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As I think you know, things tend to spin out of control here and everywhere else on the intenet. So to mostly return to the initial problem, you face a problem, so how do you make the problem go away? To avoid repeating what has been said, we can just say that the problem is trespassing, which is illegal. When someone violates your rights in that manner, you can’t (shouldn’t) take direct action by way of using retaliatory force against The Others (just an arbitrary label for the sake of convenience in talking about the problem). This is really the job of the police. Now perhaps there are things you can do, analogous to “bring your bike inside, don’t leave it on the porch”, maybe techno-sanitizing your phone if it has been infected with malware. But for the most part, this isn’t something that anyone here can help with, and is hardly a problem that you can solve yourself – unless you just disappear without a trace and start a new life somewhere else. You have identified a problem with your roommate, but I guess that is resolved? Then there is the problem with the others. So what you hav to do is file a formal, written complaint with the police, giving as much concrete evidence as you can which could lead to identifying and apprehending them. “Concrete evidence” isn’t the same as “conjectured explanations”, it refers to the axiomatic: things that you directly observe. You can’t directly observe that your phone is hacked, that is a conjecture based on something else, something that you observed at a specific time and place. What did you observe that led you to conclude that this is the work of a “huge group” rather than one person, or two persons? Don’t tell me, write it down. Have they ever communicated to you in a fashion that supports the conclusion that they are altruistic/collectivist/statists who are attacking you as an Objectivist? Why you attribute the behavior to a particular political agenda rather than simply assuming that they are punks, like in Death Wish 3? It isn’t important what the motivation is, so I would advise dropping from consideration all non-essentials. The essential question is, what have they done? It would be nice if you could connect specific actions to named individuals, but that’s not always possible. Specific descriptions of events, eliminate conjectures about cause. Put it in writing. Retain copies.

I should locate this work and its Addendums in this collection of works. I expect to be adding yet another addendum, this one on Descartes and Rand in their relations to Aristotle's metaphysics and philosophy of mechanics and biology. Foundational Frames: Descartes and Rand

The Semafor, David Weigel opines that Nikki Haley is "riding a charming, focused, and consistent campaign to third place." With polls all over the place, I presume Weigel is placing the former South Carolina governor behind Trump and one of DeSantis or Ramaswamy. I think it is premature to consign Haley to third place: Aside from political junkies and Trump-worshipers, not that many people are paying much attention. This means that, while part of Trump's overwhelming-looking support is never going away, a significant amount remains persuadable. In this context, Weigel's description of how Haley has been running her campaign sounds more like strategic patience than futility:Image by Rachel Leppert, via Wikimedia Commons, public doman.... Haley has built her own lane in the Republican primary. A relentless commitment to her message -- and even the anecdotes she tells on the trail -- has helped. Reporters are invited to watch her dazzle crowds, but they don't get to pepper her with questions after. Instead, Haley gets to talk about her own electability, in sync with the voters showing up to see her. She pledges to "veto any spending bill that doesn't take us back to pre-COVID levels," a $1.8 trillion spending cut, without much detail. She leans into her support for funding the war in Ukraine, and commits to an amorphous abortion stance -- finding "consensus," to "save as many lives as possible" -- even as social conservatives protest it. ... No other candidate in this race has executed an underdog strategy so effectively, with so little deviation from her original plan. Haley has managed to nail her core message -- that she's a fresher, more electable, less erratic alternative to Trump.Yeah, Gus, but this depends on Trump imploding, you might say. I say that with all his legal troubles, he may have already imploded, and closer to election time, it's going to look uglier to the persuadable part of the GOP electorate. And with Trump's volatility, there's always the chance he'll scare away a few voters on top of that. Haley is building her case now, and has neither alienated nor pandered to the Trump base. She has been running a frugal campaign, but stands to benefit when big anti-Trump GOP donors -- who have been backing away from DeSantis since he began his stupid war on Disney -- decide where their best chances lie. Haley does best against Biden in polling of any Republican in the field now, and there is no doubt that if Trump ends up in jail, or is declared to be disqualified from office, she would have a decent chance of winning the GOP primary. She is ready, if things break her way, and more people paying attention might constitute breaking her way in this election. I wouldn't write her off just yet. -- CAVLink to Original

There's a good article at Vox about a Florida intuition I will miss when we move out of state: Publix, the state's ubiquitous and well-liked grocery chain. I especially like the account of its founding at the start of the article:These pans, sold at Publix, are the best frying pans I have ever had. I own two myself and bought one for my father-in-law, who has thanked me more than once for it. (Image by Publix, via Publix. The author believes this use to be protected under U.S. Copyright Law as Fair Use.)George Jenkins was working as a store manager at a Piggly Wiggly in Winter Haven, Florida, when he tried to meet with the grocery chain's new owner to talk business and introduce himself. The guy blew him off -- his secretary said he was in important meetings, but Jenkins overheard him talking golf. So he quit and opened his own store, which he called Publix, right next to the Pig in 1930. He built the business gradually, its growth mirroring Florida's, and finally took the company outside of the state in 1991, starting with Savannah, Georgia. Today, Publix employs some 250,000 people across 1,350 stores concentrated across the Southeast. It is the largest employee-owned company in the United States. Its workers -- it prefers the term "associates" -- get shares of stock in the company after working 1,000 hours in a year... [bold added]I had not been aware of any of this -- except that a few other states in the South also have locations. Sadly, Louisiana isn't one of them: I checked soon after we decided to move there. (I don't shop there for everything, but it has been my go-to for grilling night and gourmet items the whole time we've been here.) As one might expect of a large, leftist media outlet, the piece is ultimately about politics, and seems at times to try really, really hard to slam the chain for such transgressions as not permitting workers to wear BLM garb on the job; a baker leaving a space on a cake for the word trans due to erring on the side of caution for leaving politics out of work; and an heiress (who has zero active role in the company) donating money to Donald Trump. The piece comes up empty. To Emily Stewart's credit, she does acknowledge the chain for also not kowtowing to the right, such as with this quote:"Publix wants you to have an ideal civic experience in its store. It doesn't cut corners, it's not the cheapest, you go into its stores and it feels like you're in a really nice neighborhood," says Billy Townsend, a Lakeland-based writer and former member of the Polk County School Board. "They are going for a specific kind of feel, and January 6th ain't it."The piece ends almost wistfully:Publix seeks to remain uncomplicated in a complicated world because life is complicated enough. Keeping things simple may not be possible, but isn't simple a little bit what we want our grocery stores to be?I appreciate Publix both for being an outstanding grocery chain and for showing a new generation by example that it is both possible and desirable to live life in the pursuit of excellence. Politics isn't everything: It's only a means, and we should be highly suspicious of anyone "left" or "right" who seems to think we should live our lives for a cause -- rather than supporting a cause because it will improve our lives. -- CAVLink to Original

[This was written as part of a message to my grandson for his recent 10th birthday. He is an intelligent, articulate, and athletic free learner who doesn't go to government school, won''t eat animals, and is a healthy, happy individualist.] Self-Sufficient - being Smart, Strong, and Straight Being Smart is Knowing clearly what’s real and what’s not. Discovering what exists, what it does, and what goes together or not. Learning well your words, numbers, pictures, and sounds. Understanding deeply who you are, where you’re going, and why. Seeking with reason what is true, what is good, and what has beauty. Being Strong is Working smart and working hard, using your mighty mind. Spending all the energy and effort it takes to get it done. Making the best and most of your life, not settling for less. Never giving in to fear or despair, holding tight your love and joy. Fighting for your rights without surrender, with goodwill constant. Being Straight is Staying smart and strong, pointing always at your shining star. Keeping on your true course until the end, unbent and unbroken. Moving up and forward – free and flexible, curious and caring. Honoring your principles and promises, having solid integrity. Aiming proudly for your noble purpose, striving for romantic happiness. ------ Image: "Out of the Box" by Bryan Larsen

My main point is that “God”, in the Christian sense, is not a concept, it is a proper name, like Barak Obama. Proper names don’t have CCDs. However, “unicorn” is a concept, and it has a CCD, even though there are no actual unicorns which you can touch. Mathematical concepts are all completely abstract and untouchable, but they are concepts. If we talk of “god” in the anthropological sense, i.e. supernatural personified beings across cultures as we might discuss in an Anthro class, then there would be a CCD, even though the term refers to an idea and not a tangible entity. “God” and “god” are both labels for existents, but they are not entities.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-northam-abortion-execute/ https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-virginia-gov-abortion/fact-check-virginia-governors-2019-comments-about-abortion-bill-are-missing-context-idUSKBN27D2HL https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/meme-misquotes-virginia-governor-on-abortion-bill/

I think his statement subsumes the process argument re thermodynamical and information-theoretic reasons. As concept it seems 'all-knowing' would be akin to 'unicorn' , eg the concept is valid as its referent is 'knowingly' not really real. I don't know anything about limitative theorems of logic , but intuitively it may point to the idea that a theorem or other could posit that a complete set of 'all the facts in existence ' could not be determined to be logically consistent in 'itself' based on some rational that determination of logical consistency requires some interaction with null sets and or the possibilities of unknown unknowns. I think there is also a need to distinguish between information and knowledge. It may be tangentially related that one of the ways 'they got' the chatbots to 'produce' more intelligible responses was to tweak 'up' the randomness of the relevance weights(?) , not sure what they did algorithmically/software wise but there seems to be a sweet spot for randomness at least for the results to appear more 'inline' with natural language comprehension.

How about the argument that knowledge is gained by a process, and no one can process everything?

They meant it - "To the last Ukrainian!" What made for rousing headline copy at the time is closer. The refugees, now 'draft dodgers', are to be forced by Kyiv to go home and fight(some EU countries have refused, to their credit). In war, when you've run out of your available resources, you've lost the war and must sue for an armistice. All that one heard until lately was about the endless supply of weaponry - lethal aid - to Ukraine. As though the weapons and armor, each type a proposed "game changer", would do the job alone. How much was heard about the steady losses to Ukraine's human resources - except to massively underrepresent them? (as deception to keep up morale for their troops' losing battle, keep cash and supplies coming in and sustain public belief by far away onlookers, so more would die). Ruled by western skepticism/determinism and sacrificial sentimentality, depressingly predictable

And why did NATO, at minimum, not *consider* Russian alarms about its expansion, advertised often by Putin and previous presidents, or at least enter some dialogue? Conclusion: like macho juveniles, they hubristically believed they'd "win" --without negotiations--with the large Ukraine military doing NATO's bidding and heavy sanctions to break apart the RF, politically and economically, and a vast propaganda campaign influencing public opinion in the West. All irrationally aimed at a distinctly non-hostile and conciliatory post Cold War Russia. However, now not looking good for Ukraine and NATO. The "consequentialists", in the leadership cliques and a billion followers, who looked for moral supremacy in a 'certain' triumph over Russia, and justifying the several 100's of thousands (of Ukraine soldiers) thrown at Russia and killed - and the loss of more land (than first entertained by an early treaty, as more oblasts choose to join Russia), are soon to be bitter and confused: By their ethical doctrine when Russia wins - they lose any moral high ground. No sympathy for them from me. Then there will be more of the "CYA" coming from Nato and western governments. A first crack from Stoltenberg below, admitting/bragging publicly that Putin was worried about NATO expansionism and placed a proposal for mutual security. "We rejected that". Maybe, Jens, that was the cause (and other provocations) for invasion? Not even urgent plans to discuss anything with Putin and reach a compromise? How are things looking now, buddy? Caitlin Johnstone, another fellow horrified at the senseless life lost by acts and inacts by the morally/intellectually bankrupt Western leaders who abetted and incited a conflict. And even now prevaricate, escalate and won't pull the plug https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=82124&post_id=136866482&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=20l79l&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMjE5MjE1NDUsInBvc3RfaWQiOjEzNjg2NjQ4MiwiaWF0IjoxNjk0MjIzMzE2LCJleHAiOjE2OTY4MTUzMTYsImlzcyI6InB1Yi04MjEyNCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.UuTyb8mQF-Il1ZlTW7dQGa0NlDEGiO9oGdpE17E4FGs

VDH gives some fine examples of specific actions of the political 'left' and the damage it has doen to the Republic in the recent past. https://victorhanson.com/the-frightened-left/

https://youtu.be/MKMxMUG4cKA?si=AoNmqP92YIagEoOn Sachs still at it, tirelessly pointing out the emperor's nakedness.

I know that these issues are a far drift from the topics in Binswanger 1990, the topic of this thread, and in particular the nature of teleology in organisms that are without consciousness or are under some direction by their consciousness, which is much less autonomous and discerning than human consciousness. But that is all right with me if we chat a bit on these interesting byways, because the intervals required for me to produce the substantial segments of the essay view of that book, including putting it into historical perspective, is long, at least weeks. I'll peg what is here so far, for convenience: Part 1, Part 2 – Aristotle I am working now on the remainder of Part 2, which is Suárez, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Part 3 will return to the layout in the subject book, which is cast in our contemporary biology. Tad, on your two questions: No. No. Neither Rand nor I would concur with the dualism of Descartes in his sense that thought (he means anything mental) and spatial extension are two fundamental substances, the only two we have, each depending on nothing else, aside from God who brought them into existence. Clipping it down, neither Rand nor I would concur with the dualism of Descartes in the sense of thought and extension being two fundamental substances, each depending on nothing else. Rand stressed the distinction and fundamentality of existence and consciousness. "Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, . . . " (AS 1015–16). Both are present for one's discernment of them from day of birth to now, although, one would be on towards an age of being able to understand Rand's 1957 writing about it to get explicitly in mind those two things, existence and consciousness. What Rand says there is fine by me and important, but I go ahead and incorporate what we know about the biological character of consciousness by modern science and make a somewhat more general distinction in place of that one of Rand's. She had the division: existents and existents that have consciousness. I wrote instead (in EW) the division: existents and existents that are of-existents. The latter includes the living activities that are consciousness (awareness of existence) but as well any living action whatever. So in my terms, here is how I think about your second question. Potentials are featured only in concrete existents and only pertaining to them in their aspect of being not also of-existence. Possibilities are in existents that are of-existents, such as when we sort out the potentials of things for possibilities of our control and possibilities of our inventions and possibilities of our behaviors, or when we grasp the belonging-formalities of concretes and grow vast tooling-formalities upon them for use in our inventions and actions and for our satisfactions of mind, or possibilities are in our story-making entertainments, our fictions. So it's worth making this distinction I've labeled potentials and possibilities. I don't think Rand would have thought of a line segment as not really real. I guess she could get into that sort of trouble with talk of only concretes being real and then denying that spatial relations are concretes (if she did). However, I should say also for Rand that she recognized that there are relationships in the world independently of our mental grasps of the world. Perceptual similarities are in the world, in her understanding. So are quantities, which we get under our scaled rulers. I am with Descartes and with Newton on the reality of lines in physical space. Our procedure for bisecting a line segment using compass and straightedge reflects formalities of physical space around us and what it is possible to do with them. Hero of Alexandria said that a straight line is a line stretched to the utmost, and like him when I want to approach getting stones laid in a line, I stretch a string. The things we do in the mind in synthetic geometry, as in Euclid, are not without connections to the world, even though our method in geometry is quite different than our method in chemistry or geology.

Now dead

There's no "paranoia". I didn't bring this to light on this forum for more gaslighting but again objectively I do understand reasonable doubt given that I only gave an extremely brief synopsis of the countless events, crimes, gaslighting, and harassment that I have experienced and I do still appreciate the comments greatly as I feel less isolated from the world which I shouldn't mention tbh because they keep erasing or limiting everything that I value especially when I speak of valuing something. My vehicle was not stolen (yet, crosses fingers while ignoring that as an Objectivist I'm not superstitious lol), although some of my other property absolutely *has* been stolen, but my SUV has been both sabotaged in various ways and repeatedly gone through and "messed" with, and, yes, I understand that saying these facts of reality that in a normal situation could be seen that way and truthfully if I hadn't gone through everything that I have and experienced all this nonstop nonsense I'd be as skeptical reading someone list it all cold like this too. But, they from my recent research they do so many things like this as both a form of gaslighting and to make it *look* like paranoia to discredit the victim. More importantly, me knowing and commenting all of this provides extremely important evidence that *I* specifically possess the metacognition that an actual person undergoing any type of actual paranoia would *not* possess do to their actual illness. A person undergoing actual paranoia would not be able to consider that such a possibility could exist in the same way that an individual that had psychosis or hallucinations would not understand that that's a possibility. The metacognition of understanding what all this could * look like* to uninitiated individuals who have never even possibly imagined that such things that *are* beyond absolute doubt happening to myself (as was the case for even myself a couple years ago) virtually *proves* that it absolutely is *not* any form of "paranoia" nor "delusion".

Include in that also your own second opinion, a determinedly critical one, every day. I once suffered from paranoia for a couple of days (and other mental defects) due to metabolic encephalopathy, which in my case was due to a bladder blockage. To be sure you have not fallen into a paranoia, in the sense of a delusional belief that one is being persecuted in a systematic way, subject each negative thing going on to the critical possibility that it could be independent of the other negative things. For example, the theft of your auto. (By the way, when did that occur?) Regardless of whether these negative events are largely an organized attempt to get you, if they continue, you might consider moving away from there. I've moved far away from where I was born and educated through college, and again moved far away from the place I had my commercial-work part of life. One loses direct company of family and loved ones residing at those old places, but indeed one can make a fresh start. (In my first move, I was without any assets beyond the $84 dollars in my pocket and my ability to do unskilled labor and be dependable. It is possible, and it can be worth the change of your world.)

Now instead of Republican versus Democrat we have Establishment versus anti-Establishment. It is the Establishment side that sorts people into elites and "little people," and who hope to keep themselves at the top while keeping the "little people" dependent and incapable of escaping. (The whole idea that the Establishment try to embody is essentially Platonism.) Of course the idea of "anti-Establishment" is almost as useful as "atheist" because the term doesn't say what someone is for. It would encompass collectivists who want to transfer power from the existing Establishment to another (theirs), who might be more properly called "anti-this-Establishment." It would also encompass individualists who don't want an Establishment at all but who want a free country. It would also encompass anarchists who don't want any kind of government or laws at all. It's a mistake to package-deal these kinds of people. (Think who gains and who loses from such a package-dealing...) The sorting of people into elites and "little people" is not merely a conceptual device, it is an enforced set of standards. You end up with two rules of law for the two groups. Recognizing that this has occurred is not the same thing as endorsing it or helping to create it. A politician who tries to get the votes of the "little people" is merely recognizing the categories which the Establishment has already created. However, aiming for the votes of the "little people" does not say if you are an individualist or not; it doesn't even say if you are anti-Establishment or not, since the Establishment also hopes to win votes from "little people" so that they can at least maintain the appearance of having been legitimately elected.

Two quotes to begin. The first: “In general, it is absurd to make the fact that the things of this earth are observed to change and never to remain in the same state, the basis of our judgment about the truth. For in pursuing the truth one must start from the things that are always in the same state and suffer no change.” - Aristotle, Book 11, from his Metaphysics. Now the second: “Serenity comes from the ability to say ‘Yes’ to existence.” - Ayn Rand, 1973, from her essay “The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made”. Any science of first principles rightly supposes that the justificatory structure of our schemas and assertions are terminal. It would seem then that there ought to be a terminus of judgment also, for how is one to judge a thing which can not be justified, even in principle? Justification surely is a form of explanation, namely one which identifies a cause whose identification itself deals in adherence to a kind of normativity appropriate to the production of human knowledge. Aristotle points out that all explanation is in terms of something more fundamental, and nothing is truly capable of explaining itself, for nothing is more fundamental than itself - it simply is itself. It has seemed strange then to philosophers throughout history that those concepts and principles occupying the base of human knowledge, being capable neither of having explanation or justification, should still be the ultimate source of both, hence the perennial quest for and atheological concerns towards an explanation of something like Being as such. This sort of meta-attitude is not confined to metaphysics or what calls itself metaphysics. Indeed in Hume’s infamous passage about the inescapable bifurcation or rather the inexplicable marriage of descriptive and normative statements, we see the presence of an anxious, “something from nothing” worry more familiar to us in the context of discussions about God. We may find this sort of sentiment just as easily in epistemologies also of the last century, where neo-Kantians like Wilfred Sellars marshal the notion of inference as constitutive of the perceiving act so as to escape the undesirable conclusion that the perceptually given could at once be justificatory and non-propositional, i.e., not itself justified or justifiable. The ability of certain things to be a power unto themselves has always been met throughout history with skepticism and derision, especially by philosophers. While this fact may owe some to the prevalence and intuitive attractiveness of a naive necessitarian conception of causality (which itself necessarily invokes a prime mover), where the supposed constant conjunction of motion is appropriated as identifying the form of epistemic relations or ethical systems, I believe the source is more complicated in matter if not in form, and partly social. Namely, that in human interaction we constantly seek the identification of a final cause to explain the behavior of the human agents we interact with. And insofar as these motivations are explicit - as is the case with more noticeable, determined action - the cause can be expressed in propositional form, and we are thus loathe to think that any cause ought not to be able to expressed to one another someway, somehow. Even in relations lacking humans altogether, say perhaps the evolutionary development of an alternative organism, we identify the final cause of species survival and propagation as an explanatory summation of the efficient - and principally chemical - causes responsible for an organism’s biological integrity. We understand our mature language to be capable of reaching all corners of nature, both now, before, and forevermore. We understand and believe then that if there are no reasons to accept something, then there can certainly be no reasons not to reject it. And it is precisely here, in elevating a particularly - and this is key - conceptual mode of grasping existence to legislate what is and is not permissible to treat as existent that all philosophical hell breaks loose. The explicit error is thus: the holding of the man-made, for no conceptual artifact is necessary, to constrain the metaphysically given. That is, the total inversion of epistemological primacy, of treating not perception but conception as cognitively basic. There is really only one tradition in the history of philosophy which explicitly recognizes a kind of metaphysical acquiescence as the source of epistemological accuracy, and that is the Aristotelian one, of which Objectivism is a part. Just as Aristotle refuted logical determinism by affirming the direction of truth to move from the metaphysically given to the man-made, so we may chastise those anti-foundationalist tendencies which make much ado about the fact that those so-called primaries of cognition cannot be explained or justified, yet serve as the source of both; the primaries, insofar as they constitute an identification of the relation of man's necessary formatic apprehension (for to be aware is not merely to be aware of something, but to be aware of something somehow) of existence to existence are not to be judged. The man-made can not arbitrate how the metaphysically given ought to be, or how its epistemic status ought to present itself, indeed the very concept of “ought” is inapplicable. It as arbitrary to assert that because primaries are inexplicable they are somehow invalid or untrustworthy as it is to rule out the concept of “inertia” with Aristotelian physics. In both cases, perception, our primitive and primary contact with and awareness of reality - because it is metaphysically given and the identities of the human, sensory apparatus as well as the existents which act upon them are outside the power of human volition, of human making - vindicates what may be thought of as possible and trustworthy, and no more and no less. You may recall that I mentioned that there can be no reasons given not to reject the metaphysically given, and this is true unless those reasons are tied to some normative conception of what it is thought should be about and what it should serve. Indeed one is always free to ask: “why shouldn't I contradict myself?”. Objectivism has no answer to give this question save: man shall not live on thought alone, and if he is to acquire his bread also, he will need non-contradictory thought and a non-contradictory method to achieve it. Objectivism does not judge the metaphysically-given precisely because its recognition, its identification, is the means of making proper judgments about it, its very precondition. To say “yes” to the metaphysically-given is not to judge it as true or good, but to acknowledge the metaphysically-given fact that correspondence between and conformity of the metaphysically-given to the man-made is good or otherwise conducive to the survival of the man-made, and moreover still that the content of this relation is itself metaphysically-given. Objectivism does not promote an attitude of metaphysical acquiescence as true because it is good, but as good because it is true. Power over nature does not come from asserting man's omnipotence, but from asserting where and indeed how power is possible to him. To paraphrase Bacon: Nature, to be commanded, must not be judged.