BLAIR, AGAIN - March 27, 2008

In last week’s news was a further incomprehensible payoff to Tony Blair. The Yale schools of Divinity and Management have appointed him to a professorship at a price that I have not seen published. I do not have an familiarity with the school of management, but mostly such beasts are the repository of the hateful doctrine out of the Univ. of Chicago. that greed and predation are the engines of progress and prosperity, so if he will be there to teach greedy students how to cheat the public, that is at least a subject on which he is an acknowledged expert. But on divinity he is about as knowledgeable as a street sweeper. His sudden revealing of his onversion to Catholicism, which was easily known to anyone who observed him during the 10 years of his premiership, is generally thought to have been hidden in order to preserve his standing in Anglican England. I guess this is what he perceives as giving his Christian witness to his faith, but I am no expert on the subtleties of Christian versions of hypocrisy. If that is what he will teach the students at the Yale Divinity School, then it is a much reduced college since I saw it last, 50 years ago. In addition to this wooden medal from Yale, he has been given a job, reportedly paying in the 7 figures, with the Morgan Chase bank. From his record in Britain, I would say that any reputable graduate of Cambridge U in the field of finance knows more about banking than Blair ever will, and Morgan is not even bothering to give him an office, since no one would waste valuable Wall Street space on someone who has nothing to give them. To top this, the Zurich insurance company has also “hired” him, at what figure I do not know. My students in undergraduate probability class probably know more about random risk than he does. My guess is that he is like a general at the Pentagon who has bought shoddy goods from an arms manufacturer and is rewarded after his retirement from that with a fat job in the office of that company. I don’t know who is putting up the money for Blair’s sinecures, but there is no reason to believe that he has any knowledge that they need except whom to go to for favors.