Brownian Motion

Bigger Thomas Little Jack Horner Average Joe

Given his age--81--Kerkorian may not feel he can wait for the GM turnaround, even if he suspects it's coming.

I'm all for deleting 0-post "members" after a year, but I'm not keen on "cleansing" the formerly active who, for reasons unknown to us, no longer participate.

The "Go-to Girl" Mary Jane Mogen David

Walt Disney ranked ahead of Dwight Eisenhower? Stephen Foster ranked ahead of Richard Nixon? And if you include Frank Lloyd Wright, how can you not also include Andy Warhol?

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By December 3, 2006 Lindsay Lohan Attending AA Meetings: Publicist By REUTERS Filed at 6:50 a.m. ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actress Lindsay Lohan, who has been a frequent target of the tabloids for her partying ways, has begun attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, her publicist said on Friday. ``It's positive and she hopes the press leaves her alone,'' publicist Leslie Sloane-Zelnik said of the 20-year-old film star, whose penchant for parties and nightclubs have made her the focus of tabloid stories portraying the auburn-haired actress as out of control. In July, a producer of the film ``Georgia Rule'' blamed Lohan's ``hard partying'' for a series of late arrivals and absences from the set that her spokeswoman said was due to illness. Sloane-Zelnik on Thursday blasted Lohan's critics in the media, saying they had crossed a line by mocking a heartfelt letter the screen star wrote following director Robert Altman's death last week. Sloane-Zelnik said the note, which one columnist suggested was composed by Lohan on ``one of her legendary party benders'' and contained misspellings and grammatical errors, was instead dashed off by the distraught young actress on a Blackberry, moments after she learned Altman had died. Lohan burst onto Hollywood's radar at the tender age of 11 after she was cast in 1998's Disney movie ``The Parent Trap.'' She went on to star in several Disney productions for cable TV, and has starred in movies ``Freaky Friday'' and ``Mean Girls.'' In a 2005 article in Vanity Fair, she admitted to having an eating disorder and bulimia, then later denied her statements.

Jane Froman Susan Hayward Haywood Henry Henry O. Henry Dance With Me, Henry

Give us a link.

Mark Lane Mark Trail Hansel & Gretel

Ollie Fran Kukla

Click here to return to the browser-optimized version of this page. This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061211/greider Friedman's Cruel Legacy by WILLIAM GREIDER [from the December 11, 2006 issue] Now that the economists and their camp followers have mourned and celebrated the life of Milton Friedman, allow me to kick a little dirt on the icon. Without question, Friedman was the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century, as his admirers claim. What they do not say is that he was also the most destructive public intellectual of our time. Friedman actually failed as a scientific economist but succeeded as a moral philosopher. His greatest scholarly accomplishment--his monetarist theory of how to regulate money and credit--was intellectually flawed at its core and collapsed when the Federal Reserve tried to follow it. The central bank wisely discarded Friedman's money-supply approach before it did more damage. It is now a forgotten relic at the Fed. Friedman's broader argument--that a society should be governed by self-regulating markets instead of big government--did better but also did not lead to the utopia he promoted. His "free market" faith has produced instead the very thing Friedman regularly denounced: a bastardized system of interest-group politics that serves favored sectors of citizens at the expense of many others. Enterprise and markets were indeed set "free" of government regulation, but big government did not go away (it grew bigger). Only now government acts mainly as patron and protector for the largest, most powerful interests--the same ones that demanded their liberation. Instead of serving the broad general welfare, government enables capital and corporations to feed off the taxpayers' money and convert public assets into private profit centers, shielded from the wrath of any citizens trying to object. If that is what Friedman really had in mind, he should have said so. His most profound damage, however, was as a moral philosopher. He championed an ethic of unrelenting, unapologetic self-interest that effectively pushed aside human sympathy. In fact, humans' responsibility to one another has been delegitimized--portrayed as an obstacle to the hardheaded analysis that maximizes returns. Friedman explained: "So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not." Pay no attention to the collateral consequences. Your only obligation is to the bottom line. Friedman's message was highly appealing--he promised people a path to freedom--but it triumphed, ultimately, because it served the powerful forces of capital over labor, economic wealth over social concerns. Government was indeed failing on many fronts, especially inflation, and liberalism had no answer. Friedman's answer was alluringly simple. Get rid of government. People everywhere now understand what Friedman's kind of "freedom" means. America has been brutally coarsened by his success at popularizing this dictum--millions of innocents injured, mutual trust gravely weakened, society demoralized by the hardening terms of life. Most people know in their gut this is wrong but see no easy way to resist it. Friedman's utopia is also drenched in personal corruption. The proliferating scandals in business, finance and government flow directly from his teaching people to go for it and disregard moral qualms. When you tell people in power that their highest purpose in life is to maximize their own returns, there is no limit to how much "good" they will do for the rest of us. I don't recall hearing Friedman express any discomfort. Perhaps he regarded looting and stealing as natural features of capitalism that market forces would eventually correct. This is what the memorials left out: the cruel quality of Friedman's obliviousness. Art Hilgart, a retired industrial economist, recalls hearing Friedman lecture in 1991 and recommend the destruction of Medicare, welfare, the postal system, Social Security and public education. The audience was dumbfounded. Finally, a brave young woman asked what this would mean for poverty. "There is no poverty in America," Friedman instructed. A clear voice arose from the back of hall: "Bullshit!" The audience cheered wildly.

Glenn Miller Herbert Hoover Kate Smith

I have run into this expression half a dozen times in the last two weeks. Does anyone know where it originated?

With all the blather being shoveled in behalf of Friedman, it's important to recognize that his extremely rigid ideology of unfettered markets will hinder and then frustrate attempts to deal with world environmental concerns. Summers mentions global warming, but that concern is but the most immediate; there are plenty of other concerns where a free market outcome will reduce the survival odds of the human race, in some cases dramatically.

Just this past week the Pope reaffirmed the need for celibacy for Catholic clergy. So long as the Church continues to twist human sexuality to its own ends, it will continue to attract a disproportionate number of those who are already either sexually twisted or predisposed to becoming so. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/world/eu...amp;oref=slogin

The Great Liberator By LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS Published: November 19, 2006 Brookline, Mass. IF John Maynard Keynes was the most influential economist of the first half of the 20th century, then Milton Friedman was the most influential economist of the second half. Not so long ago, we were all Keynesians. (“I am a Keynesian,” Richard Nixon famously said in 1971.) Equally, any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites. Mr. Friedman, who died last week at 94, never held elected office but he has had more influence on economic policy as it is practiced around the world today than any other modern figure. I grew up in a family of progressive economists, and Milton Friedman was a devil figure. But over time, as I studied economics myself and as the world evolved, I came to have grudging respect and then great admiration for him and for his ideas. No contemporary economist anywhere on the political spectrum combined Mr. Friedman’s commitment to clarity of thought and argument, to scientifically examining evidence and to identifying policies that will make societies function better. Mr. Friedman is perhaps best known for his views on money and monetary policy. Fierce debates continue on how the Federal Reserve and other central banks should set monetary policy. But the debates take place within the context of nearly total agreement on some basics: Monetary policy can shape an economy more than budgetary policy can; extended high inflation will not lead to prosperity and can lead to lower living standards; policy makers cannot fine-tune their economies as they fluctuate. These insights may seem self-evident — but they were won through a combination of Mr. Friedman’s powerful argument and painful experience. I know. As an undergraduate in the early 1970s, I was taught that everyone other than Milton Friedman and a few other dissidents knew that fiscal policy was of primary importance for stabilizing economies, that the Phillips curve could be exploited to increase employment if only society would tolerate some increase in inflation and that economists would soon be able to tame economic fluctuations through finely calibrated policies. When I started teaching undergraduates a decade later, Mr. Friedman’s heresies had become the orthodoxy. While much of his academic work was directed at monetary policy, Mr. Friedman’s great popular contribution lay elsewhere: in convincing people of the importance of allowing free markets to operate. From what I’ve heard, Milton Friedman’s participation on a government commission on the volunteer military in the late 1960s was a kind of intellectual version of the play “Twelve Angry Men.” Gradually, through force of persistent argument and marshaling of evidence, he brought his fellow commission members around to the previously unthinkable view that both our national security and our broader interest would be best served by a volunteer military. Another example of Mr. Friedman’s influence is the structure of modern financial markets. Today we take it as given that free financial markets shape finance. The dollar fluctuates unhindered against other currencies and there is an entire industry of trading futures and options on interest rates and currencies. At the time Mr. Friedman first proposed flexible exchange rates and open financial markets, it was thought that they would be inherently destabilizing and that governments needed to control the movement of capital across international borders. There are other areas like vouchers for school choice, drug legalization and the abolition of certification requirements for lawyers, doctors and other professionals where Mr. Friedman has not yet and may never carry the day. But even in these areas, the climate of opinion and the nature of policy have shifted because of his powerful arguments. This all would be enough to mark Milton Friedman as a great man. But beyond Milton Friedman the economist, there was Milton Friedman the public philosopher. Ask reformers in any one of the countries behind what we used to call the Iron Curtain where they learned to contemplate alternatives to communism during the closed era before the Berlin Wall fell and they will often tell you about reading Milton Friedman and realizing how different their world could be. Milton Friedman and I probably never voted the same way in any election. To my mind, his thinking gave too little weight to considerations of social justice and was far too cynical about the capacity of collective action to make people better off. I believe that some of the great challenges we face today, like rising inequality and global climate change, require that the free market be tempered instead of venerated. And like any economist, I have my list of areas where I believe Mr. Friedman oversimplified or was simply wrong. Nonetheless, like many others I feel that I have lost a hero — a man whose success demonstrates that great ideas convincingly advanced can change the lives of people around the world. Lawrence H. Summers, a university professor of economics at Harvard, was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration.

Hmmmmm... Do you dream of someday owning the Brooklyn Bridge? Or a perhaps a nice lithograph by Thomas Hart Benton?

Bert Russell Bert Berns Nero fiddles while... George Burns Charles Goodnight Ben Nighthorse Campbell

Happy Caldwell Erskine Caldwell Carl Erskine

Berkeley Breathed J.C. Heard Charles Sawtelle

Is that young Bob Dole?

Terry Garr Gar Alperovitz Greer Garson

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By November 9, 2006 Sid Davis, 90, a Filmmaker of Cautionary Tales for Youth, Dies By MARGALIT FOX Sid Davis, a prolific educational filmmaker of the 1950s and ’60s whose cautionary movies — from “The Dangerous Stranger” to “The Bottle and the Throttle” — sought to terrify an entire generation of young people into straitlaced middle-class obedience, died on Oct. 16 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 90. The cause was lung cancer, his family said. A former Hollywood stand-in for John Wayne, Mr. Davis was considered one of the foremost practitioners of the social-hygiene film. Originally underwritten by Mr. Wayne, Mr. Davis’s work took on a range of subjects that most educational filmmakers considered taboo: sex, drugs, alcohol, rape and molestation. Mr. Davis lost count of all the films he made, but there seem to have been at least 150, perhaps as many as 200. His best-known titles, familiar to legions of baby boomers, include “The Terrible Truth” (about marijuana); “Name Unknown” (juvenile delinquency); “Why Take Chances?” (flying kites in rainstorms and other heedless acts); “Girls Beware” (sex) and “Seduction of the Innocent” (marijuana, barbiturates and general depravity). The movies are squarely in the tradition of cautionary literature for children, whose best-known example is probably “Struwwelpeter,” the German tale of the dreadful fate of a dreadful child, which has been traumatizing young miscreants since the mid-19th-century. Mr. Davis’s films, most live-action, some animated, are 16-millimeter equivalents. They are small mirrors of postwar anxiety in an age when juvenile delinquency was perceived as a looming threat. The Sid Davis universe is fraught with peril. Every transgression — a swig from a bottle, a drag on a cigarette — leads to swift and certain doom, usually in under a half-hour. Among the series of unfortunate events to which Mr. Davis’s young protagonists fall victim are these: abduction, murder, rape, stabbing, robbery at gunpoint, falling off a cliff, suffocating in an abandoned refrigerator, being burned to a crisp, being stuffed into the trunk of a car, being run over, pregnancy, venereal disease, unemployment, time in pool halls, time in prison, myriad auto accidents, heroin addiction (a direct result of smoking marijuana), prostitution (ditto) and bad hair (ditto). Even by the standards of independent filmmaking, Mr. Davis’s budgets were minuscule. He made several of his early pictures for just $1,000 apiece. He directed and photographed most of his work himself, featuring friends, family members and local police officers in the cast. To modern audiences, Mr. Davis’s work can look like high camp. Some of his films have aged strikingly badly, in particular “Boys Beware,” which warns of the dangers of child molestation at the hands of roving, predatory homosexuals. (Mr. Davis played one of them in a brief cameo.) But a few films have artistic merit even now, Rick Prelinger, a historian of nontheatrical films, said in a telephone interview yesterday. Among them, he said, are “Gang Boy,” made with real gang members and notable for its social realism and fantastic dream sequences. He also cited “Age 13,” about a youth growing up poor in Southern California. Both films were directed by Arthur Swerdloff. Sidney Davis was born in Chicago on April 1, 1916, the son of a housepainter and a seamstress. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1920, and as a boy, Sid found work as an extra in Hollywood films. To help support his parents, he dropped out of school in junior high. (Mr. Davis would later make “The Dropout,” cautioning against just such a course of action.) From 1941 to 1952, Mr. Davis, a strapping man of over 6 feet, worked as Mr. Wayne’s stand-in. He became a filmmaker in 1950, after his young daughter, Jill, seemed unimpressed by parental warnings about strangers. Borrowing the money from Mr. Wayne, Mr. Davis made “The Dangerous Stranger,” in which several children accept rides and are never heard from again. His other films include “Vandalism,” “Gossip,” “Too Young to Burn,” “What Made Sammy Speed?,” “Say No to Strangers!,” “ABCs of Walking Wisely,” “Alcohol Is Dynamite” and “Keep Off the Grass.” Mr. Davis’s wife, the former Norma Henkins, whom he married in 1941, died in 1996. He is survived by his companion, Shirley Friesen, and one grandson. Also surviving is Mr. Davis’s daughter, Jill Davis, who as a child was shown being impaled by an errant pair of scissors in “Live and Learn.” Home * World * U.S. * N.Y. / Region * Business * Technology * Science * Health * Sports * Opinion * Arts * Style * Travel * Job Market * Real Estate * Automobiles * Back to Top Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company * Privacy Policy * Search * Corrections * RSS * First Look * Help * Contact Us * Work for Us * Site Map

Savannah Churchill Hard-Hearted Hannah Oh Miss Hannah

The Squirrel's Revenge.