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  1. No, that would be secondhanded, I did it to prevent myself from getting Covid and studied mRNA vaccines before taking the vaccines. This is ridiculous and I'm not taking part in this strange discussion anymore and will read to moderate it against arbitrary conspiracy theories and from those seeking to ignore reason, evidence, and proper epistemology.
    4 points
  2. Monart, here's a link to Brownstone Institute and their many articles https://brownstone.org/ the gold standard for all things pandemic, good science, optimal health and freedom-orientated, fronted by the heroic Jeffrey Tucker ("Liberty or Lockdown?"). They have been my bright reference point
    4 points
  3. monart

    "Project Starship"

    ["Project Starship" is a very young and serious man's description of a romantic and philosophic vision of the future – and of the present, too. It's dedicated to the heroic genius of Ayn Rand, upon whose work this conception of starship is largely based. It's an answer to my previous post here, "What Can One Do?" ] ---------- Project Starship 3rd Edition Monart Pon © Copyright 1976, 2001, 2023 Monart Pon The Starship (General) In the boundless universe of stars, in a small region called the Milky Way Galaxy, is one star called the Sun. Spinning around this Sun, on a planet called Earth, is an organism called Man. This man is tapping the energy of the Sun and transforming the material of Earth to build his starship, his starship to seek, hold, and give the beauty that brings him his happiness. The starship that man creates is an expression of his mastery over his own destiny, a mastery that breaks the circle of nature with a straight line, a line that reaches from this earth to touch the farthest stars. The structure of the starship is the product of man’s shining his cool, strong light of reason upon the wilderness of reality to tame it into the home that supports his life. Growing from this work of discovering and unifying truth, goodness, and beauty, the starship is a selective re-arrangement of various aspects of reality into those forms that further his well-being. Abstractly, starship is a complex concept, integrating the knowledge that leads to the success of human life. Concretely, the starship is an artificial planet, an earth re-created into a hierarchical unity of arts and machines, performing the functions of sustaining and enriching man’s spiritual/material health. Symbolically, the starship is a badge that signifies man’s ultimate purpose, his central activity, his highest achievement. The starship for beautifying man can inspire him on his quest for new arts, new machines, new adventure: on a voyage that blasts off from this port of Earth and shoots outwards to other ports of other worlds--outwards to the countless stars of the countless galaxies of the unbounded universe. The Project (Introduction) Project Starship is an adventure to the stars, a romance for the ideal of starship--a consecration to the ultimate purpose of creating a world comprised of all those things from which comes the experience called happiness. Project Starship grows from the acceptance and expression of one’s responsibility as a special kind of being, whose honor is one’s volition and whose glory is one’s starship. Project Starship begins with understanding these facts: a. Starship is the integrated structure of knowledge and processes, of arts and machines, of ideas, values, and inventions that, together, can nurture the continual growth of life and happiness. b. The necessity of starship is based on the volitional nature of human life, the rational process of one’s consciousness, and the unlimited capability of one’s actions. c. The starship’s vital core is one’s conceptual consciousness, one’s mind, one’s reason, the basic faculty that discovers and invents the ship’s knowledge and processes. d. The starship’s most basic and crucial knowledge is philosophy, the knowledge of fundamental principles, the knowledge that integrates and guides all other knowledge, the knowledge that yields an attitude of romanticism for the wisdom as summarized in this way: Man is a rational animal, whose existence in objective reality is sustained by the volitional operation of his conceptual consciousness called reason towards the cognition, evaluation, and invention of his starship to happiness. I. The Basis Man is a living, conscious, volitional being. Starship is an expression of this volitional nature. Man, like all living things, is alive conditionally upon his generation of a series of successful internal-external actions to fulfill the needs for his life’s existence. Like other conscious living things, man uses his faculty of consciousness, his power of being aware of reality, to understand the meaning of the information gathered by his senses. This consciousness is a power to determine the good, or life-enhancing, and evil, or life-destroying, aspects of reality. It is a power to guide the course of actions towards the production of the good, and a power to experience, through emotion, the resulting state of life called happiness. Unlike other conscious things, however, man has volition. He has direct control over the operation of his process of awareness, and, therefore, over his life. He can choose to be conscious and live, or to be unconscious and die. He can choose to be sharply or vaguely conscious: he can raise his level of awareness, sharpen its focus, enlarge its field, increase its cognitive efficacy, or he can blur, shrink, blank out and sabotage its processes. Volition begins with the choice to drive the mind to the highest achievement of successful life, or to leave it to stagnate to a rotting death. Born ignorant and naked, man is innately ignorant of what is good or harmful to life, and is inherently naked of the tools to achieve the good and fight the evil. He has no instincts, no fur, fangs, or claws. To acquire knowledge and tools, man has to discover them by means of his mind. To fulfill the needs for his life’s health, he has to earn them by directing his mind towards the understanding of reality, the detection of possible good, and the invention of those extensions and augmentations to himself that can achieve the good. To attain the successful state of life called happiness, man must accept and express his responsibility as a volitional being: he must deserve his honor as the driver of his own mind, the master of his own life, the maker of his own destiny. This honor and responsibility of volition grants man the freedom of a potentially unlimited capacity of awareness, a potential to know the simplest, or most complex, part of reality, a potential whose limit is essentially determined by man’s own choice and desire. At his command, man can enhance, elevate, focus, his level of awareness, from the automatic but limited, perceptual state of non-volitional beings, towards the virtually unlimited, conceptual field that only he can achieve. The conceptual mode of consciousness brings into his grasp a vivid understanding of the nature of himself and his world--an understanding that can transcend the immediate moment and place around him, to ultimately span an eternity of time and an infinity of space. Given this kind of volitional awareness, an awareness unlimited in possibility of clarity, depth and scope, then the kind of actions possible to man is also unlimited. The sophistication of a conceptual consciousness can guide the most complex series of actions, the kind that can significantly alter the environment to suit human life, and that can enrich man’s health and extend his life-span. Man’s possession of a conceptual, volitional consciousness distinguishes his life as, symbolically, a straight line, an endless line transcending the immediate bounds of this Earth, of this Sun, of this Galaxy, to ultimately touch all parts of the vast realm of stars. To complement this volitional life, to clothe his nakedness and replace his ignorance, to glorify his honor as a master, to seek his happiness--man creates the starship. Starship could be the highest expression and achievement of human rational being. It is a ship of knowledge and processes: an integrated mobile environment that provides man with nourishment for growth, shelter against decay, and locomotion to explore his boundless realm. It is a starship because its primary source of energy and inspiration emanates from the stars. It is a starship because it is the kind of structure that can house and fly, comfort and move, man’s life on an astro-adventure. It is a starship because it can inspire man to be starbound, to seek new knowledge, new powers, new beauty--to seek his happiness and glory by sailing the endless sea of stars. II. The Constitution Starship is an integrated structure of the knowledge and processes, the arts and machines, the truths, goods, and beauties that, together, can enhance the continual growth of man’s life. The starship’s vital core is man’s consciousness called reason. Reason is the creator, commander, coordinator, of the starship’s every part. Reason builds, organizes, integrates and maintains the ship’s entire structure by forming ideas, values, and inventions. It conducts the long and complex process that begins with raw materials and energies of the universe and ends with pro-man products. Reason is the basic generator of man’s happiness and the starship’s potent dynamo. Reason performs the three general stages of starship-building: cognition, evaluation and re-creation. Cognition is the process of identifying the facts of reality, of discovering the properties and relationships of entities, of determining what is available for transformation. Evaluation is the process of detecting values and goals, the process of judging the possible good. Re-creation is the process of re-shaping, re-arranging, converting the raw elements of reality into those forms that can further life. The knowledge thus acquired, the ideas, values, and inventions, is integrated into the structure of the starship, constituting part of what may be called the starship’s intellect and spirit. Reason’s supreme power of creativity is made possible by its conceptual manner of perceiving and understanding reality. The rational, conceptual process is one of perceiving, identifying, and integrating the data received by the senses, condensing the multitude of observations into simplified groups called concepts. A concept is a mental unit concretized by a word and individualized by a definition. It is a condensed unit of knowledge formed by the differentiation and integration of essential attributes and relationships among entities. A concept reduces a multitude of facts about reality into easily grasped essentials, thereby freeing the mind from routine in order to study the new. Each concept thus formed is further combined with others to form larger concepts, or is divided into smaller ones, continuing this process of differentiating and integration indefinitely, bringing in ever-more organized knowledge, forever expanding the scope of man’s awareness. The starship’s knowledge may be divided into science and technology. Science is the faculty of facts, the faculty that studies what is. Technology is the faculty of fancy, the faculty that, based on the sciences, studies what could be. Linking the two is ethics, the faculty of morals, the department of philosophy that studies what should be. Directing science and technology is philosophy, the faculty of axioms and fundamental principles--the faculty that studies the basic nature of, and relationship between, man, reality, and the starship. Philosophy is the starship’s most crucial knowledge, the knowledge that unifies all the complexities of science and technology, the knowledge that gives a comprehensive framework of principles guiding and inspiring the conduct of all other knowledge. Philosophy identifies the underlying nature of existence, of that which exists, of what is real, describing reality’s meta-laws, defining the principles of reason’s conceptual process, and prescribing the basic principles of life-seeking actions. Two axiomatic concepts of existence that philosophy studies are “identity” and “causality”. Identity is the concept that an existent, any existent, if it exists, then it exists with an identity--with a set of characteristics that distinguishes it from all other existents, making that existent a thing, not a nothing and not just anything, but a something. Identity thus distinguishes the real from the unreal, the natural from the supernatural. Causality is the concept that an action or process is generated by specific entities, generated in a specific manner, resulting in a specific effect, according to the identity of the entity generating the action. Every action, every effect, presupposes an entity that generated or caused that effect. All of reality’s processes, including man’s, are accountable by certain properties or principles governing those processes. Causality thus distinguishes the kind of actions that an entity can generate from those it cannot, those actions that are explainable from those that are miraculous. These axiomatic concepts are the basis, integrator and compass of all other concepts of the starship, guiding the ship’s science and technology to study the specific identities of entities and their actions. Applied to man’s actions, “identity” and “causality” yield the ethical derivatives of “honesty” and “justice”. Honesty is the principle of being natural, of being true to reality, of perceiving reality as it is. It is the principle that since reality is objective and since man is a rational being, then to be true to nature, to be human, is to be conscious and conceptual. This means to pay attention, to understand reality with the clearest and fullest focus of the mind, with the widest context of knowledge, according to the law of identity. Honesty thus distinguishes the kind of thinking that man must perform to understand the nature and meaning of his life. Justice is the principle of being fair, of being true to man, of treating men as they are. It is the principle of men acting to seek, grant, and accept only the earned and deserved from each other. It is the principle that since every effect presupposes its causal agent and since one’s desired effects are not achieved without cause, then every part of the starship must be earned, earned by exerting effort in a specific manner according to the law of causality. Justice thus distinguishes the kind of actions that man must perform to achieve the happiness of his life. Honesty and justice form the basis of ethics, the set of principles (independence, integrity, courage, etc.) that guide the actions of the starship’s creation, the set of values that helps to unite the major faculties of science and technology, linking the facts of raw nature with the fancies of man’s desire. Science is the faculty that scrutinizes the kinds of entities and processes that exist. Science systematically analyzes the properties of existents, determines their relationships, defines the methods of measurements, and categorizes the results into ideas. Technology is the faculty that imagines the possible beauty that could come from the ideas of science and invents the techniques of re-creation to concretize the imagined ideals--creating the forms of artistry that enhance man’s spiritual life, and the forms of machinery that enhance man’s physical life. Thus, the starship is generally a structure constituted by the knowledge of science and technology, and by the products of arts and machines, integrated by philosophy for the purpose of man’s happiness. III. The Crew The crew of a starship is a society of individuals. Each member of the starship’s crew is guided by the principles of honesty and justice. He is a specialist in some industry of the starship for a certain period of time, trading his particular service for that of other members. Some may be scientists trading with technologists or philosophers with artists. Whatever the relationship, each concentrates his energy on some specific profession, and combines his effort with others in trades that yield industries too difficult for one man. Some benefits of this co-operation are the diversity of services and products, an amplification in the power of an individual to seek his happiness, and a more efficient, faster creation of the starship. The benefits of such a social starship are protected by an agency devoted towards the defense of a man’s right to his own life. This political instrument functions as a police and court to secure the individual from possible interference and destruction caused by the physical force of other men. It governs the retaliatory use of force to defend against initiated force, and may be called upon to resolve peaceful disputes. Today’s government at times protects the freedom of men to pursue their happiness, and yet, other times, commits (for the sake of cowards and parasites) the very crimes against which it is commissioned to fight. This legalized violation of rights causes injury, hardships, and unnecessary obstacles, and must be opposed morally and politically, in order to free man’s achievement of his starship to happiness. The Project (Conclusion) . Project Starship is a life-long purpose, an industry of philosophy, science, and technology, a career of understanding man, reality, and the starship--a study and practice of creating the starship’s basis, constitution, and crew. The first symbolic step in the starship project, for those who choose it, is the naming of one’s starship (e.g., Starship Pegasus, Starship Phoenix, Starship Prometheus). The name serves to symbolize and unify the specific stages of one’s project and serves as the banner of one’s quest, the emblem of one’s home. In the name of one’s starship, an introductory study of philosophy is undertaken. The study of philosophy begins with gathering the knowledge with which to understand such subjects as: the nature of objective reality, the nature of man’s mind and emotion, the principles of moral action, the preconditions of a rightful society, and the nature of the romantic spirit. This knowledge will aid in the identification of what the starship is, why man needs it, and how he can build it. The place to initiate the study of philosophy is Objectivism, the philosophy originated by Ayn Rand. Objectivist philosophy provides the principles for the starship project described in this article. Specifically, the starting point is Ayn Rand's essay, “Apollo 11", in which she wrote: "Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of reason. Yes, reason can solve human problems--but nothing else on earth or beyond it, can…. Let us hope that some men will learn it. But it will not be learned by most of today’s intellectuals, since the core and motor of all their incredible constructs is the attempt to establish human tyranny as an escape from what they call “the tyranny” of reason and reality….. If the lesson is learned in time, the flight of Apollo 11 will be the first achievement of a great new age; if not, it will be a glorious last--not forever, but for a long, long time to come." ("Apollo 11", The Objectivist, vol. 8, no.9, September, 1969; also in the anthology, Voice of Reason, 1989; also online ) ----------
    3 points
  4. Boydstun

    "Project Starship"

    Sight of Superlative Achievement Stephen Boydstun (2007) My favorite character in Atlas Shrugged is John Galt. One of the crucial traits of this character is his extraordinary technical ability. I can adore a fictional character, and part of the reason I adore this one is his possession of that trait. Adoration is one thing, admiration is another. Galt’s technical genius is admirable only in the derivative sense that I would admire that trait in a real person. I cannot admire a fictional character. I can admire the character’s creator as creator, but not the character. Fortunately, there are in our time many individuals whose mathematical and scientific accomplishments are at the high level of the fictional character John Galt. They are not well known to the general public. I want to tell you about one such man. Eli Yablonovitch invented the concept of a photonic band gap. He arrived at this concept in 1987 while doing research on making telecommunication lasers more efficient. Another physicist Sajeev John arrived at the concept independently that same year. John came to the concept in the course of pure research attempting to create light localization. Four years later, Yablonovitch was the first to create a successful photonic band-gap crystal. He used a variant of the crystal structure of diamond, a variant now called yablonovite. The structure was formed by drilling three intersecting arrays of holes, 400 nanometers in diameter, into a block of ceramic material. This structure, at this scale, was able to eliminate the propagation of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range. Photonic band-gap crystals are yielding a new generation of optical fibers capable of carrying much more information, and they are contributing to the realization of nanoscopic lasers and photonic integrated circuits. The name photonic crystal sounds like a crystal made of light. That is incorrect. A photonic crystal is an artificial crystal (or quasicrystal) made usually of solids such as dielectrics or semiconductors. The electrical properties of a semiconductor are intermediate between a dielectric (an insulator) and a conductor. In a dielectric material, the valence electrons of the atoms are tightly bound to them. They are confined to energy levels within the band of levels called the valence band. Above that band of levels is a broad band of energies inaccessible to the electrons under the laws of quantum mechanics. That forbidden band is called the band gap. Above the band gap is a band in which electrons could move freely in the material if only enough energy were applied to them to raise them to that band of energy levels. This band is called the conduction band. In a semiconductor, the valence electrons are less tightly bound to atoms than they are in a dielectric. The band gap is smaller. A smaller boost of energy is needed to induce the flow of electrons, a current. The degree of electrical conductivity of a semiconductor can be precisely controlled by doping one semiconductor chemical element with small amounts of another. When an electron is promoted across the band gap, an effective positive charge called a hole is created in the valence levels below the gap. The holes, like the electrons, can be entrained into currents. By controlling the supply of electrons and holes above and below the band gap, carefully designed semiconductors are able to perform electronic switching, modulating, and logic functions. They can also be contrived to serve as media for photo detectors, solid-state lasers, light-emitting diodes, thermistors, and solar cells. The properties of an electronic band gap depend on the type of atoms and their crystal structure in the solid semiconductor. To comprehend and manipulate the electronic properties of matter, electrons and their alterations must be treated not only in their character as particles, but in their character as quantum-mechanical waves. The interatomic spacing of the atoms in matter is right for wave-interference effects among electrons. This circumstance yields the electronic band gaps in semiconductors as well as the conductive ability of conductors. A photonic band gap is a range of energies of electromagnetic waves for which their propagation through the crystal is forbidden in every direction. The interatomic spacing in semiconductors are on the order of a few tenths of a nanometer, and that is too small for effecting photonic band gaps in the visible, infrared, microwave, or radio ranges of the spectrum. Creation of photonic band gaps for these very useful wavelengths requires spatial organizations in matter at scales on the order of a few hundred nanometers and above. In the 70’s and 80’s, researchers had been forming, in semiconductors, structures called superlattices. These were periodic variations in semiconductor composition in which repetitions were at scales a few times larger than the repetitions in the atomic lattice. The variations could consist of alternating layers of two types of semiconductors or in cyclic variations in the amount of selected impurities in a single type of semiconductor. These artificial lattices allowed designers, guided by the quantum theory of solids, to create new types of electronic band gaps and new opticoelectronic properties in semiconductors. Photonic crystals are superlattices in which the repeating variation is a variation in the refractive index of the medium. It is by refractions and internal partial reflections that photonic band gaps are created. The array of holes that Yablonovitch and his associates drilled for the first photonic crystal formed a superlattice of air in the surrounding dielectric solid. Additional workable forms of photonic-crystal superlattice have been demonstrated since that first one. Costas Soukoulis and colleagues created a crystal of crisscrossed rods, and it has yielded photonic band gaps in the infrared part of the spectrum. Photonic crystals have been created mostly in dielectric or semiconductor media, but Shawn Yu Lin and associates have created them in tungsten. These may prove useful in telecommunications and in the conversion of infrared radiation into electricity. In 2001 Eli Yablonovitch co-founded the company Luxtera, which is now a leading commercial developer of silicon photonic products. Photonic crystals, manipulators of light, they are alive “because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power—of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form.” –AR 1957 (re diesel-electric) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Scientific American 1983 (Nov) “Solid-State Superlattices” –G.H. Dohler 1984 (Aug) “Quasicrystals” –D.R. Nelson 1986 (Oct) “Photonic Materials” –J.M. Rowell 1991 (Nov) “Microlasers” –J.L. Jewell, J.P. Harbison, and A. Scherer 1998 (Mar) “Nanolasers” –P.L. Gourley 2001 (Dec) “Photonic Crystals: Semiconductors of Light” –E. Yablonovitch 2007 (Feb) “Making Silicon Lase” –B. Jalali Science News 1991 (Nov 2) “Drilling Holes to Keep Photons in the Dark” –I. Peterson 1993 (Sep 25) “A Novel Architecture for Excluding Photons” –I. Peterson 1996 (Nov 16) “Light Gets the Bends in a Photonic Crystal” –C. Wu 1998 (Oct 24) “Crystal Bends Light Hard, Saves Space” –P. Weiss 2003 (Oct 4) “Hot Crystal” –P. Weiss 2005 (Nov 5) “Light Pedaling” –P. Weiss Nature Photonics 2007 (1:91–92) “Bandgap Engineering: Quasicrystals Enter Third Dimension” –C.T. Chan Fundamental Papers – Physical Review Letters 1987 (May 18) “Inhibited Spontaneous Emission in Solid-State Physics and Electronics” –E. Yablonovitch 1987 (Jun 8 ) “Strong Localization of Photons in Certain Disordered Dielectric Superlattices” –S. John 1989 (Oct 30) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case” –E. Yablonovitch and T.M. Gmitter 1990 (Nov 19) “Full Vector Wave Calculation of Photonic Band Structures in Face-Centered-Cubic Dielectric Media” –K.M. Leung and Y.F. Liu 1990 (Nov 19) “Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures: Bloch Wave Solution of Maxwell’s Equations” –Z. Zhang and S. Satpathy 1990 (Dec 17) “Existence of a Photonic Gap in Periodic Dielectric Structures” –K.M. Ho, C.T. Chan, and C.M. Soukoulis 1991 (Oct 21) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case Employing Non-Spherical Atoms” –E. Yablonovitch, T.J. Gmitter, and K.M. Leung
    3 points
  5. OO is supposed to serve a particular purpose, which is not the same as the purpose of Twit-Face or alt.philosophy.objectivism and its spawn HPO, if you remember them. When content deviates from that purpose, it is right for management to take corrective action. My judgment is that adherence to that purpose here is not strict, and it has gotten much looser since I first joined about 20 years ago. Every person who contributes here should be able to articulate their justification for contributing, to say what value you receive in exchange for your posts. If you can’t do that, you should re-evaluate your self-sacrifice. In fact, very many former contributors have done so (by which I mean, the vast majority). There are loose guidelines which state what the purpose of OO is and what contributors should and should not do. Intellectual honesty is one of those requirements, the problem is that intellectual dishonesty comes in many flavors, one being evasion and the other being unreasoned reliance on authoritative statements. The covid thread reeks of evasion and was worthy of closing on those grounds. I concluded that there was no rational value to be had in the thread, and that put paid to my participation there. I might, in another incarnation, contemplate whether just leaving the thread open does any harm. There have been many fora for Objectivism, most of which have fallen into complete inactivity. When you peruse the content of other Objectivist fora, ask yourself if you would want to be associated with that group and if not, why not? My judgment is, “No: crappy content” (NB this explicitly does not refer to HBL). The potential harm of crappy content to Objectivism should be obvious, so now we know the basis for closing crappy threads, what remains is a specific evaluation of one or more threads, to decide if they are overall above that crappiness threshold (I will not engage in a specific autopsy here). I would like to avoid reaching the “crappy content” conclusion w.r.t. OO.
    3 points
  6. As I mentioned at least twice above, “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” provides the proof that you have demanded, which incidentally is an unreasonable demand (evidence is evidence, you don’t get to arbitrarily stipulate what constitutes evidence). You have not addressed the facts, instead you retreat behind automatic denial as a means of evading the science. In the face of evidence having been presented, it is incumbent on you to disprove that evidence. Indeed, I have no evidence that you have even looked at that article, and I can think of no rational reason for your refusal to directly address the science. You offer no alternative conclusion regarding the axiomatic (the myriad scientific observations of covid), instead you just repeat your denial without evidence to support an alternative, nor do you even state what such an alternative is. In other words, you are engaging in selective epistemological nihilism. My current counter-offer is that you should provide evidence that malaria exists: I will take the position that you have taken, which is to just deny that malaria exists. I sincerely hope that you do not hold a political-consequences theory of epistemology, that the standards of proof depends not on the logic of the claim and the objective nature of the existent, but are determined by whether the existent has been misused to support initiation of force. Under which logic, I substitute measles, smallpox or Spanish flu in my challenge to you, all of which triggered tyrannical governmental responses. I would like to see what you consider to be acceptable proof that malaria exists, and see some reasoning as to why you find that evidence to be sufficient (unless, of course, you are also a malaria-denier).
    3 points
  7. monart

    Motive Power

    Motivation is a key to human action, to its initiation, sustenance, and completion. Based on one’s values, motivation comes in many forms, such as financial, legal, ethical, promissory, logical, intellectual, and esthetic. At its core, motivation is emotive, i.e., e-motion: that which “-moves out”, that which is the motive power of action. An example of esthetic motivation is the following. Motive Power The motive power of life is the engine of directed motion, the generator and creator of life’s ambition, driving actions forward in life’s continuous sustenance and realization. In music, as in life, there’s a motive power that pulls music outward, a keynote that carries the flow of melody in harmony on a constant beat toward resolution and arrival. In literature, as in music and in life, there is a motive power that draws out the words and names the concepts that inform and inspire thought onward to envision real ideals. The source of motive power, in literature, music, and life, is: integration – it’s choosing to clarify and unify words, tones, and actions with integrity and purpose, all aiming for the climax, crescendo, and ecstasy that await. As three models of motive power, behold: In real life is the person and character of genius and benefactor Ayn Rand (see 100 voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand and The Letters of Ayn Rand, In music and literature, are the following two complementary works: one a motion-picture in sounds, the other, a motion-picture in words; the music “Collision” may be heard as a short prelude to the scene from Atlas Shrugged. All models are worth repeated visits for reflection and re-motivation. ===== “Collision”, by John Mills-Cockell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiIe3PjiYp4 And his other similar earlier works from 1970s, such as “Melina’s Torch”. “Tillicum”, “Aurora Spinray”, “December Angel”, "Appaloosa and Pegasus" – all can be heard on Youtube. Also, especially noteworthy is his 2004 Concerto of Deliverance, commissioned as a tribute to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. http://www.starshipaurora.com/concertoofdeliverance.html ===== Dagny riding the John Galt Line (especially p. 245-246, Atlas Shrugged😞 She felt the sweep of an emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward. She turned to the door of the motor units, she threw it open to a screaming jet of sound and escaped into the pounding of the engine's heart. For a moment, it was as if she were reduced to a single sense, the sense of hearing, and what remained of her hearing was only a long, rising, falling, rising scream. She stood in a swaying, sealed chamber of metal, looking at the giant generators. She had wanted to see them, because the sense of triumph within her was bound to them, to her love for them, to the reason of the life-work she had chosen. In the abnormal clarity of a violent emotion, she felt as if she were about to grasp something she had never known and had to know. She laughed aloud, but heard no sound of it; nothing could be heard through the continuous explosion. "The John Galt Line!" she shouted, for the amusement of feeling her voice swept away from her lips. She moved slowly along the length of the motor units, down a narrow passage between the engines and the wall. She felt the immodesty of an intruder, as if she had slipped inside a living creature, under its silver skin, and were watching its life beating in gray metal cylinders, in twisted coils, in sealed tubes, in 'the convulsive whirl of blades in wire cages. The enormous complexity of the shape above her was drained by invisible channels, and the violence raging within it was led to fragile needles on glass dials, to green and red beads winking on panels, to tall, thin cabinets stenciled "High Voltage." Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines? -- she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?" -- like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel. They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power -- of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time. They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going -- not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again -- not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages -- the power of a living mind -- the power of thought and choice and purpose. She was making her way back toward the cab, feeling that she wanted to laugh, to kneel or to lift her arms, wishing she were able to release the thing she felt . . . . =======
    2 points
  8. tadmjones

    "Project Starship"

    Nay, you shall see a bold fellow many times do Mahomet's miracle. Mahomet made the people believe that he would call an hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers, for the observers of his law. The people assembled; Mahomet called the hill to come to him, again and again; and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said, If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill. So these men, when they have promised great matters, and failed most shamefully, yet (if they have the perfection of boldness) they will but slight it over, and make a turn, and no more ado. Bacon, Francis, chapter 12, Of Boldness, in his Essays.
    2 points
  9. Commenting on just this part: If you torture a man for 14 years and he dies a month later, you don’t say he died of natural causes. Good grief. What’s under the ellipsis – “the Devil or” – mocks the truth.
    2 points
  10. Craig Murray in the UK has written extensively about the incarceration and trials of Julian Assange. About the publication of the unredacted documents see "Julian Assange’s Grand Inquisitor" by Chris Hedges. But what the WSJ (mainstream media beholden to the Deep State) says as well as the above is irrelevant. The CIA is in large part a pack of murders – good riddance to bad rubbish.
    2 points
  11. A forum is a space for discussions/debates. What you are describing is an unmoderated forum (= zero control over content). The owner defines what, who and how. It is not "pretty much true by definition" that a forum is unmoderated. My understanding is that @Boydstun described various choices as to how to moderate a forum, not choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. One does not have an a priori freedom of speech on a private forum. It is implicit in the attributes of private property. The non-owners are guest and are subjected to the rules of the house. Harmed is that owner who does not want his property to be used in ways he does not desire, for example to spread ideas he hates.
    2 points
  12. A. The implication of your wording above is that "official, authorized(??), mainstream narrative" is mostly wrong, which in itself is a conspiracist claim😁 B. Yes, the labeling "conspiracist can be used to intimidate etc., but the fact that it is used does not necessarily imply intimidation: it can be a true factual statement. In our case: 1. You approvingly cite Christine Massey, a quack and a conspiracist: consider her YogaEsoteric [sic!] and FluorideFreePee [sic!] sites, her unscientific, ridiculous "No Records Found" research and her general denial of the existence of viruses; 2. You (and C. Massey) approvingly and with no caveats refer to the book Virus Mania as an authoritative source, although the title itself is very telling: Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio - How the Medical Industry Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense The respective viruses allegedly do not exist, the bad and greedy medical industry invented them, and epidemics, for enormous profits at our expense. It is obviously a conspiracy; it had to start at lest 120 years ago (Poliovirus, 1909) and had to involve, since, dozen or hundreds of millions of medical professionals spreading this alleged fiction. It is a shame to refer to that person and to the book approvingly and with no caveats - on this Objectivism forum.
    2 points
  13. If there didn't exist facts relative to deeming the therapy 'safe'( this term has specific meaning when applied to medical interventions and coming from medical experts) there was nothing to investigate. So what facts did you investigate relative to safety? It seems you just accepted an argument from authority and then reasoned your way to a rationalization, people do that all the time. Two times in this thread you have asserted that you will not be participating in the discussion and then continue. Is this a good look for a moderator of an O'ist forum? (It feels like lying)
    2 points
  14. Reason and investigation of the facts. Also, the context that my grandfather had just died of it a couple months before and to protect my mom who I was staying with at the time who has COPD. Just because there is a standard time for testing doesn't mean in context of a disease that nobody has natural immunity to that individuals such as myself can't take vaccines or medical drugs that have not went through the full process of testing outside of that context as it would be a potential sacrifice of one's life to do otherwise. It would be similar to someone with cancer taking an experimental treatment. Also, why is any of this important as it's a personal choice. I don't even fully understand the full purpose of this entire thread about denying the existence of a disease where essentially every fact of evidence and perception proves the existence of while no evidence exists that shows that it doesn't. It's just arbitrary although I have some ideas why someone would claim this against the overwhelming facts of reality. This is just a very strange discussion.
    2 points
  15. Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α A sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, propositions, and judgments had been important in the modern empiricist philosophy received by Quine. In the present Part and the next, I set out the relation of Quine’s opposition to the distinction in the 1950’s to the Peikoff-Rand opposition to the distinction in the following decade. I emphasize a major problem, tackled earlier by Kant, as reason the dichotomous distinction had been important. That is, I emphasize the problem it had been set to solve in a way not Kant’s. The characterization and responsibilities of analytic statements in sharp contrast to synthetic statements put forth in Logical Empiricism (also called Logical Positivism) constituted an alternative solution to that old problem, alternative to Kant’s solution. I shall step back in the next Part to more of Carnap and the response of Quine to him, and step back to the epistemological problem that had arisen in Kant. I’ll formulate a new solution, one in some affiliation with Rand’s theoretical philosophy and her theory of value. Form and necessity will enter, and I’ll assess Peikoff’s ASD against my layout.[1] “[Quine] is perhaps best known for his arguments against Logical Empiricism (in particular, against its use of the analytic-synthetic distinction). This argument, however, should be seen as part of a comprehensive world-view which makes no sharp distinction between philosophy and empirical science, and thus requires a wholesale reorientation of the subject” (Hylton and Kemp 2023) Quine held that the best science we have garnered is the best ultimate truth at present we have of the world. He did not see logical principles such as the law of excluded middle as arising from ontology, but as a principle of convenience pervasive in knowledge. I should say that dichotomy between those two candidate bases is false. I go with Rand’s picture of elementary logic, as a certain pervasive character of method in successful identifications of reality. Such existence-based logic infuses any higher logic naturally appropriate in attainment of ordinary and scientific knowledge. I add that excluded middle is a tooling formality for a living mind. It is not a formality belonging to concretes in their actuality and independently of the existence of living mind discerning them, by thought, in their concrete identities. Further, in my system (2023), alternatives of any sort do not exist in the universe at all until life enters the scene, and all alternatives, however high in the intellect, are descendants of the fundamental alternative that Rand exposed as uniquely facing the living: continuation of maintaining life or termination of life. We have mind, I say, capable of getting knowledge of concretes in part by use of principles of logic and mathematics tooled from formalities that belong to concretes. Identities of concretes—their characters, situations, and passages—can be formalities belonging to concrete existents, where discernment of those formalities is by thought engaged in elementary experience of ordinary objects in the world. Belonging-formalities such as a broad-form principle of identity “Existents have identity, and existence of the latter in full just is the former” can be assimilated and tooled by thought into further formalities tethered to belonging-formalities. The principle of excluded middle, for example, can have a tether to belonging-identities as well as to the high-powered human mind. In other words, we need not begin with logic, then use it in grasping the world, as Quine would have it. No, we begin with the world, including its identities in belonging-formalities, the world in ordinary human experience. When retaking the world in science, we wield formal tools with some tethers, by ancestry, from the world of ordinary experience. Which tooled formalities of logic and mathematics are best suited to which parts of the world is a further intellectual enterprise. Minkowski geometry can be weighed against 4D Euclidean geometry for most faithful and most effective tool for comprehending physical flat spacetime. Aristotle’s syllogistic and second-order logic can be weighed against Quine’s choice.[2] Quine aimed to integrate knowledge historical, knowledge scientific, including psychology, and knowledge philosophical. I notice, whole truth be told, he ended up smashing against early-childhood cognitive developmental psychology in the second half of the twentieth century, from his armchair. Elizabeth Spelke remarked: “Our research provides evidence, counter to the views of Quine (1960) and others, that the organization of the world into objects [in comprehension] precedes the development of language and thus does not depend upon it. I suspect, moreover, that language plays no important role in the spontaneous elaboration of physical knowledge” (Spelke 1989, 181). The reorientation between science and philosophy sought by Quine is wholesome, I should say. Ayn Rand remained in the old outlook from the philosopher’s chair. She took the sciences, including the modern hard sciences, to be in a one-way need of philosophy, especially in epistemology.[3] “Philosophy is a necessity for a rational being: philosophy is the foundation of science, the organizer of man’s mind, the integrator of his knowledge, . . .” (Rand 1975, 82; also ITOE 74). “Science was born as a result and consequences of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base” (Rand 1961, 44; also 26–27). Rand acknowledged that scientific biology informed her concept of the general nature of life that she employed in her theory of ethics. (More generally, on the influence of biology on philosophy, see Smith 2017.) A bit of measurement theory informed Rand’s theory of concepts. A bit of Helmholtz, her thoughts on music. Rand acknowledges no cases in which science begat or informed philosophy in metaphysics or epistemology. I disagree. Harmonics, geometry, and astronomy existed before Aristotle, before his metaphysics or his theory of science or his organization of logical deduction. Aristotle’s empiricism was a boost to sciences (De Groot 2014), but harmonics, geometry, and astronomy were not inaugurated by systematic explicit philosophy (see e.g. Graham 2013). The idea of a physical law mathematical in expression was not invented by philosophers. Nor the need to look for certain symmetries and symmetry breaking in comprehending parts of physical reality (see Schwichtenberg 2018 [2015]; Healey 2007). From Plato-Aristotle to the present, where theoretical philosophy flourished, it was shaped by received mathematics and science (Netz 1999; Bochner 1966). Concerning science in our own time, contra Rand, it has not declined in comparison to advances in the nineteenth century, which Rand had maintained in support of the idea that bad strains of modern philosophy have led to a decline in scientific achievements (Rand 1975, 78). Modern hard sciences have continued their stampede to the present time, and cognitive developmental psychology arising in the second half of the twentieth century continues bringing new light to the present. To be sure, scientists operate within a general metaphysics they hold, and as Michael Friedman has illustrated, this may be especially useful for resolutions during a time of fundamental innovations in the course of science (2001, chap. 4). Scientists have also been innovators in methods of investigation, theoretical, observational, and experimental. In that we might say they have on a philosophical hat. But I object to the picture that full-tilt philosophers come up with valid methods of rational scientific inquiry independently of existing science, methods not already in the heads and hands of scientists rolling back the darkness. (To be continued.) Notes [1] Recall that “Resonant Existence” is my own philosophy, whose fundamentals in theoretical philosophy are set out in my paper “Existence, We.” The overlap between my philosophy and Rand’s theoretical philosophy and her theory of value are extensive, although, the differences are substantial. [2] Bivalent, first-order https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-firstorder-emergence/ predicate logic with identity [such has been proven complete]) for best truth-preserving tool in science. I might add, it seems fine tooling-form logical structure of natural-language thought on the world, at least when this much classical logic is bound additionally to existence by relevance logic. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-relevance/ [3] But consider Sciabarra 2013 [1995], 121–23. References Bochner, S. 1966. The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104. Friedman, M. 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: CSLI. De Groot, J. 2014. Aristotle’s Empiricism. Las Vegas: Parmenides. Graham, D.W. 2013. Science before Socrates. New York: Oxford University Press. Healey, R. 2007. Gauging What’s Real – The Conceptual Foundations of Contemporary Gauge Theories. New York: Oxford University Press. Hylton, P. and G. Kemp 2023. Willard Van Orman Quine. Online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Netz, R. 1999. The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics – A Study in Cognitive History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. New York: Signet. ——. 1975. From the Horse’s Mouth. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet. ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. Meridian. Schwichtenberg, J. 2018 [2015]. Physics from Symmetry. 2nd edition. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Sciabarra, C. 2013 [1995]. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. 2nd edition. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Smith, D.L., editor, 2017. How Biology Shapes Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Spelke, E. 1989. The Origins of Physical Knowledge. In Weiskrantz 1989. Weiskrantz, L. editor, 1989. Thought without Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
    2 points
  16. @necrovore That would mean those people would have to had advanced knowledge years prior to the pandemic of the existence of the covid virus which is a big leap implying a planned conspiracy when it is much more likely that it was simply a coincidence involving passive attacks from the Left on the religious Right. While there likely are occasional side effects of childhood vaccines (like watching a commercial for any medicine or vaccine shows in detail) we've essentially all had them and they have been scientifically proven to be extremely rare with the benefits outweighing the slight risk. Obviously, that doesn't imply forced vaccinations are moral or should be legal outside of maybe an extremely lethal and highly contagious novel disease, covid doesn't qualify, although I personally got the vaccine the week it was allowed. (J&J which to prove the above point of risk was soon taken off the market due to the blood clot risk). The main principle involves the fact that the government should not be involved in education as it should be private or funded via charity as like most things current governments are improperly involved in when their only valid jobs are the protection of individual rights.
    2 points
  17. No, it doesn't follow that it's a bogus award, just because Mr. Eckert wants proof of virus isolation from Dr. Kammerer first, while Dr. Kammerer want proof of the award first. Consider the flip side, since Dr. Kammerer doesn’t want to show her proof first, does it follow from that alone that she doesn’t have it? No. In an article reporting Dr. Kammerer's side of the dispute: "In a letter from a lawyer dated October 17, 2022, the law firm Rogert & Ulbrich informed SaMiraFamily AG and Mr. Samuel Eckert that Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer complied with the request and will present proof of the existence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus with proof of the existence of the amount of the request." In an article reporting Mr. Eckert's side of the debate: "In view of the expressed "suspicion of fraud", the accusation of "cheating" and the fact that Kämmerer announced more than once to the public that she had the evidence necessary to fulfill the promise, but she did not want to "give it away" and obviously still doesn't want to, Transition News sent her and her lawyers several questions." So, it's at least a stand-off: each side wanting the other to provide the proof first. But the fundamental question remains. If the proof exists that SC2 has been isolated, purified, and distinctly identified, and that this proof is so widely available that asking for it is absurd, then where are the documents for it? If the proof is so obvious and publicly available as to be unquestionable and unchallengeable, then why does Dr. Kammerer not want to "give it away"? Is it like someone claiming they have proof that Objectivism is false, but doesn't want to "give it away"?
    2 points
  18. Just to add to the above, my grandparents on my Dad's side who took me to church from toddler age until I made my own decision to stop going at about 9 or so where originally from Arkansas and were Southern Baptists who took me to Baptist churches, but right away at 4, 5, 6 years of age I immediately had what I now know were extreme moral issues with the idea of a being/God requiring sacrifices, first in animals and then of actual people (which even then I knew made zero sense whatsoever and was evil). Then there were all the contradictions such as a "trinity" that is one, magical stuff like people walking on water, being magically turned to salt, being swallowed by whales and living, dying and magically coming back from the dead, etc. Things that are impossible and people just randomly believing it all without even thinking or demanding proof in any manner. Then there was the way people acted there that literally scared the crap out of me, made no sense, or was boring to the point I'd just fall asleep. Kids my age being rewarded for randomly citing the books of the Bible at like age 6 when the assignment was actually to cite a specific assigned verse in the children's class while acting like mindless zombies, being in the main service with my Grandparents and people randomly yelling out hallelujah like crazy lunatics, the list could go on and on. It was just a scary, contradictory, nonsensical experience at nearly all times. The singing and things like listening to stories that even then I knew were just myths was OK but overall I considered it an extremely negative experience and since the purpose of it all was to stop rational thought and encourage conformity in outlandish ideas that would get people sent properly to a psychiatrist for if they claimed them in the present I quickly realized that it was a form of child abuse to continue in any manner past about 8 or 9.
    2 points
  19. Isn't it proven that there was a big spike in respiratory deaths starting in 2020, which must have had some cause or causes?
    2 points
  20. "Prevarication" = non-stop lying and distraction It's your minds they own. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-ukraine-war-runs-on-lies/
    2 points
  21. The same question can be asked about the common cold, appendicitis or malaria. Do you know by your own reason that these things exist, or do you merely rely on the expertise of others who say that they exist? I have personal sensory experience with the common cold and appendicitis, and not malaria. I now know that Turkey exists, though I do not know directly that Iraq exists, however, I have friends (whom I trust, perhaps unreasonably so) that can attest to the existence of Iraq. There is a simple formula that can be followed to deny all knowledge: just deny something. If you claim “I personally had covid”, the counter-claim would be “How do you know it was covid that you had, not something else?”. Indeed, Peikoff discusses the procedure in his explication of reason and certainty – to be certain, you must not just have evidence for a proposition, you must eliminate all evidence, even conceptual evidence, for alternatives. You could say “Possibly I had covid” or “Possibly I had appendicitis”, but how can you rule out all of the alternatives. It is always possible to say “It might be something else”. The key to not devolving into epistemological nihilism is to reject unsupported denial as a logical tool. To deny that an individual has appendicitis or the common cold, you must offer superior evidence that they have a specific alternative. My initial hypothesis regarding covid was that I had strep throat. I refuted that in two ways. First, the probative throat pustules of strep were lacking. Second, the antigen test was positive. My knowledge of what I had was not complete, for example I do not know which of 5 variants I was infested with, and certainly not which of the thousands of sub-mutations. The broader lesson is that you don’t deny knowledge just because you are not omniscient. If you intend to discount the testimony of scientific experts, you have to have superior evidence that they are not to be trusted. In fact, scientific experts collectively provide the essential evidence against themselves. I always urge people to directly engage the peer-reviewed literature as best they can, though I can’t make heads of tails of physics publications. An article will (should) contain the seeds of its own destruction, identifying weaknesses and alternative accounts, because the reviewers demanded that those seeds be planted. Unfortunately, most popular knowledge of science is transmitted in untrustworthy venues. I don’t know whether Science is trustworthy in other areas, but I can tell you that it is completely untrustworthy in the area of linguistics, where it occasionally publishes an ill-researched article. Blogs are plainly untrustworthy. So, a crucial skill in evaluating scientific claims is being able to evaluate the credibility of a journal, which is a very difficult task. Belief in climate change is a major problem, because it's a very specific package deal which is partially related to something else that the senses directly validate – weather change. "Climate change" is an ill-defined assertion that cannot even be spelled out as a concrete scientific hypothesis. Covid, on the other hand, is a specific, testable, and tested scientific claim.
    2 points
  22. Belief in all things covid is more complicated, I think, than whether or not one believes there was a specific viron spreading through the human population. One reason to defend one's belief 'in it' is to rationalize the relinquishing of autonomy and especially among those who are cognizant of the level of prize they allot to individualism and productivity and the associated emotional responses that are tied into that relinquishment.
    2 points
  23. INTERLUDE Three handy and highly informative articles pertinent to this present essay: The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction Carnap versus Quine on the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction and the [Quine's] Argument against Logical Empiricism
    1 point
  24. I went the crazy route of using an actual safe protease inhibitor as a prophylactic, instead of the rational choice of using an untested gene therapy.
    1 point
  25. How is risk mitigation exemplified by the J&J injection being pulled from the market? It was allowed on the market by the FDC because it was deemed safe and effective , but they pulled it because it wasn't safe and effective?
    1 point
  26. Can you give some examples of the CDC saying that?
    1 point
  27. It has always been true that there is a potential for a new pandemic of some sort or other, partly because of germs mutating and partly because of human expansion into more places. It is probably wise to be prepared. It is surely wise to at least be aware of the potential.
    1 point
  28. Why you keep going… …Because you seek to know truth, to show it, to let it be known and shown. You resist and defend against the truth being denied, distorted, or defiled. And more so with fundamental, radical axiomatic truths. Objectivism is such a fundamental truth. Objectivism is an integrated system of philosophy you come to know as truth by way of looking at reality by your own mind and reason. You did not give trust to experts, not to professors or priests, as to whether Objectivism was true or false. You know for yourself that Objectivism is true. In the same independently thinking way, you come to know and defend the truth of covid. Or not?
    1 point
  29. I wrote that in jest; it's an exaggeration. However, it's a known propaganda technique to discredit the truth by associating it with various crank theories, so that when people encounter the truth, they will think that it's just another crank theory. This is similar to the way that if a group wants to peacefully protest something, you could plant some violent people in amongst the protesters, so that the whole group can then be blamed for the violence. I remember seeing a lot of news in the mainstream media about "anti-vaxxers," starting maybe a year or so before Covid-19 appeared. This news was about people who objected to the requirement that their children, in order to be enrolled in school, have to be vaccinated for polio, mumps, measles, etc., and usually it was stated that their objections were religious in nature, or based on the (disproved I think) notion that vaccines cause autism, and so it was based on crackpottery. I remember at the time being puzzled about why their stories were being "pushed" so much by the news media. Of course, once Covid-19 came out, it became obvious: news about the "anti-vaxxers" had been spread deliberately, in advance, so that when the Covid-19 "vaccine" was introduced on short notice, anybody who objected to it, even doctors, even if their objections were scientifically legitimate, could be declared to just be more "anti-vaxxers," i.e., cranks who could be ignored. When you have populations of millions of people, it is often possible to find cranks rather than having to create them. (I am inclined to think that Mr. Eckert is probably a crank, if he objects to the whole science of virology... I do remember a writer republished on Zero Hedge claiming that "there is no such thing as a virus," but I don't know if that's him, but it is a crank thing to say.) So it's unlikely that Mr. Eckert is actually a CDC or FDA "plant" put there for the purpose of discrediting others. It could be that people at the CDC and FDA are deliberately trying to give him more prominence than he deserves, deliberately promoting him to make people think he's is somehow typical of the "alternatives" to themselves, in order to get people to discredit all alternatives to the CDC and FDA. (I also remember in one of Ayn Rand's essays, she pointed out how "The John Birch Society" was lumped in with some other things it didn't belong with, and that is an example of the same sort of technique at work.) It is because of the use of propaganda techniques like this that you have to think when reading alternative media, but this kind of propaganda is also why you have to read the alternative media in the first place.
    1 point
  30. "The Church says 'no' to IVF due to the massive destruction of embryonic life, the assault on the meaning of the conjugal act and the treatment of the child as a product not a gift."* Also, the church of Rome has long been opposed to sexual joy for its own sake, to capitalism, and to scientific and technological advances shrinking human helplessness against nature (which undercuts some of the jobs of the witch doctors.) Alabama Supreme Court puts the secular sword behind the preposterous RC mystical view: frozen embryos are children.
    1 point
  31. How were mRNA vaccines against the covid virus created and developed if the DNA sequence of the virus was never "purified and isolated" (concepts that do not apply to DNA sequencing btw), or are they also non-existent conspiracies?
    1 point
  32. No, it doesn't follow that it's a bogus award, just because Mr. Eckert wants proof of virus isolation from Dr. Kammerer first, while Dr. Kammerer want proof of the award first. It does follow. If you tell me: "do <<this>> for me and I will give you 1.5 millions" then, if I don't know you, the first thing I will do is ask you to show me that you do have such kind of money. If you refuse to provide evidence that you have the money, then I will - rightly - conclude, on this basis alone, that your offer is bogus. There is no symmetry between you and me in the above arrangement, so that there is no need to consider "the flip side".
    1 point
  33. In defense of Dr. Kammerer I would say that knowledge is hierarchical. It's much easier to prove the existence of Covid-19 if you can count on, say, a science of virology, which has, over a period of decades, developed techniques to identify the existence of various viruses. If Mr. Eckert acknowledges the validity of virology and merely disputes the particular virus or family of viruses, then the proof is probably easy, for a competent virologist. It becomes much harder if Mr. Eckert disputes the validity of the whole science of virology, because then Dr. Kammerer would have to prove that before getting to the part about Covid-19. Virology itself rests on other discoveries, and if Mr. Eckert disputes those, too, then Dr. Kammerer could be in for a very long slog. The same kind of thing happens when trying to prove evolution to Christians.
    1 point
  34. A Friday Hodgepodge 1. "Why Can't Professional Philosophers Get Rand Right?," by Mike Mazza (New Ideal):What's going on here? To many twentieth-century philosophers, the gold standard for assessing philosophical merit was a concise deduction with informally defended premises. Especially in ethics, these informal defenses attempt to get the reader to accept that a premise is "intuitive" (or the implication of a deeper, intuitively true assumption). So, it's understandable that philosophers educated in this tradition would attempt to interpret someone outside of it as making gold-standard arguments; it's what they're comfortable with and trained to look for. Notice that Rachels and Rachels's first premise states a fact and then attempts to draw from it a common-sense or intuitively plausible implication: the individual is "of supreme importance." But Rand does not argue like this at any point in her case for egoism.Mazza indicates that parochialism, of which the above is only a type, is a problem even for those few non-Objectivist academics who have been sympathetic to Rand, and is right to call out professional philosophers, of all people, for falling into it. 2. "Selfish Randsday to All," by Harry Binswanger (Value for Value):Randsday [the anniversary of Ayn Rand's birthday --ed] is for reminding ourselves that pleasure is an actual need, a psychological requirement for a human consciousness. For man, motivation, energy, enthusiasm are not givens. Psychological depression is not only possible but rampant in our duty-preaching, self-denigrating culture. The alternative is not short-range, superficial "fun," but real, self-rewarding pleasure. On Randsday, if you do something that you ordinarily would think of as "fun," you do it on a different premise and with a deeper meaning: that you need pleasure, you are entitled to it, and that the purpose and justification of your existence is: getting what you want -- what you really want, with full consciousness and dedication.I especially recommend visiting this post for the excerpt from Rand's The Fountainhead, which powerfully demolishes the trite, but deadly and wrong sentiment that it's easy to be selfish. 3. "Portraying CEOs as Cartoon Villains," by Jaana Woiceshyn (How to Be Profitable and Moral):Image by J.J., via Wikimedia Commons, license.When we see the news headlines about online sexual exploitation of children, experience daily the stubbornly high food prices, and witness job cuts, it is easy to take the governments' accusations at face value. No wonder the public distrust of corporations is high. But are the accusations based on evidence? Are corporate CEOs real villains, or are politicians just portraying them as cartoon villains, like the cold-hearted Scrooge McDuck or the conniving Mr. Burns in The Simpsons who stop at nothing to maximize profits? I argue the latter. Politicians are scapegoating corporate CEOs for the problems that ultimately the governments created.This dishonest practice has always been a hallmark of the left, but the right has moved from failing to even pretend to stand up for business to joining in. Indeed, such phrases as corporate media -- once a shibboleth of the left -- now get bandied about as if we're all communists now. 4. "Has the Right Been Eviscerated by Trump?," by Peter Schwartz (PeterSchwartz.com, 2019):[Trump's] core constituency supports him unquestioningly. He calls them "my followers," and they attend his rallies, vote for the candidates he endorses and give him the adulation he desperately seeks. They have helped him co-opt the right. The better Republicans have been driven out and the worst ones entrenched. The few, isolated defenders of a free market have nowhere to turn for political support. There is no significant faction fighting against Trump's war on trade. Today, the right -- the intellectual leaders and the mass followers -- consists predominantly of nativists, who want to "make America great" by expanding the power of the state and regressing to the tribalism of centuries past.This post is even more relevant now than when I read it in 2019. And if the above isn't disturbing enough, news from the latest CPAC will more than underscore Schwartz's point. -- CAVLink to Original
    1 point
  35. Correction , should have said the decade prior to 9/11 , I think I read AS in 89 , and at the time it was the last unread book on the shelf. I did not know who Ayn Rand was at the time , but reading AS was like a religious experience , lol.
    1 point
  36. This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any of that even remotely and this about the primacy of existence not consciousness in even the remotest manner. Consciousness is a result of existents as I described in detail. Also, the first objective proof of the existence of a multiverse was the double slit experiment and there has been countless more experiments and technology including the creation of quantum computers that are further evidence. While I have a layman's knowledge of some Indian religion and most others through history the presentation and science is not related in any manner to any of this, their accidental similarities in some incidences aside. Also, I'm an American with absolutely no Indian ancestry (although I do have Native American Indian ancestry from both sides of my family). But in the decade leading up to finding the philosophy that fit my personal views, opinions, and knowledge best in Objectivism before 9/11 I did study to some degree most of the world's religions (while of course remaining an Atheist because of each containing massive contradictions contrary to reality and the Law of non-contradition even if some occasionally have ideas that contain some degree of truth however tainted. The Tao of Physics is an example. ) and then studying the major philosophies of the world throughout history before finding Objectivism which represents the truth about reality and man's nature essentially perfectly.
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  37. I'd think "perception" contains the idea of awareness, and is not helpful in a statement of what is awareness or how it comes about. But perhaps you just mean by "perception" here inputs from sensors bring information of things to the processing plant. That is OK. What is the relationship of information processing in neural networks and my information processing in awareness that I am typing a question ending at the question mark? If the information processing of the neural-network activity underlying my information processing in conscious awareness just is that conscious information processing, that identity needs to be established by argument and research results. On the face of it, it appears that when we are consciously taking in information and making it integral to our actions, we are not thinking about those underlying neuronal information processes (firing patterns of neural networks), but of things like what marks we are making on the computer screen and what worthwhile thoughts of worldly entities, characters, passages, and situations in topic (or tangentially) we are striving to attain and share. Perhaps you could show us where you think is the cutting edge of research on that question is today. (Please don't say "I'm the cutting edge". That is not credible nor informative, what one is aiming for is not what one has in hand, and it bespeaks a failure to look and assess beyond ones own thought in the enterprise of human knowledge.) I'm not aware that any well-founded right answer to my question has been reached, but I'm not really up to date on latest research. I've noticed the following works tackling the question or issues pertinent to it through some years now. Of any you have studied, do you find any to be getting somewhere (or for that matter, of any interest to you)? Artificial Intelligence – The Very Idea (Haugeland 1985) The Remembered Present – A Biological Theory of Consciousness (Edelman 1989) Consciousness Explained (Dennett 1991) The Race for Consciousness (Taylor 1999) The Quest for Consciousness – A Neurobiological Approach (Koch 2004) Consciousness (Hill 2009) Mind: Your Consciousness is What and Where? (Honderich 2017) The Feeling of Life Itself – Why Consciousness is Widespread but Cannot Be Computed (Koch 2019) Conscious Mind / Resonant Brain – How Each Brain Makes a Mind (Grossberg 2021).
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  38. Actually it wouldn't surprise me at all if this Mr. Eckert were secretly working for the CDC or the FDA or something.
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  39. Good cautionary questions. No, I've not given it a serious look; I just note that it would be an easy award to win if SARS-CoV-2 has already been isolated. Yes, indeed, it would be an easy award to win if SARS-CoV-2 has already been isolated. You suggest that, as nobody took up the challenge, SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated. If you have given it a serious look, you would have seen that the offer is not quite serious: From the site and the video linked to, I saw that the person who initiated the challenge and offers the reward is a certain Mr. Samuel Eckert. On October 17, 2022, Fr. Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg contacted this Samuel Eckert through her lawyers. She accepts the challenge. She will provide the required proof. For the fact that she, as you requested, is indeed a virologist, she sent attached her publications. She then asked Mr. Eckert to prove that he does possess the amount of the award, e.g. by depositing it in an escrow account. Now this Mr. Eckert answers something like: wait a minute, the objective of this challenge is not to pay 1.5 million, but to open a debate etc. ! In another video (this one, minute 15:43), Mr. Eckert explains that first should Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer provide the required proof for existence of SARS-CoV-2, and only then will Mr. Eckert prove that he has the money ! A bogus award, in other words. It would have been better if, before suggesting that nobody accepted the challenge and implying that this is an additional indication that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't exist, you would have given this challenge a serious look.☹️ His site indicates that this Mr. Eckert is a conspiracy theorist (no viruses exist etc.). This is not the first conspiracist you are approvingly citing on this Objectivism forum: it was also Christine Massey (from YogaEsoteric and FluorideFreePeel), then the book Virus Mania: Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio. How the Medical Industry Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense.☹️☹️
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  40. Again, papers like “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” appear to have identified SARS-CoV-2 definitively and independently, but a reading of the documentation shows otherwise. Yes, as I've said before, I've read the paper you named (along with several others over the years, including the progenitor paper from Wuhan, "A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019".) The purpose of the paper is to offer a new, better method of purification that can be applied to SARS-CoV-2 (SC2). The method was developed using an SC2 sample that the authors did not acquire themselves directly from a patient, but from another, outside source, "SARS-CoV2 isolate Finland/1/2020". They cultured and re-purified it, then compared it with "the SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan (NC_045512.2) reference genome" for validation of their new purification method. So the paper is actually a description of how the authors (re)purified what they assumed to be SC2 (from Finland) and then compared it with the originally alleged SC2 genome (from Wuhan). The first study from Wuhan that reported a "novel coronavirus" is the primary reference study to which all subsequent studies. As I pointed out before, and as close reading would show, the Wuhan study is biased, flawed, and suspect, in ways that include the authors' not taking into account the pre-existing respiratory disease epidemic from the severe air pollution in Wuhan.
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  41. I enjoy your posts. It's like you take my own thoughts on subjects and then express them much more eloquently than I can currently due to constantly being in a relatively stressful situation mostly outside of my control and essentially uncaused by myself that no matter what I do to attempt to thwart it keeps getting continually sabatoged via outside sources.
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  42. Interesting. But have you checked what happened after the challenge was proposed? Did anyone accept the challenge? I would be cautious about a 1.5 million award: is it a honest offer, not a bogus one? Does the person/organization have this kind of money? Who will evaluate the scientific proof? Etc. IOW: have you establish the seriousness of this award offer?
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  43. Again, no documentation has been found or offered, verifying that SAR-CoV-2 has been isolated, purified, and distinctly identified as a new existent, and, furthermore, that it cause Covid-19. Ignoring this fact may lead one to the distraction of comparing "having covid" to having appendicitis or malaria. No tyranny has ever been imposed because of appendicitis or malaria, or the common cold.
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  44. Yes, to some, psycho-epistemological barriers to autonomous discovery of the truth are difficult to detect and acknowledge, especially when faced with the potential feelings of fear and guilt.
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  45. Many tips and clues are posted by the participants here. The fundamental question is: Has the alleged cause of covid, the "novel SARS-CoV-2", been scientifically proven to exist and be identifiable by a process of isolation and purification? In answering this question, there may be distractions and diversions from its primacy and the controversy that, after 4 years, the answer may still be in the negative. Note that there is an as-yet unclaimed 1.5 million Euros award to any “virologist who presents scientific proof of the existence of a corona virus, including documented control experiments of all steps taken in the proof.”
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  46. What's different is that the belief in covid is based on science, so say the covid believers. Our belief is based on observation, experimentation, evidence, logic, and all the methods of reason; whereas, the belief in God is based on revelation, authority, testimonials, intuition, faith. So, do you, the covid believers, know that covid exists by your own reason? Or, do you know it by reliance on the authority of (some of the) experts in virology and epidemiology? For most of us, of course, we have to trust the consensus of experts; we don't have the knowledge or time to learn and know it for ourselves, which is normal and to be expected, for all knowledge outside our own fields. Isn't your trust in covid experts is similar to that of the God believers' trust in their pastors, priests, popes, and theologians? Not at all. Our trust is based on science and the science of the experts. So it's rational for you to trust the covid experts, but not rational for the God believers to trust their God experts. Yet you both don't know for yourself the existence of covid/God. What if belief in either is unjustified because the experts haven't told the whole truth? How do you find out?
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  47. The attempt to order language before concepts, or vice versa, is a logically flawed enterprise, because neither exists without the other. Both are essential properties of the faculty of reason. A concept, in Rand’s analysis, is not simply a mystical assemblage of generalized entities that somehow cohere, a concept is an open-ended definition with a label. There are no definitions without language (inspect all of Rand’s examples of concepts), and the labels are the representational filing device for concepts, i.e. morphemes, expressed either with physical gestures, written symbols, or in its normal state, sound. Claims about feral children are vastly overstated and over-romanticized. First, no children are taught language at all, they learn language on their own from peo-ple speaking in their environment. Second, that process begins before birth. Fetuses do not learn words, but they learn, from exposure, many facts about the language of their environment. Remember that the womb is not a soundproof chamber. Third, there are virtually no decent scientific studies of feral children, and no evidence about the cognitive state of actually-feral children (children who exist without human contact: you can see why it is logically impossible to test for the existence of concepts in a feral child, were you to find one. The one somewhat-studied such child was Genie, for whom there is no publically available scientific evidence regarding her initial cognitive abilities although we weakly knew in principle how to assess their existence. There is no evidence at all that she had concepts when rescued (after substantial psychological treatment, she gained a limited ability in language given substantial intervention efforts, which apparently failed for the most part). There is a misunderstanding of concepts as involving some sort of universal “inner language” where actual language learning involves discovering the relation between universal inner language and actual individual languages. Under the universal inner language theory, of course, all humans are born with something like a language already built in, and early Chomskian linguistics did take that stance, and therefore by definition all children must have built-in concepts in some kind of Cartesian “universal machine language” for humans. We know better now (I am not sure whether Chomsky himself knows better). Under that theory, one must claim that feral children have concepts and can form propositions, they just can’t express it in ordinary ways. In fact, feral children are so severely damaged, cognitively, that they really provide evidence for nothing about the nature of language. Concepts and language are developed in parallel, by iterated reasoning. A child observes that mom, dad and the dog are different existents which have different properties. The child associates the sounds of “mommy”, “daddy” and “doggie” with the referents (or whatever names are assigned to those people / beasts). They learn to differentiate, after more exposure to the world, learning that “daddy” and “grampa” are different names and different people. So far, these are names, not concepts. The leap to concepts comes when they learn of types, and can distinguish “doggie” from “kitty”. Feral children are not really a "gold standard" in linguistics, they are a sound-bite gimmick that Cartesian linguists used to invoke as supposed factual support, but for what? In fact, it just suggests (does not show) that there is an age past which a first language cannot be acquired by normal means, that age being around the age of majority. But children do acquire language well before that, except in extreme cases usually involving severe child abuse or mental / physical disability.
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  48. We have a better chance of surviving four years of Biden than of surviving four years of Trump.
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  49. Grames

    Quote by E.B. Tylor

    Muslims contributed to algebra but did not invent it entirely. A contributing factor was the increasing use of a more compact notation for numbers instead of the Roman numerals, what is now called the Arabic numerals. But the Arabic numerals were not Arabic, they first occurred in India. This gives the clue that Arab culture flourished when they could be peaceful trading empires. Unfortunately for those peoples who were not part of the Arab culture, such periods of peace only occur after victorious jihads that leave behind no handy additional targets for conquest.
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