Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

My friend Gary Weiss has becoming very focused on the NYC mayoral campaign.  Weiss, author of books on crime, financial and otherwise (his book on the rise and fall of Crazy Eddie's, a very New York centric tale, is pertinent here)  is anti-Mamdani with some fervor.  He has a very well written article on the subject in Discourse this week. Rather than paraphrase it, I'll just link you to it and give you a brief quote.  https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/trouble-right-here-in-new-york-city?fbclid=IwY2xjawLgpqlleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE4T0dqTzExQm0zdWp3MEhsAR7jw4RugcsWBNFa4YOhxFNdvSyoW7yJ1kOzGbJO1HuRbYoTilv1rrpwLMpyPg_aem_S-eWO8EvUTeDik6MBziqqA   After discussing his objections to Mamdani's "rent freeze" plan Weiss turns on himself and says,  " See how much detail it took to address just  two words  blasted out by Team Mamdani? That is the essence of an effective con. Be simple while your critics are compelled to be complicated as they dig throu...

I believe I've written earlier in this blog about independent journalist Gary Weiss' book, which came out in the summer of '22, about the rise and fall of the Crazy Eddie consumer electronics chain.  My review is available in the Nov/Dec. issue of The Federal Lawyer.  I bring the subject up again simply in order to quote a favorable review of the book in The New York Times.  "The meat of this limber book is its investigation into the deep family drama and funny money behind Crazy Eddie, which aggressively undercut competitors like Circuit City and The Wiz with some astonishingly shady business practices. Taking on this complicated if at first small potatoes-seeming story, Weiss is like that valorous spouse who decides to finally paw through the big box of tangled cords and wires in the basement and painstakingly straighten them out." Those are the words of reviewer Alexandra Jacobs. For more:  Crazy Eddie’s Life Was Insane! - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

I've received a review copy of RETAIL GANGSTER, the new Gary Weiss book about the rise and fall of Eddie Antar, aka Crazy Eddie, famous NY based retailer of electronics in the '70s and '80s. By the way, if when I say this you think immediately of the guy who used to shout at us on television about how his prices were IN-SAAAAANE, you are not alone. That was an actor, Jerry Carroll, doing a fine job. Weiss reminds us early on that, memorable though it was, Carroll's act -- which became a company calling card and was quoted in the 1984 fantasy romance SPLASH, was not especially original. I'll quote Weiss directly here: "By the 1970s, the 'crazy merchant' shtick was a well-worn cliche in retail advertising....In 1962 the sitcom  Car 54 Where Are You -- set in the Bronx -- featured a men's shop with a loudspeaker screaming, 'Get a new suit for practically nothing! I'm having a mental lapse! Come in and take advantage of me!....'."   Th...

Donald Trump can't even run a profitable casino. The itch to gamble may be the most powerful known addiction, and in cities where casinos are allowed, there is no such thing as the free entry of potential competitors: the established players have their safe niche. An inability to make a profit in this circumstances should be, well ... suspicious as to one's chief-executive cred. Yet Trump's Atlantic City casinos filed for bankruptcy protection twice. A very perceptive observer of the financial scene, Gary Weiss, has explained some of the background: He sold junk bonds to finance his casinos and, by 1991, was so overleveraged that he was seeing his empire stripped by the banks. "Already more than $3.8 billion in the hole and sliding perilously close to a mammoth personal bankruptcy, the brash New York developer had no choice but to accept the dismantling of his vast holdings," Time magazine reported. Leave it to Trump to fail in a business that became a m...

In recent days we've seen in quick succession: (1) a report that Iran's leaders were acknowledging the historic fact that there was such a thing as a Nazi effort to eliminate the Jews; (2) the unraveling of that report as a bit of overly hopeful mistranslation ; (3) frenzied attempt by the U.S. administration to arrange a photo op of the heads of state of the US and Iran shaking hands; (4) the failure of those efforts, and finally; (5) the hyping of a telephone call in which the two men finally do make some sort of contact. What, if anything, can or should we make of all of this? If I were a suspicious sort, the sort given to conspiracy theories, I might say that the fix was in for (5) even before reports (1) above. Reports (1) were in some sense planted, in order to prepare public opinion for the grand breakthrough that we're supposed to believe (5) was. That's if I were a suspicious sort of fellow ... but instead I'll simply observe that the noti...