Tag Archives: Oprah WInfrey

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

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 ChristopherJohnnyDepp 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 JoRowling, 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.

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

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 ChristopherJohnnyDepp 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 JoRowling, 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.

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

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 ChristopherJohnnyDepp 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.  JoanneJoRowling, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

The second portion had fifteen people to watch:

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

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

The third portion of my list had ten people watch:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Drew Brees is the quarterback for the defending Superbowl Champion New Orleans Saints National Football League team. He has been named Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the year and the Associated Press Male Athlete of the year both recently announced 2010 awards. Howver this is not an annual nod, this is perhaps a less well-known nomination but it is meant to cover more time. he came to a city tremendously battered by Hurricane Katrina and he dame to a state battered by Katrina, Rita, Gustave, Ike and other hurricanes in recent years. He has stayed through the BP Oil Spill and evolving world economic crisis. He wears a nine and has made it popular in a large region of this country while it is a most honored number in what the rest of the world calls football. That is only or mostly an accident but it is not the only bridge he has built. He has achieved iconic status in a city America regards as 70% black and has played in several regions of these United States of America.  New Orleans is a place far more troubled and also far more rich in heritage and potential than recent news reports have indicated and Brees has a gift for speaking to all parts of the cultural complex. He can speak to groups with strained relationships and be a symbol for both and he can include his family in this journey. He really does have some kind of a gift for unity. Over time he may have a chance to use that role and gift on a larger stage if in a less dramatic way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In each of the posts in the series of posts which make up this list I have discussed those who are not in it. Here the rub is more painful than most. I am very aware that I have not yet included and may not include Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins only because of their age and the fact that this is a list for a decade that begins still a few months in the future.  It also hurts me to have missed David Hackworth and Benoit Mandelbrot because I am limiting the list to living people and even though their contribution will live on in the future I am excluding them on the basis of bad timing on my part in starting  this list this year. 

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 

That gives me a total of fifty people on a list which is supposed to be either 91 or a hundred people but which is not due to be finished on December 31. It is not due until September 10, 2011. This list will bring me to fifty-five  if I am counting correctly so far.

Here is another portion of my list of people to watch. 

1. Liu Zhijun: 刘志军 was born on January,1953, in Ezhou, in Hubei province and is a committed Chinese Communist and a Chinese politician. Liu Zhijun has been Minister of Railways in the People’s Republic of China since 2003 and was previously the Vice Minister, Chief Despatcher of Chinese Railways and the Director General of Shenyang Railway Administration. He is a member of the Han Nationality Ethnic group which is the dominant and majority ethnicity in China. His general education is not entirely clear to me but he attended and performed well in a Chinese school system where he was apprently on a pre-engineering track. He began his career in Feb. 1972 and joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Aug., 1973.  As an established engineering careerist  graduated from Party School of the CPC and majored in Marxist Philosophy in July, 1998.  Liu Zhijun graduated from Party School of the CPC and majored in Marxist Philosophy in July, 1998.  He earned a Master’s degree from the  Party School of the Communist Party of China. This was partly a review in Engineering but had a Marxist and  a social planning focus as well as getting him certified as having some graduate level study as an engineer.  He rose in his career to serve as a member of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.  He now holds avery important post and is the princpal official in charge of the railway affairs and policy in general and is the chief executive of the  General Office of the Ministry of Railways.  Among the departments and interests which answer to him are: the  personnel department, finance department, the task forces and committes overseeing international communication and cooperation,  and the varied parties and institutions  focused  on collaboratin on the construction of high speed railway. In all areas he answers for the allocation of rail resources to all aspect of Chinese need and development as well as the improvement and maintenance of railway safety. Chinese railway authorities claim to have broken commercial rail records.   The high speed rail devlopment in China has been the subject of a great deal of internal discussion for some time. While the system in which he works is less individualistic than some and penalties for missteps can frequently be severe  Liu Zhijun is certainly personally at the center of this impressive effort. It is not entirely clear to me what his involvement with the  experimental mag-lev or magnetic levitation trains that do run in China is but the other high speed mag- lev railroads are certainly under his authority and also fast conventional trains that are not mag-lev but include pressurized trains running to Tibet from the plains. But it has been reported that a Chinese-made maglev train has reached a top speed above 268 miles an hour on it operating track.  While  French trains have recorded test runs at 356 miles per hour this is very impressive.  However,  any readers here becoming riders there  will reach speeds of 220 miles an hour  on a commercial mag-lev ticket as opposed to the record breaking pace announced by the Chinese government or its announced goal of developing a 312 mile an hour train.  While the United States moves away from its own  greatness to chaos and mediocrity and hellish failure the Chinese are building on trains which have long been a national strength and obsession.  Liu Zhijun is leading that effort.

2.  His Tuitonga Highness, King George Tupou V, Tuitonga Faka Tonga is the King of Tonga.  The Kingdom of Tonga is a country about 1,200 miles north of New Zealand and about 500 miles East of Fiji.  It consists of about 150 islands in three island groups about forty are regularly inhabited but a good percentage of the others are used for farming, recreation, emegergency depots and docks and for the celbration of ancient rituals by inhabitants of neighboring islands.  The total population of the country is a bit over 100,000 although probably as many people who see themselves as Tongans and sometimes visit as well as sending back money in many cases live in other countries.  Tonga depends largely on the remittances of funds from the Tongans  abroad, on the bureaucracies the government is able to create and then also has a large subsistence econmy which is based on exchanges which never make a fiscal or monetary appearance. This shadow economy is based on the use and resprocal exchange between Tongans  of handcrafts, harvests from the bush farms allocated to as many Tongan males upon achieving adulthood as possible and from fishing. Their is also a tourism industry but it is limited in actuality and potential in terms of creating small business activities. The King as head of the government has a role to play in creating funds for the bureaucracy and other government activities including the Palace and Royal House from the negotiation of cruise ship docking rights, fishing rights and marina use. However, the big development  in this area is the  role Tonga plays in certain Sattelite sot rights. Recently for example  Tonga  and Indonesia have reached an agreement to coordinate their use of the 134[degrees]E orbital slot over the Pacific Ocean and have ended a very bitter dispute  by launching  a joint venture satellite to replace the Indonesian sattelite which is near the end of its useful life. Tonga and Indonesia are also involved in the joint operation of both the Rimsat and Palava B1 satellites from the same orbital position.This means Tonga has a close working relationship with Russia as well as New Zealand and the US where many Tongans reside, the UK in which it is a member of the British Commonwealth and the the Mormon Church which is a major player throughout Polynesia. Constitutional reform is ongoing and the Crown Prince and Princess were killed  in a car crash in California just before the recent succession which was alos marked by bloody and  destructive fires  abd riots. I lived in Tonga and attended Tonga Side School. I worshipped both in the Capital’s Roman Catholic Cathedral and in the Palace’s Royal Chapel back in the seventies. I maintain ties there but do not know the King. I met his father briefly a few times.  

3. Dominique Strauss-Kahn is the tenth Managing Director of  the International Monetary Fund. Strauss-Kahn is  a French citizen  who became the IMF’s tenth Managing Director in November 2007.  From 1997-1999 he served as Finance Minister of France.  He was selected by the IMF’s Executive Board is responsible for  appointing the Managing Director and prefers to come to a consensus. A French national and native Dominique Strauss-Kahn was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on April 25, 1949.  He did spend much of his childhood in Morocco. This was at a time when French power in North Africa was considerable.  His service as the French Finance Minister came at the peak of a long carreer embracing Academia, private corporate law, service as a politician in the national eye  when was elected Deputy (Member of Parliament) to the National Assembly (1986), and there he chaired the Finance Commission from 1988 to 1991. He was prepared for the National Assembly by  having been  appointed Deputy Commissioner of the Economic Planning Agency (1981-1986). This left him two years to prepare to run for office while coniuing as a professor.  After leaving the chairmanship behind  Strauss-Kahn served as Minister of Industry and International Trade, during which time he participated in the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations from 1991 to 1993.  He then left politics behind for a while and from 1993 and 1997 was in the private sector as a corporate lawyer.   He is however a lawyer with a PhD in Economics from the University of Paris  where he began to be a tenured professor  in 1978 he is well in touch with the focus of thought in Europe and can help the IMF to adjust to America’s long saga of geopolitical abdication, frenzy and suicide as he struggles with French and European concerns which are serious enough. 

4.Heinz-Otto Peitgen  is both a German native and citizen who has long lived and worked in the United States of America as an academic and mathematician. Heinz-Otto Peitgen did have some kind of personal connection to the towering Benoit Mandelbrot  but  is also in his own right  among the most prominent researchers in the fractal mathematics and gemoetry and in their application in related fields of study. Peitgen has been a professor of mathematics primarily  in a nonetheless varied carreer. This teaching and research was based at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1985 until 1991. Florida  Atlantic University has been his home since 1991 where he is still  a professor of mathematics atFlorida Atlantic University in Boca Raton Florida.  Despite his roots in the American Acdemy he was eductated in Germany at the University of Bonn and the University of Bremen and remains tied to each and has remained a major force in Germany all along in the world of applied mathematics.  He started  a company in 1995  which changed its name in 2009  and is now the Fraunhofer MEVIS – Institute for Medical Image Computing which Peitgen still manages. In 1997, Peitgen joined others in founding a second company MeVis Medical Solutions AG, MMS, which has been listed on the German stock market since 2007.

  5. Julie Taymor is an acclaimed American Director and lively artist who  was born on Decmeber 15, 1952 in Newton, Massachussettes in the United States of America  She is married to Elliot Goldenthal. She is the complete package as a director of theater, opera and film within the same continuous carreer. Taymor’s has received  two Tony Awards and been nominated a total of four times.  She made much of her reputation with the public for directing the stage musical, The Lion King, and it was for this for which  she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for directing a musical and another Tony Award for Original Costume Design.  She has also won a the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design. Having done other things including working with the  Metropolitan Opera and  winning  an Emmy Award, and  receiving a nomination for the Academy Award for Original Song she is still a major player in New York Theater. Her most recent project is the not yet opened Broadway-musical, Spider-Man : Turn Off the Dark.   Her father was gynecologist and her mother was a political science teacher when she was growing up. They were a Jewish family. She directed plays with her siters acting in early childhood for family enjoyment and by nine was active in the Boston Children’s Theater. In high schools she traveled in Asia and her training and background in Theater are extensive including Julie Portman’s Theater workshop of Boston and Paris’s   L’École Internationale de Théâtre. The breadth of her knowledge and exposure within the world of the lively arts is  really impressive. 

 

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

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.

Personal Identity

This is a brief introduction and a reposting of an old Facebook Note.  The Facebook note is one of series about Jesus and the Gospels which I did and which I began to post here within other notes on Veterans Day. I feel the need to get that whole series on to this blog within a reasonably brief period of time. So this is the continuation of that set and is also about identity as I am aware of my own identity today.  I am very aware of all that I have and have not done and all that I have going for and against me today. I also am thinking of Oprah Winfrey’s retirement and Sarah Palin’s book tour. These are two strong personalities whom people relate to as people and who are doing something to define and redefine themselves in the public eye. So I am using this occasion to post this Facebook note and here it is.  

I am still trying to get to a total of 52 Facebook Notes by my June 15 birthday. A birthday is a very personal kind of celebration and is less shared than almost any other. Only twins and other multis fully share a birthday when one is talking about the kind of birthday Americans of my generation celebrate. I have so many varied memories of this day and so many people have almost no significant memories of that day. Then there are a relatively few people who remember sharing it with me. People who happen to share this date of birth are like earth-like planets around other stars — perhaps similar but so far mostly unrelated. A birthday is in large measure a celebration of identity.

Identity is a complex thing. Certainly it can become complicated to discuss and define it.
I wish to discuss some of it now. I think that my parents, who were much younger as my parents than as any other of my syblings’ parents, lived in a generation that were much aware of seeking after their own identity. The search for Identity is certainly on of the great quests of mythology, scripture, history, fiction and ordinary life. Most of us during adolescence have at least some time and inclination to consider who we are and who we would like to become. I have had more than an average amount of leisure for such questions. Partly because of the family and country I come from but partly because of who I am. I have been robbed, assaulted, threatened, intimidated with cut-off electricity and confinement and tempted with all the blandishments of money. sex and power (in a small degree) but I have always remained me — there has always been a whole lot of me that could not lose itself in this process. I still had the problems and flaws that were my problems before and I still had the strengths and accomplishments that were mine before. Many people are less immune to outside influence than I am. There are again various reasons for that fact being true. I will not be able to go through them exhaustively in this note for sure.

However, I am at a point in my life where I know that identity is not the same subject it was for me in adolescence. Like most people I have figured out a great deal more about who I am now that I am 44 than I knew when I was 17. However, there was a lot in my life that was never going to be identifiable and understandable mostly as a question of identity. But identity is important to me.

I think that one part of my identity is that I am willing to make a little trouble. I am willing to raise a little hell, lower a little heaven and then join the fight on Earth when the huge ruckus stirs up. I am not sure that very many people enjoy peace more than I do not am I claiming that I am an invincible super-fighter. However, I am willing to seek out and engage adversaries, opponents, enemies and others with some alacrity and some frequency. I do this in games and sport, in politics and in varied forms of discussion. I do not mind mixing it up.

When we think of all the great power of stars, galaxies, strings and clusters of galaxies we certainly feel small and relatively insignificant. There is a great deal of truth to that insight but it is not the only relevant insight. We are relevant to ourselves and to those around us certainly. It is our responsibility to take ourselves seriously to some extent. It is even our responsibility to be in our corner and love ourselves to the proper (and not to the improper extent). There may be something very wrong with many of us when we get overheated asserting ourselves as Black, white, gay, straight, men, women, Hispanic, Acadian, Mensan, Jewish, Muslim, German, Italian or Buddhist. But there would certainly be a lot more wrong with never trying to figure out who we are, never trying to be loyal to those associated with us, never trying to present our own moral sensibilities to the world around us.

I am the kind of person who is born with a relatively narrow window of approach to both survival and hope . However, I am no one of the very few such people who against almost all odds really find that niche and manage to make it all work out. Rather I am perhaps one of the near also-rans. I look at the unknown relatively numerous outliers who never have known even as close with the world in which we live as I have had upon occasion. I have a good number of friends who have worked far less at paying jobs, have had more trouble with law enforcement and public health officials and have generaly shown more evidence than I of hanging on the very edge of the body politic and public society. We have all go to define ourselves to some degree by our relationship with others.

I think of the song put out a few years back by (then very young) country singer Jessica Andrew that went approximately like this:

“If I never win a Grammy,
That will be all right….
Sometimes I am clueless and I’m clumsy,
But I have friends who love me.
I know exactly who I am —
I am Rosemary’s granddaughter
the spitting image of my father
and my Mama’s still my biggest fan.”

There is a lot of depth and humanity to such a point of view. It is increasingly less credible and relevant today. While it is certainly true that there have always been very serious problems and evils associated with extended family and webs of well-defined relationships it is also true that such relationship networks are valuable at a huge variety of levels and in a huge variety of ways. They are every bit as certain to be valuable and precious to humanity as they are to be poor centers of absolute power. They are part of the very large and important range of troublesome issues and institutions which pay off handsomely when worked well.

We are reminded each day of the value which modern corporations and entrepreneurs put on their identity in business terms and for business purposes. It is simply impossible to overstate how badly a corporate Board of Directors would like to make a manager feel if that manager or executive allows outsiders to write checks on company accounts for their own benefit. However, I think that the struggle of the individual for recognition of his identity socially and otherwise is also a struggle to preserve that which is really precious.

While I have recently disclosed my interpretation that Peter was already important to the Jesus story even before Jesus approached him directly and almost anyone would admit that Jesus developed close ties to him as an Apostle on a variety of occasions. Nonetheless, the moment of the establishment of Petrine Primacy is a moment tied to identity. Jesus asks the famous series of questions about his own identity. “Who do people say that I am?” and “Who do you say that I am?”

Matthew 16: 13-20

“When Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples, ” Who do people say that the Son of Man is ?” They replied, ” Some say John th Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. ”
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter said in reply ” You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.”
“Blessed are you Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my heavenly Father. And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”
(Jesus continues) ” I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Then he strictly ordered his disciples to tell no one that he was the Messiah.” {New American Bible, parenthesis mine}.

The faith of Peter which is so fruitful for the Founding of Jesus’s church is tied to Peter’s confession of Jesus’s Identity. Peter had already tied so much of his own identity to the identity of Christ. this confession is fully shared among all of the Apostles and others following him from among the 72 on that occasion. Luke places his account of this event in the ninth chapter of his Gospel shortly after Herod Antipas’s double entendre that Jesus was John the Baptist whom he himself had beheaded. Jesus leads most of his highly committed entourage out of Galilee into the Tetrarchy of Batanea where Philip’s Caesarea was located. This was a central business hub for many interests inside and outside the empire.
Herod Philip’s relationship with his brother Herod Antipas was strained and while I can’t remember what happened to Herod Archelaus when Pilate had already ended all real power and even influence of that Herodian Quarter-king decisively. Batanea had a sizable Jewish minority and some Jewish villages with autonomy but was of the also ancient Lebanese culture.

According to the traditions of my ancient secret society whose interpretations I am disclosing in these end of year notes, Jesus led his disciples on this trip for five reasons. It was typical of him to be extremely efficient and to satisfy several goals with everything he did. Jesus was:
1. Giving Herod Antipas the slip for a while.
2. Bringing the first proclamation of his teaching to Jews in Batanea.
3.Smuggling identifiable good from his two most recent raids on the demon camps which he could currently under with Joanna and Chuza, Herod’s Steward and his wife.
4.Bringing leftover porkfish to be passed out to Batanean Jews and their families.
5. Meeting alone and secretly with the organization he had founded in his first desert raid which were his vassals mostly of the House of David but even including two foreigners and who were different from the church. This group chose and he chose for them a rendezvous outside of Galilee whenever possible.

The context is important because it shows both Jesus’s obvious material strength and success and also his obvious weaknesses compared to this city honoring both Rome and the quarter-king Philip. If a man who was able to build such an important commercial city was in league with the invasion infrastructure the Devil had described to him in detail at Caesarea Maritima and considered his barely Jewish brother Antipas too Jewish and if the resourceful Philip named this city for the Emperors of distant Rome and was himself only a quarter-king then what of a Prince with only a compound and a couple of carpentry shops, what of a Rabbi who had never finished his formal training, what of a Grandee whose wealth was four ovens, six unknown water platforms and a quarter share in six boats? What was a man who had to smuggle his loot to this city to hide even a few bags of mixed gold and silver figurines, insignia, weapons and medals to sell at low prices for secrecy’s sake? If he was dwarfed by the wealth of a quarter-king then who could he be? But in this moment the people still see him as miraculous doing something great and holy. In this moment Peter sees with his enormous practicality all Jesus is asking and yet looking at all Caesarea represents he still proclaims Jesus the Messiah and Son of the Living God. We fail to hear how astonishing it is and to hear Jesus’s confident accepting gratitude.

The Jesus of history was not the holy bum recent centuries have increasingly made him. But after the porkfish were eaten and the fine dinner for a hundred or so disciples at a big house was celebrated he and his followers had a few gifts and unreliable payment deliveries from Joanna to make it to the next big storm. They fished when they could and had the advantages of the bait sites but also shared these opportunities and spent long periods of time in prayer and discussion and preaching. They were warriors hunting and seizing a few times over four or so years and that is vital to understanding everything about them. But they were hunted far more by more than one enemy larger and better armed than they were, living in a manufactured famine and sought out by the needy in large numbers. Few people have ever lived under more strained circumstances all in all. I think most moderns really don’t believe the gospel story and so they do not see how this economic struggle and Jesus’s grace in it shapes so much of the accounts. Yet in his Master’s troubles Peter saw a Messiah and Son of the Living God. Jesus had saved his life and risked his own life for Peter’s already but still many would not have seen things as Peter did.

One of the things that takes shape in these notes is the idea that there has been a line of chiefs among the people who are now Acadians called the Basileus Arkadios and that Joseph Broussard — Beausoleil des Acadiens– was one of these. It is a tradition of my line of the secret society I am revealing that among those Jesus and his Apostles freed from captivity and certain death in the demon camps were a number of girls who were subjects of the Basileus Arkadios of that era. The Arcadians were a somewhat diffused and disorganized people with their days of statehood and wealth without equal (nearby) in a past far more distant than that of David’s reign in Jerusalem. Some Arcadians were then Jews in religion and legitimate line, some were God-fearing Gentiles of whom there were many among the people of Jesus’s time and some were pagans. They lived in there ancestral homes in ancient Arcadia in the North of Greece and in small semi-secret colonies across central Europe and the Middle East it is believed by our esoteric tradition that some of both the God-fearers and the Panist pagans met Jesus and the Apostles around Caesarea and brought him gifts from the king with his declaration of friendship and that some of them also traveled to bring token gifts of wine and bread to his mother at their compound in Nazareth. The gifts given to Jesus were a most rare blank scroll of joined sheets with no writing and a scroll from the Hebrew scripture in Greek as well as two amphorae of fine wine.Jesusit is said sent the scrolls to the Temple in Jerusalem and drank the wine with his gathered disciples local Jews and the emissaries.Some Panist left converted and did not visit the Grottoes of Pan nearby. Others it is said began to copy what they heard and some of it found its way into the lost book “the Sayings of Jesus the Christ” from which many gospel texts are drawn.

Whether or not the story is true it is a valued part of my identity that it is remembered. My identity as an (Anglo-)Acadian is much more precious to me because of the thought of the story. Jesus spoke to many Gentiles but always said his message was (at least chiefly and firstly) for the lost sheep of the House of Israel. On this point there is also an element of the warrior tradition which is relevant and unknown to the public church. The Gospels mention that at the last supper Jesus was told there were two swords and he said that such would be enough. Jesus’s entourage was often lightly armed and sometimes specifically unarmed. they had to sell identifiable captured arms and also to arm freed captives for the journey home. However, the legend is that Jesus had a weapon that was not a sword.

The weapon of Jesus was the mythical Shepherd’s Staff which was frequently carried by a lower ranking disciple attending upon him. The staff was simply shod and round at the bottom but had a concealed tip hidden in the detachable crook. The crook and tip could be joined as an ear planing adze and another adze tip was stored secretly. The whole snapped very tightly together and was wrapped also in a leather cord. This cord was also able to be run through the crook as a bow drill and a drill tip also hidden in it could be attached to one of two dowels joined by a cord which were snapped into the staff and then wrapped in their own cord. These dowels also held blades which allowed for making cuts on timbers in a variety of ways using the cord and the other dowel to manipulate them but ether could be held easily or used as a drill dowel. The whole drill could also be used as a fire drill bow. Jesus could also remove the dowel cord assembly and put it in his belt for close fighting while using the crook and reversed staff as a spear and spear thrower. John’s Gospel has Jesus crucified at Passover but places much of the story on or near the feast of tabernacles. It is in this Gospel that the cleansing of the Temple appears early and Jesus shortly after is approached by those wanting to kill and arrest him and in front of a great crowd retools his living water teaching. He says that he will make living water flow from those who hear him. Jesus actually gave this speech to observing demons and the huge crowd after his only cleansing of the Temple. He was letting them know that he was the one they suspected but did not know whose weapon hit their guards and punctured the heart. John’s distortion of the timeline is also a clue as to the totally extraordinary events of the year that Jesus died. According to some the “We” who rewrote John’s gospel from his original text were disciples who also had been or were Magi. The year when Pilate had begun to encroach each week a little closer to the holy court’s with the insignia of pagan Rome. That and killing the Galileans were signs of all out war and invasion. There is evidence That Jesus and his allies in the Temple maneuvered to have Passover called a month earlier or a few weeks later than the allowable time that year and only part of the usual crowd was there. Jesus entry and defiance in the market was a controlled outpouring of the `frustration before Pilate was ready. Under this theory or tradition Jesus was crucified on the day we would know as April 19 or something that year when there was a partial eclipse predicted by the Magi. I do not know the dates involved in their tradition and can’t find the right eclipses consistently on my search engine. But when one moves in esoteric one meets those who also move in it and the theory when explained properly makes some sense but it is not our theory. These Magi also believe that many unexplainable things happened that day but that he planned his crucifixion to coincide with the eclipse. Such persons would then have Jesus’s birth at about 6 BC rather than 1 AD. That is not the secret society of which I have been speaking rather it is another secret society that believes in Jesus.

It was also this staff’s dowel cord assembly to which Jesus attached the long strings to make the whip with which he cleared most of the Temple Market in front of the mighty Antonia Guard. Meanwhile shouting in Pilate’s establishment’s hearing that even having a market near the Court of the temple was a desecration. He shouted this in a Galilean accent while Pilate thought of how it must be to have killed Galileans offering their sacrifice in the Court of Israel itself. Guards were injured but most humiliating of all He slipped completely away. After that no tradition makes mention with authority of the Shepherd’s staff.

In the first film I ever saw with my ex-wife there is a scene that comes to mind here. In the Rand Haines film “Children of a Lesser God” Marlee Matilin’s character resembles the actress who plays her in being a deaf beauty. The character called Sarah has graduated from the school for the deaf where William Hurt’s Mr Leeds is teaching. He is sexually attracted to her but also wants to teach her to speak. After having rebuffed his attempts to teach her several other times she ridicules the facial expressions of another deaf student when speaking and a bit later says “I never do anything I can’t do well”. The tensions are not resolved there but there is the sum of her reasons. Whatever, the Apostles may have been originally they were suddenly preaching, baking, fishing, raiding, rabbinical students involved with a man with a lifestyle which is perhaps the most unusual lifestyle in history in its final set of combinations. They could not have felt that they were always doing their tasks well. Their belief in the Christhood of Jesus and their embrace of that identity is largely what sustained them through what is quite possibly the most unique apprenticeship in the human record.

As my own birthday approaches I think that we all receive much of our identity from what we have done with and made of our lives. Like Sarah in the movie we spend some of our time in and some out of our comfort zones. I find every physical limitation’s increase with age hard to bear. I had thin eyelashes and eyebrows all my life but now they are already disappearing almost and each wound of youth almost remains. I accept those personal weaknesses as part of my identity. But I also notice them as unpleasant.

I am writing this just before the wedding of some friends. I know that they are reshaping their own identities in the wedding. The two really do become one in so many ways. I have to shower now and get ready for the rehearsal supper. It is part of my identity to try to be presentable when I can. I think that we all understand the importance of identity. To know Jesus Christ’s identity has been a long journey for me and to know my loved ones also. I have rambled aimlessly to an end here. Perhaps I will complete 52 notes to tell you who I am before June 15 or perhaps not. Regardless I will be me and all I do must take that into account.

 
End of  Facebook Note–
 
I hope ye brave, ye few, ye proud — ye readers — will discover more of your own identity and of the identities of those about whom you ought to know more in this wintry season (or summer or otherwise depending on where you live). I hope the identity of Jesus Christ has some meaning for you as well.