Reidy

You don't say whether the school is trying to obligate you to buy photos, though some of the posters here have taken your statement that way. A straightforward refusal (put it in writing) would probably get around such a claim. Otherwise a lawyer could tell you more. (Save anything the school gave you in writing. It might come in handy.) If the school or the photographer publishes the photo without your permission you probably have a case. Apart from that you're afraid of hurting your son if you don't buy the pictures. Do you know for a fact that your refusal would hurt him? One solution would be to tell him that he's better-looking than the photos show and that's why you don't like them. If that doesn't work you could buy a few to humor him.

JASKN's advice looks good to me. Hank and Dagny were not co-workers. They worked at different companies in different industries in cities 371 miles apart. Galt was down the chain of command from her, though, when they first rode the tracks together.

Such large claims need fleshing-out. They are so large that the web forum format may not have room for all you'd need to say. The first and so far last I've read about Reid was his Wikipedia writeup, and nothing characteristically Randian leapt out at me. So much effort has been expended over the years making her out as a Taoist, a Hegelian, a postmodernist, a highbrow Tillich / Niehbur Christian, a lowbrow fundamentalist Christian, a secretly-coded Jew, a 60s radical, a Manhattan / LA westside establishment liberal, a flower child and probably plenty more that I haven't heard of, that one of your tasks will be to explain why nobody saw this before. Let us know when you're ready.

I can't tell you much, but An Existentialist Ethics by Hazel Barnes, an eminent academic Existentialst, contains a chapter on Rand.

Two thoughts occur: 1. This is a matter for you and a financial planner, who could tell you, e.g. how much to save in order to have a certain amount in a certain number of years, assuming plausible portfolio growth for, or what your expenses are likely to be assuming a plausible inflation rate. Those aren't the only questions a planner could answer. 2. If you have a good career going and your employers or clients value you, you might cut back to part-time and use the hours gained to work on your other projects. Another possibility is to spin down to a more routine and undemanding job, part-time or full, to have time and energy for your other projects. Let us know how this turns out.

Ed Younkins is another who has written on related topics.

An article in today's National Review Online takes up this point. The author says that treating all offenses alike (Franken's along with much worse acts by Clinton and Moore) risks aiding the feminist line that virtually everybody (everybody male, anyway) a rapist.

Whatever the merits of the wider point here, the participants show a shaky understanding of Heraclitus. He lived and wrote before philosophy had the sophistication to express a notion such as the law of identity. What people nowadays think are his positions are actually the work of soi-disants Heracliteans of later generations. Aristotle distinguishes between the historical Heraclitus and "Heracliteanism" a couple of places in the Metaphysics: - For it's impossible for one and the same both to be and not to be, as some think Heraclitus said (IV 3, 1005b23); - Further, seeing that nature is in motion, they all thought that of what changes nothing can be said truly and that what is always changing in every respect does not admit of the truth. From this supposition grew the most extreme of the foregoing views, namely the view of those who claim to Heraclitize, such as Cratylus, who in the end thought nothing could be said, but only moved his finger and criticized Heraclitus for saying that there's no stepping into the same river twice; he [Cratylus] didn't think we could even do it once. (IV 5, 1010a6) (emphasis added) though not always: 1012a24, 34, 1062a32, 1063b24. When I studied H. I hit on a reading that I was later flattered to hear from Julius Moravcsik, a famous academic. He observed diversity and change in the world and yet wanted to find some way to see it at once and to pronounce stable truths about it. That is to say, ,he was struggling to identify conceptual thought, but nobody could grasp this until Plato came along. The nearest Heraclitus could get was simultaneous perceptual awareness of everything, in the mind of god. Thus he was like the man in Anthem, struggling to identify the first-person singular, but he never quite got there.

This has parallels in the west. Christianity used Latin long after it had otherwise gone out of use. Hebrew occupied a similar place in the Jewish liturgy until Israel made it a living language again.

Where can we see your blog?

There were at least two more of these, one in The Objectivist Newsletter, by Branden, in the spring of 65 and one in The Objectivist, by Rand, at the time of the Great Kibosh, the latter noting that Branden's publications to date were OK but that they had no control over what he might say subsequently. In the earlier one, Branden anathemized one of those let's-found-an-island groups, which was showing up at LA NBI to troll for recruits. When I moved to the area shortly thereafter I knew some people who had briefly gone along with it.

In the passage you quote (p 70 in my copy), Peikoff says that volition and validation are hierarchically connected but not that they are etymologically connected. "Volition" comes from a verb for willing or wishing, and "validation" from an adjective for strength or power.

When André Gide got back from the USSR in the 30s, he recounted a conversation with a writer he'd met. He'd submitted a story for official approval and was told to change the roads to paved - they're sure to be in by next year.

Rand did a series of interviews on the Columbia University radio station ca. 1962, though I don't know who ran the show. Most of them featured her and student questioners (to whom she could be quite nasty at the slightest provocation). NB, BB and Hospers and Gotthelf were in some of them. The station sold audiotapes many years ago, which is how i came to hear them. i don't know if they survive or not.

The moral you draw is sound, but I'll at least have to see some names (the new hire, the CTO and the company) before I believe it.