If only these hippies had been simple slackers instead of terrorists:

At about 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1968, as New York City police entered Hamilton Hall, on Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus, to clear it of demonstrators, files belonging to Orest A. Ranum, an associate professor of history, were ransacked, and papers documenting more than 10 years of research were burned. The fire came at the tail end of a month of protests that had roiled Columbia, paralyzing the university and provoking the biggest police bust ever undertaken on an American campus. Members of Students for a Democratic Society, which led the protests, denied responsibility for the arson, claiming that if anyone had set fire to Ranum’s papers, it was the police.

Now a key participant in the Columbia rebellion has made a startling confession. Mark Rudd, who was chairman of the SDS chapter during the disturbances, acknowledges that a fellow radical, John “J.J.” Jacobs, set the fire in Hamilton Hall, and that he, Rudd, went along with the plan. The confession, a depressing postscript to the 1960s, solves a four-decade-long mystery. It offers a grim testament to just how mean things got at Columbia, and a sobering reminder that not all student radicals were starry-eyed idealists. In more than a couple of cases, they were power-hungry extremists jostling for control of the student-protest movement. And Ranum had the audacity to get in their way.

Rudd went on to write several Weathermen manifestos with fellow terrorist buddies Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.  Another one of their antics resulted in three Weathermen blowing themselves into little pieces while building bombs.  Now Rudd has regrets:

“I have never, alas, apologized directly to Prof. Ranum or to the families of the three people killed at the town house. I did not want to reraise painful memories for those individuals, especially because to do so would be mostly self-serving,” he said.

Well isn’t that altruistic?  Of course, as he mourns for his fallen terrorist friends, there is no mention of the original destination for Rudd and Ayer’s bombs:

Four 12″ pipe-bombs stuffed with dynamite, using roof nails as shrapnel designed to add lethality to the blast, were recovered in the remains of the basement bomb factory. So were more than 50 sticks of dynamite, some of it fused in eight-stick bundles that could level entire buildings.Had these bombs not detonated hours before in a Greenwich Village basement, the attack imagined above could have easily come to pass. In fact, the terror attack described above would have used less than half of the bombs built by Bill Ayer’s Weathermen.

The “attack imagined above” was to be an army dance at the Fort Dix NCO Club.  Thousands of soldiers and their dates would have been blown up.

Rudd has now resurrected SDS and makes money teaching his terrorist ways to a whole new crop of kids.  His partners-in-crime, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, went on to become “community organizers” in Chicago.  Ayers has been described as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood“.

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Difference of Love

The train is never late: every time Valentine’s comes around, the Muslim world reacts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in their power to quash the festivity that comes with the celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine’s every year — and the celebration of the day itself is literally outlawed in Islamist states. The Saudis, for instance, ruthlessly punish the slightest hint of celebrating Valentine’s Day. Just a few days ago, the Kingdom and its religious “morality” police officially issued a stern warning that anyone caught even thinking about Valentine’s Day will suffer some of the most painful penalties of Sharia Law.

and stateside:

In the West, meanwhile leftist feminists are not to be outdone by their jihadi allies in reviling — and trying to kill — Valentine’s Day. Throughout all Women’s Studies Programs on American campuses, for instance, you will find the demonization of Valentine’s Day, since, as the disciples of Andrea Dworkin angrily explain, the day is a manifestation of how capitalist and homophobic patriarchs brainwash and oppress women and push them into spheres of powerlessness. As a person who spent more than a decade in academia, I was privileged to witness this grotesque attack and “deconstruction” of Valentine’s Day at close range. Feminist icons like Jane Fonda, meanwhile, help lead the attack on Valentine’s Day in society at large. As David Horowitz has documented, Fonda has led the campaign to transform this special day into “V-Day” (“Violence against Women Day”) — which is, when it all comes down to it, a day of hate, featuring a mass indictment of men.

and furthermore:

Valentine’s Day is a “shameful day” for the Muslim world and for the radical Left. It is shameful because private love is considered obscene, since it threatens the highest of values: the need for a totalitarian order to attract the complete and undivided attention, allegiance and veneration of every citizen. Love serves as the most lethal threat to the tyrants seeking to build Sharia and a classless utopia on earth, and so these tyrants yearn for the annihilation of every ingredient in man that smacks of anything that it means to be human.

Read the whole thing here.

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A small plane has crashed into an office building in Austin.  The FAA currently considers this event “apparently a criminal act” (see last update below).

UPDATE: The Statesman is reporting that the crash was in the 9400 block of Research Boulevard, an office park that happens to house the FBI’s Austin field office.

UPDATE: The FBI occupies part of the building complex in question; not clear if FBI offices were target, or even other government agencies in other buildings.

UPDATE:  According to the Statesman, the FBI offices were not hit.  The building that was struck housed mostly IRS offices.  It is assumed to be an accident, though some witnesses claim the plane came in at “full throttle.”  The report says the plane was believed to have come from Waco.

 UPDATE: In case you were wondering:

“At this time we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to criminal or terrorist activity,” said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, told CNN. “We are in the process of coordinating with state officials and other federal partners to gather more information and at this time we will defer additional questions to local officials and the FAA.”

UPDATE:  It is now being reported that the plane took off from Georgetown Municipal Airport, and there is some belief it is tied into the house fire referenced in the comments section.  More to come . . .

UPDATE:  The Statesman is now quoting an FAA official that the crash was “apparently a criminal act.”  The FAA has not yet confirmed that the plane belonged to the man whose nearby home was on fire.

UPDATE:  Since the crash is now considered a criminal act, The Statesman reports, the FBI will take over handling.  Further:

A federal official confirmed for the Statesman that the tail number of the Piper Cherokee plane is registered to a plane owned by Joseph Andrew Stack, the private plane pilot whose nearby home was on fire at roughly the same time..

UPDATE:  Here is the latest from The Statestman, discussing the connection between the crash and the house fire.  It also contains a link to the rambling, self-pitying, at times incoherent internet note apparently written by this murderous loser, seemingly as a suicide note since it listed his birth year (1956) and death year (2010).

UPDATE:  From a 3 p.m. update from The Statesman:  “Authorities have been unable to reach the crash impact site and do not yet know the condition of the pilot, Clopton said.”  I bet I can guess.

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I periodically post here about why and how markets work and their fundamental contribution to our individual lives as well as the whole of mankind.  It is continually irritating to hear business leaders, politicians and supposed experts waxing eloquent on aspects of liberty and free markets  which they do not understand.  I listened to a well known international investment banker interviewed last night whose primary cure for what ails the U.S. banking system is the regulatory control of senior bankers’ compensation.  The one undeniable, but unspoken, fact I drew from his comments is his paycheck is definitely cut from an office in an offshore office and he would not be subject to the government control of his income he so freely advocated for his competitors.

Shikha Dalmia writes about economics and markets for Forbes.com and Reason magazine.  She won the 2009 Bastiat Prize, presented by P.J. O’Rourke, for online journalism along with Dan Hannan of the UK.   Dalmia has written a great essay illustrating the all too often misunderstood relationship between individual merit and the value of an idea and its manifestation as product or service.

With the notable exception of Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, market theoreticians have to a large extent employed the equivalent of the Great Man theory of history to explain what makes markets tick. According to this theory, the course of history is shaped not by the convergence of multiple, unpredictable events but by the intervention of great men. Likewise, in the conventional thinking about markets, economic progress depends not on the labors of infinite economic actors but on the select few, the brainiacs, who rise to the top and generate innovations from which ordinary mortals benefit through a kind of trickle-down effect.

The theory’s promoters are varied, prominent, wrong and occasionally acid-tongued:

English sociologist Michael Young noted in his influential 1958 fable, The Rise of the Meritocracy: “Civilization does not depend on the stolid mass, the homme moyen sensuel, but upon the creative minority, the innovator … the brilliant few … the restless elite who have made mutation a social as well as a biological fact.” Less elegantly, Ayn Rand evinced a “pyramid of ability” in capitalism under which “the man at the top contributes the most to all those below him.” What’s more, this Nietzsche of capitalism opined: “Man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of their brain.”

Charming broad, that Rand woman.

Here Dalmia begins to explain the neutrality of markets and why the immediate results do not always fit our sense of moral justice:

In a functioning market, Hayek insisted, financial compensation depends not on someone’s innate gifts or moral character. Nor even on the originality or technological brilliance of their products. Nor, for that matter, on the effort that goes into producing them. The sole and only issue is a product’s value to others. Compare an innovation as incredibly mundane as a new plastic lid for paint cans with a whiz-bang, new computer chip. The painter could become just as rich as the computer whiz so long as the savings from spills that the lid offers are as great as the productivity gains from the chip. It matters not a whit that the lid maker is a drunk, wife-beating, out-of-work painter who stumbled upon this idea through pure serendipity when he tripped over a can of paint. Or that the computer whiz is a morally stellar Ph.D. who spent years perfecting his chip.

In a perfect world, a meritocratic system would function with mechanical precision delivering rewards to the smartest, hardest working people of the highest moral character. But that is emphatically not where we live no matter the relentless efforts of leftist academics, opportunistic politicians and ignorant religious leaders to forge those impossible rules upon an uncompromising and uncooperative reality:

The idea that there is no god (or some secular version of him) meting out cosmic justice through the market’s invisible hand is unsettling, even to market advocates, but it shouldn’t be. It opens up the possibility of a defense of markets that is, as it were, more marketable.

Few would dispute that markets are fairer than the aristocratic order they replaced where privilege was a birthright, not something to be earned. But the view that the super-gifted or the super-smart deserve the biggest rewards doesn’t seem a whole lot fairer given that these traits are arguably inherited, too. This conception, in fact, forces those who are less successful to internalize their failure—accept their second-class status as preordained—breeding alienation and resentment. Hard work or some quality of character would offer a more palatable basis for building a case for markets, except that all the lowlifes who routinely make it rich in markets offer too much evidence to the contrary.

The idea that there is no god (or some secular version of him) meting out cosmic justice through the market’s invisible hand is unsettling, even to market advocates, but it shouldn’t be. It opens up the possibility of a defense of markets that is, as it were, more marketable.

Few would dispute that markets are fairer than the aristocratic order they replaced where privilege was a birthright, not something to be earned. But the view that the super-gifted or the super-smart deserve the biggest rewards doesn’t seem a whole lot fairer given that these traits are arguably inherited, too. This conception, in fact, forces those who are less successful to internalize their failure—accept their second-class status as preordained—breeding alienation and resentment. Hard work or some quality of character would offer a more palatable basis for building a case for markets, except that all the lowlifes who routinely make it rich in markets offer too much evidence to the contrary.

The ultimate moral success of liberty lies allowing and trusting the rules of free markets to flourish, despite our natural misgivings about the initial or apparent unjust or unequal rewards. Herein lies the central truth about merit and value:

But markets don’t just expand and democratize the concept of merit; they render it moot. No longer does it matter what great qualities reside in you. What matters is if you can make them work for others. The concept of merit is replaced by that of value. Merit is intrinsic, concentrated, and atomistic; value is relational, decentralized, and social.

Dalmia is a brilliant and concise thinker and writer.

This is an excellent six and one-half minute Reason TV interview with Shikha Dalmia on the movie, Slumdog Millionaire, the explosive Indian economy and what it can teach Americans about their own problems and solutions.

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EDD KELLUM HENDEE went home to the Lord on Saturday, the 13th of February 2010.  He was born on the 19th of February 1976 in Dallas, Texas and attended Second Baptist High School in Houston, the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1999.   Edd went on to earn a masters in English from George Mason University and then served five years in the United States Navy.   As a lieutenant on the U.S.S. Denver in Operation Enduring Freedom, he led boarding teams onto foreign vessels in search of al Qaeda.

Edd married the love of his life, Claudine Moore Hendee of Houston, Texas, on the 17th of February 2002, and together they had three beautiful children.  He considered his family the best accomplishment of his life.After his naval service, Edd graduated from Harvard Business School in 2006, and went to work with Barry Sternlicht at Starwood Capital Group in Greenwich, where he quickly rose to vice president of acquisitions, leading the largest initial public offering at the time, the third-largest real estate investment trust raised in U.S. history, and the largest externally-managed blind pool fund ever completed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Edd was extraordinary in every aspect of his life.  He balanced a profound intellect with an engaging and kind heart that stemmed from his love for the Lord.  He treasured his family and made common, everyday activities exceptional.  Edd’s tenacious spirit helped him overcome a Joe Theismann leg break, and he went on to complete a marathon and an Ironman Triathlon, despite this setback.  He was a tremendous role model.   He will always be remembered for his infectious laugh, mischievous smile and warm heart.   Edd enriched the lives of countless family, friends, and coworkers around the globe who loved him and shared his love of life.

Edd is survived by his beautiful bride Claudine Moore Hendee, son Campbell Luke, 4, son Hudson Jacob, 2, and daughter Reagan Reese, 8 months, mother Nina Johnson Hendee, father Edd Campbell Hendee, sisters Lisa Hendee Blackard and Kristin Ann Hendee, mother-in-law Norma Jean Moore, father-in-law Gary Lee Moore, sisters-in-law Gena Moore Rush and Gabriella Lee Moore, and brothers-in-law Chris Kirkland Blackard and David Rush.

A funeral service and celebration of Edd’s life is to be conducted at eleven o’clock in the morning on Saturday, the 20th of February, in the Worship Center of Second Baptist Church, 6400 Woodway Drive in Houston, where Dr. Ed Young is to officiate.  Immediately following the funeral service, all are invited to join the family for a reception in the adjacent Deacon’s Parlor.  A private family graveside service and interment is to follow.

1 John 3:11  This is the message you have heard from the beginning:  We should love one another.

In lieu of flowers or customary remembrances, memorial contributions may be directed to the Claudine and Edd Hendee Children’s Educational Fund, c/o Wells Fargo Bank, 901 Gessner Road, Houston, TX, 77024.

This notice was published in the Houston Chronicle on February 17, 2010.

An online guest book by Legacy.com and the Houston Chronicle is here to leave notes of sympathy and condolence as well as the comments section below.

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