Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

Hillary’s History and Politcal Conventions in a Time of Crisis

Posted on August 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

The conventions have had a bit of time to fade into the background. Both campaigns have been unconventional and both candidates experienced something different about their conventions.  In the DNC there was the contention between  Sanders supporters and the Hillary majority that she might have wished was less than it was. In the RNC,  Donald Trump was operating in a situation where Ted Cruz was booed off stage for not endorsing him and where not a single former President spoke to endorse him. Hillary had President Hubby and President Hussein. Trump did not have  have George War Hero Bush, George Texas Rangers Bush,  or Mitt Romney captain of the very loyal GOP block of moderate Mormons.  But if both sides had memorable conventions the most historic was the Democratic National Convention where a woman we all know very well if we know politics was nominated as the candidate for the Presidency of the United States.  I have no wife, no daughter and largely followed the conventions on both sides alone. I have a lot of female relatives and correspondents. But no matter what their political beliefs I would have to expect that most American women felt some kind of identification with Hillary.  It has been a long road here and she has earned the nomination by dint of creating an unequalled record of engagement in the affairs to which it relates in our time. That does not mean I will vote for her. I have not decided whom to vote for but I do want  recognize that as a student radical,  constituent advocacy attorney, First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the United States, United States Senator from New York,     U.S. Secretary of State and Presidential Candidate twice she has paid her dues. She simply cannot be denied that statement — no Democrat has ever had more sweat equity than she has…

She faces a candidate who is running on the plat form of building the Great Wall of the United States and encouraging an immigration policy led by wives for billionaires — although Marla Maples snuck in there somehow…. So we will see.  She is likely to be the next President of the United States of America.  She and her hubby do not make me happy about America’s future but unhappiness is a fairly permanent and pervasive thing for me.  I began my Mon ay with a meeting with the police to reclaim a relatives lost dog who had innocently enough put another relative into medical (really dental care) and then escaped the makeshift tethering the owners had done  as they left for the hospital.  Sunday after the DNC which was yesterday I had a very pleasant dinner with family but there was a potentially serious injury on both the way out and the way home.   Not traffic injuries but unrelated things. My life is full of little problems and medium size problems and big distractions but like most Americans I feel that I have a connection to Presidential politics.  Madame President or President Trump seem the only alternatives likely and Madame President is more likely. I do care and have a few things to say now.

We all have images of what leadership should look like which are not simple portrayals of reality.
To safeguard liberty we must be able to adapt to the changing times.
The icons of our country are precious as are our diverse people. But changes of interpretation have been continuous.
Hillary Clinton a familiar face….

Hillary Clinton has emerged as the first truly serious Presidential nominee by a major party in American history.  Victoria Woodhull’s candidacy in the Equal Rights Party in the nineteenth century was not a joke and has has been followed by many other minor party candidates but none of them had a realistic chance of winning. In addition, Geraldine Ferraro failed spectacularly on her ticket and Sarah Palin first lost with John McCain and then resigned the governorship of Alaska whereas before the national run she had reason to believe that she would be a reasonably successful governor and a fixture in Alaskan and regional politics for years to come.  Both women had some real success and fame after their losing bids, but not enough to say in either case that the run was entirely good for their public and political status. Palin did better in the creation of other opportunities than Feraro. But neither had as much to lose as HRC. Her selfish political reason for running (along with whatever noble and other reasons she has) is that she has done everything else except the VP and the Presidency that would constitute a climb up this ladder. Hillary Rodham Clinton has  a lot of valuable experience and also has a great deal of history to overcome. The Democratic National Convention was her time to try to cement her position leading the charge of the Democrats to regain the White House and also to show she can be an asset on down ballot elections. I think that it is fair to say that it has not gone all that smoothly. Thursday evening was the peak and the key of her efforts to legitimize and secure her position. The precedent had been set by Ivanka Trump introducing her father at the Republican National Convention, Chelsea and her mother would follow suit. But the crucial difference in a daughter introducing her mother was lost on nobody.  The question many were asking was whether a woman’s moment could be an effective reality. I thought that as regards the evening as a whole the jury is still out and may always be out. But Chelsea did a fine job.

Thursday evening Chelsea Clinton looked the best I have ever seen her look on a big stage and she spoke with virtually flawless delivery and presentation as she introduced her mother.  Then there was a video in the hall and a great deal of commentary by people who get paid to comment on most networks.  Bernie Sanders supporters in yellow shorts emblazoned with a dove of peace and the slogan “enough is enough” were much in evidence and some were interviewed.  Almost everyone was respectful of Chelsea and what she had to say.  It was much like Ivanka’s introduction at the Republican National Convention, in that it was hard not to at least wish to allow the speaker in each case a chance to rejoice and be proud of their respective parent.

Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech was another matter. There were several times when chants of “Feel the Bern” had to be drowned out by her supporters chanting “Hill-a-ry” but that was not like a cheer at the right spot — it still disrupted her delivery. That was despite several points in the speech where she made overtures to Sander and his supporters including directly thanking him and adopting his cause. She also attacked Donald Trump a great deal.

 

Wednesday, I did watch the Democratic National Convention during most of the nearly two hours that they were broadcast on broadcast networks in what seems like a later version of primetime than I remember primetime being. But actually the speeches by Tim Kaine and President Obama had little trouble keeping my interest. While I was tired and my nerves were frayed from a hard day I was eager to hear what they had to say. Of course, it bears saying that I had a high level of interest when watching Donald Trump and Ivanka as well as Ben Carson and some others who spoke at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week. Both conventions have been contentious. Both seem to have achieved unity by their respective Wednesday evening speeches…. the contest between the parties can in fact take place.

 

I went out to dinner with an old friend on Tuesday evening and so we both missed the Bill Clinton speech. It is a tense time in the country and in the world as all times are but more so.  The country is at its most partisan, the supremacy of these two parties no matter what is more clear than ever in a year like this if there have been any other years like this. Monday July 25, 2016 the Democrats got their convention started. Most people seemed to agree that the highlight of the evening for the party was the speech given by Michelle Obama, the First Lady of these United States.   The news was not all good. there were scandals with the DNC, which has been hacked and has  leaked emails some say show they acted unfairly in favor of Clinton and against Sanders. Those scandals with the DNC are bound to make some people wonder about what was in the Clinton emails lost from her private server when she was in the State Department. Donald Trump has certainly already tried to make the connection. But regardless of what this means for the long history of apparent improprieties among the Clinton network and its two principal actors there were more direct concerns early on. It seemed clear enough that  not all Sanders supporters were in the mood to forgive and forget or to focus their anger on the hackers or any support the hackers may have received from Donald Trump or Russia. That is not likely to change completely even if it turns out that Russia is launching deliberate attacks on the Democratic party. Some evidence suggests there may be a pattern of such attacks.

They were already annoyed and now some of them are really angry. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had not planned to start the convention with her own public resignation from leadership. But her resignation and the hard work, symbolic gestures, speeches and other activities of the Democratic National Convention do seem to have worked to bring the discordant party together.  We must see the struggle as one aided by the supposed sharp contrast between the parties and candidates. However, when that is said one wants to remind everyone of all the candidates have in common although there is no reason to believe that that matters all that much. This is a season of conflict and competition….

Some will rejoice at the tone of the Hillarious  Democrats, peaceful and Kind compared to some in the GOP. But others will wonder if that is realistic.  Trump is not seeking world war or genocide. He is more alarmed than alrmist. The events around the world kept conspiring to make alarm seem reasonable. Japan had is largest mass killing in over half a century without firearms and a saintly old priest was immolated by ISIS in a French church. The Convention seemed tone deaf to some outsiders.  The message of universal tolerance, equal opportunity and average wonderfulness did not jive well with all the headlines. Of course the Democrats are in executive power that has two very different effects which play out across long periods of time.  First, a certain amount of relevance is assured and more is presumed. It’s almost impossible to be as out of touch as a party out of power can be. On the other hand, the portion of the electorate seeking change is likely to want to change such a party into an out of power party. But, in our current situation –and unlike the way many but not all countries work– the roles of the parties are reversed on the legislative side of things. Dems are out there and GOP holds sway. Both sides experience the two effects listed above in a limited and complicated way…

So the country has a complicated set of signals being sent…. But one of these people is going to be President.  Republicans just had their big political convention a few weeks ago at the longest description and it fades from memory. Hillary had her moment and now the Democrats are having their own chance for the Convention to fade in memory. The press is on for the vote. The election matters and I will return to it. But I do want to look at this moment as well.

 

 

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Posted in 1, family, ISIS, Islam, Islamist modern Jihad, media, Sarah and Todd Palin Family, United States of America, Western civilization, White House

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Clinton’s Campaign: Does She Have Credibility, a Creed and a Contest ?

Posted on July 5, 2016 | 1 comment

Will Secretary and Senator and Former First Lady  Hillary Rodham Clinton be the first female President of the United States? It certainly seems likely. Here you can read my first post when she became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.  Since the very first version of this post came out the Washington Post has run an article saying that her credibility is damaged, that article is here and it may or may not represent political reality. But the contention made here in all versions of this post so far is that there appears to be a small chance that she will be indicted, arrested and charged in the email scandal or in any matter to do with Benghazi. By small of course I mean that there is not a large chance. There appears to be a miniscule chance that Bernie Sanders will mount a successful revolt or set up a powerful third party challenge which would derail her path to the presidency. There is more or less no realistic chance that she will be stopped from being elected except by the victory of Donald Trump as the Republican Nominee over her as the Democratic Nominee in the general election. Almost no chance is not the same as no chance. Any number of things could happen including death of physical impairment. But the odds seem to be better than fifty percents that she will be the next POTUS. Few people have ever had more relevant work or official experience when approaching the highest office in the land. To be a Senator is a lot, to be Secretary of State is a lot, to be First Lady is a lot — to be all three is a staggering degree of experience. Of course I physically stagger more easily than some more physically gifted readers and so I go to that adjective and the related adverb more readily than they might. But if one does not stagger one at least must take notice of the degree to which she embodies tremendous experience. Compared to her:

  1. Donald Trump has never held elected office,
  2. he has never lived in the White House,
  3. he has never lived in the executive mansion of a State,
  4. he has never held an office appointed by a President,
  5. he has never led a sustained policy discussion as Clinton did with healthcare,
  6. he has never been officially invited to sit at the table to negotiate  a formal treaty on behalf of the United States.
To safeguard liberty we must be able to adapt to the changing times.

To safeguard liberty we must be able to adapt to the changing times.

On the other hand they do have some lack of experience in common:

  1. Neither on has held a major post in a religious institution,
  2. neither has served in the military,
  3. neither has served in the workaday world of the intelligence community,
  4. neither has lived on our borders or in border towns for any length of time,
  5. neither speaks Spanish of French well, official languages of our neighbors,
  6.  neither has lived and worked as a citizen in the way business people, missionaries, journalists and  volunteers do every day across this world as they forge an American identity abroad.

Ambassador Stevens was an unusually high ranking victim of violence abroad. In the last few days other Americans have lost their lives around the world but a glimpse into the kinds of decisions he faced is also a glimpse into kinds of decisions that Americans who believe in what they are doing abroad face every day.  The following excerpt is from the recent report on the Benghazi incident:

While the end of the fiscal year funding deadline was looming, the Diplomatic Security Agent in charge at the Embassy in Tripoli was, nonetheless,
concerned about Stevens’ trip to Benghazi. Although his first planned trip to Benghazi in the beginning of August 2012 had to be canceled because of security,14 Stevens was adamant, however, about going in September.15 The Diplomatic Security Agent testified:
Previous to this—to his decisions to going up there, there was— we would meet weekly to discuss the security situation in Libya.…[
T]here was a specific meeting regarding what was happening in Benghazi. In that meeting, we reviewed incidents and  probable causes, what’s initiating it. And a lot of discussion was that it was the conflict or the incidents up there were, you know, local population against local population and that that they weren’t specifically targeting Americans … up there. I expressed my concerns about the incidents that did involve us. And the basic response was that they … were anomalies.

We all have images of what leadership should look like which are not simple portrayals of reality.

We all have images of what leadership should look like which are not simple portrayals of reality.

Romney was a missionary in France during anti-American times, Bill Clinton visited Russia as a student in the Cold War years and there are other connections to tat least the same world Chris Stevens lived in that can be found in other political lives outside the military but not in the lives of Hillary Clinton or Donald trump so far as I know. Both have traveled a great deal. both have been at some risk but the proportion of risk to resources has never been equal in my opinion to the baseline many Americans abroad have experienced every day all of my life.

The other thing that they have in common is access to fame, fortune, privilege and the people in power. This is not an even contest between the two of them but neither does it really matter who has had more of such opportunity. These opportunities have defined both of their lives for a long time. One big difference of course is that Trump like all previous American Presidents is a man and Clinton is a woman. I visited that in the post where her candidacy was all but assured but I am not going to deal with it much in this post.

There are issues related to Clinton that have very little to do with the fact that she is a woman. Trump recently said he just knew very little about her religion and she responded by declaring her self emphatically enough to be a Methodist. My own take on some of the discussion of Clinton’s religion has been posted in this blog before and can be seen here. Of course there may be more to say as time goes on.  One fact about the election of the first Clinton to the Presidency is that the result was likely determined by the most credible third party candidate in presidential politics in my lifetime — Ross Perot. He made it more than possible for Bill Clinton to defeat George Bush Senior. Thus Clinton did not face the kind of intense contest he would have otherwise.  This kind of splitting is well established in British politics and may have been fostered in some way or another by the Rhodes Scholar, Bill Clinton as the biggest take home lesson from his time in Oxford. Some may see Trump as Ross Perot on steroids. He is the third party candidate who became the  candidate of a major party and the main obstacle to Clinton’s election. that would still be true even if Romney or someone becomes a real third party candidate somehow. So how does trump match Clinton on matters of faith?

To see Clinton’s faith in political terms this season means to examine Donald Trump’s faith as well. He seems to be a person, like Clinton, about whom one could say a great many contradictory things based on pretty good evidence. That is not necessarily because he is deceptive or a hypocrite but may be because of the place he comes from in his life context. Interestingly enough he has made it clear that he supports Christmas as a national holiday and seeks to preserve it. That was the narrow subject of my original blog post about Clinton’s faith and the faith of other candidates.    Christmas was of course never my only interest in the religious identity of candidates. I love Christmas very much and the Christian observance of it by this country is a tradition I think worth striving for and worth some sacrifice. However, it is interesting that the ugliest rumors and suspicions about Donald Trump involve the ways in which he reminds people of the NSDAP or Nazis and the Third Reich. While many Christians nothing like the Hitlerites have rallied around Christmas, there is also no doubt that the Nazis made Christmas and especially the control of Christmas tree sales and early focus of political activity.  In further clarification, it is interesting to note that the list of candidates in the Democrats poll I posted in that article did include Biden but did not include Sanders. Even more interesting is that Trump does not appear among the six Republican candidates who appear in the poll I posted and reviewed in terms of the religion of the candidates. Huckabee was the leader in the poll and he was of course a Baptist minister who claimed the same hometown as President William Jefferson Clinton — Hope, Arkansas. So where does that leave the discussion of religion as I saw it back in 2014? It is not a perfectly relevant post in every way  then.  But here is the principal quotation from that blog post as it pertains to understanding Clinton’s faith in very general political terms. The first paragraph below deals with how Americans likely to vote Republican were thinking about Republican candidates in 2014 and how that related to Christmas and it observance by the Christians of this nation . However the remaining paragraphs  relate to what Clinton’s religious identity is likely to be. It is perhaps best to look at the text:

There is a lot of shaking out to do if these numbers mean any thing before any Republican can claim the nomination.  But it does indicate perhaps the streams of thought that are shaping the country as regards finding a religious root for values expressed by America’s  “right” in politics.

What then about the left? Where does the other side of American  political energy come down on our connecting with the roots of Christianity.  Unlike the possible GOP nominees, Hillary Clinton has tended to tower over her challengers for the 2016 Democratic nomination. Some people are saying that candidates like Elizabeth Warren are poised to show explosive growth but it would take a lot of growth to challenge  Clinton in the primary.

Joe Lieberman who ran with Al Gore was not a Christian but a Jew who seemed to tolerate a good deal of public Christmas. Mitt Romney belonged to what most scholars consider to be a post-Christian religion but it is one that celebrates Christmas as an American holiday and the birth festival of Jesus Christ. Many presidents have been devout Christians: Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wilson, John Kennedy and half a dozen others are clearly men who in my opinion must be seen as Christians entirely. Whatever they did not achieve of the Christian ideal is not because they did not adhere to that faith and religion. Richard Nixon was reared as a Quaker and (though many American Quakers seem pretty much to be Christians) Quakers as a whole are not a Christian faith but one which grew up among Christians.  It is hard to say what Nixon was when he was President. With men like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and  a few others it hard to say where they stood in terms of religious classification and identity.

So that brings me to Clinton. She is a favorite enemy of the Christian Right and other religious people in American politics and she may well deserve it. She has a background which is mostly verifiable: Clinton was reared a Methodist Protestant Christian, belonged to a Senate Prayer Group and has spoken at Prayer Breakfasts.  Her profile may seem different to American atheists than to most other people. Here is an atheist site evaluating Clinton’s background and religious values.  It is hard to know how  she would deal with Christmas.

I have just finished observing the Independence Day  holiday in a minimal sort of way. It is always a time that I like to think about what it means to be an American and posts about those thoughts can be seen here. But although those ideas have been posted here they have more often been shared in other places and my thoughts about America have been posted here on other holidays. Those holiday thoughts on Memorial Day have been  here and on Veterans day have been here. While I have in common with Clinton and Trump that I have not a day of service in the military in my past it seems to be the military holidays that most inspire my patriotism. My observation of the Independence Day holiday was not entirely minimal by every standard and I did post quite a few notes and the lyrics of the National Anthem on my Facebook profile but minimal my observance  certainly was  in some measures. Neither Trump nor Clinton were very visible in my own perusal of our nation’s birthday. But one of them will likely be the American Head of State by next Independence Day. Unlike Christmas these holidays are not specifically Christian. I am a Christian and for me Christian prayer is part of these national holidays. I am not sure how the faith of either major candidate informs  their celebration of these days.  But faith and the most gung ho kinds of patriotism are linked by many as can be seen at links here and here. What else does  America expect from a leader and does Clinton have it?

Clinton has a lot of government experience, but the range is not infinite. One of the big achievements of this week has been the placement of the Juno observatory in position as a satellite of Jupiter. Some of the reason many people around the world are interested in this project can be gleaned here.  Neither Clinton nor Trump seems to be the kind to play an extraordinary role in blazing a pioneering trail into space.  These kinds of brave explorations may shape the future or not but they do not seem to define the vision of either Clinton or Trump.

One question many people have about religion is whether or not someone who prays for help should be President. Perhaps prayer means one cannot do the job. But some contend Clinton had private emails because she did not want to disclose the degree to which she could not do her job. That story can be seen here. It is to be noted that this not entirely clear story comes from a publication as biased in favor of Clinton and against Trump as one can get. But the point is here only that Buzz Aldrin, a rocket scientist, astronaut and space planner is a noted public prayer promoter in his own life and not being known for religious acts makes nobody a scientist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in 1, Christianity, France, Independence Day, Religious Holidays, Russia, United States Armed Forces, United States of America, Western civilization, White House

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Presidential Politics and Personal Lives

Posted on August 27, 2015 | Leave a comment

Compared to many of my blog posts this post will have few links. This whole blog is filled with references to my personal life and I often draw connections in my writing between my personal life and whatever political issue I am discussing. You can use search engines on the site to connect this blog post to the rest of my blog. If you do you will not need links and guides to see that my personal life shapes my political views.

I think that to some degree all American voters and all the constituents of the United States of America do much the same thing in terms of making connections and are also influenced. People vote in favor of access to legal abortion in an unrestricted way so they or someone they know can possibly procure and abortion more often than not. People vote against broad legal access to abortion because they don’t want a clinic nearby, they fear their daughters will be sexually mistreated more often in a world where dealing with pregnancy that way is easy or they have lost an unborn child that was their girlfriend or wife’s choice and they felt abused. Some are young women who do not want to encourage irresponsible men to be more irresponsible are to send a message to the broader society that young women do not care about their unborn babies. Not all the pro-life movement is made up of people influenced that way but there are many of them.   The personal connections are complicated and not the core of the speeches, blogs and banners that fuel rallies and movements related to abortion, guns, war, welfare, the minimum wage and many other things.  Those personal stories can be heard but they are not on center stage publicly. This post is partly about how we voter are influenced by our view of our personal lives and how politicians personal lives are involved in their pursuit of office.  Even for those of us not seeking public office many of our personal experiences are shaped by events or trends that make the news and get into political speeches. Journalists and politicians would not be doing their jobs if that were not true. Where we live and what we do for a living determine which sorts of things are most likely to influence us. That is part of what is meant in the old saying that “all politics are local”.

Hurricanes have been a part of life here since before I went to China and since I returned. But some have really shaped my life in a variety of ways.

Hurricanes have been a part of life here since before I went to China and since I returned. But some have really shaped my life in a variety of ways.

 

 

There was a time when thoughts about personal lives of Presidents and candidates for the White House were different than now.  That time most recently was from perhaps when Jimmy Carter was embarrassed by his brother’s antics though the time  when Gary Hart was found with a  woman not his wife in a compromising position and until the Clinton dalliance with intern Monica Lewinski.  People were eager to say in those cases and other that the personal lives and especially the family and sexual lives of political figures were perhaps outside of our concern to some degree and cloaked in some kind of privacy expectations. But Clinton had done a lot of things that got people upset in various part of the political world and among various segments of the electorate and the affair with Monica Lewinski was the thing that almost got him impeached. Since then Elliot Spitzer and the escorts, Anthony Wiener and the sexting, the kissing freshman Congressman from Louisiana named McAllister (more or less) and the  news of Congressmen making homosexual advances in men’s rooms, racial segregationist Strom Thurmond having a mistress of color, the sexual escapades of President John F. Kennedy, Barney Frank consorting with a male escort and other such sexual conduct have been widely agreed to be relevant. In addition the jokes one tells, the clubs one belongs to, one’s mental and physical health over the last half century and whom one may have met at a party are all agreed by almost everyone to be the public’s business if one chooses to run for office.  What a woman tolerated from a mate is also seen as very much a political quality of some kind. So far in this race their seems to be a problem with Hillary Clinton and choices she made in determining what is or is not a personal email. There seems to be an issue with very few voters as to whether the intention of the fourteenth amendment was to so universalize all rights  that it trumped the native clause for Presidents. This must be what Ted Cruz believes even as he challenges the same fourteenth amendment in providing birthright citizenship for many. There seems to be a problem with Joe Biden being too sad about his son Beau’s death to be sure that he can run for President of the United States. But while many personal qualities and experiences have been discussed the personal lives of the candidates have really not yet been at the center of things.

We are most of us never going to run for office but if we do run we will find that in a very real sense we have always been running and everything we have done was part of our political campaign. Every meeting was a political gathering. But I am not writing this post primarily to protest against that trend. or to defend privacy and personal space and limits to public curiosity. This is a post of another kind.

Meeting at Big Woods with Filipino friends who are US citizens now.

Meeting at Big Woods with Filipino friends who are US citizens now.

I am putting together a sort of series of blog posts on presidential politics during this presidential primaries season. In this series I am examining a series of questions and issues related to the election of the President of the United States. In each of these posts I have explored some aspect of the context and significance of the presidential  race and related it to some positions and traits of at least some of the candidates. In this post I am planning to discuss both the personal lives of Presidents and Presidential candidates on the one hand and the personal lives of American citizens and voters. This is the great personal part of politics which most of us at one time or another have wished was not part of the political process at all but which is nonetheless part of the process anyway.

The odd thing about each of our personal lives is that they are so very individual and specific to us. The recent appearance of Donald Trump on the political scene has reminded people that those running for office can take personal offense at many things. Trump has also reminded the world that given the resources and the inclination a political contender can bring the battle of personal insults and disparaging remarks to bear on those who normally deal in inflicting such pain.

Many people seem to relate to this kind of personal belligerence on the part of Donald Trump rather well. In fact throughout the world and across the ages there has always been a tendency to follow leaders who could dish out pain in return for the grievances inflicted upon them. Of course there are many other factors that make up the kind of person most likely to be a leader.

Englissh_corner_China

Three years ago today I had an interview on the phone to try to get disability benefits. I had just had a very traumatic experience on August 7, 2012. Perhaps it was a cousin to a heart attack or perhaps it was a mild heart attack but the truth is that I reached a point where my health was so bad and the pain after getting treatment was so great that I could not function. Now things are different. Not good and maybe not better but different.  I am coming to this election a more completely disenfranchised man in terms of life in general but still on the downward trajectory of many years. But my beliefs are formed not by my narrowing experiences of decay and decline but by other experiences. Each day is part of a whole life and I write and blog about the politics that life has conditioned me to see. I think we all ought to ask which presidential  candidate has the experiences and not just the job experience that will make a good and great president. The truth is that I think millions of Americans are already examining these candidates just that way.

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Four People To Watch in the Second Post 9/11 Decade

Posted on January 17, 2011 | 4 comments

This is the last installment of names in my list of one hundred names of People to Watch in the Second  Post 9/11 Decade. I am glad to have this basic list done and in an uncertain world it is surely possible that this will be the end of the project. However, before September 10, 2011 I hope to put out a ranked list of the Ten Most Watchable People in the Second Post 9/11 Decade. However, there is something a bit more absurd about doing that there is about this already presumptuous project.  That and the post discussing those who almost made this list are extensions from and developments upon the basic project which is simply to finish this list. For me I always finish any significant project with the sense of having made my  life a little more complete my eventual death a little less frightening.  However, I do think the list has some real value in itself and I will set out a  bit more clearly what that value may be at the end of this post.   

My first post on this list appeared in its original version September 11, 2010 and had twenty-five names:

Series Link 1.  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:

SL 2.  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:

SL 3.  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:

SL 4.  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

The fifth post had thirteen  people to watch:

 Charles Alan Murray, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr, Professor Ei-ichi Negishi, Drew Brees, Angela Dorothea Merkel(- Kasner),  General Stanley Allen McChrystal, Danica Sue Patrick, Melinda French Gates (born Melinda Ann French, Marilyn Vos Savantt, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi, Madame Nicolas Sarkozy,  Air Defense Commander Shigeru Iwasaki and Amy Hungerford

 SL 5.

  https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/thirteen-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-911-decade/

My sixth post in this series had eight  people to watch:

Howard Lutnick, His Serene Highness Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco (Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi), Elbert Leander “Burt” Rutan, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i ( سید علی حسینی خامنه ای), Dr.Tracy E. Caldwell – Dyson(Ph.D.),  Lang Lang,  Natalie Portman  ( נטלי פורטמן‎, Natalie Hershlag), John Christopher “Johnny” Depp II

SL 6.

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/eight-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-9-11-decade/

My seventh post added thirteen more people to watch. In it I also published a final decision to make the list one hundred names long.

Joanne “Jo” Rowling, OBE, J. K. Rowling , Nicholas Sparks, Nicholas Charles Sparks, Maria Ioannidou, Μαρία Ιωαννίδου, Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, Дми́трий Анато́льевич Медве́дев, Buzz Aldrin, Dr. (Col. {retired})Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., Dalai Lama,  Zachary Richard, Chett Chiasson, Dr. E. Joseph Savoie, ” ‘Tit Jo’” Savoie 

SL 7. 

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/nine-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-911-decade/

My second to last post had eleven names:

Thomas S. Monson, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,  Bill Ford, William Clay Ford, Jr.,  Michael Fred Phelps, Patriarch Kirill I, or Cyril I Кирилл, Патриарх Московский и всея Руси, born Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev,  Владимир Михайлович Гундяев,   His Suinine Majesty, Carl XVI Gustaf, Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus , General David Howell Petraeus, Commander International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) , Father Adolfo Nicolás Pachón S.J., S.T.D.  , The Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Serena Jameka Williams , Shakira,  Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, Letizia Moratti  née Letizia Brichetto-Arnabold , Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall,Camilla Rosemary née Shand, previously Parker Bowles

SL.8

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/eleven-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-911-decade/

1. Ben Shelley  is the  recently elected President of the Navajo Nation. Born in a Navajo Hogan in Thoreau, New Mexico,  was in the terms of Navajo familial and tribal structure born into To’aheedlinii and for Ts’ah Yisdk’idnii. His maternal grandfather is Ashiihi and his paternal grandfather is Totinii.    In the United States of America there are approximately 275 Indian land administered as Indian reservations (reservations, pueblos, rancherias, communities, etc.). The largest is the Navajo Reservation of some 16 million acres of land in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Many of the smaller reservations are less than 1,000 acres with the smallest less than 100 acres. On each reservation, the local governing authority is the tribal government.  The diversity of these people and the complexity of this system and the need for all of its members to be included in the  Societal and constitutional transformation of the United States is something that is hard to reduce to a few words. But tHe President of the Navajos is someone who must be taken into account in all of this and in lager hemispheric issues as the United States begins to refocus on its own region if it adjusts to survive. Navajo Nation President Shelly graduated at the top of his class from Snowflake High School. Leaving his home and the lands of the Navajo Nation for a time Mr. Shelly pursued higher education in Chicago, Illinois, where he received a  technical degree in business management and certification in heavy equipment mechanics. For more than ten years Mr. Shelly used the knowledge and skills he acquired to operate his own opened and managed his own small business on the Navajo Nation for over a decade.  In tribal politics Mr. Shelly began his public service as a Navajo Nation Council Delegate from Thoreau Chapter. Elected in 1991, he served as a member of the Transportation and Community Development, Economic Development, Intergovernmental Relations, and Budget/Finance Committees.  In mainstream New Mexico  politics Mr. Shelly also served twelve years as a McKinley County Commissioner and Chairman of the McKinley County Democrats. After serving four years as chairman of the Navajo Nation Council Budget and Finance Committee, Mr. Shelly was elected by the Navajo people and sworn into office on January 09, 2007 as the Vice President of the Navajo Nation.He now leads the Navajo People as the Navajo Nation President as he was sworn in on January 11, 2011. I lived and worked for a good part of one winter in and around Thoreau and the nearby parts of Navajoland. I have friends who largely grew up in that area and  the pople are part of novels by Hillerman and Bova and others set in the present and the future.  Issues of religion, language, history, economics and  race all go beyond any easy comment here but Mr. Shelly is poised to play a role in any future restoration and renewal of this nation and probably could speak well with fellow list member Bill Richardson on very important challenges. 

2. Helene Valerie Hayman née Middleweek , Baroness Hayman,  was born 26 March 1949 inWolverhampton  and  is the first, current and only Lord Speaker of the  House of Lords in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. As a member of the Labour Party she was a Member of Parliament from 1974 to 1979/ This was am arguably crucial time in the history of the party which allowed her to be really recognized by the rising “New Labour” of  Blair tenure at the head of Her Majesty’s Government and  for that and other accomplishments she became a Life Peer in 1996. Outside politics, she has been involved in health issues, serving on medical ethics committees and the governing bodies of bodies in the National Health Service and health charities. In 2006, she won the initial election  among the Peers of the House of Lords for the newly created position of  Lord Speaker. She has had to and done well in leading the House through varied reforms and a change of government.  Baroness Heyman has also worked extensively with such outreach programs and communications programs as the Peers in education. Further, she hosted his Holiness Benedict XVI and delivered a historic and well-crafted speech when he visited Westminster Palace last year.  

3. Phyllis Miller Taylor Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Taylor Energy Company LLC since the death of her husband, Patrick F. Taylor, in 2004. In 2005 she was the one and only listed billionaire on the Forbes magazine list who was a citizen and resident of Louisiana. She has fallen off the list in recent years possibly because of philanthropic giving  which has long typified her life.  She has been described even by relatively callous and objective reporters as  ” dedicated”, “compassionate”  and “visionary”. Phyllis M. Taylor has been very active in the realm of philanthropy over the past 25 years. Phyllis Taylor serves as Chairman and President of the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation which is the philanthropic organization she founded with her late husband in 1985.  The most famous achievement of this institution is its promotion of the Taylor Plan/TOPS which helped create educational opportunity for millions inLouisiana where students have been able to attend college because of these plans. Students who excel in secondary education are given money for tuition in college as long as they meet minimum maintenance standards. TOPS  However,  the Foundation she has long worked with also supports law enforcement, the military, and other worthy causes.  In 2008 the Louisiana legislature recognized  The Taylor Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS) and the late Pat Taylor’s contribution to the implementation of the program by changing the “T” in TOPS, an acronym, from “Tuition” to “Taylor.”  The Taylors used their own money as a seed and their own time to nuture the seed  in creating this program making state-paid college tuition available to academicaly qualified students. Twenty-one other states have adopted versions of the “Taylor Plan.”  Phyllis Miller Taylor was born in  Abbeville the town where both my parents and three of my grandparents were born and which is my hometown. This is the Parish seat which is in the heart of Vermilion Parish where I currently live.  Taylor earned a bachelor’s degree at University of Southwestern Louisiana where I earned my bachelor’s degree  and a post-graduate law degree at Tulane University which I twice attended but not where I got my only graduate degree. She clerked for my grandfather the late Louisiana Chief Justice Frank Wynerth Summers and she is my cousin. In this region were are neither very distant cousins nor close cousins but in most of the US today we would be considered distant cousins. We have seen eachother at family reunions and other events but have never been close.  In the tradition of her late husband, her true passion is to ensure that tomorrow’s generation has the opportunity to obtain a college education.  The TOPS program developed by Patrick Taylor and promoted by the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation has been her main preoccupation. This program uses accountability and prior achievement to create much better returns on investment than comparable programs offered by the US government since before and after its founding and establishment as a Louisiana endowment.  Although the details are more obscure than those related to TOPS she is also known to have invested much of her own time, money and energy in rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina.  Still working on these projects after the major media had moved on to other stories, Taylor told an interviewer in regional media  “Katrina has given the Greater New Orleans area a chance to remedy and remold many aspects of the area that would never have been possible otherwise. My concern is that we take advantage of this opportunity and get it right, rather than focus on the time it takes.”  During the worst period Taylor Energy moved its company offices to Lafayette which is the parish bordering on Vermilion. Taylor and several of her employees stayed in Abbeville where she was born and reared as wells as other employees eslewhere in Acadiana. Taylor employees were located temporarily in a three parish area, Vermilion, Lafayette, and Iberia. It was wonderful to stay at the Caldwell in Abbeville for that time and revisit, on an extended basis, my home town.  Discussing that time  in the same interview mentioned above Taylor said, “I was not able to take advantage of all that is available since we had many issues within the Company operations to consider, but I did my best. Many of the Taylor Energy employees explored the area fully and fell in love with the place. For me, that was a great chance for them to learn a bit about where I came from.”

4. Robert De Niro, Jr.  was born August 17, 1943 and is an American actor, director, and producer. His father was a well-respected expressionist painter who was well-educated and whose own father was an Italian-American but whose mother was Irish American. Serious artistic respect runs in the family. This living DeNiro is widely considered one of the greatest actors of his generation and just a day or so before this posting he received the Cecile B. DeMille Award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association ans that is a high ranking lofetime achievement ward presented at the Golden Globes. DeNiro’s first major film role was in 1973’s Bang the Drum Slowly. In 1974, he played the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, where he created a legendary niche for himself with an iconic character in a role that won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He made the first of a number of significant films Martin Scorsese in 1973 when he played in  Mean  Streets.  Later  DeNiro worked with Scorsese  and earned an Academy Award for Best Actor  for his portrayal of Jake LaMotta in the 1980 film, Raging Bull. Other Scorsese films for which he was nominated  but did not win were  Taxi Driver (1976) and  Cape Fear (1991). In addition, he received nominations for his acting in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) and Penny Marshall’s Awakenings (1990). This was one of the many roles he has done which was outside of the urban American tough guy.   Outside of the Oscars he earned four nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy: New York, New York (1977), Midnight Run (1989), Analyze This (1999) and Meet the Parents (2000).  He has made a large number of appearances in film and has succeeded as a director as well as an actor.  However DeNiro makes this list largely because he founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 with Craig Hatkoff and Jane Rosenthal.  This festival is part of Deniro’s identity as a New Yorker and was founded  in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center  and the many faced loss of vitality  and hope in the TriBeCa neighborhood and the rest of  Manhattan. The festival has featured hundreds of films and is making the world more aware of New York’s significant role in world of film. DeNiro  has tied himself into the story with which this seies and this list is intimately tied.

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

Posted on January 15, 2011 | 3 comments

This is the second to last installment of my list of People to Watch in the Second Post 9/11 Decade.  This is really the very most specific list of people of this sort which I could possibly have created in the time I have had available and there are no names on it by accident. After this list portion I will have reached 96 names. These names will have a final cohort of four more names and then the list will be complete at 100 names. 

My first post on this list appeared in its original version September 11, 2010 and had twenty-five names:

Series Link 1.  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:

SL 2.  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:

SL 3.  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:

SL 4.  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

The fifth post had thirteen  people to watch:

 Charles Alan Murray, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr, Professor Ei-ichi Negishi, Drew Brees, Angela Dorothea Merkel(- Kasner),  General Stanley Allen McChrystal, Danica Sue Patrick, Melinda French Gates (born Melinda Ann French, Marilyn Vos Savantt, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi, Madame Nicolas Sarkozy,  Air Defense Commander Shigeru Iwasaki and Amy Hungerford

 SL 5.

  https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/thirteen-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-911-decade/

My sixth post in this series had eight  people to watch:

Howard Lutnick, His Serene Highness Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco (Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi), Elbert Leander “Burt” Rutan, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i ( سید علی حسینی خامنه ای), Dr.Tracy E. Caldwell – Dyson(Ph.D.),  Lang Lang,  Natalie Portman  ( נטלי פורטמן‎, Natalie Hershlag), John Christopher “Johnny” Depp II

SL 6.

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/eight-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-9-11-decade/

My most recent post added thirteen more people to watch. In it I also published a final decision to make the list one hundred names long.

Joanne “Jo” Rowling, OBE, J. K. Rowling , Nicholas Sparks, Nicholas Charles Sparks, Maria Ioannidou, Μαρία Ιωαννίδου, Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, Дми́трий Анато́льевич Медве́дев, Buzz Aldrin, Dr. (Col. {retired})Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., Dalai Lama,  Zachary Richard, Chett Chiasson, Dr. E. Joseph Savoie, ” ‘Tit Jo’” Savoie 

SL 7. 

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/nine-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-911-decade/

This second to last installment of names on the list has eleven names on it.  A brief biographical sketch of each person appears below.

1.Thomas S. Monson, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, its chief living revelator and prophet. He has held this office since 2008. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is often referred to as the LDS Church or Mormon Church. Monson’s presidency is headquartered in the largest city built largely by Mormons — Salt Lake City, Utah. The LDS or Mormon Church reports a worldwide membership of 13,000,000 as of June 25,2007, with over 6.8 million residing outside the United States. It is the fourth largest religion in the United States. According to statistics released by the Church, 47% of its members live in the United States and Canada, 36% in Latin America, and 17% in other parts of the world. This central Mormon Church is not the only Church in Mormonism and has denounced polygamy for historical reasons and there are other communions not in union with Monson which have not done so and also have other differences with Monson’s much larger church.  Church is growing by about 300,000 members per year, worldwide. The Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints seeks to publicize its central belief that Jesus is the Christ. Monson and the LDS assert that Church doctrine revolves around Christ’s atonement as the defining event in world history. Their doctrine is in fact by technical analysis a kind of syncretism of modern (19th century) popular science, varied pagan traditions, Islamic influences in Freemasonry and real study of the Christian and Jewish Scriptures and traditions. This is all recast in terms of American history and archaelogy.  Mormons such as Monson see this  as a restoration of something lost restored through the prophet Joseph Smith; and continued through the voice of succeeding prophets and leaders of the Church and say that doctrine rests upon the principles taught by the Savior during His ministry; relayed through ancient prophets as recorded in scripture; . The doctrines of Christ are believed to be eternal.  Currently Mormonism is finding many ways to influence the world including the Marriot Hotel chain, Glenn Beck and non LDS Mormons such as the fictional Hendricksons of Big Love on HBO and the actual people in the show Sister Wives on TLC. Mormon missionaries are a powerfully active force in the world. Monson was born August 21, 1927 in Salt Lake City, Utah to Mormon American parents  G. Spencer and Gladys Condie Monson. He grew up in a fairly typical Utah Mormon background and lifestyle during that upbringing he received ordination to what Mormons call the priesthood as almost all Mormon young men do. In 1945 Thomas Monson joined the US Naval Reserves.  In the year 1948 he reached three significant milestones, he graduated cum laude from University of Utah, became professionally associated with the Mormon publication the  Deseret News and late in the year on October 7, 1948 he married Frances Beverly Johnson. The Mormons lack the formal distinction between clergy and laity which most Christian communions and many other religions employ and yet resemble the most clerical and organized religions in much of their level of structure and organization. Monson continued an established rising and climbing in this structure as in 1950 he became bishop of Sixth-Seventh Ward of Temple View Stake in Utah. and relatively shortly  thereafter in 1955 June became counselor in stake presidency, Temple View Stake, Utah. 1959–1962.  Among other duties undertaken he served as president of Canadian Mission headquartered in Toronto, Canada and then really reached the upper ranks when he was  ordained an Apostle on October 10, 1963 at age 36.  He became clearly in line to succession to his office in 1985 November 10 Called as Second Counselor to President Ezra Taft Benson. 1994 June 5 Called as Second Counselor to President Howard W. Hunter. 1995 March 12 Called as First Counselor to President Gordon B. Hinckley. 1997. His other personal distinctions include the University of Utah’s Distinguished Alumnus Award., long service as a member of the National Executive Board of Boy Scouts of America and receiving  several distinguished Boy Scouts of America Awards.  Monson served on  President Ronald Reagan’s President’s Task Force for Private Sector Initiatives.  Other awards include: the Minuteman Award from the Utah National Guard, Continuum of Caring Humanitarian Award by Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph Villa.  Distinguished Utahn Award from Salt Lake City and Utah Valley Management Society Chapters.  Distinguished Public Service Award from Washington, D.C. chapter of BYU Management Society and others.

2. Bill Ford, William Clay Ford, Jr. is the Executive Chairman of the  company that bears his name and largely  “put the world on wheels”. He is fulfilling an ancestral legacy as he proceeds  into the 21st century.  It has been notbale in that in recent periods of economic and financial turbulence Chrysler had long ago been recued by the government of the United States , then became part of German carmaker  Daimler Corporation and then got more help recently. General Motors has emerged from its beleaguered past by destroying much of its infrastructure, going into bankruptcy and receiving a huge government bailout. Ford has paddled and navigated its own canoe in all this and has had many succeses unique among the Big Three of American Automakers. “The ongoing success of Ford Motor Company is my life’s work,” Bill Ford has said . “We want to have an even bigger impact in our next 100 years than we did in our first 100.” Mr. Ford joined the Ford Board of Directors in 1988 and has been its chairman since January 1999. He serves as chairman of the board’s Finance Committee and as a member of the Environmental and Public Policy Committee. He also served as chief executive officer of the company from October 2001 to September 2006, when he was named executive chairman. As CEO, Mr. Ford  took the company from a $5.5 billion loss in 2001 to three straight years of profitability. He has described his vision for the company as “I want us to be a company that makes a difference in people’s lives; one that delights its customers, rewards its shareholders and makes the world a better place.To do that we are focused on delivering desirable products, a competitive cost structure and a sustainable business model.” Mr. Ford joined Ford Motor Company in 1979 as a product planning analyst and later held a variety of positions in manufacturing, product development, sales, marketing  and finance.He served on the company’s National Bargaining Team during the 1982 Ford-United Auto Workers labor talks, credited with starting an employee involvement movement that revolutionized the industry .  Investing in himself in 1983 Ford undertook a 12-month course of study as an Alfred P. Sloan fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He came out of these studies and was elected chairman and managing director of Ford Switzerland in 1987.  He has led influentialcommittes and operations for Business Strategy for the Ford Automotive Group in 1990 and his team  set guidelines and made recommendations for  low-volume manufacturing plants in developing countries which have contributed to F0rd’s independent survival. Ford became general manager of Climate Control Division in 1992, and was very successful. He established the company’s first wildlife habitat at a plant location and the first automotive plant in the world to use 25 percent post-consumer materials in all of its plastic parts which contributed to his reputation as someone whocared about the environment. This was increased by his winning in his division the President’s Commission on Environmental Quality Award for effectively making a green change by replacing a hazardous chemical in a production process with water.  Between that assignment and his current post he hled varied important executive posts at Ford.

3. Michael Fred Phelps was born on June 30, 1985 and is an  American swimmer who has, overall, won 16 Olympic medals—six gold and two bronze at Athens in 2004, and eight gold at Beijing in 2008.  Michael Phelps is the son of Fred and Debbie Phelps. He is a third child whose parents had two older daughters, Hilary and Whitney. Michale has been well-known for his love of the Baltimore Ravens football team and he and his family have lived his life in Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. His father, Fred was a state trooper, and his mother Debbie was a middle-school teacher named twice as Maryland’s “Teacher of the Year.” Michael Phelp’s father was a good athlete and so are his two sisters. Michael followed his sisters into swimming at an early age. Hilary was a promising swimmer of the butterfly without reaching national prominence or sticking with it a long=lasting obssessiont. Whitney swam competitively for a much longer time . Sister Whitney tried out for the U.S. Olympic team in 1996 at the age of 15 and Michael was among those in attendance cheering  her on. Whitney didn’t qualifyand  her career was shortened by problems with herniated disks.  In his medal counts achievement Michael Phelps has twice equaled the record eight medals of any type at a single Olympics.  That record was set before his own birth by Soviet gymnast  Alexander Ditayin at the 1980 Moscow Summer Games. His five golds in individual events tied the single Games record set by Eric Heiden in the 1980 Winter Olympics also before Michael was born and it wasequaled by Vitaly Scherbo at the 1992 Summer Games.  Phelps has all to himself the record for the most gold medals won in a single Olympics, his eight at the  2008 Beijing Games surpassed American swimmer Mark Spitz’s seven-gold performance at Munich in 1972. Phelps Olympic medal totalis second only to the 18  Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina won over three Olympics, including nine gold.  Phelps’s other honors include: World Swimmer of the Year Award six times, American Swimmer of the Year Award eight times and  the 2008  Sports Illustrated  Sportsman of the Year award. His medal count is at least fifty-nine medals in major international competition, fifty gold, seven silver, and two bronze including the Olympics, the  World, and the Pan Pacific Championships. . Phelps has founded and largely endowed  the Michael Phelps Foundation, seeking to grow the sport of swimming and promoting healthier lifestyles. Setting in the US Anti-Doping Agency’s “Project Believe” program, Phelps is regularly tested to ensure that his system is clean of performance-enhancing drugs. There have been those who were scandalized by his alleged use of recreational marijauana. Phelps has been a physical specimen of unique capacities, a culturaly sensitive ambassador of his generation of Americans and a workaholic in his sport. What he may turn out to be in the future remains to be seen,

4.Patriarch Kirill I, or Cyril I Кирилл, Патриарх Московский и всея Руси, born Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev,  Владимир Михайлович Гундяев was born in November of 1946 is a Russian Orthodox bishop who has been  Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus‘ and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church since 1 February 2009.  Prior to becoming Patriarch, Kirill was Archbishop (later Metropolitan) of Smolensk and Kaliningrad beginning on 26 December 1984; and also Chairman of the Orthodox Church’s Department for External Church Relations and a permanent member of the Holy Synod beginning in November 1989. The Russian Federation is trying to find its way forward in the post-Soviet era and so is this Church. I will stay away from statistics in this sketch because the great questions are too unresolved. How strong a church, how relevant, how official and how dynamic is entirely unclear. However, the possibility of a mjor role for this patriarch in the emerging order is very real.

5.His Suinine Majesty, Carl XVI Gustaf, Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus was born  April 30, 1946.  King of Sweden  has been King of Sweden since 15 September 1973, when his grandfather Gustaf VI Adolf died. He is the only son of the late  Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Vasterbotten, and  Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. His father Gustaf Adolf was killed in an aeroplane crash on the afternoon of 26 January 1947, at Copenhagen Airport, Denmark. Unlike many other European monarchs who have extensive styles, King Carl Gustaf’s formal and complete style is simply His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden. The King’s heir apparent, upon passage on 1 January 1980 of a new law establishing equal primogeniture (the first such law passed in European history), is  Crown Princess Victoria, the eldest child of the King and his wife,  Queen Silvia. There is always an element of mystery as to the real significance of any king. However for all apperances he is past the prime in the cycle of Monarchy althou this can change. The struggle tosurvive and be relevant relates to the stripping away of powers in the constitution the change which allows females to inherit the throne equally, the simplification of Titles and the decision not to enter the European  system. In all this it is still clear that the king is an important figure who also holds significance for Norway’s future and influences things in Denmark as well as in the larger world. Officially as of about 2007-2008 figures the Swedish economy looked like this:  GDP (purchasing power parity): $338.5 billion . GDP (official exchange rate): $455.3 billion. GDP – real growth rate: 2.7%. GDP – per capita (PPP): $37,500 . GDP – composition by sector: agriculture: 1.5%: industry: 28.8% ; services: 69.7% . The Swedes have a domestic national labor forceof about 4.839 million. Unofficially, this is a great country with tendrils of influence throughout the world that are hard to trace and track.  This King of Sweden will be a factor on the world stage as long as he lives. 

6. General David Howell Petraeus, Commander International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) was born November 7, 1952  and is a United  States Army general who served in other four-star assignments including 10th Commander,  U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) from September 16, 2008, to June 30, 2010, This was the technical peak of his carreer so far as his current post is lower on the charts. He was returining to a new theater in what some might see as a single war since  he had served as Commanding General, Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF-I) from January 26, 2007, to September 16, 2008.  He was confirmed by the Senate on June 30, 2010, as commander of MNF-I where Petraeus oversaw all coalition forces in Iraq. He took over command from temporary commander Lieutenant-General Sir Nick Parker on July 4, 2010. A product of very fine and expensive educational programs that typify the ideal of his generation of generals. Petraeus is a West Pointer with  Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy from which he graduated in 1974 in the top 5% of his class. He improved this impressive start in academic rank to become the  General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College class of 1983.  He subsequently earned an M.P.A.  in 1985 and a Ph. D.  in International Relations in 1987 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at  Princeton University. Petraeus was Assistant Professor of International Relations at the United States Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University. Some news reports have speculated that Petraeus may have interest in running for the presidency partly because he visited a school known for hosting the presidential debates, New Hampshire’s  Saint Anselm College. However, the culture does not seem generaly friendly to generals becoming Presidents of the United States these days and Petraeus has denied such ambitions. he may play a significant role in the transformation of America should constitutional and social transformation occur.  

7.Father Adolfo Nicolás Pachón S.J., S.T.D.  , The Superior General of the Society of Jesus was born April 29, 1936 was born  and is the leader of the Society of Jesus—the Roman Catholic religious order, also known as the Jesuits.  For almost 500 (about 470) years, the Jesuits have made their mark on the world. Across the globe they are known as educators dedicated to “finding God in all things,” exploring wide-ranging cultures and academic fields.  As the largest male religious order of the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus is present in virtually every country in the world, currently organized in roughly 100 Provinces and Regions. In addition to being present to most local churches and cultures, the Society is an international body, and has always sought ways to strengthen our ministries via international collaboration. One form of that collaboration is the close relationship between two Provinces that we call twinning. In addition, in our day the Society has created structures called Conferences which bring together Provinces in major geographical areas so that they might work together more effectively, both within Conferences and among Conferences. Finally, the General Curia in Rome, guided by our Superior General, Most Reverend Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., coordinates the worldwide work of the Society.   Most Reverend Adolfo Nicolás, S.J. is generally addressed as Father General. The position carries the nickname of Black Pope, after his simple black priest’s vestments, as contrasted to the white garb of the Pope. The current Superior General is the Reverend Father Adolfo Nicolas. Father Adolfo Nicolás Pachón, S.J., S.T.D. is a Spanish priest of the Roman Catholic Church. He is the thirtieth and current Superior General of the Society of Jesus.  Adolfo Nicolás was born in Villamuriel de Cerrato, Palencia, and entered the Society of Jesus  or the Jesuits, in 1953 in the novitiate of  Aranjuez.  He studied at the University of Alcalá, there earning his licentiate in  philosophy, until 1960, whence he first traveled to Japan and became familiar with  Japanese language and culture. Nicolás entered Sophia University in Tokyo, where he studied theology, in 1964, and was later ordained to the priesthood on March 17, 1967. From 1968 to 1971, he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, earning their doctorate in theology. Returning to Japan, Fr. Nicolás became professor of systematic theology at his alma mater of Sophia University, teaching there for the next thirty years. He was Director of the East Asian Pastoral Institute at the Ateneo de Manila University, in Quezon City, Philippines, from 1978 to 1984. It was during those years that my father and I studied in a special intensive scripture residential seminar called “Scripture Ventures”  which is not in the official registrar’s definition of an EAPI or Ateneo de Manila course but which had a number of significant scholars and faculty from both of those institutions. I also knew many Jesuits in that relatively small world of the Province of Manila. I certainly heard  of Fr. Nicolás Pachón who is fluent in English and conversant at least  to some degree in at least one Filipino dialect. However, I do not believe that I ever met this man in those years when we were moving in close proximity. If that is incorrect I apologize. He  moved on to Japan not so far off from the time my family temporarily dug up all its roots in the Philippines, Fr.  Nicolás  and later served as rector of the theologate in Tokyo from 1991 to 1993, when he was appointed Provincial of the Jesuit Province of Japan. Nicolás remained in this post until 1999, and then spent four years doing pastoral work among poor immigrants in Tokyo.

8. Serena Jameka Williams  was born September 26, 1981 is an American professional tennis player who has been one of the most remarkable successes in professional athletics in recent decades. She is made more remarkable by being a black professional tennis player, part of a duo of sisters who have achieved a great deal and being an American where tennis has great media appeal. Serena Williams is former World No.1 and at this posting is ranked World No. 4 in singles and No. 5 in doubles with sister Venus Williams. She has been ranked first in the world in singles tennis by the Women’s Tennis Association on five separate occasions. Despite numerous injuries she is considered to be one of the greatest women’s tennis players of all-time.  Serena has won 27 Grand Slam titles places her ninth on the all-time list: 13 in singles, 12 in women’s doubles, and 2 in mixed doubles. She is the most recent player of either sex to have held all four Grand Slam singles titles simultaneously.Only four other women have ever done so.  Williams has won two Olympic gold medals in women’s doubles.  She has won more career prize money than any other female athlete in history.  Serena has played older sister Venus in 23 professional matches since 1998, with Serena winning 13 of these matches and eight of these were Grand Slam finals, with Serena winning six times. Beginning with the  2002 French Open, they played each other in four consecutive Grand Slam singles finals, which was the first time in the open era that the same two players had contested four consecutive Grand Slam finals. The pair have won 12 Grand Slam doubles titles together. Serena has also been a successful businesswoman. However, part of the story of Serena Williams is her resentment of the differing kinds of attention available to players like the Russian-American Maria Sharapova whose delicate white beauty joins with her athletic skill to create a different appeal on the court to many tennis fans. Still young enough to be a voice in a possibly changing America, Serena Williams also can bring a sense of family, business and black politics in an America which may find it necessary to reassert some more tradtional city club and country club points of view in much of the world including parts of tennis.  

9. Shakira,  Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll was born February 2, 1977) and  is a very well established Colombian singer, songwriter, musician and dancer  who is continuously emerging as a greater factor as a  record producer and philanthropist. Shawkira emerged in the music scene of Colombia and Latin America early in the 1990s. Shakira has won many important industry awards incluing: two Grammy Awards, seven Latin Grammy Awards and   twelve Billboard Latin Music Awards. Her crical appeals has been demonstrated in that she has been nomited for at least one  Golden Globe award. Commericaly, her success is huge: Shakira is  the highest-selling Colombian artist of all time, and the second most successful female Latin singer after Gloria Estefan, with over 60 million albums sold  worldwide.. Shakira’s U.S. album sales are just below 10 million.   These things alone would show alone with a lot of anectdotal evidence that she has managed to bridge the chasm that separates most of the  Americas from access to the success of the media industries of “American” pop culture, But there is more evidence: Shakira is the only South American recording artist to reach the number-one spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, the Australian ARIA chart, and the UK Singles Chart.  Shakira was ranked the 76th artist of the 2000–10 artist of the decade by Billboard.  Shakira is to be given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as well.   Born  in Baranquilla, Colombia, and raised in self-described poverty but with certain humane advantages Shakira began to perfrom in school sponsored shows.  Her school offered venues for her as a live performer, singing rock and roll,  as well as pieces with Latin and Middle Eastern influences with her own original twist on belly dancing. Shakira is a native Spanish speaker and also speaks fluent English and Portuguese.  She had a period of commercial failure in the locla recording industry until she was able to gain some control over production and the her success began. Her third album was the first success she had in sales as in  1995 she released Pies Descalzos,  making her a huge success in Latin America and Spain then with her 1998 album ¿Dónde Están los Ladrones?  she earned the respect of music critics throughout the Spanish Speaking world and beyond. Since then her works have included the successful US releas of music video “Whenever, Whenever” 2001 and the accompnying album in English Laundry Service, later in the middle of the decade two more albums  called Fijacion Oral Vol. 1 and  Oral Fixation Vol. 2. were very successful including  the best selling song of the 2000s, “Hips Don’t Lie”.  In the fall of 2009, Shakira released her sixth album She Wolf worldwide. Shakira is positioned to help forge a new cultural consensus as America digs into its full self and find a new way forward.

10.  Letizia Moratti  néeLetizia Brichetto-Arnabold  and is Mayor of Milan  and therefore also Chairman of the Board of Directors of La Scala  Moratti was born  in Milan. She is married to the oil magnate Gianmarco Moratti  (brother of Massimo Moratti and has two children, Gabriele and Giada. Her carreer as a businesswoman who has worked ininsurance and telecommunications.  Moratti was president of the Italian state television company RAI from 1994 to 1996.  In 1999-2000 she undertook positions which made her responsible for the growth of Rupert Murdoch’s group in Europe, these of course are the companies that are related to the Fox networks in the United States.  Serving as Education minister in the second and third Berlusconi cabinets from 2001 to 2006 she emerged as a powerful political influence and figure in Italy.  She ran as a candidate for Mayor of Milan in the 2006 municipal election as the candidate for a party like structure called  “House of Freedoms”. She won the election, with over 52% of votes. The Mayor of Milan is the ex-officio Chairman of the Board of the La Scala Opera and helps to direct its powerful cultural and academic institutions. her experience in media and culture as education make her a formidable player in that worldwide culture game in which she is entitled to be a major player. She is close to her father who is a fromer disabled prisoner of war in world War II. She has been accused of ties to facist elements despite seeking to build bridges across politics and also renounceing Nazism and Fascism formally on several occasions. In a possible world wide reaction to constitutional changes in the United States of America she could be a mjor player indeed.  

11.Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall,Camilla Rosemary née Shand, previously Parker Bowles was born on  July 17, 1947) is the second wife of Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and is the current holder of the titles Princess of Wales, Duchess of Cornwall, Duchess of Rothesay and Countess of Chester. Although Camilla automatically became the Princess of Wales upon her marriage to Prince Charles, she prefers to be known by the lesser title of Duchess of Cornwall, avoiding confusion with the Prince of Wales’ first wife, Diana, Princess of Wales.”  She uses this title everywhere except  Scotland, where she is styled Duchess of Rothesay.  She carries a great deal of baggage with her and  in some ways is a symbol in which themes of milennia, centuries, decades, years and minutes always form very convoluted knots. She is known as one who however culpable or inculpable made life very difficult fro the mother of the likely future King of the United Kingdom of England and Scotland. There is for example in my mind no doubt as to the privilege of Christian Kings to practice polygamy but her own story would make a very tortured mess of that doctrine. There is little doubt that in the modern world in the West people would cheeer to see old lovers end up together after suffering reversals and think it noble. But do they like that somehow it ties to a tortured soul’s life and a princess dead in traffic abroad? No matter what she does or chooses hers will be a troubles image and tales for many. What makes her more platable than otherwise is that she seems to know how diificult it all can be to take and to know what she did for duty, what for love, what for convention. It is a path she seems to walk with some care and dignity in times that are darkening and troubled everywhere as regards marriage and family.

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

Posted on January 4, 2011 | 5 comments

I have decided to  make this a one hundred person list. That decision to go with 100 instead of 91 is one of the remaining big decisions  in this little project. There are still of course all of the decisions related to deciding who will be on the list.

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

The fifth post had thirteen  people to watch:

 Charles Alan Murray, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr, Professor Ei-ichi Negishi, Drew Brees, Angela Dorothea Merkel(- Kasner),  General Stanley Allen McChrystal, Danica Sue Patrick, Melinda French Gates (born Melinda Ann French, Marilyn Vos Savantt, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi, Madame Nicolas Sarkozy,  Air Defense Commander Shigeru Iwasaki and Amy Hungerford 

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/thirteen-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-911-decade/

My most recent post in this series had  eight  people to watch:

Howard Lutnick, His Serene Highness Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco (Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi), Elbert Leander “Burt” Rutan, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i ( سید علی حسینی خامنه ای), Dr.Tracy E. Caldwell – Dyson(Ph.D.),  Lang Lang,  Natalie Portman  ( נטלי פורטמן‎, Natalie Hershlag), John Christopher “Johnny” Depp II

https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/eight-more-people-to-watch-in-the-second-post-9-11-decade/

Then comes this post of nine people. That should bring my new total to eighty-seven. Twenty-five and fifteen brought us to forty. Ten more got us to fifty.  Five more to fifty-five. Thirteen more got us to sixty-eight. Eight after that came to seventy six and now nine brings us to eighty-five. The advantages to this odd system are actualy numerous. Given that they are embedded in this blog these posts have the advantage of all being of different numbers and so being easier to keep track of in this context.    I have now decided on one hundred people for the list. So that means I have fifteen people and probably two more posts listing those named left in the series. Probably the total will get uneven again. Eleven and four are the most equaly paired numbers for which I have not used at least one of the paired numbers in a previous post.  Then I hope to do a post on the top ten as the ones so far are in no particular order.  After that, assuming I am not derailed,  then before September get here I will do a post on those who almost made it and a post summarizing the list and its purpose. 

1.  Joanne “Jo” Rowling, OBE, J. K. Rowling  was born 31 July 1965  and is a British author best known as the creator and writer of the Harry Potter series of books series, which came to her as project concept on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The original book series has ended and like some others on this loist she may seem to be someone who already had a great influence and despite her relative youth is on the way down as such things go.  However, she is on this list legitimately for the present and the future. To attest to this I note that in October 2010, J. K. Rowling was named ‘Most Influential Woman in Britain’ by a group of important magazine editors.  Her philanthropic contributions include supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Slerosis Society of Great Britain, and Lumos (formerly the Children’s High Level Group).  She also has close ties to some young performing artists who are likely to shape their field in the near future to some degree. These include Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson who  were leading actors in  popular Harry Potter series of films, in which Rowling had overall  script approval and served as a producer on the final instalment as well as developing friendships with cast and crew to some real degree. The Potter books have  won significant awardsand sold more than 400 million copies. . Rowling was living on British welfare benefits before writing her way to multi-millionaire status and an Order of the British Empire. As of March 2010,  Forbes  listed Rowling’s net worth at $1 billion.  The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List  ranked her as the twelfth richest woman in Great Britain. Forbes  also ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007  and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for  2007  Person of the Year. She has promoted advanced literacy, the survival and popularity of the novel and mythological and flokloric literacy among many other schievements.  

2. Nicholas Sparks, Nicholas Charles Sparks  was born December 31, 1965  in Omaha, Nebraska and is an internationally-bestselling American novelist and screenwriter. Sparks has published 17 novels, with themes that include Christian faith, young love, marriage, romance,  tragedy and fate.  Six have been adapted to film, including  Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember,  The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe,  Dear John and The Last Song.  Nicholas Sparks makes this list because of the seamless blend of a compelling commerical impact, compelling popular art, a dynamic and integrated personal and family life and his ties to sports, Roman Catholic and educational communities.  NicholasSparks  was born into the family of Patrick Michael Sparks who was a practicing professor and Jill Emma Marie (née Thoene) Sparks who was  a committed and an  optometrist’s assistant. He was the middle of three children, with an older brother Michael Earl “Micah” Sparks (1964–) and a younger sister, Danielle “Dana” Sparks (1966–2000), who died at the age of 33. Sparks has said that she is the inspiration for the main character in his novel A Walk to Remember. Sparks was raised Roman Catholic and is of English, German, Irish and Czech ancestry. While his family traveled for his father’s studies and early teaching gigs they settled in one place for his  years at Bella Vista High where he graduated  as valedictorian in 1984. He enrolled at the University of Notre Dame with a full track and field scholarship. In his freshman year, his team set a record for the 4 x 800 relay.  The world of Track has remained a huge part of his life as his website bio says of a later period in his life:  “That same summer, my oldest son, Miles, a seventh grader, began competing in track and field. I went out to the local public high school, where I’d been told they’d installed an all-weather track. I took a look, realizing it was nothing more than an oval, asphalt road. There wasn’t a chance kids could practice on it without getting injured, so my wife and I decided to donate an all-weather tartan track, one that would foster a love of running and appreciation of an active lifestyle.I also decided to begin coaching the local high school track team, focusing on the 400m and 800m, for competition at the high school and Jr. Olympic level. Little did I know how much a part of life coaching would become over the next few years.”  Sparks  did some writing of vaired kinds while at Notre Dame but majored in business finance and graduated with honors in 1988. He also met his future wife that year, Cathy Cote while they were both on spring break. They married on July 22, 1989 and moved to Sacramento, California. They are deeply tied to the Cahloc faith as he has said “I was raised Catholic, baptized, confirmed, Sunday School, went to Notre Dame, go to confession, go to church weekly. My oldest son is an altar boy. All my children go to the Catholic school. My wife Catherine was raised Catholic. We were married in the Catholic Church.”  The filming of his movies and the support the films have gotten from Sparks have made him a huge new factor in popular culture.  In June 2004, the film version of  The Notebook was released, starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling. It was a huge success,  he himself has called it “an instant movie classic, and a perfect companion to the book”.  That first published novel was an instant publishing success. It followed an unpublished novel and a book which he had collaborated on and which was published and which seems to be related to  the spirituality of the Lakota Sioux people.  The films sold his books and still do and more are being made into film as I type this. Discussing the period after the first movie Sparks writes:  “In August 2004, I was surprised when three of my novels, The Notebook, The Wedding, and Nights in Rodanthe, all appeared together on the New York Times paperback bestseller list”.  Sparks plowed that financial boom into lots more successful writing but also into sport and do-goodism. “Around that time, I was also asked to serve on the USA Track and Field Foundation Board of Directors, an honor which I eagerly accepted”. He coached New Bern High School to indoor and outdoor state championships. This and writing constant bestsellers was not  all he did.  He writes: ” Autumn 2005, brought yet another undertaking when my wife and I sponsored a family from New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The family – one member, a son, was a young athlete I had met the previous summer named Karjuan Williams – moved to New Bern, and my wife and I spent a lot of time and energy establishing them in a new household”. Early in 2006, Sparks and his wife together with Tom McLaughlin founded The Epiphany School. The school is a Roman Catholic prep school with a difference. “My intention is that, by the time every student has graduated, he or she will have visited 26 countries on six continents, whether it’s studying history of the Americas among Mayan ruins, Ancient Greece at the Parthenon, or ecology and the environment in the rain forests of Costa Rica”. His track coaching at the New Bern High School has more or less ended but was as successful at state and national levels as his huge writingcarreer has been. According to websites New Bern High School was recently voted the greatest high school relay team in history. In race records the team is either referred to as New Bern High School, or Track Eastern Carolina.  If America is to be remade then Nicholas Sparks is pised to be one of those involved in remaking it. Sexuality, family, sport and education are being impacted in the USA and abroad by this single private citizen and those with whom he associates.

3 . Maria Ioannidou, Μαρία Ιωαννίδου is director of the Acropolis Restoration Project and an independent architecture & planning professional  and civil engineer.  She directs an extensive, internationally acclaimed antiquity conservation and restoration programme  that has been ongoing on the Acropolis of Athens since 1975.  She is in an institution where past diectors have been men but where a female Greek-American archiect who is not herself has also made a major contribution. When one considers the history of Venetian Knights in Constantinople and Turks throughout the Hellenic world it is impossible to see the destruction of the Parthenon and acropolis as unintentional. the greatest cataclysm which can be usefull compared to two flying busses hitting the World Tade Center happened in the Great Turkish War in the late 17th century—when the Ottoman Empire was at war with Venice and other European countries and  Greece was an occupied nation. The Turks used the magnificent Parthenon they saw as a diabolic temple of pornography as an ammunition dump. Thea Venetian attack on Athens in 1687 included a cannonball that set off the Turkish munitions, blowing 700  huge stone blocks from the Parthenon’s now ruined walls that then eroded much more in recent centuries once out of structure and had all been  strewn around the Acropolis. From 1997 to 2002 Cathy Paraschi, a Greek-American architect fitted these damaged  pieces together. She made real progress but incomplete progress. Maria Ioannidou has the duty of leading the challenging Restoration, comprising a number of sub-projects that aim to stabilise, conserve and prolong the life of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis, is supported by the Greek State and the European Union.  Ioannidou explains, “we’ve adopted an approach of trying to restore the maximum amount of ancient masonry while applying the minimum amount of new material.” That means using clamps and rods made of titanium—which won’t corrode and crack the marble—and soluble white cement, so that repairs can be easily undone should future generations of restorers discover a better way.There have been some bravura feats of engineering. The 1687 explosion knocked one of the massive columns out of position and badly damaged its bottom segment. There have been new damages from recent earthquakes that the restorers have had to deal with along with everything else. The team and one of its expert leaders designed new equipment to deal with the problem including a metal collar that exerts precisely controlled forces to grasp a column securely without harming the stone. This allowed repair of bottom segments in massive columns and also allowed more learning about the column construction which has challenged many ideas in the histroy of technology. The knoweledge and symbolism involved explains why although on the brink of bankruptcy, the Greek government committs serious money to improving the country’s architectural treasures. In the next several day as of this posting, it will reveal a restored temple on the Acropolis rock.  Greek pre-Arabic mathematics were tied to geometry and the human measure and they were very advanced. They also had very advanced power tools and this personmakes the list for working in a nexus of productive science, patriotism, feminism and historical consciousness.

4. Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, Дми́трий Анато́льевич Медве́дев,  was born  on September 14,  1965 and is the third and current President of the Russian Federation, inaugurated on 7 May 2008. He came to the presidency  after taking the  popular vote in the presidential election held on  March 2, 2008 with 71.25%. Medvedev’s candidacy was backed by then President Vladimir Putin and by his political allies and machine.  They belong to the same political party and he was first informally endorsed by this largest  Russian political party, United Russia and then later formally endorsed when several pro-presidential parties had been brought on board.   Medvedev had a solid background but more as an appointed technocrat and  had never held elective office prior to 2008. The current President has served as First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian government,  Vladimir Putin’s Chief of Presidential Staff, e Chairman of Gazprom’s  (the oil and gas nationalized giant) board of directors and other minor or affiliated positions. His endorsement and partnership with Prime Minister Putin is significant with Putin’s history as the tough Commie headed for the inner circle who has tried to find his wayinto the world of reforms and to a role as enlightened man in a new political consensus. Medvedev has legitimate progressive libertarian and democratic credentials within the Russian context as well as a certain inborn facility with neo-tsarist icnography which he shares with the very different Putin.  Anatoly Sobchak was, an early democratic politician of the 1980s and 1990s  and was one of Medvedev’s professors.  Medvedev joined Sobchak’s team of democrats in 1988 and worked the  head of Sobchak’s successful campaign for a seat in democratized Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR. As President, Medvedev has made economic modernization one of his top agendas.   Even his childhood speaks more of intellect than toughness and ideological orthodoxies of the recent past.    Dmitry Medvedev I believe  born  and  certainly brought up in Leningrad.   Medvedev’s father was Anatoly Afanasevich Medvedev (November 1926 — 2004) a Professor at the Leningrad Institute of Technology, his mother is Yulia Veniaminovna Medvedeva (née Shaposhnikova, born 21 November 1939)His wife Svetlana Linnik seems to have been what Americans would call his high school sweetheart. He is half ethnic Ukrainian, was in Communist youth organizations and joined the communist party in college but has always been part of the wave seeking legitimacy within the constructs of Western Civilization’s political traditions. His work outside government also related to living out in the renewed free market. Medvedev earned a degree from the Law Department of Leningrad State University in 1987 (together with a number of influential soviet leaders of his generation most of whom continue as leaders of the Russian Federation) and in 1990, received his  graduate level Candidate of Sciences degree in private law there.  Medvedev , worked as a “docent” at his  alma mater university, now renamed to Saint Petersburg State University, in addition to his business activities and participation in the Saint Petersburg City Administration.  He is not so easy to read in souch a short sketch and his situation is not simple. Nor is there a simple way of describing Russia’s role itself. But he is certainly a person to watch in the coming decade.  .

5. Buzz Aldrin, Dr. (Col. {retired})Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr.  was born in Montclair, New Jersey on January 20, 1930. Aldrin is an American mechanical engineer, retired United States Air Force pilot and the  astronaut who was the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 11,who on July 20, 1969,  was the second human being to set foot on the Lunar surface, following his mission commander Neil Armstrong.  Buzz became an engineer as a West Pointer when he graduated third in his class  from the US Military Academy.  He  joined the Air Force and dsitinguished himself as a combat fighter pilot  in Korea and was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross.  After more military experience he earned  his Doctorate of Science in Astronautics at MIT and wrote his thesis on Manned Orbital Rendezvous.  He came to  NASA in 1963 as part of the third  astronauts batch, Aldrin was the first with a doctorate nicknamed “Dr. Rendezvous.”  His mother, Marion Moon, was the daughter of an Army Chaplain and Aldrin celebrated the Eucharist according to protestant rites when he landed on the Moon.  His father, Edwin Eugene Aldrin who studied with rocketry’s early giant Goddard, served with distinction in the military becoming  a Colonel in the Air Force did advanced studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and towered over musch of Buzz’s early manhood as a resprected aviation pioneer.   Dr. Buzz Aldrin has at least three US patents freceived for rocketry inventions.  He devised many of the docking and rendezvous techniques  for spacecraft in orbit which are still used today.  These are just a few of his space related contributions.  But all these years are overshadowed by 21 hours  spent with Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface and when the two returned with 46 pounds of moon rocks having operated before history’s largest worldwide television audience of about 600 million people. He still stays in touch with the crew of Apollo 11, advocates for Space and had a brief stint on the popular show Dancing With the Stars. Dr. Aldrin is both my Facebook Friend  and part of an online novel’s reader group I have established but I do not really know him nor even know how much he really knows about me for that matter. 

 6.  Kundun, The Highest Point,Ogyen Trinley Dorje, Dalai Lama is currently unique in histroy and not really like any of his predecessors nor entirely separate from them.  Living in northern India and fleeing the conquest of Tibet by the Communist Chinese government  the 14th Dalai Lama serves as the head of state for the Central Tibetan Administration (“Tibetan government in exile”).  Bothe preserving and popularizing some of Tibaetan Buddhism’s religion and tradition hea has also been freed from huge amounts of time spent in ritual obligations and has become a popular culture star.   This 14th Dalai Lama remains the head of state for the Central Tibetan Administration (“Tibetan government in exile”) and is a worldwide spokesman both for deep Tibetan values in a sacred tradition and for whatever will help his case. He has never been a simple figure. His lack of orthodoxy is indicated when he has stated that the institution of the Dalai Lama may be abolished in the future, or the next Dalai Lama may not be Tibetan and may be female. The female thing and his many female admirers in the west maks the fact that all Buddhism has a very dark and arguably evil side of its history as regards women and that of all these traditions the one that most offend the sense of shared humanity, fairness and life for typical women the Gelug or “Yellow Hat” branch of Tibetan Buddhism. has the worst record. But of course that is a very incomplete and controversial part of the story. He has also been a symbol for Tibetans afraid of being overrun and wiped out by the Han Chinese. Tibet does have historic ties to the Chinese Emperors and the Chinese have kept some Lamaseries running and helped Tibetans. On the other hand heroic battles by Tibetans with swords on ponies against the superpower still occur and they remeber their Nobel Peace Prize winner and and he also gives some focus to their art. His title combines of the Mongolian word Далай “Dalai” meaning “Ocean” and the Tibetan word  ་”Blama” meaning “chief” or “high priest.”  The Dalai Lama is believed by his devotees to be the rebirth of a long line of tulkus who are considered to be manifestations of  Avaloitesvarahe bodhiattva of compassion, the reincarnation of a series of spiritual leaders who have chosen to be reborn in order to enlighten others.  The role of this man will continue to evolve and its relevance may be affected by changes in the East and West in the future.

7.  Zachary Richard    is an environmentalist ,poet and singer-songwriter who in1996 founded Action Cadienne  an organization dedicated to promoting of the French language and the “Cadien/Cajun culture of Louisiana. In choosing Zachary Richard I am especially aware of him as a musician and worry about choosing him to the probable exclusion of Michael Doucet and Paige Reese but he is much more than an Acadian musician. In March, 1997,   Zachary Richard was decorated Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres de la République Française. Also in 1997, Zachary was enrolled in the Ordre des Francophones d’Amérique by the government of Québec. Richard has received three honorary doctorates, bestowed by the University of Moncton (New Brunswick), the University of Louisiana (Lafayette) and Ste Anne’s University in Nova Scotia. His albums include High Times,  Mardi Gras and Migration, Mardi Gras Mambo, Zack’s Bon Ton,Snake Bite Love, Women in the Room, Cap Enragé and Faire Récolte. These works have generated recognition including gold and double platinum albums and numerous reviewed awards.   His role in the Cajun Renaissance was significant when as a young already working artist he bought a Cajun accordion.  From that basis he earned his credibility in promoting the Cajun tradition, because it really was Zachary who energized an increasing old man driven genre when he formed the first new generation Cajun/Rock band. While living  in Montreal, Zachary published three volumes of poetry and won  the prestigious Prix Champlain for  in 1998.   A third Zachary Richard volume, was awarded the Prix Roland Gasparic in Roumania with mention of his militant commitment to the defense of the French language in North America.  Zachary had published three children’s books with his daughter Sarah.   Recent years especially have seen him work in important television documentaries including his production, narration and scoring of Against the Tide, the story of the Cajun people of Louisiana with LPB which was awarded Best Historical Documentary by the National Educational Television Association (NETA) in 2000 and its truly French language version, received the Prix Historia from the L’institut d’Histoire de l’Amérique Française in 2003.  He has also worked with Coeurs Batailleurs ( a 26 part series exploring the Acadian diaspora), Migrations, about North American avian migration which won the Liriot D’or (first prize) at the International Ornithological Film Festival (France) in 2008, and  Kouchibouguac, about the  expropriation of 250 Acadian families in 1978 for the creation of a national park. 

8. Chett Chiasson,Executive Director of the Port Commission at Port Fourchon. He is a former Director of Economic Development for the port and has been promoted to  the top spot by The Greater Lafourche Port Commission  taking the reins from Ted Falgout, who retired at the end of 2009 after thirty-one years of port leadership. This tradition of long tenure, the BP disaster this year and the confluence of energy, economic and environmental issues  will make him a necessarily influential figure. The importance of Port FOurchon may be declining but it is truly enormous. “I am honored to be the Executive Director of the Greater Lafourche Port Commission,” says Chiasson. “I look forward to continuing the growth and success that was achieved during Mr. Falgout’s tenure. With the outstanding Board of Commissioners, employees, and tenants we have, the opportunities are limitless.” Chiasson has a B.A. in Political Science and a Masters in Public Administration and is in the AAPA’s Professional Port Manager certification program. His background has been an advantage to port business; he has brought in large projects and new lessees in Port Fourchon and helped to expand property interests at the South Lafourche Airport. Chiasson had been key in relevant activities before the BP disaster such as recouping losses from storm damage, working with several local, state, and federal agencies to repair and rebuild the port’s infrastructure and environment.  Chiasson will be Port Fourchon’s second Executive Director in port history and begins his new position as the port begins its fiftieth year.

9. Dr. E. Joseph Savoie, ” ‘Tit Jo'” Savoie  is the at the helm of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which is also the Universite des Acadiens and is former  Louisiana tate Commissioner of Higher Education. He is the university’s sixth president .   He relatively recently succeeded Dr. Ray Authement, who retired after serving as UL Lafayette’s president for 34 years. When hire he said, “ I’m excited about the opportunity to help steer the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as it continues to move ahead, always focused on student success.” President Savoie has  very strong ties to UL Lafayette before becoming Comissioner he had served asvice president for University Advancement, executive director of the Alumni Association, program director for the Union Program Council, student government advisor and as an adjunct assistant professor. He earned his  bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from this same UL Lafayette. Savoie continuedhis studies with doctor of education in educational leadership and administration from Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York. Savoie work prior to presidency postsecondary education includes participating in these reforms in Louisiana: the restructuring of higher education governance; creation of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System; teacher education and school reform initiatives; fromulation of  the state’s Master Plan for Public Postsecondary Education and the promotion of collaboration within the entire education community. Savoie has received awards and honors including the 2007 CASE District IV Chief Executive Leadership Award, which has even been renamed the “Dr. E. Joseph Savoie Chief Executive Leadership Award,” the 2004 University of Louisiana at Lafayette Outstanding Alumnus Award and the 2000 Henry Mason Award, which is presented by the Louisiana Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. He and his wife Gail Savoie have a daughter, Jennifer Blaire Saulnier, and a son, Adam Savoie. Dr. Savoie was on the board which elected me as the winner of the 1989 May commencement Oustanding Graduate Award  of the Alumni Assoication of the university. I have known him for years and we have never been close or friends (nor open enemies or anything else intense). I believe he is capable of brokering any set of changes which might be good for the Univeristy and the region and other factors and people. He of course may fail as anyone may. However, given the opportunity he will be ablr to play a vital role should needed societal changes thrust his institution into national prominence.

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Ten More People to watch from 9/11/2011- 9/11/2021

Posted on December 11, 2010 | 8 comments

In this list I have the third installment of my list of people to watch in the  second decade after the 9/11 attacks. This is like all the others somewhat diverse but still somewhat predictable in its preferences and tendencies.  This is the third post in a series. Here is the link to the most recent  post which in turn has links to the two earlier posts:   https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/fifteen-more-people-to-watch-in-9112011-9112021/

1. Gaudencio Borbon Cardinal Rosales is the Cardinal Archbishop of Manila in the Philippines. Manila is the only majority Christian country in  the  historyEast Asia. There was time when there were numerous Christian countries in and around the Byzantine Empire in the Near East part of Asia but most of that legacy has been erased by Islam. The Cardinal Archbishop of Manila is a very important figure in the Roman Catholic Church and in geopolitics.  I met Bishop Rosales when he came down to Malaybalay in the province of Bukidnon   to be installed as the first Ordinary of the Diocese of Bukidnon. His predecessor had been the Bishop of the Prelature of Bukidnon.  Rosales was born in Batangas City in the Province of Batangas. Rosales come from the country’s elite. Not that there is absolute clarity in social rank but his family is near the top. His grandfathers were Julian Rosales, once mayor of the town of Batangas and Pablo Borbon, once a governor of Batangas province. Rosales’ father, Dr. Godofredo Dilay Rosales, was  among the earliest Filipino physicians to complete medical school and residency training entirely in the United States of America. In a country where many became part of the brain drain to go abroad  Dr. Rosales became a balikbayan instead and devoted himself  to practice in Batangas City. Rosales’ mother, Remedios Mayo Borbón, was the first cousin of the great Filipino nationalist, Claro M. Recto.  Gaudencio Rosales matriculated at the San Jose Seminary, and his classmates two other future bishops.  Ordained a priest by Bishop Alejandro Olalia on March 23, 1958, he was then assigned to teach for 11 years in seminary of the Archdiocese of Lipa (which was then merely a diocese). He became an auxillary bishop before in the Manila Archdiocese before I knew him in the eighties. We did get to know eachother pretty well and my parents knew him even better.  Like some on my list he is not a juvenile by any stretch of the term. But he is uniquely qualified and positioned to work and lead with certain challenges and transformations that may occur in the second post 9/11 decade.

2. Queen Sofia of Spain, Su Graciosa Majestad Sofia la Reina Catolica   is well-beloved by many in Spain and a decent number of people in Greece and Denmark. Her reputation and style in these countries in Egypt and in circles beyond these countries have formed  an extensive web of relations and connections which have made it possible for her to promote and embody a vsion of Constitutional Monarchy in Spain which is part of the secularizing and modernist European experience.  Princess Sophia of Greece and Denmark was born in Psychiko, Athens, Greece on 2 November 1938.   She is  the eldest child of the King Paul of Greece (1901–1964) and his wife, Queen Frederika (1917–1981), a former princess of Hanover. Queen Sofia is a a royal consort descendant of the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg dynasty and tied to such House and clan structure as it possesses. I would not say she is a member of that dynasty because her royal titles in effect are through her her husband Juan Carlos I (baptized as Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias who is the  monarch regnant and  King of Spain .  He is a true Bourbon (if I were wrting in Spanish I would say the French dynasts of the past were Borbon — I do not split them into two Houses).  She is then in the Spanish Bourbon or Borbon dynasty.  Under  the Spanish Constitution, Title II: the Crown, Article 56, Subsection 1, the Spanish monarch personifies and embodies the  Spanish nation. The crwoned head serves as  a symbol of Spain’s enduring unity and permanence; and as such, the monarch is the commander-in-chief of the Spanish Armed Forces as well as the head-of-state in the monarquia parlamentaria  (parliamentary monarchy). While these constitutional provisions are relatively recent all royalist systems have a tradtional element and the tradition in Spain is for Queens Consort such as Sofia to be relatively powerful and influential. Queen Sofia’s brother is the deposed King Constantine II of Greece and her sister Princess Irene of Greece and Denmark this family’s royal titles are no longer recognized by the Constitution of Greece. While her life included travels and exile which made her more cosmopolitan the family  returned to Greece from a World War II exile in 1946. She also renewed her Tetuonic heritage by studying at the Schloss Salem school. But was fully Greek in many ways before undertaking to become Spanish studying childcare, music and archeology in Athens and representing Greece in sailing at the 1960 Summer Olympics.

3. Oprah Winfrey is best known as host of The Oprah Winfrey Show and director of the associated corporate empire of spin-off shows, a magazine, numerous charities and a complex kind Book Club with both local and national aspects.  The Oprah Winfrey Show entered national syndication in 1986, becoming the highest-rated talk show in television history. In 1988, she established Harpo Studios, and joined predecessors Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball the third woman in American history to own her own studio. The Oprah Winfrey Show has remained the most watched talk show for 23 straight seasons.  Harpo Productions, Inc. which she owns has produced the show which is winding down now but is still seen  by an estimated audience and viewership 42 million a week in the United States in addition to other viewers in 145 countries. Coming from a difficult background which she has admitted involved family based abuse of various kinds and was rooted in a consciousness of the more unpleasant sides of rural African- American experience she  began her broadcasting career at WVOL radio in Nashville while still in high school.  At the age of 19, she was the youngest ever and the first black woman to anchor the news at Nashville’s WTVF-TV. Moving to Baltimore’s WJZ-TV Oprah began to co-anchor the Six O’Clock News and later the local talk show, People Are Talking.   She has made her name and fortune based in Chicago however and did not move their until 1984.  She came there to host WLS-TV’s morning talk show, AM Chicago, which became the number one local talk show beating oput the seemingly invincible Donahue within a month. Less than a year later the show had a one hour fromat  and was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show.  Her path with regards to race, sex (as a practice and a status), social order charity and personal rage and hurt has been a fascinating journey to watch. I think that the United States will either collapse into chaos or will change in some fundamental ways and if it does change Oprah will have a role to play in both midwifing the new consensus and helping to protect and propser the capital of negro American entrepreneurs in an America that may have to choose to become more formaly white supremacist or slip into the ranks of Haiti and Mozambique.  A cuatious and clever person without a husband or children and almost endless energy  she made two moves in 2008, she endorsed Barack Hussein Obama for Presisdent and Oprah and Discovery Communications announced plans to create  “OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network”.” The new multi-platform media venture will be designed to entertain, inform and inspire people to live their best lives. OWN will debut on January 1, 2011, in approximately 80 million homes.

4.  Bill O’Reilly is clearly a product and embodiment of of a New York, Irish Catholic background as is evident to those who follow his career.  Bill O’Reilly born in Manhattan and raised on Long Island. He has a Bachelor’s degree in History from Marist College, along with a Master’s in Broadcast Journalism from Boston University and then returned after a relatively full carreer to earn  another Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  The historic run of The O’Reilly Factor on the FOX News Channel continues. This program has remained the most watched cable news show for 11 straight years. More than 300 newspapers carry his column each week. His website generates hundreds of thousands of dollars annualy for charity. Bill’ O’Reilly’s six non-fiction books are all in print and have sold more than five million copies. Bill  O’Reilly’s differs from Rush Limbaugh and others like Beck in the age at which he came to his role as conservative firebrand, the education he brings to the job and also in the professional  experience which informs his current position. His broadcast career began in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Local reporter and news anchor positions of real basic and not so basic journalistic and broadcasting skills were established in other cities such as Dallas, Boston, and New York.  He achieved a national audience et Bill when he worked at CBS News, ABC News and the first version of Inside Edition.

5.  Julie Ann Yannatta is probably among the  two or three least known persons on this entire list from a global perspective. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Tulane Law School and been admitted to both the New York  and California bars as an attorney.  She lives and is involved in the entertainment industry in Southern California but has traveled to much of the world and lived in several very different parts of it. She is married and has one son.  She has been involved as a director in a secular humanist based open charity called Operation USA  which is 30 years old and in which she has played an important role. She has served as the General Manager of Shangri-La Music which united commercial and humanitarian interests in a recording enterprise.   She is among the founders of a firm called Artists First which enables musicians to use new media to directly market and sell their works  with the benefits of some kind of infrastructure. She was an executive producer for the Instant Karma  music project which was the centerpiece of the Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur. She has developed a network of significant relationships which include webs between people in the tradtions of past American Communism’s descendants, Scandinavians, Japanese musicians, feminists, the Democratic Party and    entertainment lawyers. All of this would not be enough to make this list. She is also very pretty. In objective terms she is a beauty with some lines that are preternaturaly perfect but beauty is also a cultural phenomenon. Julie’s appearance is of less cultural significance than it might be because it does not fit any of the major cultural parameters defining great beauty in our time. She is now in her very early forties and is shorter than either standard super models, Victoria’s Secret models and is not quite the  Hawaiian Tropics shape.  Her looks and her carreer together would still not be enough to make this list. Perhaps if I were a better man I would find a way not to include her in it as it may inconvenience her. However she is here because while at Tulane Law School she sort of collided (rather gently and minimally) with a whole web of institutions and people  she could never have anticipated. She became important to a key figure in this world within the world. She has remained significant. She did not handle it all that well in objective terms but she handled it thousands  of time better than could have been expected. It is possible that this will become important in the future.  

6. Vitaly Alexandrovich Lopota   is thePresident of the S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, General Designer, technical manager for flight tests of manned space systems, deputy chairman of the State Commission for flight tests of manned space systems.   Since 1991 he has been the director and chief designer of the Central Research and Development Institute for Robotics and Engineering Cybernetics .  In July of 2007 he  began heading S.P.Korolev RSC Energia in which his contributions and role have almost been too varied and complex to believe and which is  among the most strategically important companies in Russia. His firm is the prime organization in the country for development and operation of manned rocket and space systems as well as leading in the field of  launchers and robotic space systems, and the spin-offs of the current advanced space technologies to the marketplace and civil society in socially useful products.  V.A. Lopota is in many ways a mayor or governor for the  corporation’s community and infrastructure  which includes housing, transit and some security institutions.  RSC Energia is  Russia’s principal corporte player in meeting commitments to the International Space Station (ISS) program.  The ariety and dviersity of these commitments is vast and America is retiring the Shuttle and will be more dependent than ever on the Soyuz and other proven platforms which he has worked with for quite a while.  Energiya has  started on the project of a nuclear-powered space transportation module. The governor aspect of his work is also seen in his service as  the Chairman of the Council of Directors of companies based in Korolev, town of science.  Here this distinguished scientist and engineer  who is V.A. Lopota becomes the politician who  helps to manage urban development,  job creation,  and production facilities improvement issues in the space industry. His space program is not divorced from the need for the  construction of housing and buildings of social significance.  One of the highest priorities for Vitaly Lopota is to preserve and further develop the Korolev’s school of Russian rocket and space science. With his active participation, a full-time post-graduate courses and the council which can confer academic ranks have been re-established at the Company.  . Vitaly Alexandrovich Lopota was born on September 28, 1950, in Grozny.  His first real job was down and dirty stint as a fitter at an oil refinery in Grozny. After completing army service, he studied in Leningrad Polytechnical Institute (known as Leningrad University since 1990) and completed postgraduate studies  there in 1981. V. A. Lopota  rose through the ranks, starting off as a junior research associate, to eventually become a professor, chair a department and to head of an applied research laboratory later known as the Laser Technology Center. Vitaly Alexandrovich Lopota is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Science, Engineering. More than 200 scientific papers have been published and he holds over 50 patents for inventions. He is a member of Council for Science, Technologies and Education at the President of the Russian Federation, a member of the Council of general and chief designers, leading scientists and specialists in high-technology sectors of economy under the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation, a member of a number of councils of experts at federal and regional levels, scientific, academic and engineering councils.

7. Amy Grant   and I are not friends  but she is certainly a name I come to on a personal basis here.  She just turned fifty this Thanksgiving Day and still looks great. Her recent book Mosaic has had broad appeal and she is married to one of the most acclaimed Country music artists of all time in Vince Gill. One of her Christmas songs has just been covered by American Idol winner Danny Gokey. But Amy Grant  has been around a good while.  Amy Grant is just a tiny bit older than I am and I have been listening to her music about as long as she has had a record deal. I used to own My Father’s Eyes, Age to Age, Straight Ahead, Unguarded and several other albums in what was never a really large record collection. She is the most successful artist in the history of the genre called Contemporary Christian Music.  She has won several Grammy Awards and a plethora of Dove Awards. She has been part of my life and I have played tracks of her albums at prayer services, lectures and retreats.   I belonged to  (and still do belong to) a college household with a Hebrew name and have often celebrated Christian direct borrowings from the Sabbath Meal and the Pseder Supper. She made her mark with many songs but one of the early big hits was a song with a Hebrew  language lead line. I combined doing ministry and religious communications with involvement in secular media work. While she was a successful phenomenon it is still true that I could often see her working though decisions and difficulties that were the same as mine in that same process. Some challenges were identical, some very close and others just  resonant but it was a real bond. I also went to her concerts a couple of times and I felt I could invite a variety of friends who would not  form a group elsewhere. Although the actual groups were small and kind of unsuccessful the potential seemed to be their. With my own sisters and some other young girls I could use her as a role model for a real young woman struggling to survive and grow in faith and be herself. Amy Grant was part of a soundtrack in my personl life that included Otis Redding, Michael Doucet, Bruce Springsteen, The Bangles, Rush, John Michael Talbot,  the Carpenters, Michel W. Smith,  John Denver, Willie Nelson, George Straight, U2, Rafe Vaughn Williams, Ray Charles, Fats Domino and many other artists when I was young as well as lots of live worship music. However, Amy Grant’s music has more special stories than almost all of the others from the large pop culture world.  I have recently downloaded some of her music and interviews and it makes me remember watching her career progress. She has now been married to Vince Gill for years and I remember when that was topic of conversation as an upcoming event. The most important reason she is on this list is that if America is to become what America must become to survive thenthere must be key figures rooted in Evangelical Protestantism who can communicate with everyone and be forces for the change needed in that community. Amy Grant is well qualified to be such a force and she is not folding  up her life’s work yet.  She has kept working and I have seen some of her stuff on tv and  now can see that she is still working.   I still find the vibe associated with her fascinating. 

8. Ratan N. Tata  is the Chairman of the Board of Tata Motors, Ltd. in Mumbai, India. One of his achievements include designing and developing an indigenous Indian car – Indica – one of the leading products in its category in the car market.The biggest news ever from him is the recent development of  the Nano . ?The “people’s car” as it has been envisioned by Mr Tata was commercially launched in March 2009.  The car is billed as the fuel efficient, low-cost, ecologicaly friendlytransport needed in India and abroad . The Company was also awarded the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for the Tata Nano, in the transportation sector. Ratan N. Tata has broad business experience and is also or at least certainly has recently been a Director of Alcoa Inc. based out of New York which was formerly the Aluminum Corporation of America.  He has lived an impressive life and is now 73 years old.  Mr Ratan N Tata returned later in life to the  USA and completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School where he built upon  earlier studies. Mr. Tata holds a B.Sc. (Architecture) degree in structural engineering from Cornell University. He joined the Tata Group in 1962. As Chairman of Tata Industries Limited since 1981, he helped transform the company into a strategy think-tank and he and the group became promoters of new  high technology businesses. In 1991, Mr Tata was appointed Chairman of Tata Sons Limited, the holding company of the Tata entities and currently holds the chairmanships of major Tata companies. Under Ratan N. Tata the  Group’s revenues have increased more than ten-fold to annualized revenues of $67.4 billion.  Mr. Tata has been recognized with poeitions of trust and honors by civil society and government in India and has received numeous high honors of varied kinds from institution across the globe.  

9.  Mark Zuckerberg  is the youthful self made billionaire and founder of Facebook who recently has been the subject of the movie The Social Network, almost all of 60 Minutes episode was listed by Barbara Walters as one of the years ten most interesting people.  He has been devoted full-time to his present position at the head of this internet behemoth since at least 2004.  Last year he gave away an enormous amount of money to various charities and especially to support public schools his giving is reported to be about half of his network. Facebook is a social network with about 600 million members.  Mark Zuckerberg is a native of White Plains, New York. His parents are  Karen, a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. Mark and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle were reared in Dobbs Ferry, New York.  Zuckerberg was raised as a relatively observant  Jew, including having had a Bar Mitzvah when he turned 13 and although he has since described himself as an atheist it is unlikely that he rejects the Hebrew ethnic part of his background. Zuckerberg was involved with computing in a fairly sophisticated way even in middle school. His father began his instruction in programming in the 1990s, and then software hired developer David Newman to advance his private technical education  in about 1995. Zuckerberg actually took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home in the mid-1990s. He complimeted all this study with a variety of personal projects for fun and to meet business needs around him. He did show other interests at Ardsly High School but in his junior year transferring to one of America’s most exclusive schools the Phillips Exeter Academy and it was there his education and life began to become even more focused.  Zuckerberg won prizes in science (math, astronomy and physics) . But according to official records he continued to excel in Classical Studies and could read and write to some degree in English,  French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was an athlete who became captain of the fencing team.  He was already a commercial success in high school but he chose to go to Harvard and continue his education. There he found even larger success in Facebook and up until now that has largely defined his subsequent activity. He also met his girlfriend Priscilla Chan in college and they are still together. He has been a vocal supports of Barack Obama and is a very strong and hard personality. In the days when people read faces (as recently as the eighties a study was ublished but ignored in a big way) he has many facial characteristics of a general. He may play a vital role if America is to prosper in the coming period of years in which there are so many challenges. 

10. Jean -Cristophe Niel serves and has served as the  Director General of the ASN  which is the French Nuclear Safety Authority since January 15, 2007.  He serves under a small but elite commission appointed by various very high political figures in France. However,  for a man in one of the technical disciplines on this list he is not so old and his experience yields him huge opportunities to develope as a world player.   The ASN is an agency in country which has a limited but serious nuclear military plan and arsenal and sees nuclear power as a vital part of economic strategy both from a point of view of societal development and national autonomy and survival. The Director General of the ASN, under the authority of the President, ASN, organizes and conducts the services of the ASN, composed of central services, as well as eleven territorial delegations. The ASN includes 420 employees in Paris and in the eleven territorial delegations. Its annual budget is approximately 50 million euros, of which 30 million is personnel costs. The ASN benefits from the expertise of the IRSN for an amount of 71 million euros.The ASN is a large organization with regional divisions that  conduct their activities under the authority of the regional representatives appointed by the ASN Chairman but with whom the Director General must interact in a variety of ways to be at all effective.   The divisions perform most of the direct inspections of BNIs, of radioactive material transport and of small-scale nuclear activities and contribute to ASN’s public information role.  ASN comprises the headquarters and 11 regional divisions with responsibility for one or more administrative regions operating in many capacities for emergency management and safety assurance. This organisation enables ASN to perform its regulation duties nationwide as well as in the overseas territories.  I have not found Dr. Niel’s exact age but he graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique (1980) and the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussés (1985), and has a doctorate in Theoretical Physics(University of Paris IV, 1990).  His work experience includes positions as chief engineer of bridges and Chaussés, and posts in the field of nuclear safety and radiation protection.  From 1991 to 1995, at ASN (formerly DSIN) he was in charge of the control of the  fuel cycle, radioactive waste and control facilities. From 1995 to 2005, he held  important functions at the Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN).  He worked there as head of the department of safety assessment, responsible for managing  majority of experiments and manyother tests requiring expert personnelle conducted by the IRSN for ASN, Jean Niel was director of the strategy, development and external relations.

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Fifteen More People to Watch in 9/11/2011-9/11/2021

Posted on December 8, 2010 | 9 comments

A few months ago I wrote a blog post largely about people to watch in the period following the end of the first  post 9-11 decade. I recommend you check the post out again.

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

This is the second in a  series of posts  about the people who will play an important role in the second  post 9/11 decade. In that post I mentioned some people who had almost made the first list. There were quite a few and some made this list while others did not and now I am adding some  people to this list that are virtually unknowable from an American point of view as well as a few other names of also-rans. The sketches are longer in this post than the shortest sketches in the other as well. Partly because some people are less known and once having described them a bit it did not seem right to shorten everyone more famous on the list.  Those who almost made this list include two invisible people whose names do not appear here and whose offices are more important than their persons for our immediate purposes. The most watchable in my view is the President of the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. This body produces high quality works for China and others in Chinese from foreign languages, textbooks and educational materials in perhaps twenty-three languages for the Chinese and quality translation into English and other major languages of important Chinese works. In my opinion it is the most important media outlet of any kind which is almost never mentioned in the Western media.  While he is not the President perhaps current presidential information could be had from Professor Wang Tongfu, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.  The next invisible person is the senior official in charge of diversion and concealment in the design of nuclear and military facilities in Iran.

In terms of true also-rans this time I had fewer although I still hope to get to the ones from the first list eventually: They were Drew Brees, Michael Phelps, Helio Castroneves, Ken Feinberg, Helene Baroness Heyman, Bob Gates, Cyril I  Кирилл, Патриарх Московский и всея Руси, Sir Donald Tsang and Marco Rubio.

In that first of these related posts I used the theme of Gearing up for the future of America as a context for coming to know some prominent human beings playing a role on the world stage .  I identified  a group of people as very important Dramatis Personae:

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 .

This time I want to post fifteen more people to watch. They may not be the last batch before the September 11, 2011 decennial memorial.

1.Barons Rothschild: This one is sort of cheating. There is a Baron Rothschild in the British Aristocracy which is fully functional  and existent and Jacob Baron Rothschild must be given top billing. There is a separate Austrian Baron Rothschild but the disestablishment in Austria must be factored in for things to be well understood there. There is a network of French Barons Rothschild supporters and a quite serious and prominent man of influence styled Simon Baron Rothschild who lives in New York. I am one person who believes we must aim for a larger and greater Israel and that there must be a Hebrew royalist portion of the new order. There are others who agree with me. In such an event an Israeli Baron Rothschild must be part of these visions of the future. The Rothschilds themselves have never endorsed this plan (nor, as far as I know, decried it). 

2. Britney Spears:  Ms. Spears is a dancer, singer , brand manager, sometimes a songwriter, a mother and an ex-wife. She is also a sort of political voice for the idea of a sexually explicit class or group of performers who are serious about not being antisocial. Avoiding uncontrolled  drug abuse, staying with relatives, seeking to maintain discipline and other values have long been evident despite her many troubles. She is a person who could play a role in the emergence of a formal courtesan culture in the West even if she herself did not become one. I doubt that she would consider herself an intellectual revolutionary but she has played a role with social significance. 

3. Carl A. Brasseaux  Louisiana has been thrust into the public eye around the world again by the BP Oil Spill. One of the important cultures in the area is the Louisiana Acadian or Cajun people who are also part of a larger and more diverse Acadian ethnicity. There has never been a cessation of Acadian action on the world stage. Carl A Brasseaux is the preeminent Acadian historian of my lifetime and of recent centuries certainly. I have great respect for him and we have met and spoken about history. I have read much but not all his work much of which is listed in part below (these are authored works mostly, but he has extensive co-authored and edited works as well). This does not mean he endorses this blog. I have only a Master’s degree and have never published a book of history, so I fall far short of his standards in many ways. He on the other hand is a Brasseaux which is a middle chiefly clan, he is not from Bayou Lafourche or Vermilion Parish and has no close relatives who are recent members of La Maison de Le Roi. He is therefore cut off from most of the insights that inform me in these decayed times. There are five other historians who I rely on as much or more than he in technical terms for my model of recent centuries for our tribe, But none of them do what he does. As with the Queen’s Apology the effort made in this blog is unthinkable without Brasseaux although perhaps like the Queen  of the United Kingdom he might not be able to endorse or verify its statements. Books he has written and edited include: The Founding of the New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana 1765-1803, Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People 1803- 1877, Selected Bibliography of Scholarly Literature on Colonial Louisiana and New France,  The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792-1809, Scattered to the Wind: Dispersal and Wandering of the Acadians, 1755-1809 and Narrative Paintings: The Collection of Maurice Dedieu/Peintures Narratives.

4. Philip Lord Norton Baron of Louth. A created Peer and a prominent Conservative he is the author of many books including the British Polity and others that deal with issues of Parliament, governance and civil society. He is a professor at Hull University and leads a Parliamentary academic internship program as well as being active in varied fora in Europe and the Commonwealth. He is a truly prolific author and is supposed to write a great deal on the trains he rides frequently. He really is committed to his own connection to civilization as are so many on this list.  He is the blogger on Lords of the Blog with whom I became most involved in dialog and later followed to the newer The Norton View. I am back to commenting  on the Norton View though not on the LOTB as I type this and perhaps comment often and but less in-depth.
 
 
5. Carlos Slim Helu: Carlos Slim Helú is well known as the Telmex Billionaire but is a complex man descended from a prominent Lebanese- Mexican family who actually led the Lebanese movement for full acceptance as part of Mexican society. He  studied Civil Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (known by its Spanish acronym UNAM) School of Engineering and taught Algebra and Linear Programming while studying for his degree, meaning that he was both a student and professor.  He had a very long career building the Grupo Carso before  the 1980s when he became  a noted businessman in the industrial, real estate and commercial ventures for which some business press knows him.  In 1990, the group acquired Telmex in partnership with SBC and France Telecom, and began a new era of entrepreneurial development in a globally strategic sector. Over the course of 16 years, Telmex has developed a world-class technological platform that has optimized its processes and strengthened the corporate culture. Over the period of time in the early eighties when Mexico was in a terrible crisis he acquired a vast and diverse fortune in that country which is still undervalued today.  In the  early nineties he acquired Telmex and is still a major shareholder and its symbol around the world. Over the 90s and ’00s Telmex has invested the equivalent of US$27.692 billion in Mexico’s telecommunications and combined with operations in Latin America, more than US$30 billion. He is a major player in many aspects of development in the region. His values and ideas are both promising and threatening and both supportive of  and undermining to the complex of US  and Iberian American forces for good and ill which shape so much of the region. The worst mistake would be not to pay attention to him. He should be watched and evaluated as a cultural force.

6. Charles Bolden:  The first man of visible African Negro ancestry to lead NASA at the very top-level he is  a resident of Houston Texas most of the time and has been and remains an astronaut and Marine. Bolden was born Aug. 19, 1946 and is a native of  Columbia, S.C. He graduated from C. A. Johnson High School in 1964 the year I was born and received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. There he earned his B.S. in electrical science in 1968 and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. After completing flight training in 1970, he became a naval aviator. Bolden flew more than 100 combat missions in the Vietnam War  and was stationed in Namphong, Thailand, from 1972-1973.  Remaining in the Marine Corps after the war Bolden also earned a master of science degree in systems management from the University of Southern California in 1977. Following graduation from that degree he completed Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Md. in 1979. He was an active and successful test pilot until his selection as an astronaut candidate in 1980.  He held many important positions in NASA and the astronaut corps although he did leave before returning and becoming Administrator .He had left on returning from his last space shuttle flight in 1994, returning  to active duty as  the Deputy Commandant of Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. Should social and constitutional change occur in the United States and should he be alive at the time, he is destined to play an important role in the integration of African-Americans and their heritage into a more rank based society. 

7. Taylor Swift:  Prolific young songwriter and very successful performer Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Not being a Southerner  she nonetheless listened to and developed a love for country music, especially some classic female artists and their work. Performing  from her preteen years around her hometown, at festivals, fairs and sang at karaoke contests. She got a guitar and started writing songs at the age of 12, and this was the same time she got her first guitar.  At this writing she remains devoted to the family that helped her become the youngest songwriter signed to a publishing deal with Sony/ATV.  She was one of the artists who helped launch a new and upcoming record label Big Machine Records. Debut album Taylor Swift came out at No. 3, but helped by My Space and the new media it had risen greatly  instead of receding  39 weeks later and was on  the top of the charts having sold over 2.5 million copies, earning the young star a Platinum album. Her career is not slowing and I think she will play an important role in defining sexuality and  young womanhood in our coming decade. She is also very tall and that will cause her to look at different situations and concerns affecting life in the public eye and our evolving culture.  

8.Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands: Queen Beatrix succeeded her mother as Queen of the Netherlands in 1980. From that date, Her Majesty formed part of the government. The Netherlands remains a very influential country and she remains a powerful influence in the community of royals in Europe especially. The Queen was married to Prince Claus. They had three sons: Prince Willem-Alexander, Prince Friso and Prince Constantijn. The eldest, Prince Willem-Alexander – the Prince of Orange – will succeed her.

9. Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson:  Billing himself in almost all public venues as plain Richard Branson because of his ties in business to the American and French republics and his life’s history as the heir to the casual revolution around the world in the sixties he has been and continues to be a dynamic cultural force. The Green Fund and Virgin Galactic may not come to a hill of beans in the big picture. Like some other things on this post credit is given for effort. I even see Branson a bit more subdued and diminished in hope recently but he is still brash and energetic seeking a way forward in space and ecology.  He was born in 1950 and educated at Stowe School. He created  Student magazine there .In the early 1970s he created  Virgin first as a mail order record retailer, and then with record shops starting with one  in Oxford Street, London and a recording studio in Oxfordshire. Before 1980 came around Virgin Music one of the top six record companies in the world. He leads two hundred companies and has a considerable amount of vision. While he has other vulnerabilities his biggest is death. It is not clear how much influence his work will have if he dies anything other than a very old man. 

10. Kate Middleton,  Catherine Princess of Wales, Princess William of Wales, Princess Catherine: Her name title and form of address are likely to change a great deal over the next decade or so and not just when she gets married. She embodies a commitment by the British royal family to the British people. She is smart and pretty and discreet as it is possible to be (which I admit is almost not at all in her situation). She is devoted to her man. She dresses modestly enough to be respectable and revealingly enough to let the world see that her Prince has a woman who can do the very important wifely job of turning him on sexually. She is sweet and quiet in presentation and yet you can imagine a Knight who loved life wanting to seduce her in the days when this might have gotten his head rotting on a stake. She covers the bases and may turn out to be far more than that once her role is second nature. certainly a young woman of vast potential.    

11. Prince Luís of Orléans-Braganza (born Luís Gastão Maria José Pio Miguel Gabriel Rafael Gonzaga de Orléans e Bragança e Wittelsbach on 6 June 1938) He has been styled as Prince and as His Imperial and Royal Highness throughout his life. This family has taken an activist view to the royalist cause and this claimant more than most. In Brazil he is widely recognized as one of the two claimants to the Brazilian throne and head of the Vassouras branch of the Brazilian Imperial House. He is the  great-grandson of Emperor D. Pedro II .  Prince Luís is a member of the Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property a conservative Catholic organization which compared to my politics has been known as less favourable to enhancing Christian development of Aboriginal American and African-American cultural groups and for seeking to stop land reform. However, while I do not claim to influence him or his many groups I can honestly say that he has channels which have kept an open line to voices for diversity, neo-manorialism, American Guildism, Maritainist Royalist culture and other parts of the royalist movements in the hemisphere which are more liberal than perhaps his own positions. There has been little (if any) evidence of hidebound rigidity and he and his family work at the royalist cause hard and over time.

12. Ms. Gail J. McGovern is the Red Cross’s seventh president and chief executive since 2002, and she has more or less balanced the budget in a battered organization. The Red Cross tumbled with a $200 million deficit, and with penalties and  fines related to its blood collection and distribution business it had other crises leading to low morale amid widespread staff cuts at the Washington headquarters.  She left a position as a professor at Harvard Business School to lead this mess. She has stayed out of the spotlight except when doing expert and relevant things in dignified fora or running the large charity with a grand tradition. Gail J. Mc Govern,  is a woman who like Sarah Palin seems to be really doing something to integrate the traditions of the distaff side with the values and leadership of a new feminist society. Unlike Palin she does not have to give her opinions on this subject or any other very often. McGovern was a senior executive at AT&T and Fidelity Investments.

13. Me I have worked in a number of public endeavors more or less continuously since I was four years old. However, I now feel that even if I die tomorrow my own mostly frustrated efforts will produce a few tangible and discernible ripples in the future which an astute person could discover and find significant. Of course because this is my blog I had a much  easier time making the blog list than anyone else. 

14. His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar since June 26, 1995. He continues the Al-Thani dynasty that began nearly two centuries ago. Sheikh Hamad began serving as Minister of Defense when he was acclaimed Crown Prince in 1977.   His extensive preparation for Kingship accelerated in the 1980’s when  he led the Supreme Planning Council, and even more since 1992,  when Sheik Hamad began selecting Qatar’s cabinet and became  responsible for administering the country’s day-to-day affairs. He has also led the development of Qatar’s oil and natural gas resources. His country will spend this second post 9-11 decade preparing for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Political, social, security and technological challenges will make it easier for the country to progress in many ways and to hold the attention of both the world as a whole and of its Persian Gulf and Arab neighbors everywhere.  

 

 15. Prince William of Wales:   Prince William has a  university degree, he did not graduate from Oxbridge, he has been to amusement parks and has held charity rock  concerts, he knows how to behave in Church, he resents being left out of combat. He knows  the maw of celebrity culture devouring his family as a personal memory.  He will be formidable. Prince William is not Prince of Wales at this posting — his father still holds that distinction. He is a Prince of the Blood as Francophone people see things and a Prince is a Prince certainly.  The story is not yet finished in all respects –although he would always be Sir William Knight of the Garter and is  also an offficer with a commissioned rank before the family name of Wales, he is not Prince ”of anything”. He is rather William of Wales who happens to be Prince William. His dad can be styled Prince Charles of Wales but is able to move all the parts around to connect with the others in his identity and his son cannot. Thus in terms of snobbery (as I sit here in my running shorts watching tv alone I still dare to lecture as the superior snob to most) William is an odd creature.  He is fully royal — a Prince of the Blood in the House of Windsor is well up near the top of that club which though vastly much less than one mil of all people is bigger than most people think. He is without reference to royal claims a member of the chivalry being a Knight of the Garter. Without needing to consider his royal or chivalrous claims he is a member of the gentry (in the sense which does not exclude higher ranks) or is a social gentleman as a holder of an officer’s commission. However, because he is not yet Prince “of” anything and does not seem to hold any titles  from the aristocratic ranks such as Baron, Viscount, Marquess, Earl or Duke he is barely an aristocrat. Someone like me who has nothing much to lose in this big bad world can say he is royal, chivalrous and genteel in rank but not Aristocratic or Noble in the exclusive sense.  His father was Prince of Wales and such a royal title is also aristocratic because of the “of-ness” but did not need such a title to be an aristocrat as he was (and is also still) Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay which are plumb aristocratic titles of the best type.  I do not own Burke’s Peerage and I may be missing a title but I think not. Perhaps his grandmother will give him a noble title as a wedding present.

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The Last Year of the 9-11 Decade Has Begun

Posted on September 15, 2010 | 10 comments

This is the first installment of list of People to Watch in the Second Post 9/11 Decade.  I want to say that in general I do not greatly edit a post and leave it in its original place in the blog. However, this was a jumping off point for a very ambitious project and so it has fallen into a different category of post. The latter parts of the series were first posted much later and had very minor revsions as I am typing this updated introduction in January of 2011. This post has already had some minor edits before tonight and will likely have quite a few more after this. So if you have read this since it was first posted on September 11, 2010. The historian in me is of two minds about this. First, like any historian I revise my writing and there are article versions that precede book versions of histories. However, this is not in any meaningful sense a history whereas by editing this post I am making it less usable and manageable as a typical historical source. I hope you read it anyway and find it useful in mapping out the projections you produce for the future.  The imperfectly kept rule will be that in the biographical sketches under each name the information in the original post will be in ordinary type while later text additions will be in this italic typeface. 

After the initial trauma of the 9-11 experience had grown a bit less raw it became rather a commonplace to assert that America had been forever changed on that day. I became rather a refrain to discuss how life and our history would be marked by that day which split the era into before 9-11 and after 9-11.  Even as I type this American populist conservative  commentator and television host Glen Beck has some sort of 9-12  movement which emphasizes this shift.  The truth is always hard to exactly determine and difficult for people to agree upon entirely. Nonetheless, it is true that we did experience an event of enormous cultural and historical significance on the eleventh day of September 11, 2001.

What will the long-term outcomes likely be?  I am not going to devote most of this post or of my time in these days to really trying to predict a very specific vision of the future.  In this blog I have advocated a certain set of future courses of action and states of being for the United States of America and the world.  However, advocacy and prediction are quite different things. There is little that involves detachment in the former and little that involves committed passion in the latter.

I am entirely engaged in the work of being myself and attempting to live up to my own responsibilities most of the time. That is similar to the lives of most people most of the time. Our responsibilities, aptitudes and abilities vary but  a very large number of us could describe our lives in those terms. What happens to be true is that the world does not wait for us to have our own lives in perfect order before it confronts us with challenges. America and much of its legacy in the world faces such a challenge just now.   

There is no simple solution to all of the problems that we have to solve. But it will simply do little good to pretend that we do not have serious challenges that we must meet.  It helps to know what principles govern human behavior at the individual, family, community , national and global levels. But knowing all the basic principles that will shape the decisions we make and others make will not be enough.  We will need to know many things including players who will be making the decisions and  the reasons that are likely to appeal to them as they make those decisions.  I have left out several people for reasons too complex to summarize here but want to mention some of them by way of showing how incomplete the list is:

Larry Summers, Meg Whitman, Philip Lord Norton, King Juan Carlos, Felipe Calderon, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Mary Landrieu, Nancy Pelosi, Taylor Swift, Michael Phelps, Drew Brees, Colin Powell , Henry Louis Gates, Arnold Schwartznegger, Nick Clegg, James Carville, Anderson Cooper, Billy Nunguesser  and even me…   

Gearing up for the future of America these are in no particular order a group of people to whom more may be added later:

Dramatis Personae:

1.President Barack  Hussein Obama This President of the United States of America  will continue  to set the tone for much of the American future and its policies for the foreseeable future. We face the future as best we can in a world where the election of Barack Obama has already shown us as profoundly weak in the eyes of so much of the world. Barack Hussein Obama it is to be noted is the descendant of an American mother and has married and had children with an American wife. The mother was white, the wife is black. Obama’s father was an African student and he also had an Indonesian stepfather. In a scoiety where forty-one percent of children are currently born out of wedlock, Schwarzenegger has been Governor of California, Jindal  is currently Governor of Louisiana, Granholme was Governor of Michigan until two weeks ago and tens of millions live here without documents Obama has a strong basic appeal to our society which is committed to its own utter destruction at this time.

2. Josef Ratzinger, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI The second consecutive Patriarch of Rome, Bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiff and Successor to the Throne of St. Peter who has  not been an Italian and that (without saying the Italians are not agreat people and without saying that Bishops ought mostly to come from their own lands or related lands) is a good thing. It would probably be good if about half of all Popes were Italian  over time but I would not want to see dozens of Popes in a row who were not Italian so everyone must do the best they can. He is a German who fought in the regular nonpolitical  part of the German forces doing his duty in World War II and is a very accomplished scholar. However, the service to any state headed by Adolf Hitler and his lunatics is a blemish on the Papacy. But the Papacy has had many blemishes — nonetheless I do not lay all the blame on him personally but I do hold it against him.   He remembers the insanity of Nazi political religion and although his experience was more ambiguous than he admits he will work to see that the liturgy and practice of the Church draws forth a milieu such as produced Mozart, the Bach family and the Gothic Cathedrals. If he could say anything kind and honest to the Jews in the way of professional advice and have it received he would advise them to invest in their worship and liturgy to reach and surpass the heights of the Temple’s musical past.  

3. Her Britannic Majesty, Elizabeth She has managed to become the Head of State for sixteen countries as they left the Empire as well as head of the Commonwealth. The Crown is more independent of the UK government than it has been in centuries and this gives her bargaining power in that government she would not have otherwise.  Queen Elizabeth of Scotland and of England Second of the Name’s traditional  Christmas Speech this year was perhaps as good as any if not the best she has ever given. She seems to be growing both deeper and more spiritual and nuanced. There is no doubt in my mind that she will continue to be a factor in the world for at least as long as she reigns.

4. HRH Charles Prince of Wales is the Prince of WAles with the most formal education in history. He will not be a pet or showdog for anyone. Much of what he does is decent, admirable and very fine. He deals with issues others fail to see as vital. He can nonetheless be very dangerous to US interests. On the other hand he may help resist greater mutual dangers. As is often found in Kings (which he is not yet) the best and worst of his complex heritage are present together in him.  One of his many new initiatives is accounting for sustainability which is I think in part a response to the BP disaster. I think he is also very involved in the marriage of his son Prince William and trying to make a better and more secure future for both British royalty and the British people.

5. David Cameron A careful and clever young Prime Minister who will not overreach any time soon. He wants to build a Cameronism for the Conservatives  and see them rule the UK but he is in no hurry. Nobody knows what he may be capable of or what his limits are — not even David Cameron.  David Cameron has now formed a coallition government with the Liberal Democrats. He and Nick Clegg have done a very good job of organizing the debate and the reform of parliament in a way which can possibly lay a foundation for a political future that reverses many of the seemingly intractable roots sent into the political ground by the Labour Party in its thirteen years or so in power. He is still feeling his way in these years of Lib-Con coallition and is likely to emerge from the process stronger than ever. With a wife and young children he is clearly a symbol of what long-term political potential could look like.

6. Sarah Palin This former and resigned Alaska governor and Republican Vice Presidential Candidate has made an impact on American politics and raised cultural hopes which are not easy to quantify. She is not perfect but is a powerful living symbol of deep hopes of many people. Sarah Palin has recently had a television reality show called Sarah Palin’s Alaska in which she promotes her state and makes up in some way for walking out of the Governor’s Office. She also has come out with her second book after  the memoir Going Rogue. This second book is America by Heart and has been very successful.  She continues to develop ties with the Tea Party and other aspects of the US electorate and political milieu. 

7. George H. W. Bush This former US President is getting old enough that he may not be with us for long into the coming decade (or he may live well past this final year of the first decade, through the coming decade and into following one) but regardless his influence on the CIA, his heritage in establishing a unique American family expressed of Presidents, Governors and rooted in his father’s senatorial career makes him unique. His work with  Bill Clinton in the field of disaster relief will make the world and the nature aware of his work well into the Obama regime. He is also taking a measurable role as patriarch (in a limited American sense) of the Bush clan. He is mentioned in his son’s new memoir and has appeared on television discussing his exceptional sons, wife, daughters-in-law and grandchildren. He seems to be applying his formidable intellect to the fact that there are systemic problems in the USA which may demand remedies he would not have hoped to see employed during most of his life. 

8. George W. Bush This former President of the United State will continue to have influence both in the Bush family network and in the business community. In time his political legacy will be seen by the  GOP as having been elected twice with significant coattails.  If he lives a long time he will have more of a politico-social life than most imagine now before he leaves the stage. However, he will not be the individual super-producer of work that Jimmy Carter has been. Sincw the first part of this entry was posted this former President Bush has come out with his memoirs Decision Points which has sold very successfully. Dana Perino his former Whte House press secretary has used her television news job to defend his record in subtle by continuous ways. His daughter Barbara Bush has been working on establishing a very successful health and medical charity which givers her occasion to discuss his good deed in AIDS outreach in Africa. His reputation has been rebuilt considerably since he left office amid clouds of critical animosity. 

9. Glen Beck One to watch! It is too early to say what this Mormon populist conservative tv host, commenter and  organizer will really do over the long-term. Beck continues to play a fairly serious game. He is a man of patience and significant internal resources on whom a great deal of the jury of history is not only out but in some cases has not yet even been convened.

10. Hillary Clinton This Secretary of State and former First Lady is a big question mark. She will respond effectively to opportunity. That does not mean the liberal feminist has no ideals but her style is opportunistic. She will do a lot if there are big opportunities in her path and she will do very little (for one of her stature) if there are not good opportunities. Hillary Clinton has begun to pay the full and significant price of being Obama’s secretary of State. On the other hand, she works with her husband and her Senate ties in New York and with leaders around the world. She works and stays with the game and sometimes fails her way to success. She is becoming more impressive and indispensable in American political terms even as she becomes more flawed and marked by faults of various kinds. 

11. President Nicolas Sarkozy has already sought to strengthen ties with the United States, has entertained the Pope, has married a supermodel the whole world has seen nude and is worth seeing nude, has deported Gypsies and taken action against Moslem corruption of French culture. There is something of La Royaume de La Belle France about him. He needs to hunt and got to Church once in a while in very expensive clothes (seriously)  In doing all these other things so far he has avoided brutality, great scandal and the greater than necessary abuse of human rights. He  will chafe against the European bit distance himsel from the UK when he can in conscience and is the first real chance that French royalist gradualists have had for a negotiation towards their better goals. Sarkozy is farther from being able to adress his principal goals than most world leaders and he is a cautious man as regards policy. Sarkozy has not been able to bridge both the Obama gap and the language gap and forge more ties with the United Statres of America. It seems to be a case where events are pushing him into the European mainstream so far.

 12. Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu ( בִּנְיָמִין “בִּיבִּי” נְתַנְיָהוּ ), also Binyamin Netanyahu) was born on October 21, 1949 and  is the ninth and current Prime Minister of Israel  and importantly Netanyahu is the first and only Israeli prime minister born in Israel after the establishment of the State of Israel. He achieved this distinction with his earlier Prime Ministry but it is still his distinction currently. With strong social and educational ties to America he holds varied roles in the small and complex country at the unique crossroads of the old world simultaneoulsy serving as the Chairman of the Likud Party, as a member of the Knesset, as the Health Minister of Israel, as the Pensioner Affairs Minister of Israel and as the Economic Strategy Minister of Israel. He will surely struggle in the current environment  but if the right changes occur he will lead Israel and the region in capitalizing on this set of changes.  Netanyahu must currently deal with an American regime which is completely antithetical to  a peaceful and secure Israel and where he also lacks a wide variety of good options.  However, as I type this Hezbolla ministers have resigned in Lebanon and there are forces struggling to assert a new order in the Middle East.

13. Bill Gates, William Henry “Bill” Gates III was  born October 28, 1955 and is a great creator and leader who is now largely redefining philanthropy.  He is best known for being long time chairman of  Microsoft, the uniquley important software company he founded in a powerful partnership with Paul Allen. He and his wife Melinda are partners in love and parenthood but their partnership has also been very significant for  the world as they steer and an enormous empire of giving and activism. They are financialy able to do this as Bill Gates  is  ranked among the  richest people in the world  and was ranked as the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he fell to third. During his career at Microsoft, Gates Gates built the giant into an essential part of computing around the world as both CEO and  later chief software archirect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock. Perhaps he may be drawn back into the corporate leadership he knows well and into new forms of social leadership. In the meanwhile he is likely to have a profound impact on America and the world as they find their way forward with Microsoft, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, their cooperation with Warren Buffet and other challenges that come along.  Bill Gates is becoming that kind of litmus test of America’s potential to adapt and survive. He has social moementum which could be harnessed for the good of society by skillfull social change  in America but has long struggled under great suspicions. America does not believe it has to choose between people like Billl Gates and more evil leaders. America believes it does not need leaders. 

14. Steve Jobs will use the Gates retirement to pull ahead. However at the personal level he is a darker figure than he was as a youth. Even as a youth he was no saint. But he is brilliant and a vital national asset like Gate in that way. Apple, the Next flop,  Pixar and more Apple. He is a compelling genius in technology and industry who chose the pirates flag as the icon for Mac development and who instead of a big charity has a liver transplant where someone had to die for him to live. He has ads for Apple that mostly attack PCs and Microsoft’s Windows. He is easily compared to Gates and has always been loved by the cool kids in American society as it is. Steve Jobs cannot be dismissed as someone to watch.  In the layering of this post it happened in 2011 but before Sept. 11 that Jobs took a leave of absnce from Apple indefinitely for health reasons.  

15. Carl Svanberg This Swede Chairman of BP and other corporations is one to watch. Low profile and clever he is not the man to forget.   Svanberg did graduate work  and earned a Master’s degree  in Applied Physics  after a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Scandinavian institutions of quality and honorary doctorates from other institutions.  Svanberg remains a major player in high tech industry in the Norse Lands remaining a well invested director on the board of telecom firm Ericcson where he served as CEO  from April 8 to December 31 of 2009. He is also on the board of several other companies and maintains some of the agressiveness of the ice hockey player he once was. He rubbed several people in Louisiana the wrong way during the BP crisis. 

16. UN Secretary  General Ban Ki-moon,   반기문 (潘基文) This cool professional can think more clearly about the Middle East but his bones and instincts know less than any previous Secretary General. On the other hand this man from East Asia is bringing to 37 years of relevant  service both in Government and on the global stage and having served in Korea as  Director-General of American Affairs he is trying to educate the West about the Far East in his quiet way — Good luck with that!  On 1 January 2007, Ban Ki-moon of the Republic of Korea became the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations .  He was as well as being Director-General of American Affairs, his country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade. In that Korean ministry he had held  responsibility for a variety of portfolios, including Foreign Policy Adviser to the President, Chief National Security Adviser to the President and Deputy Minister for Policy Planning . As a diplomat he has lived in New Delhi, Washington D.C. and Vienna as well visiting many other places. He is married to his high school sweetheart and they have two children and is believed to be trilingual – French being the third language. He was educated in Korea and a t Harvard in the USA. 

17. Hu JinTao  胡锦涛 is The Premiere in the People’s Republic of China will continue to try to develop the Presidency and Premiere powersharing and to increase the importance of the Congress of People’s deputies if he can. He will try to restore full regularity to the Chinese governments by incorporating Imperial and Confucian elements. He will  reform the Party and execute those who commit crimes which bring the party into ill regard. Minority and foreign relations will be a continuous challenge and he will foster the development of Chinese urban consumer life to make China less dependent on Exports.

18. Timothy Geithner One to watch! He is an opportunist with ideals and may do much or little depending on where money moves relative to him.

19. Al Franken A man to watch. He is clever, rooted, articulate and conscientious. He is also a bitter angry and reckless man. Which guy will show up for the next eleven years? Franken is a comedian who won a bitterly contested recount in his Senatorial election when elected with President Barack Hussein Obama. He has authored books of rather nasty tempered political humor. He is not so far either a substantial statesman nor a total joke in the US Senate.  

20. Barney Frank Money, New England and Homosexuality will increasingly become a portfolio of political expertise and experience for this man. He will grow in stature on these things and lose relevance on others as often happens to older politicians in legislatures. However, he could seize on on some successful other cause and make himself known in other circles. 

21. Vladimir Putin ,Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin  Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин,  will remain Putin while he remains alive. He has many hopes he still cannot really do anything to achieve but he keeps chipping away  at the obstacles. He likes healing and building better but could become a figure of destruction fomenting hate — it just depends on too many factors to sort out here.

22. Bobby Jindal has earned some credibility with Louisiana in the BP crisis but not enough to waste. Look to see him as the Indian-American, Louisiana and Oxford alumni Jindal unless a big chance at being a national Republican Icon is very clear and near.  Bobby Jindal has just come out with a book titled Leadership in Crisis which is part political memoir  and part summary of the BP crisis and part autobiography. I have also met with him briefly since I first published this blog post and we discussed some issues relating to the spill. This was in a public venue in Abbeville’s A.A. Comeaux Recreation Center after a speech and did not get into his secretary’s permanent log. But I thought it was a useful exchange.

23. Bill Richardson will do a variety of things in New Mexico, America and the world. But if constitutional change comes to the USA then expect him to rise to new prominence as a major framer and negotiator for the constitutional rights and role of Aboriginal Americans and their Nations. 

24. Bill Clinton will become a very prominent broker if constitutional change comes and his health holds out. Otherwise expect him to continue to fade away more and more with occasional flashes of influence. Bill Clinton is busy lately. He participated in the 2010 elections which were one of the biggest defeats in the history of the Congressional Democrats. He has worked for Haiti but has seen lots of mediocre and poor results. However, like his wife he is always growing in experience and sophisitication.

25. Osama Bin Laden will become more of an icon as the Obama presidency progresses if his health holds out. His second act will get under way.  Is he a living legend or a dead one? That basic query is the question many can’t help asking and if he is alive what  is he really doing. He may well be behind the rebuilding of his movements in the Arabian Peninsula and Afghanistan.  He is a powerful symbol of what it means to be committed to a cause over a life time. 

What does it mean to pick on a few players in the world and recognize their importance to our future? It does not mean that they are the only participants in the future of our world who will matter.

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Posted in 9-11 attacks, Bobby Jindal, BP Chairman Svanberg, Christianity, France, Geopolitics, Gulf of Mexico, List of People to Watch, Louisiana, Peace Plan in Israel, Roman Catholicism, United States of America, Western civilization, White House

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