether it is through the production of wind, solar or hydro-produced renewable energy, or via energy efficiency upgrades that reduce waste, by reducing our need for foreign energy supplies. Moreover, an increased domestic supply of clean energy supports our veterans at home.

Nationally, clean energy hires veterans at a rate over 60% higher than the national average of all industries, providing high-paying, long-lasting careers for those who have proudly served our country.

By reducing greenhouse gas and strengthening Americas energy independence, clean energy is building a brighter, more sustainable future for our country and this carries down to the veterans who help carry out its mission.

Atlas Shrugged had it wrong

In the book Atlas Shrugged a fictitious economy is brought to its knees when rich capitalists running huge businesses go on strike. Their withdrawal from society into a hideaway meant that the brains of how to run an economy were gone, and things started immediately going to hell. When the economy got frazzled enough that the politicians declared complete surrender to the corporate titans, they returned and all was well again.

Ayn Rand had it completely backwards. The pandemic has exposed this clearly. Today we see that in the real world it is the truck drivers, nurses, trade workers, and laborers who are essential to a working capitalist economy. When these workers withold their talents, the gears of capitalism shudder and slow. Meanwhile in this real world, the rich titans of industry spend their time racing for glory and bragging rights in their space rockets, or scheming how to hide their wealth from the tax man. The Pandemic Papers show what the capitalist titans are really doing with their money to hide their profits. The rich corporate bosses racing to the stratosphere in their toy rockets shows that narcissism is a larger impetus for them than any thought of societal

Jeff Jacobsen, Rapid City

Headed toward communism

America passing through socialism on way to communism. Americans are at a critical point of choosing between communism and the freedoms of a representative federal democracy that has made us the most prosperous, generous, strongest, freest and fairest nation on earth. For years many in academia, media and politics have worked to indoctrinate our young people with the idea that socialism is compassionate and makes everyone's outcome in life equal through legislation. People are continually stripped of their rights until all that remains is a tyrannical regime with total control over the people. Just look at moron Joe Biden's mandates on vaccinations and wearing of masks after being vaccinated. His stupidity has brought us sky rocketing fuel, food, timber and steel prices. The moron pays people not to work and then wonders why there is empty store shelves and products not being moved. I didn't vote for President Trump because I liked him. I voted for him because he was the only person i can think of that would stand in the way of a movement designed to tear down and destroy our nation. May God bless President Trump and the United States of America.

Babies and snail darters

T-shirts with 1973 on them, demonstrators shouting things like my body, my choice, mind your own uterus, a sign about bullet shooting vaginas and other such nonsensical slogans etc. was seen and heard as the Womens March headed for the Supreme Court Building just weeks ago.

The abortion issue started when overpopulation alarmists decades ago argued the need for artificial contraception claiming that the population would be so dense that by now each person would barely have one square foot of space to stand on. Birth control didnt go far enough, so the hideousness of the abortionist was elevated in stature, given a nice gown, fine instruments and a sanitized space to work in, which for no rational reason I can think of, that by moving it into in the clinic made it less horrible, acceptable, desirable, and protected by law!

So here we are many years later. On a march defending the same ugly, shameful, sickening practice that was once considered back alley butchery.

Today the birth rate isnt keeping up with the death rate. We will soon be dying out, or to be more specific, committing self inflicted extinction. The Supreme Courts decision that created the legal abortion challenge has been kicked back and forth over the years between the lower courts, and State Legislatures ever since. But there might be a way to unburden the Court and the country of this scourge. Justice Roberts would know how to do it. He was able to find a way to save the Affordable Care Act from death by making health care a tax! In 1973, the same year killing babies became legal, the Snail Darter and field mice had more standing than did human life. Maybe the only way to save babies from death at this moment is for the Court in similar fashion to make them endangered and grant them protection from abortion under the Endangered Species Act of...1973.

Matthew Schmidt, Rapid City

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Letters to the editor, Oct. 23, 2021 | Opinion | rapidcityjournal.com - Rapid City Journal