Reidy

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.

Rand was a storyteller. This requires compressing time and amping up the drama. That's why events go by more quickly on screen or stage than in real life, and it's why Rand fits so many events into, e.g. the Twentieth Century Motor Company story. According to Barbara Branden's biography, Rand first flew in 1963, several years after Atlas Shrugged. I once had a friend who was a pilot, and he told me that she got her flying lore from Lingbergh's The Spirit of St. Louis, including one technical inaccuracy.

To begin at the beginning, I don't understand what you mean by "immoral". My limited but still extensive observation of the O-web tells me that it means "with the permission of the Objectivist authorities" - Rand, Peikoff and (to some tastes but not others) Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. As far as I know, none of the deities has ever pronounced on the question. An independent, heroic, scrupulously rational person would conclude from this that we do not have that permission and that only a hatred-eaten mystic would feel free to waste food. An intellectual thug, by contrast, might believe that what is what is not explicitly forbidden is permitted and would thus accept the rule-of-thumb "when in doubt, throw it out". Which are you? (Side question: what do you mean by "waste"? Does it mean throwing food away? I should think that this is just the right course of action with food that is perishable and that you don't want.)

Textbooks on logic are easy to find. With help, you can discover what follows or not from a set of statements, and from there you can go on to apply it to the statements you come across in conversation or in the news. David Kelley is an Objectivist, so his textbook might be a good place to start. A technique I've learned (but can't really teach) is to ask, when somebody makes an asserition (typically about ethics or politics), what the principle behind it is. If your interlocutor can't or won't, then the assertion isn't worth taking seriously. If he does, use your book learning to spin out the consequences.

Not to stick to your outline: I'm not convinced that it's a problem. Hume, who raised the issue, said that no number of non-evaluative premises (is-statments) could ever yield an evaluative conclusion (ought-statement). To say that a set of premises can't entail what's not implicit in the premises is a tautology. A more interesting question is whether evaluative statements can be. like is-statements, i.e. claims of fact that are either true or false. In more modern terminology such statements are natural statements, and the question is whether or not ought-statements can be natural. Early in the twentieth century, G.E. Moore convinced many philosophers that oughts cannot be natural and that to treat them as such was to commit the "naturalistic fallacy". Many followed up on Moore with explanation of what oughts might be instead: exhortations, commands, emotional self-reports and so on, utterances that look like declarative sentences but really aren't. Yes, I think that Rand's account shows successfully that oughts can be statements of fact. That living organisms can be helped or harmed is the matter of fact that non-naturalists said you couldn't find. Rand wasn't the only one to hit on this, though. It all traces back to Aristotle. (Yes, she admired him in other respects, but she said expressly, in The Objectivist Ethics, that he didn't have much of value to offer in ethics. Branden agreed in his NBI basic course, dismissing his writings as "little more than a manual of etiquette".) In the twentieth century, Philippa Foot, a mainstream academic if ever there was, followed a similar line, starting at about the same time as Rand, though I'm confident neither had heard of the other when they first hit on these insights. Foot's last book, Natural Goodness, cites several others who've followed the line. She later came to know of Rand; Tibor Machan, who knew her personally, called the book "a carbon copy of the Objectivist ethics"; he also said she was an intellectual snob, freely acknowledging the insights of her academic colleagues but not Rand's.