Madhavi

I earned a 4.0 last semester while working ~30 hours a week.
 
Also, I recently ran 4 miles in <28 minutes. That is a big accomplishment because I could barely run a mile in 8-9 min at the start of spring. That will go away though because I am starting to bulk up this week.
 
And this is my 400th post  .

I love this thread idea.

Recently, I just amassed a 3.3 semester GPA at Texas A&M, while remaining in good standing with the Corps and making time to compete in the Ranger Challenge competition in Fort Knox this October. I was a team-lead on our Ranger Challenge team, meaning not that I led the entire team, but that I was assigned two new guys to teach them our tactics and the skills they would need at competition. We took fourth place out of twenty-something teams from ROTC units across the nation. This is especially meaningful to me because last year I was a newcomer to the team, and we took seventh. This year I got a chance to pass down what my team-lead had taught me, and my kids did awesome at the competition, which made me proud.

Oh and also I finally got the contract spot I have been working to earn since I came to A&M in Fall 2011, so I am now officially a cadet employed with the United States Army. I draw real grown-up pay, too!

If anyone is looking for a fiction book with good themes, check out Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth.
 
The protagonist is Wang Lung, a man living in China in the early 20th century who is sort of a peasant Hank Rearden. Throughout the novel, Wang rises from a subsistence farmer to a wealthy landholder through hard work and careful planning. He and his wife are extremely industrious and consistently choose to save their occasional surpluses rather than splurge it on silk, opium, or concubines like other peasants. They encounter various obstacles like a thuggish uncle and a lecherous concubine but always manage to succeed in achieving their goals. Later we see Wang's sons grow up with varying commitments to his philosophy. Although Wang is not perfect, he is a very good example of a heroic protagonist whose greatest virtues are productivity and value attainment.

I could most certainly not see Rob Lowe as Francisco. And I always thought of Dagny as more...delicate, frame-wise. Selleck maybe if he shaved his moustache(I have no idea how to spell that).

The Freedom from Religion Foundation recently threatened to sue public schools in the town of Muldrow, Oklahoma, if they refused to remove plaques inscribed with the Ten Commandments from classrooms.
Unfortunately, when Republican State Representative John Bennett weighed in on the controversy in his district, he upheld the popular yet false view that the Ten Commandments—and, more broadly, Biblical morality—are necessary in order to teach children the difference between right and wrong.
Although Representative Bennett conceded that “the superintendent and local school board has no choice but to remove the plaques if they want to avoid a lawsuit,” he also warned of ominous consequences: “A nation that refuses to allow educators to teach children right from wrong will become a corrupt nation, where sin prevails, evil abounds and everyone does as they please.”
Surely children need to be taught the difference between right and wrong, and schools necessarily play some part in this aspect of children’s education. But educators should not turn to the Ten Commandments or to any other religious scripture for this purpose. Students should learn that stealing, lying, committing murder and the like are wrong not because the Bible says so but because such actions are contrary to the requirements of successful living. Such lessons should be taught through the reading and discussion of literature, history, and science—not by posting contextless commandments on the wall.
As for having no other gods before the Judeo-Christian God, keeping the Sabbath holy, and the like, these ideas have no place in publicly funded schools. Of course, parents have a right to inflict such dogma on their own children (at least until the children reach adulthood), but they have no right to force religious dogma on other children or to have government force others to fund its dissemination.
Bennett should rest easy: Removing the Ten Commandments from the schools will in no way interfere with the ability of teachers to teach or students to learn rational moral lessons in school. It will only free them from some of the irrational ones.
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Related:
Teaching Values in the Classroom Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand’s Morality of Egoism Religion vs. Subjectivism: Why Neither Will Do Image: Wikimedia Commons


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Great quote from the movie Unforgiven: “It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.”
That is what a killer does – He takes away everything the other person had, and the whole life they could have had. This also does not count the victims loved ones who lost someone too.
When a person has violated the rights of someone else to the point he has permanently taken away all of their values through the most precious value of all, his life, the killer’s life is forfeit. I agree the burden of proof should be high and I would rather let a guilty man go free than an innocent man be wrongfully killed, but the Jeffry Dahmer’s of the world have no business soaking up tax payer money so they can live off the victims the stalked in life. Who does that reward and who does that punish? He did it, yes we know he did it, and we invest Government with a monopoly on force to protect us from exactly that kind of person.
Mercy rewards the criminal at the expense of the victim. Justice is the concept at work here and Justice demands each person is rewarded or punished for what they have earned.

Ayn Rand Hits a Million…Again!
Atlas Shrugged Author Sells 1,000,000 Books in 2012
IRVINE, Calif.—Thirty years after her death, novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand is still selling a lot of books, a million to be precise. The popular author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead has sold 1,000,000 copies of all of her titles in 2012.
2012 saw Atlas Shrugged sell 359,105 copies, its third highest total of all time, behind 2009 (#1) and 2011 (#2).
As the decades move along Rand has only gotten more popular. Atlas Shrugged was a bestseller in Rand’s day, but it’s selling more than ever in the 2010s. Annual purchases of Atlas Shrugged by decade averaged:
1980s — 74,300 per year 1990s — 95,300 per year 2000s — 167,028 per year 2010s — 303,523 per year To date Rand’s books have sold a total of 29,500,000 copies. 2,962,876 of these have been requested from the Ayn Rand Institute by American school teachers.
# # #
The Ayn Rand Institute has speakers available for interviews. Please contact Kurt Kramer at [email protected] or call 202-609-7470, ext. 202.
The Ayn Rand Institute is a 501©(3) organization dedicated to promoting the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. For more information on Objectivism and Ayn Rand, visit www.aynrand.org.


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You're more than welcome to write a better novel than Atlas Shrugged.

This passage reflects Kira's inner conflicts and mixed feelings about Andrei.  Rand makes clear that Kira does have strong feelings for Andrei despite the fact that he's a communist.  As an indivldual, Andrei does have some heroic and admirable qualities, so sleeping with him was not totally repugnant for her.  At the same time, any enjoyment she experienced in Andrei's bed would amount to a "sacrilege" because of her intense love for Leo.  Her pleasure would be clouded by feelings comparable to the guilt of infidelity.  She does not want to enjoy sex with Andrei--but Rand the novelist is also a woman, and she knows she could not help but enjoy it (and even desire it, to some extent).
 
I think that, in some respects, We, The Living offers a more realistic depiction of such inner conflicts than Rand's later novels, which portrayed their central characters (with the exception of Hank Rearden) as mostly devoid of such conflicts. 

This is the best passage I could find so far in regards to this, it sets the context and meaning quite well:

Kira would have suffered more if she had not tried everything she could to keep Leo alive. Notice she exhausted all other options before she began the affair with Andrei. She waited in lines all day, talked to multiple officials, begged them to help Leo, etc.. and they all rejected her pleas because he was 'one man' - and why should the state care about one man? Who was he? No one cared about how much Leo meant to Kira, or about how much she was suffering because Leo was on his death bed. The only option available to Kira was to sleep with Andrei, or to let Leo die- and she couldn't bear the latter. Sleeping with Andrei was the price she had to pay for Leo's life. On the surface, it can appear that Kira sacrified everything (her own body, and eventually her relationship with Leo) to keep Leo alive- but she did all of it for selfish reasons.

Ecstasy doesn't necessarily mean pleasure. In this context, it doesn't mean pleasure. She might not have been happy, but at least her eyes expressed a deep emotion, which would be ecstatic emotion. Lydia likes the realism and seems to be crying at their pain. Kira may be feeling all kinds of emotions, perhaps seeing a strange beauty in the peasants not merely falling in submission to evil. I picture Kira paying close attention to every detail, while Lydia is merely reacting.
 

I don't have the book here, but it sounds like the performance was stylized. Sometimes the "stylization" in a work of art is captivating. One might see the expertise of the artist, even while rejecting his theme and content.