Thirteen More People to Watch in the Second Post 9/11 Decade

In this post I have continued my series on People to Watch in the Second Post 9/11 Decade.  These are people that I think have a likelihood of shaping events are a strong capacity to influence the development of culture and society over the next ten years after September 11, 2011.  The people outlined in past posts before now are linked and listed below:

My first post on this list had twenty-five names:

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/the-last-year-of-the-9-11-decade-has-begun/

President Barack  Hussein Obama , Josef Ratzinger, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Her Britannic Majesty, Elizabeth, HRH Charles Prince of Wales, David Cameron, Sarah Palin, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Glen Beck,  Hillary Clinton, President Nicolas Sarkozy, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Carl Svanberg, UN Secretary Ban Ki Moon, Hu Jin Tao, Timothy Geithner, Al Franken, Barney Frank, Vladimir Putin,  Bobby Jindal, Bill Richardson, Bill Clinton and Osama Bin Laden

The second portion had fifteen people to watch:

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/fifteen-more-people-to-watch-in-9112011-9112021/

Barons Rothschild, Britney Spears, Carl A. Brasseaux, Philip Lord Norton Baron of Louth, Carlos Slim Helu, Charles Bolden, Taylor Swift, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands,  Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, Kate Middleton,  Catherine Princess of Wales, Princess William of Wales, Princess Catherine, Prince Luís of Orléans-Braganza (born Luís Gastão Maria José Pio Miguel Gabriel Rafael Gonzaga de Orléans e Bragança e Wittelsbach, Ms. Gail J. McGovern, Me,  His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani and Prince William of Wales

The third portion of my list had ten people watch:

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/ten-more-people-to-watch-from-9112011-9112021/

Gaudencio Borbon Cardinal Rosales, Queen Sofia of Spain, Su Graciosa Majestad Sofia la Reina Catolica, Oprah Winfrey, Bill O’Reilly, Julie Ann Yannatta, Vitaly Alexandrovich Lopota, Amy Grant, Ratan N. Tata, Mark Zuckerberg and Jean -Cristophe Niel 

The fourth portion of my list had five people to watch:

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/five-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-911-decade/

Liu Zhijun: 刘志军, King George Tupou V, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Heinz-Otto Peitgen,  Julie Taymor

That means that prior to this  current new  list of thirteen people I have reached fifty-five people. After this post I will have reached sixty-eight people. I am not decided yet as to whether the list will be for a total of 100 or a total of 91 people but clearly I am getting near to the end.  There is no order of priority in the group. It is possible I may do a last post which ranks the top ten who made the list but so far there is no order.  Among those who almost made this installment of the list are:  Justices Stephen Bryer and Antonin Scalia, George Lucas, Charlie Rose, Stephen Spiehlberg, Ted Turner, Lang Lang, Carrie Underwood, Steve Martin, Roger Federer, Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, His Royal Highness Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum ( محمد بن راشد آل مكتوم)Emir of Dubai, and James Earl Carter.

1. Charles Alan Murray (born 1943)  has staked out a place for himself which will be important if the United States of America makes the adjustments it needs and is able to enter a necessary period of constitutional and social readjustment.  He would be the scholar able to delineate a new popular framework for an educational and political white supremacist consensus. This is not his intention given his libertarian ideas. Charles Alan Murray is a  political scientist, author, columnist, and pundit and is  a fellow at the  American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.  He is best known for his controversial book The Bell Curve , co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein in 1994, which discusses the role of IQ in American society. He first became well-known for his Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 in 1984, which discussed the American welfare system.  Murray has also written among other things Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 in 2003. He has written for Commentary Magazine, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and  The New York Times. Murray has received and honorary doctorate from Universidad Francisco Marroquín.

2.Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950)  will play an important role in creating a base of Black scholarly discourse if American renegotiates its constitutional positions as it must.  He serves as the Alphonse FletcherUniversity Professor at Harvard University, where he is director of the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. HenryLouis “Skip” Gates, Jr. is a scholar, writer, editor, literary critic, educator and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and development of academic institutions to study black culture. In 2002, Gates was selected to give theJefferson Lecture, in recognition of his “distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.” The lecture resulted in his 2003 book, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. As the host of the 2006 and 2008 PBS television miniseries African American Lives, Gates explored the genealogy of prominent African Americans. Gates sits on the boards of many notable arts, cultural, and research institutions. .”

3. Professor Ei-ichi Negishi,  is the Japanese Scientist who is the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, he won the prize for a work related to that of two other scientists  for what is described as “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”.   Since winning the Prize he has taken a position with Sony Corporation.  The power of organic chemistry is at the heart of all the complexity of life and this technique allows humans to create many complex chemicals useful in pharmaceuticals, medicine and electronics and Professor Ei-ichi Negishi has ties with Europe, the United States and Japan which will make him more than perfectly placed to realize the potential of these developments. He is a native of the Japanese adventures of largely bad reputation being born in 1935,  in Changchun, China. He is, or at least has been a professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in the United States of America. There he seems to have been associated with research in Process and Reaction Engineering, a project for Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and BioSciences, computational chemistry, Chemical Structure Dynamics and Mechanisms, International Collaboration in Chemistry Between US Investigators and Their Counterparts Abroad, Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities Instrument Development, Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative as well as other objectives supported by specifc grants.

5. Angela Dorothea Merkel(- Kasner) was born 17 July 1954) is the current  Chancellor of Germany. Merkel is the first female to hold that post. In 2007  while German Chancellor she became the second woman to chair the G8, afterMargaret Thatcher.  Merkel was elected to the Bundestag (German Parliament) fromMecklenburg-Vorpommern  and became   the chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2000, and Chairman of the CDU-CSU Christian Social Union (which is the CDU’s Bavarian sister party) parliamentary coalition from 2002 to 2005. Later coallition partners have included the Social Dmocratic Party of Germany and Free Democratic  Party.  This has involved changes in arrangements and varied postsin the world and Europe.  The election of Benedict XVI as Pope and the rise of the German Banks in the Eurozone has made her increasingly important. Her being a woman is significant going a long way to distance her from the last great German grasp at world power. She has carefully felt her way forward in a path full of dangers and traps and doubtless means far more harm than good.

6.General Stanley Allen McChrystal (born August 14, 1954) retired as a four star General following remarks he made about Vice President Joe Biden and others in the Obama administration  which appeared in a Rolling Stone article. General McChrystal was recalled to Washington D.C. where US President Obama accepted his resignation of his commands in Afghanistan and allowed him to retire.  I believe he will become a talking point and symbol for a number of issues related to security, martial culture, respect, media and other matters. Because of his relative youth and good reputation he will be drawn into potential positions of influence if the real transitions we need occur. He may be what I would call a good figure or a bad figure if this happens.  That will largely be moral and political choice which he must make.   His last assignment was as Commander, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A).  He previously served as Director, Join Staff from August 2008 to June 2009 and as Commander, Joint Special Forces Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, where he was credited with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al- Quaeda in Iraq, but also criticized for his alleged role in the cover-up of the Pat Tllman friendly fire incident.  McChrystal was reportedly known for saying and thinking what other military leaders were afraid to, one of the reasons cited for his appointment to lead all forces in Afghanistan, a post he held from June 15, 2009, to June 23, 2010.

7.Danica Sue Patrick (born March 25, 1982) is a racecar driver. She is an athlete, a sex symbol and a businesswoman who manages to make a relaxed and integrated connection to the American public and the racing world.  She is married and lives in Phoenix, Arizona.  She speaks and moves well on camera, can handle interviews well, loves music and played the flute and sang in the choir in High School. With a lot of focus on being sexy, real and representing the girls next door she is no joke at all as a racer. She is the only woman ever to have led in the Indianapolis 500 race.She placed 3rd in the 2009 Indianapolis 500, which was both a personal best for her at the track and the highest finish by a woman in the event’s history  She has  also been successful in Indy racing while making the transition from Indy Car to NASCAR racing. She has made a broad and varied committment thus far to the often much more specialized life of an American auto racing drive. She can be said at this time to be competing in the IndyCar Series, the ARCA, and the Nationwide Series in NASCAR (NASCAR alone is measured by some to be the largest spectator sport in America).  She is a Sports Illustrated multiple issue swimsuit model, has been in numerous other magazines as a model advertising is a major advertising spokeswoman forseveral of her racing sponsors and some other corporations . Patrick was named the Rookie of Year for both the 2005 Indianapolis 500 and the 2005 Indy Car Series. With her win in the 2008 Indy Japan 300, she distinguished herself as the first woman to win an Indy car race. Patrick currently drives the #7 GoDaddy.com Honda /Dalara for Andretti Autosport. In 2010, Patrick began racing in the NASCAR Nationwide Series, driving the #7 GoDaddy.com  Chevrolet Impala for JR Motosports part-time. She also has an equity stake in her #7 team. She has won several races for the pole postion. Danica Sue Patrick competes in a sport where people die. She plays an important role which a few women must play for America to maintain the opportunites for women which are part of our future. It would help if she is able to do all of this and have a healthy baby or two or three. Her struggle with the issues of when to race pregnant is part of her life’s race. She is two years younger than Sarah Fisher who opened some doors for her and has also benefitted from Patrick’s success. There is something basic and primal tha male fans say to Danica which is  part of the kind of female freedom American civilization needs   “Yes, you are small (DSP weighs about 100 pounds) and pretty and I would like to marry or sleep with someone like you and maybe protect them and my babies they were raising. But I can live with the chance you are taking that you will be smashed to death or burnt alive in a sport where all out competitive effort is the norm.”  In the societies at the peak of pre-Roman Celtic cutlure most men were warriors and most women were not but a few queens and princesses fought bare-breasted in the thick of it all. That “effective symbol” allowed them to be more feminist than they could have been otherwise. The role is necessary and nobody plays that role in the USA better than Danica Patrick.  

8.Melinda French Gates (born Melinda Ann French; August 15, 1964) is an American philanthropist and wife of Bill Gates. She is the co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to which the Gates have donated more than $24 billion. Tehy have also attracted a vast amount of other money which most famously incldes a large part of Warren Buffet’s fortune.  She was a former unit manager for several Mocrosoft products such as  Publisher, Microsoft Bob, Encarta, and Expedia. Melinda French Gates was born in Dallas, Texas to Raymond Joseph French, Jr., an engineer, and Elaine Agnes Amerland, a homemaker. She attended St. Monica Catholic School, where she was the top student in her class year. She graduated from Ursuline Academy of Dallas as Valedictorian in 1982. Gates  who was then still French completed her undergraduate work at Duke University earning  a degree in computer science and economics in 1986.  She continued her graduate work at Duke and earned an MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in 1987. She went to work for Microsoft and held many responsible positions  in product development rising to her last position was Microsoft’s General Manager of Information Products. During the latter part of that time she dated and then in 1994, she married Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Shortly thereafter, she left Microsoft to focus on starting  a family and raising her children: daughters Jennifer Katharine Gates (born 1996) and Phoebe Adele Gates (born 2002), and son Rory John Gates (born 1999). Gates served as a member of Duke University’s board of trustees from 1996 to 2003. Melinda Gates  holds a seat on the board of directors of the Washington Post company.

9. Marilyn Vos Savantt was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for five years under “Highest IQ” for both childhood and adult scores. She has since been inducted into the Guinness Hall of Fame.  Marilyn Vos Savantt is married to one of the most extraordinary achievers of our time although his achievement are not of broad use and are somewhat controversial in the expert communities that discuss them.  Her husband is Robert Jarvik, inventor of the Jarvik 7 and Jarvik 2000 artificial hearts. These two extraordinary people  have two children together, Mary and Dennis, and the whole family works together at Jarvik Heart where Marilyn Vos Savantt is an executive. The family live in a sort close association with the next generation included  in Manhattan within a few blocks of each other.  Marilyn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Mary vos Savant and Joseph Mach. This family closeness has not kept her from reaching the outer world, she is a national columnist and author. Since 1986, Marilyn has been writing the “Ask Marilyn” question-and-answer column for Parade, the Sunday magazine distributed by 379 newspapers, with a circulation of 34 million and a readership of 79 million, the largest periodical in the world. Honors  she has received include being  named one of fifty “Women of the New Millennium” by the White House  Vital Voices: Women in Democracy campaign, winning the “Women Making History” award from the National Women’s History Museum and receiving  of honorary Doctorates of Letters.

 10. Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías ;( born July 28, 1954, in Sabaneta, Venezuela) is the President of Venezuela. Time magazine to named him in their list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2005 and 2006. Chavez really stands out because of the way that  he is able to network to create a global network which can be a player in geopolitics. He does not have to lead the coallition but merely to reamin a key player in that coallition to find a path that suits his own goals and ambitions. U.S. State Department, and others, criticize Chávez for allegedhuman rights violations, while supporters point to improvements in constitutional and legal rights,  health care, women’s rights, reucing poverty and the improved treatment of indigenous peoples under his presidency. His political influence in South America – partly due to his government’s use of Venezuela’s oil wealth – and his sometimes strained relationship with the United States endow him with a high geopolitical profile  Whatever political ideology he has developed comes from his carreer as a  military officer during which Hugo Chávez founded a partly military and partly civilian revolutionary movement in the early 1980s to oppose and then overthrow Venezuela’s Punto Fijo system, which he considered corrupt and undemocratic. The movement failed in a 1992 attempted coup d’état against President Carlos Andrez Perez, after the Pérez government ordered the violent repression of protests against spending cuts in a crackdown known as El Caracazo (1989), which saw hundreds killed. Chávez served two years in prison  and then helped transform his movement into something new in 1997  called the Fifth Republic Movement which is a political party and arguably a neo-communist one. He readied this  to participate in the 1988 presidential election, with Chávez its candidate. Chávez promised to bring prosperity to Venezuela’s poor majority, to tackle inequality, and to hold an assembly to create a new constitution to codify a range of new legal rights.  He is now president under this new constitution. There can be bo doubt in my mind that peopl who want to do what I regard as ecil at the expense of ood which the United Sates wants to do will take advantage of Chavez as best they can. Also Venezula already had a nationalized petroleum industry, a history of free elections and a distribtution bureaucracy. Worst of all his power in geopolitical terms largely depends on confrontational stances towards the USA. However, there are many reasons why Chavez could be part of a positive consensus in this hemisphere by my standards. I believe that a policy which brooks no opposition is not really worthy of being called policy and he could be the leader of the opposition in a dynamic Organization of American States in which the USA is naturally dominant. Or he could become part of the complex sydrome that will fairly soon tear this hemisphere significantly to pieces before plunging it into real stagnation. All that remains to be determined.   

11. Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi, Madame Nicolas Sarkozy was born in Turin , Italy.  She is married to Nicolas Sarkozy the President of the French Republic and Ex-Officio Co-Prince of Andorra. In her own right she was a rather famous beauty who left school at 19 to become a model. Besides that she is an heir to her legal father’s fortune along with her sister which is part of the CEAT tire fortune coming from her grandfather Virginio Bruni Tedeschi. The family’s company was sold in the 1970s to Pirelli  although the compny’s mark may still be seen on products of its former subsidiary in India, founded in 1958).  She acknowledges herself to be th biological child of another very wealthy man than her father. The family moved to France in 1975,  and both the parents she grew up with distinguihed themselves with succes in serious highbrow music and they may have left Italy to escape the Red Brigades. She is able to show a long connection  both to her husband’s conservative politics and to his native country.  She willlikely play an important role in defining protocol and social relations if France and America undergo the period of transition that they will need to prosper.  

12.  Air Defense Commander Shigeru Iwasaki  is more or less an invisible man. He has been called in to replace a leader charged with corruption. His name Shigeru calls forth the memories of a more agressive Empire of Japan. He has a powerful base and stronghold at  Fuchu Tokyo and a close administrative relationship with the defense structure abd the Prime Minister of Japan who is a few rungs above him. He is holding this office at a time when North Korea is testing weapons in the Sea of Japan, the USA is troubled and relations between the US and the Philippines are week. His is a post from which great leaders can be pushed forth. He has supervisory responsibility, with Major units of the JASDF are the Air Defense Command, Air Support Command, Air Training Command, Air Development and Test Command, and Air Material Command. The Air Support Command is responsible for direct support of operational forces in rescue, transportation, control, weather monitoring and inspection. The Air Training Command is responsible for basic flying and technical training. The Air Development and Test Command, in addition to overseeing equipment research and development, is also responsible for research and development in such areas as flight medicine. The Air Defense Command has northern, central, and western regional headquarters. All four regional headquarters control surface-to-air missile units of both the ASDF and the GSDF located in their respective areas.

13. Amy Hungerford    Amy Hungerford writes about and teaches contemporary fiction at Yale University. She is a married mother who has written extensively about genocide and literature. This is in a context where  only 18.7 percent of tenured Arts and Sciences faculty at Yale are women. Depite Yale’s conferring comparable numbers of PhDs on men and women. Her new book, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960, is coming out from Princeton University Press in the spring of 2010.  Religious insight both Jewish and Christian and without screaming ignorance of other religions pervadxes her teaching.  That teaching is known worldwide through her popular, and free, online course, The American Novel Since 1945.   She has all the necessary credentials of a serious academic much as Danica Patrick is a real auto racer. There is also something very sexually feminine in her work which is very significant. She is described in a Yale alumni  magazine online story with her breasts ppainfully wollen with milk as she is delayed in getting home. Her novels course may well have reached a few hundred male writers who have checked out of many other venues and made them consider seeking love at a university rahter than peace through suicide.  She is deeply aware of the caried crises and horrors of the modern age although in many ways for more tolerant and open-minded than some others with such insight.  She blogs on the Huffington Post, has given lectures for the Holocaust Museum and has done radio work. Her role in working out the salvation of an America which decides to engage in working out its own salvation could be very significant. Her academic background is that she has Ph.D., English and American Literature, Johns Hopkins University, 1999 and the M.A. Poetry, The Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University, 1993 as well as the B.A./M.A., Political Science and Humanities, with Honors in the Humanities, 1992. She has thought clearly and hard about serious and tragic things and she is able to do the mental work of condensing this into professional academic thought. She knows what the limits are of yale and the Ivy League and is prone to the weaknesses of those limits but not entirely. Somehow she transmits all this as a cute and relatively young mother who makes one want to believe that humanity, civilization, America, love, sex and family can somehow survive.