Reidy

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.

Here in California I've met a number of French expatriates whom I wouldn't call entrepreneurs, among them a real-estate agent, a custom woodworker and several in IT. The only one I'd call an entrepreneur, and a successful one (online French foods), occasionally spends a Sunday morning selling charcuterie at the farmers' market, and I know him only in that capacity. I wish everybody the best, though what I've read about Macro doesn't lead me to share Yes's optimism.

Interesting commentary in WSJ. The author says that Macron won because the French brain drain removed the competition; anyone who might have run against him has left the country. To skip the pay wall, if you move quickly enough, go to Real Clear Politics and click Where Has All the French Talent Gone.

We already know who Leo was. I don't remember the last name, but the ARI people published an illustrated Rand biography several years ago with a photo of him; no need to conjecture. He went the way of Leo in the book and was executed in the 1930s, long after Rand emigrated.

Wittgenstein ranks high in the Objectivist demonology, but Rand's readers might get a pleasant surprise from On Certainty. It mounts a polemic against hard-core skepticism and presents a theory something like Rand's ideas of contextual certainty.

We've heard this before. State lotteries were going to bring in enough money to balance the states' budgets. Increasing prosperity would lead to greater tax revenues that would balance the federal budget (Reagan did not say this, contrary to what some have asserted, but some people did.). Just one more tax increase and we'll have all the money we need. If everybody paid his taxes honestly we could balance the budged. The reason such predictions always fail is that, as more money comes in, governments simply increase their spending. That's what would happen here, too. As to who might buy mineral assets, national parks and the like, I can foresee a division of functions such as we see in commercial real estate. The land and buildings typically belong to insurers, banks, endowments and pension funds, while the end users rent from them. As far as I can see, nothing precludes such a solution for formerly-federal oil fields.

True or not, that's an odd remark two days after Trump suffered a major defeat the first time he tried to move a piece of legislation. That may be even odder.

The thinking here seems to be that money is the only rational motivator and that a rational actor would consider this and nothing else. This looks like a good case where this would not be true. Being kind to animals is also a motive. The question would rarely come up anyway; gratuitously painful slaughtering methods would probably not be economically prudent. On the other hand, people hold snails to starve in order to empty out their digestive tracts. The Japanese (I've read) appreciate sashimi from fish butchered live at the table; feeling the reflexive death twitches on the tongue is part of the experience.

The Wikipedia article is almost entirely accurate. Rand never called Peikoff her intellectual heir. If you follow up on footnote 5, it attributes the "especially good mood" remark to BB, not to Binswanger. (An omission rather than an inaccuracy) NB was quite as enthusiastic a verbal/intellectual fag-basher as Rand, for as long as he was associated with her and for years thereafter (though he finally reversed himself). Since the topic was more in his line and since he dealt more with the public, he had more occasion than Rand to speak his mind.

I've seen the fashion show clip somewhere before. One story is that Kilbourn (1:38) later committed suicide because of the Objectivist deities' anti-gay message. I wonder if the wedding dress (3:22) was a coded message and, if it was, whether anybody there that night caught on.

I'd never heard of this change in her thinking. Do you have a citation for it? The friend might be John Hospers. The trouble with that, though, is that her friendship with him was in the years around 1960 (kiboshed and shunned in 1963), and she issued her widely-quoted fire-breathing moral denunciation of homosexuality in 1971. That would seem to argue that Hospers had no effect on her thought in the matter. I don't know if she knew he was gay or not. Frank's brother Nick, a favorite of hers who died in the 1940s, was also gay. The BB and Heller biographies suggest that she didn't know this. That's hard to believe today, but people were much more circumspect (and naive) back then.