:''"Lakoff" and "Professor Lakoff" redirect here. For the sociolinguist, see Robin Lakoff.''

Name	George Lakoff
Birth date	May 24, 1941
Birth place	Bayonne, New Jersey
Residence	Berkeley, California, USA
Nationality	United States
Fields	Cognitive linguisticsCognitive science
Workplaces	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	Indiana University
Known for	Conceptual metaphor theoryEmbodied cognition
Spouse	Robin Lakoff (divorced)
Website	georgelakoff.com }}

George P. Lakoff (, born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the "embodied mind", which he has written about in relation to mathematics. In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, exploring this in his books. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. He was the founder of the now defunct progressive think tank the Rockridge Institute.

Reappraisal of metaphor

Lakoff began his career as a student and later a teacher of the theory of transformational grammar developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky. In the late 1960s, however, he joined with others to promote generative semantics as an alternative to Chomsky's generative syntax. In an interview he stated:

{{bquote|During that period, I was attempting to unify Chomsky's transformational grammar with formal logic. I had helped work out a lot of the early details of Chomsky's theory of grammar. Noam claimed then — and still does, so far as I can tell — that syntax is independent of meaning, context, background knowledge, memory, cognitive processing, communicative intent, and every aspect of the body...In working through the details of his early theory, I found quite a few cases where semantics, context, and other such factors entered into rules governing the syntactic occurrences of phrases and morphemes. I came up with the beginnings of an alternative theory in 1963 and, along with wonderful collaborators like "Haj" Ross and Jim McCawley, developed it through the sixties.}}

Lakoff's claim that Chomsky asserts independence between syntax and semantics has been rejected by Chomsky, who has given examples from within his work where he talks about the relationship between his semantics and syntax. Chomsky goes further and claims that Lakoff has "virtually no comprehension of the work he is discussing" (the work in question being Chomsky's). His differences with Chomsky contributed to fierce, acrimonious debates among linguists that have come to be known as the "linguistics wars".

Lakoff's original thesis on conceptual metaphor was expressed in his book with Mark Johnson entitled ''Metaphors We Live By'' in 1980.

Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as purely a linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are primarily a conceptual construction, and indeed are central to the development of thought. He says, "Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." Non-metaphorical thought is for Lakoff only possible when we talk about purely physical reality. For Lakoff the greater the level of abstraction the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons. One reason is that some metaphors become 'dead' and we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what is "going on".

For instance, in intellectual debate the underlying metaphor is usually that argument is war (later revised as "argument is struggle"):

He ''won'' the argument.

Your claims are ''indefensible''.

He ''shot down'' all my arguments.

His criticisms were ''right on target''.

If you use that ''strategy'', he'll ''wipe you out''.

For Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing better metaphors. The application of one domain of knowledge to another domain of knowledge offers new perceptions and understandings.

Lakoff's theory has applications throughout all academic disciplines and much of human social interaction. Lakoff has explored some of the implications of the embodied mind thesis in a number of books, most written with coauthors.

Embodied mind

When Lakoff claims the mind is "embodied", he is arguing that almost all of human cognition, up through the most abstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and "low-level" facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism vis-a-vis mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying "implementation details".

Lakoff offers three complementary but distinct sorts of arguments in favor of embodiment. First, using evidence from neuroscience and neural network simulations, he argues that certain concepts, such as color and spatial relation concepts (e.g. "red" or "over"; see also ''qualia''), can be almost entirely understood through the examination of how processes of perception or motor control work.

Second, based on cognitive linguistics' analysis of figurative language, he argues that the reasoning we use for such abstract topics as warfare, economics, or morality is somehow rooted in the reasoning we use for such mundane topics as spatial relationships. (See conceptual metaphor.)

Finally, based on research in cognitive psychology and some investigations in the philosophy of language, he argues that very few of the categories used by humans are actually of the black-and-white type amenable to analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On the contrary, most categories are supposed to be much more complicated and messy, just like our bodies.

"We are neural beings," Lakoff states, "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything — only what our embodied brains permit."

Lakoff believes consciousness to be neurally embodied, however he explicitly states that the mechanism is not just neural computation alone. Using the concept of disembodiment, Lakoff supports the physicalist approach to the afterlife. If the soul can not have any of the properties of the body, then Lakoff claims it can not feel, perceive, think, be conscious, or have a personality. If this is true, then Lakoff asks what would be the point of the afterlife?

Many scientists share the belief that there are problems with falsifiability and foundation ontologies purporting to describe "what exists", to a sufficient degree of rigor to establish a reasonable method of empirical validation. But Lakoff takes this further to explain why hypotheses built with complex metaphors cannot be directly falsified. Instead, they can only be rejected based on interpretations of empirical observations guided by other complex metaphors. This is what he means when he says, in "The Embodied Mind", that falsifiability itself can never be established by any reasonable method that would not rely ultimately on a shared human bias. The bias he's referring to is the set of conceptual metaphors governing how people interpret observations.

Lakoff is, with coauthors Mark Johnson and Rafael E. Núñez, one of the primary proponents of the embodied mind thesis. Lakoff discussed these themes in his 2001 Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, published as ''The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding''. Others who have written about the embodied mind include philosopher Andy Clark (See his Being There), philosopher and neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and his student Evan Thompson (See Varela, Thompson & Rosch's "The Embodied Mind"), roboticists such as Rodney Brooks, Rolf Pfeifer and Tom Ziemke, the physicist David Bohm (see his ''Thought As A System''), Ray Gibbs (see his "Embodiment and Cognitive Science"), John Grinder and Richard Bandler in their neuro-linguistic programming, and Julian Jaynes. All of these writers can be traced back to earlier philosophical writings, most notably in the phenomenological tradition, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. The basic thesis of "embodied mind" is also traceable to the American contextualist or pragmatist tradition, notably John Dewey in such works as Art As Experience.

Mathematics

According to Lakoff, even mathematics is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus "any question of math's being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is." By this, he is saying that there is nothing outside of the thought structures we derive from our embodied minds that we can use to "prove" that mathematics is somehow beyond biology. Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez (2000) argue at length that mathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than "meat".

Mathematical reviewers have generally been critical of Lakoff and Núñez, pointing to mathematical errors. (Lakoff claims that these errors have been corrected in subsequent printings.) Their book has yet to elicit much of a reaction from philosophers of mathematics, although the book can be read as making strong claims about how that philosophy should proceed. The small community specializing in the psychology of mathematical learning, to which Núñez belongs, is paying attention.

Lakoff has also claimed that we should remain agnostic about whether math is somehow wrapped up with the very nature of the universe. Early in 2001 Lakoff told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "Mathematics may or may not be out there in the world, but there's no way that we scientifically could possibly tell." This is because the structures of scientific knowledge are not "out there" but rather in our brains, based on the details of our anatomy. Therefore, we cannot "tell" that mathematics is "out there" without relying on conceptual metaphors rooted in our biology. This claim bothers those who believe that there really is a way we could "tell". The falsifiability of this claim is perhaps the central problem in the cognitive science of mathematics, a field that attempts to establish a foundation ontology based on the human cognitive and scientific process.

Political significance and involvement

Lakoff's application of cognitive linguistics to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led him into territory normally considered basic to political science.

Lakoff has publicly expressed both ideas about the conceptual structures that he views as central to understanding the political process, and some of his particular political views. He almost always discusses the latter in terms of the former.

''Moral Politics'' (1996, revisited in 2002) gives book-length consideration to the conceptual metaphors that Lakoff sees as present in the minds of American "liberals" and "conservatives". The book is a blend of cognitive science and political analysis. Lakoff makes an attempt to keep his personal views confined to the last third of the book, where he explicitly argues for the superiority of the liberal vision.

Lakoff argues that the differences in opinions between liberals and conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with different strength to two different metaphors about the relationship of the state to its citizens. Both, he claims, see governance through metaphors of the family. Conservatives would subscribe more strongly and more often to a model that he calls the "strict father model" and has a family structured around a strong, dominant "father" (government), and assumes that the "children" (citizens) need to be disciplined to be made into responsible "adults" (morality, self-financing). Once the "children" are "adults", though, the "father" should not interfere with their lives: the government should stay out of the business of those in society who have proved their responsibility. In contrast, Lakoff argues that liberals place more support in a model of the family, which he calls the "nurturant parent model", based on "nurturant values", where both "mothers" and "fathers" work to keep the essentially good "children" away from "corrupting influences" (pollution, social injustice, poverty, etc.). Lakoff says that most people have a blend of both metaphors applied at different times, and that political speech works primarily by invoking these metaphors and urging the subscription of one over the other.

Lakoff further argues that one of the reasons liberals have had difficulty since the 1980s is that they have not been as aware of their own guiding metaphors, and have too often accepted conservative terminology framed in a way to promote the strict father metaphor. Lakoff insists that liberals must cease using terms like ''partial birth abortion'' and ''tax relief'' because they are manufactured specifically to allow the possibilities of only certain types of opinions. ''Tax relief'' for example, implies explicitly that taxes are an affliction, something someone would want "relief" from. To use the terms of another metaphoric worldview, Lakoff insists, is to unconsciously support it. Liberals must support linguistic think tanks in the same way that conservatives do if they are going to succeed in appealing to those in the country who share their metaphors.

Lakoff has distributed some much briefer political analyses via the Internet. One article distributed this way is "Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf", in which Lakoff argues that the particular conceptual metaphors used by the first Bush administration to justify American involvement in the Gulf ended up either obscuring reality, or putting a spin on the facts that was accommodating to the administration's case for military action.

Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute, an involvement that follows in part from his recommendations in ''Moral Politics''. Among his activities with the Institute, which concentrates in part on helping liberal candidates and politicians with re-framing political metaphors, Lakoff has given numerous public lectures and written accounts of his message from ''Moral Politics.'' In 2008, Lakoff joined Fenton Communications, the nation's largest public interest communications firm, as a Senior Consultant.

One of his political works, ''Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate'', self-labeled as "the Essential Guide for Progressives", was published in September 2004 and features a foreword by former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.

Disagreement with Steven Pinker

In 2006 Steven Pinker wrote an unfavorable review of Lakoff's book ''Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea''. Pinker's review was published in ''The New Republic''. Pinker argued that Lakoff's propositions are unsupported and his prescriptions a recipe for electoral failure. He wrote that Lakoff was condescending and deplored Lakoff's "shameless caricaturing of beliefs" and his "faith in the power of euphemism". Pinker portrayed Lakoff's arguments as "cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality". Lakoff wrote a rebuttal to the review stating that his position on many matters is the exact reverse of what Pinker attributes to him. Lakoff explicitly rejected, for example, the cognitive relativism and faith in euphemism described above, arguing in favor of a deeper understanding of rationality that discards the modal logic conceptualization of rational thought in favor of the better supported frame interpretation.

==Works==

1987. ''Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind'' University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46804-6.

1989 with Mark Turner. ''More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor''. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46812-9

1996. ''Moral politics : What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't'', University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46805-1

*2001 Edition. ''Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think'', University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46771-9

1999 (with Mark Johnson). ''Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought''. Basic Books.

2000 (with Rafael Núñez). ''Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being''. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-03771-2.

2003 (1980) with Mark Johnson. ''Metaphors We Live By.'' University of Chicago Press. 2003 edition contains an 'Afterword'. ISBN 978-0-226-46800-6

2004. ''Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.'' Chelsea Green Publishing. ISBN 978-1-931498-71-5

2005, "A Cognitive Scientist Looks at Daubert", ''American Journal of Public Health''. 95, no. 1: S114.

2006. ''Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea''. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-15828-6

2008. ''The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain'', ISBN 978-0-670-01927-4

Videos

''How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff'' DVD format.

C-Span program online, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain

See also

Code word (figure of speech)

Cognitive linguistics

Cognitive science of mathematics

Conceptual metaphor

Embodied philosophy

Framing (social sciences)

Invariance principle

Language and thought

Metaphor

Metonymy

References

Further reading

Harris, Randy Allen (1995). ''The Linguistics Wars''. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509834-X. (Focuses on the disputes Lakoff and others have had with Chomsky.)

Haser, Verena (2005). ''Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics (Topics in English Linguistics)'', Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-018283-5 (A critical look at the ideas behind embodiment and conceptual metaphor.)

Kelleher, William J. (2005). ''Progressive Logic: Framing A Unified Field Theory of Values For Progressives''. La CaCañada Flintridge, CA: The Empathic Science Institute. ISBN 0-9773717-1-9.

McGlone, M. S. (2001). "Concepts as Metaphors" in Sam Glucksberg, ''Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms''. Oxford Psychology Series 36. Oxford University Press, 90–107. ISBN 0-19-511109-5.

O'Reilly, Bill (2006). ''Culture Warrior''. New York: Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-2092-9. (Calls Lakoff the guiding philosopher behind the "secular progressive movement".)

Renkema, Jan (2004). ''Introduction to Discourse Studies''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 1-58811-529-1.

Rettig, Hillary (2006). ''The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way''. New York: Lantern Books. ISBN 1-59056-090-6. (Documents strong parallels between Lakoff's nurturant parent model of progressive thought and psychologist Abraham Maslow's model of the self-actualized individual. Also discusses framing in the context of marketing and sales with the aim of bolstering progressive activists' persuasive skills.)

Richardt, Susanne (2005). ''Metaphor in Languages for Special Purposes: The Function of Conceptual Metaphor in Written Expert Language and Expert-Lay Communication in the Domains of Economics, Medicine and Computing''. European University Studies: Series XIV, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, 413. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. ISBN 0-8204-7381-2.

Soros, George (2006). ''The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror''. ISBN 1-58648-359-5. (discusses Lakoff in regard to the application of his theories on the work of Frank Luntz and with respect to his own theory about perception and reality)

Winter, Steven L. (2003). ''A Clearing in the Forest''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-90222-6. (Applies Lakoff's work in cognitive science and metaphor to the field of law and legal reasoning.)

Dean, John W. (2006), ''Conservatives without Conscience'', Viking Penguin ISBN 0-670-03774-5.

External links

georgelakoff.com

University of California, Berkeley department of Linguistics page on George Lakoff

Edge bio of Lakoff

"Metaphor and War" (1991)

"Metaphor and War, Again" (2003)

"Thinking of Jackasses: the grand delusions of the Democratic Party", a critical review by Marc Cooper in Atlantic Monthly

"The Extended Mind" Radio interview on Philosophy Talk

"Empathy is the New Black" Radio interview with Dr. George Lakoff on Liberadio(!) with Mary Mancini an Freddie O'Connell

"The Political Mind" a talk by George Lakoff recorded June 28, 2008 in Sacramento, CA

George Lakoff Proposes Ballot Measure to End 2/3 Rule in State Legislature - video report by ''Democracy Now!''

Biography and summary of Gifford Lectures (University of Glasgow, 2001) by Brannon Hancock

Category:1941 births Category:Living people Category:American academics Category:American Jews Category:American linguists Category:American political writers Category:Cognitive scientists Category:Mathematical cognition researchers Category:Psycholinguists Category:Philosophers of mathematics Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Metaphor theorists Category:Framing theorists

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Birthname	Thomas F. McLarty III
order	17th
title	White House Chief of Staff
term start	January 20, 1993
term end	July 17, 1994
predecessor	James Baker
successor	Leon Panetta
president	Bill Clinton
birth date	June 14, 1946
birth place	Hope, Arkansas
party	Democratic
nationality	United States
alma mater	University of Arkansas
profession	}}

Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty III (born June 14, 1946) is a prominent Arkansas business and political leader and former White House Chief of Staff for US President Bill Clinton. He is the President of McLarty Associates, a Washington-based consulting company, as well as Chief Executive Officer of the McLarty Companies.

Early life

McLarty was born in Hope, Arkansas, and graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1969. He is a member of Sigma Chi Fraternity. He worked through the ranks of the business founded by his grandfather, Thomas F. "Mr. Tom" McLarty, Hope Auto Company. After serving a term in the Arkansas House, he concentrated his efforts on growing the family's truck leasing business, first called M&M Leasing, later to become McLarty Leasing. He expanded the family's Arkansas dealership network to locations in Hope, Texarkana, Magnolia, and Little Rock. He was urged in many Democratic Party circles to seek the governor's chair vacated by David Pryor in 1978, but he deferred to his friend and fellow Hope native, Bill Clinton. He was elected to the State Legislature at the age of 23, serving a single term from 1971–1973 and served as chairman of the state Democratic Party from 1974–1976."

In 1976, he became the youngest member ever elected to the Board of Directors of the Arkla Gas/Arkla, Inc., a Fortune 500 natural gas company. In 1983 he became Arkla's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. During his tenure, the company was recognized by ''Forbes'', ''The Wall Street Transcript'', and ''The Financial Times'' for management excellence, in addition to his automotive endeavors.

He has a distinguished record of business leadership and public service, including various roles advising three Presidents: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. McLarty worked with President Carter as a member of the Democratic National Committee and was appointed to the National Petroleum Council and the Council on Environmental Quality.

White House years

He served as White House Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton from 1993 until 1994. In 1994, the President asked his OMB Director, Leon Panetta, what was wrong with his administration and was told about the lack of order in the White House. McLarty was out. According to author Nigel Hamilton, "Panetta replaced McLarty for the rest of Clinton's first term—and the rest is history. To be a great leader, a modern president must have a great chief of staff—and in Leon Panetta, Clinton got the enforcer he deserved."

McLarty is a lifelong friend of Clinton's, both having been in the same kindergarten class together. He was also a counselor to the President after leaving the Chief of Staff position and was a "Special Envoy for the Americas". He also served for five years on the National Economic Council."

Serving as Clinton's "special envoy for the Americas," he was a key figure in the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which was supported by the Council of the Americas, established by David Rockefeller in 1965. He was a top official at the 1994 Miami Summit of the Americas, which laid the groundwork for this Trade bloc; as well as serving as a key liaison to Clinton for Rockefeller's Council in the implementation of this trade agreement.

McLarty Companies

"The McLarty Companies comprises 11 automotive dealerships located in five states that generate in excess of $600 million. Mr. McLarty began his career building the company his grandfather founded, McLarty Leasing Systems, into one of the nation's largest transportation companies." Upon leaving the White House in July 1998, Mr. McLarty returned to the McLarty Companies as its Chairman.

Affiliations

Commercial

Director, Acxiom Corporation

Director, Union Pacific Railroad Advisory Board, Leeds Equity Partners Advisory Board, Cato Institute/Inter-American Dialogue Advisory Board, Diligence Llc. (Intelligence and Risk Management Consulting)

Senior Advisor, Carlyle Group (From 2003)

Non-profit Trustee, Center for the Study of the Presidency International Council of Trustees, Religions for Peace

Advisory Board, New Democrat Network

Member, U.S.-Mexico Binational Council

Member, Council on Foreign Relations (2001)

See also

Kissinger Associates

Further reading

Clinton, Bill. ''My Life''. New York: Vintage, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-3003-X

References

External links

Clinton Presidency / White Water Affair.

Hillary Rodham Clinton / Travelgate.

Stop the FTAA A website of the John Birch Society, this details the figures and process behind the founding and ongoing support of the FTAA, including McLarty's involvement.

Thomas F. McLarty III, Put Mexico Relations Back on Front Burner,''Los Angeles Times'', December 2, 2001.

Bill Richardson and Thomas F. McLarty, OPEC's clout isn't what it used to be, ''San Jose Mercury News'', November 4, 2001.

WHITE HOUSE AIDE BECOMES SUBJECT OF NEW INQUIRIES, NY Times, March 27, 1994

{{U.S. Cabinet Official box | before= James Baker | after= Leon Panetta | years= 1993–1994 | president= Bill Clinton | office= White House Chief of Staff}}

Category:White House Chiefs of Staff Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:Clinton Administration personnel Category:People from Hope, Arkansas Category:People of the Whitewater controversy Category:Arkansas Democrats

de:Mack McLarty fr:Mack McLarty ja:マック・マクラーティ no:Mack McLarty sv:Mack McLarty

Birthname	Thomas F. McLarty III
order	17th
title	White House Chief of Staff
term start	January 20, 1993
term end	July 17, 1994
predecessor	James Baker
successor	Leon Panetta
president	Bill Clinton
birth date	June 14, 1946
birth place	Hope, Arkansas
party	Democratic
nationality	United States
alma mater	University of Arkansas
profession	}}

Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty III (born June 14, 1946) is a prominent Arkansas business and political leader and former White House Chief of Staff for US President Bill Clinton. He is the President of McLarty Associates, a Washington-based consulting company, as well as Chief Executive Officer of the McLarty Companies.

Early life

McLarty was born in Hope, Arkansas, and graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1969. He is a member of Sigma Chi Fraternity. He worked through the ranks of the business founded by his grandfather, Thomas F. "Mr. Tom" McLarty, Hope Auto Company. After serving a term in the Arkansas House, he concentrated his efforts on growing the family's truck leasing business, first called M&M Leasing, later to become McLarty Leasing. He expanded the family's Arkansas dealership network to locations in Hope, Texarkana, Magnolia, and Little Rock. He was urged in many Democratic Party circles to seek the governor's chair vacated by David Pryor in 1978, but he deferred to his friend and fellow Hope native, Bill Clinton. He was elected to the State Legislature at the age of 23, serving a single term from 1971–1973 and served as chairman of the state Democratic Party from 1974–1976."

In 1976, he became the youngest member ever elected to the Board of Directors of the Arkla Gas/Arkla, Inc., a Fortune 500 natural gas company. In 1983 he became Arkla's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. During his tenure, the company was recognized by ''Forbes'', ''The Wall Street Transcript'', and ''The Financial Times'' for management excellence, in addition to his automotive endeavors.

He has a distinguished record of business leadership and public service, including various roles advising three Presidents: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. McLarty worked with President Carter as a member of the Democratic National Committee and was appointed to the National Petroleum Council and the Council on Environmental Quality.

White House years

He served as White House Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton from 1993 until 1994. In 1994, the President asked his OMB Director, Leon Panetta, what was wrong with his administration and was told about the lack of order in the White House. McLarty was out. According to author Nigel Hamilton, "Panetta replaced McLarty for the rest of Clinton's first term—and the rest is history. To be a great leader, a modern president must have a great chief of staff—and in Leon Panetta, Clinton got the enforcer he deserved."

McLarty is a lifelong friend of Clinton's, both having been in the same kindergarten class together. He was also a counselor to the President after leaving the Chief of Staff position and was a "Special Envoy for the Americas". He also served for five years on the National Economic Council."

Serving as Clinton's "special envoy for the Americas," he was a key figure in the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which was supported by the Council of the Americas, established by David Rockefeller in 1965. He was a top official at the 1994 Miami Summit of the Americas, which laid the groundwork for this Trade bloc; as well as serving as a key liaison to Clinton for Rockefeller's Council in the implementation of this trade agreement.

McLarty Companies

"The McLarty Companies comprises 11 automotive dealerships located in five states that generate in excess of $600 million. Mr. McLarty began his career building the company his grandfather founded, McLarty Leasing Systems, into one of the nation's largest transportation companies." Upon leaving the White House in July 1998, Mr. McLarty returned to the McLarty Companies as its Chairman.

Affiliations

Commercial

Director, Acxiom Corporation

Director, Union Pacific Railroad Advisory Board, Leeds Equity Partners Advisory Board, Cato Institute/Inter-American Dialogue Advisory Board, Diligence Llc. (Intelligence and Risk Management Consulting)

Senior Advisor, Carlyle Group (From 2003)

Non-profit Trustee, Center for the Study of the Presidency International Council of Trustees, Religions for Peace

Advisory Board, New Democrat Network

Member, U.S.-Mexico Binational Council

Member, Council on Foreign Relations (2001)

See also

Kissinger Associates

Further reading

Clinton, Bill. ''My Life''. New York: Vintage, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-3003-X

References

External links

Clinton Presidency / White Water Affair.

Hillary Rodham Clinton / Travelgate.

Stop the FTAA A website of the John Birch Society, this details the figures and process behind the founding and ongoing support of the FTAA, including McLarty's involvement.

Thomas F. McLarty III, Put Mexico Relations Back on Front Burner,''Los Angeles Times'', December 2, 2001.

Bill Richardson and Thomas F. McLarty, OPEC's clout isn't what it used to be, ''San Jose Mercury News'', November 4, 2001.

WHITE HOUSE AIDE BECOMES SUBJECT OF NEW INQUIRIES, NY Times, March 27, 1994

{{U.S. Cabinet Official box | before= James Baker | after= Leon Panetta | years= 1993–1994 | president= Bill Clinton | office= White House Chief of Staff}}

Category:White House Chiefs of Staff Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:Clinton Administration personnel Category:People from Hope, Arkansas Category:People of the Whitewater controversy Category:Arkansas Democrats

de:Mack McLarty fr:Mack McLarty ja:マック・マクラーティ no:Mack McLarty sv:Mack McLarty

David Passig is a futurist who received his Ph.D. in Anticipatory Anthropology from the University of Minnesota. He specializes in technological futures, as well as social and educational futures. He is an Associate Professor at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He heads the Graduate Program in Information and Communication Technology and the Virtual Reality Laboratory at the School of Education.

Contributions

Served as an advisor to the commissioner for generations at the Israeli parliament and is a member of the Israeli national comitty for research and development

A Future Taxonomy of Cognitive skills

He has developed a Taxonomy of Future Cognitive and Learning Skills. This Taxonomy attempts to refresh Blooms taxonomy of cognitive skills to reflect future needs. It also suggests a new thinking skill that was not included in Bloom's categories—named Melioration. It is assumed that this skill will be much required from the alumni of the schooling system in the future. This Taxonomy is being taught worldwide at teachers' colleges and MBA programs. He is developing tools with which one can measure the skill and develop it as well. The following papers represent the taxonomy of cognitive skill that he has published:

Passig, David (2007) Melioration as a Higher Thinking Skill to Enhance Future Intelligence. Teachers College Record. Columbia University. 109 (1), 24–50.

Passig, D. & Cohen, L. (2006) Innovative Combinations: A Tool for Measuring the Melioration Skill. Teachers College Record. Research Note. Date Published: October 9, 2006 http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 12776.

Passig, David (2001) A taxonomy of ICT mediated future thinking skills. In Taylor, H. and Hogenbirk, P. (2001) ''Information and Communication Technologies in Education: The School of the Future.'' Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, pp 103–112.

Imen Delphi

He has also developed a Future’s Research methodology named "Imen-Delphi" (ID). This methodology reflects a new paradigm in Futures' Thinking. The ID aims at structuring a procedure through which a group of experts could invent preferable futures, as opposed to the classical "Delphi" forecasting technique with which a group of experts is engaged in figuring out the most probable future. He is conducting various case studies to enhance its reliability and validity in helping various groups shaping their future imageries. The following papers represent the ID methodology in the published literature:

Passig, David & Sharbat, Aviva (2000) Electronic-Imen-Delphi (EID): An Online Conferencing Procedure. Education Media International (EMI). The official Journal of the International Council for Educational Media (ICEM) 37(1), 58-67. Routledge.

Passig, David (1998). An applied Social Systems Procedure for Generating Purposive Sound Futures. ''Systems Research and Behavioral Science.'' The Official Journal of the International Federation for Systems Research. Winter 15(1), 315-325. Wiley & Sons. England.

Passig, David (1997) Imen Delphi: A Delphi Variant Procedure for Emergence. Human Organization. ''Journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology''. Southern Methodist University. Dallas, TX. Spring, 56(1), 53-63.

Enhancing Cognitive Skills with Virtual Reality

He has established the Virtual Reality Laboratory at the School of Ed, and he is conducting studies on various aspects of the Human User Learning Interface of Virtual Reality. His Lab is the first Lab in Israel aimed at researching and teaching Virtual Reality in Education.

He is studying also the impact of ICT interfaces on a variety of human cognitive and social aspects as well as learning processes. He is suggesting that ICT interfaces are having unexpected impact on the users awareness to a variety of cognitive phenomena. He is also suggesting that VR can enhance some cognitive skills. The following papers represent this ongoing endeavor:

Eden, S. and Passig, D. (2007) Three-Dimensionality as an effective mode of Representation for Expressing Sequential Time Perception. Journal of Educational Computing Research. 36(1), 51-63.

Passig, David, Klein, Pnina & Neuman, Talia (2001) Awareness to Toddlers’ Initial Cognitive Experiences with Virtual Reality. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. 17(4), 332-344.

Passig, David and Levin, Haya (2000). Gender Preferences for Multimedia Interfaces. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. 16(1), 64-71. Blackwell Science.

Passig, David & Eden, Sigal (2000) Enhancing the Induction Skill of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children with Virtual Reality Technology. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. 5(3), 277-285. Oxford University Press.

Passig, David and Eden, Sigal (2000) Improving the Flexible Thinking in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children with Virtual Reality Technology. American Annals of the Deaf. 145(3), 286-291.

The Future Code

He has published several books about the future - one titled: The Future Code. In this book that was in the best seller list for 25 weeks and received the Gold Prize he has developed 16 predictions about Israel in four categories: Social, national security, economics and national identity.

Passig, David (2008) The Future Code: Israel's Future-Test. Tel Aviv, Yediot Press (in Hebrew). Publisher's site of the book

A second book was published in 2010 titled: 2048. In this best seller the author engage to describe the possible conflicts of the 21st century, the technologies that will drive these confrontations and how they will be reflected in the Middle east up to the mid 21st century.

Passig, David (2010) 2048. Tel Aviv, Yediot Press (in Hebrew). Publisher's site of the book

In 2011 the book was also published in Turkish by kotonkitap entitled 2050

References

External links

Book's site

Personal Site

Graduate Program in ICT

Category:University of Minnesota alumni Category:Futurologists Category:Living people