Author: Heather Wagenhals

Joanne P. McCallie

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

Joanne P. McCallieMichigan sports fans are already familiar with MSU head women’s basketball coach Joanne P. McCallie:

Last season, McCallie guided a depleted MSU squad to a 17-12 overall record and its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 1997, as the Spartans earned a No. 8 seed in the East Regional. Despite numerous injuries that left MSU with a core of just six players getting nearly all of the minutes, she led Michigan State to its best Big Ten finish since 1997, as MSU tied for fourth in the league with a 10-6 record.
The Spartans improved by four wins over the previous season?s Big Ten win total – more than any other team in the conference. McCallie, whose three-year record at MSU stands at 46-43, earned her 200th career win Dec. 5, 2002, at Oakland and currently has a career record of 213-116 in 11 seasons as a head coach.
McCallie guided one of the nation?s top shooting teams last season. The Spartans ranked third nationally in three-point field goal percentage (.397), fifth in free throw percentage (.783) and 30th in field goal percentage (.448), becoming one of just four teams to rank nationally in all three shooting categories.
The Spartans also demonstrated a tough side, leading the Big Ten and ranking 11th nationally in rebound margin (+7.7), while ranking second in the league for the second straight year in scoring defense (60.7).

Now they know she’s also a huge fan of Dagny Taggart.
UPDATE: More information about Joanne McCallie and her successes during the past year.

Greenspan on Tax Cuts

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

Writing for WaPo, E.J. Dionne, Jr. (who speaks from the Democrat perspective) has some interesting comments on Alan Greenspan apropo tax cuts:

Leave it to Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to stir the political pot. Theoretically above politics, Greenspan has more influence on the political class than almost any human being, presidents — perhaps — excepted. This week Greenspan did something no Democrat could do: He made Social Security an issue in the 2004 election.
Greenspan hit the front pages and the evening news broadcasts by speaking the unspeakable: Sustaining the tax cuts that President Bush has pushed through will require cuts in Social Security and other entitlement programs.
Democrats who put Social Security on the table are accused of playing politics. No one can accuse Greenspan of being a partisan Democrat. On the contrary, the Fed chairman’s worldview was influenced by the radical libertarian Ayn Rand. And his comments early in Bush’s term helped push the president’s tax cuts through. On Wednesday he told the House Budget Committee that he likes the idea of making them permanent.
Unlike most supporters of the tax cuts, however, Greenspan is willing to be honest about the high price that must be paid to save them. Making loud noises about nickel-and-dime cuts in small domestic programs is not a fiscal policy. Big tax cuts mean big cuts in programs everybody likes.

See the full article for further analysis.

Greenspan on Sensible Economic Policy

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

In a column for WaPo, David Ignatius discusses Alan Greenspan’s views on sensible economic policy, noting his Rand influence in the process:

It’s a delicious irony of Washington that Clinton’s heir in the trade debate is the balding, obscurantist, Ayn Rand-reading chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. He gave a speech last Friday in Omaha that should be required study for every Democrat this year. It expressed the hard fact that escapism isn’t an economic policy.
The Fed chairman began by agreeing with the trade-worriers that intense global competition has brought stress and anxiety. “There is a palpable unease that businesses and jobs are being drained from the United States, with potentially adverse long-run implications for unemployment and the standard of living of the average American,” he said.
Greenspan went on to summarize some of the growth statistics that make economists so confident that the long-term benefits of free trade and open markets outweigh the short-term costs. But he counseled workers that they must have the skills to compete. “By far, the greatest contribution during the past half-century to our average annual real GDP growth of three-quarter percent has been the ideas embodied in both our human and physical capital.” And he warned that if workers don’t get the skills required by a changing economy, the result will be growing inequality of incomes.
Greenspan’s gospel is simple, and backed by hard numbers: “Over the long sweep of American generations and waves of economic change we simply have not experienced a net drain of jobs to advancing technology or to other nations.” That was Clinton’s faith, too, and it gave him the discipline to resist politically popular policies that would have undermined economic growth.
Democrats are right to challenge the poor economic record of the Bush administration, which has squandered many of the gains of the 1990s. But they should base their critique on sound economics and honest advice to America’s working people — not on the false hope that the United States can somehow opt out of a world that is growing more competitive by the day.

See the full article for more details.

In Praise of Wal-Mart

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

ARI op-ed columnist (and industrial psychologist) Ed Locke has written an editorial in defense of Wal-Mart stores:

Wal-Mart is one of the most impressive success stories in the history of business.
Founded some 50 years ago as a single five and dime store in a small Arkansas town, it has grown into a world-wide behemoth under the leadership of its brilliant founder, the late Sam Walton, and his able successors.
It is the largest corporation in America in terms of sales, $245 billion. Wal-Mart has over 4,000 stores worldwide, employs 1.3 million people, and serves 100 million customers per week.
It is quite true that Wal-Mart has been successful in outcompeting other stores which sell the same products, such as toys, clothing, and groceries.
But how has it been able to do this? By discovering new ways of using computer systems and other technology to better manage its inventory and costs and reap the benefits of economy of scale.

Read the full article.

Alan Greenspan Cites Math Gap

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

Federal Reserve chairman (and former Ayn Rand associate) Alan Greenspan warns a Senate committee about the “math gap”:

Alan Greenspan has added a new twist to the ongoing debate on jobs outsourcing. Last week, the U.S. Federal Reserve chairman told the Senate Banking Committee that the real threat to the standard of living in the United States came not from jobs leaving for cheaper Asian locations. The bigger worry, he said, was a drop in U.S. educational standards.
U.S. students ranked 19th in a 1999 study of mathematical ability among eighth-graders in 38 countries. Four years earlier, as fourth-graders, the same cohort of U.S. students had ranked seventh. Students from Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan completed the Top 5 list of 1999. China and India did not participate in the study.
“What will ultimately determine” the “standard of living of this country is the skill of the people,” Greenspan told the Senate committee. “We do something wrong, which obviously people in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan do far better. Teaching in these strange, exotic places seems for some reason to be far better than we can do it.”

Also amusing is Andy Mukherjee’s observation that because of the education system in Singapore, Greenspan’s own career choices might not have been possible in that country.

Friend of America on Norwegian Television

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

Last year, Atlasphere member Fredrik Norman helped found an organization called Norwegian Friends of America. This past Saturday, he was interviewed on a Norwegian talk show about his views on the subject.
From his interview:

Knut Olsen: Is Bush worth dying for?
Fredrik K.R. Norman: Hopefully we won’t have to die because of Bush. Hopefully, we also won’t have to die because of Osama bin Laden, terrorists and tyrants — and that’s what the Americans are trying to save us from.
Knut Olsen: But is he worth fighting for?
Fredrik K.R. Norman: We should fight for ourselves and our own interests, and they are the same as American interests: liberty, democracy and human rights. This, we shall fight for, hopefully together with our allies.
Knut Olsen: Do you personally support Bush’s foreign policy?
Fredrik K.R. Norman: Which parts of Bush’s foreign policy I do or don’t support, I find rather irrelevant…
Knut Olsen: But is it the official stance of the Norwegian Friends of America that you do so?
Fredrik K.R. Norman: We support America’s moral right to defend her interests, because we believe those interests are the same as Norway’s interests. American interests are liberty, democracy and human rights, and those are also Norwegian interests.

Fredrik stayed remarkably cool, articulate, and principled throughout his on-air grilling. Read a transcription of the full interview at FredrikNorman.com. Via Instapundit.

Garmong on the Spirit of Columbia

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

Bob Garmong has written a moving tribute to last year’s Columbia disaster for the ARI MediaLink:

The space program is the condensed essence of this American soul. While most cultures through history have gazed with uncomprehending awe at the vast mysteries of space, NASA brings one mystery after another into the realm of human understanding. While others see only an impossibly long list of insurmountable problems, NASA solves them, one by one. While others dwell in humility at man’s smallness in the face of the universe, NASA proudly extends our command of that universe. While others see heavens filled with jealous gods, NASA sees a source of solutions to earthly problems.
What was lost over the southwestern skies a year ago was more than a single vehicle and its crew, more than a handful of scientific experiments. It was the grandest visible expression of the best within us: the intensely purposeful, heroically disciplined application of the rational mind in the service of man’s life.
To appreciate the deepest meaning of the space program, one need not support any particular approach to space exploration?such as the choice of manned versus unmanned flights, nor even the existence of NASA itself: one can argue, as I do, that space exploration should be run by private companies. But the memory of the fallen astronauts requires of us to remember, and revere, the spirit of Columbia, which is the essence of human greatness.

Read the whole article.

Camille Paglia on Ayn Rand

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

A Salon.com search for “Ayn Rand” yields a real gem ? Camille Paglia answering the question: “You remind me a lot of Ayn Rand. Both of you are foreign-born American writers who are unafraid atheists and brilliantly and fiercely analytical. Do you welcome this comparison? What is your opinion of Ayn Rand?”

Many people have noticed the very real parallels between Ayn Rand and me. (I was born in the United States, however; my mother and all four of my grandparents were born in Italy.) A New Yorker profile of Rand several years ago in fact called her “the Camille Paglia of the 1960s.”
Ayn Rand was the kind of bold female thinker who should immediately have been a centerpiece of women’s studies programs, if the latter were genuinely about women rather than about a clichéd, bleeding-heart, victim-obsessed, liberal ideology that dislikes all concrete female achievement. Like me, Rand believed in personal responsibility and self-transformation as the keys to modern woman’s advance.
Rand’s influence fell on the generation just before mine: In the conformist 1950s, her command to think for yourself was brilliantly energizing. When I was a college student (1964-68), I barely heard of her and didn’t read her, and neither did my friends. Our influences were Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Leslie Fiedler, Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol.
When my first book finally got published in 1990, a major Rand revival was under way. I was asked about her so often at my book signings and lectures that I researched her for the first time. To my astonishment, I found passages in her books that amazingly resemble my own writing: This is certainly due to the fact that we were inspired by the same writers, notably Nietzsche and the High Romantics.
The main differences between us: First, Rand is more of a rationalist, while I have a mystical 1960s bent (I’m interested in astrology, palmistry, ESP, I Ching, etc.). Second, Rand disdains religious belief as childish, while I respect all religions on metaphysical grounds, even though I am an atheist. Third, Rand, like Simone de Beauvoir, is an intellectual of daunting high seriousness, while I think comedy is the sign of a balanced perspective on life. As a culture warrior, I have used humor and satire as the most devastating weapons in my arsenal!

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