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OK so I recently got busted for driving with a suspended license and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service. Since governemnt doesn't have the right to issue driver's licences in the first place, I felt that I had done nothing wrong and that the most moral course of action was to get it over with as painlessly as possible. I did the community service with a one-man environmentalist organization picking up trash and removing invasive plants at city parks. The "president" of the organization is a guy who lost his job as an airplane mechanic (before the recession) and cannot now find another line of work, so spends his days as a professional "volunteer" running his one-man nonprofit agency. He is very ideological about volunteerism and the first day I met him, he went on a fucking rant about how evil employers are and how he couldn't get a job now because he was "overqualified." Really f'd up shit. Anyway, most of the work was unsupervised, so there were plenty of opportunities to cheat and embellished my hours, i.e. report work when I really wasn't working. I spent about 50% of my reported time not working. He eventually caught me taking a break offsite while I was "on the clock" and read me the riot act. I later sent him an email apologizing for lying to him and explained my side: I didn't mean to rip him off, but I was operating under coersion and had no incentive to work any harder than absolutely necessary. Here is his response: "Attitude is everything. You wasted my time and cheated the community of a valuable service. Volunteering can be fun, rewording and educational. I suggest you find something you like to do and try it some time." This seems ridiculous to me beacause the hours I lied about required no time investment on his part. He only benefitted from the time I spent working, and lost nothing during the time that I wasn’t. Regardless of how many hours I reported, he was always the beneficiary of my misfortune. Of course, we all understand the silliness of "cheating the community." My question is: did I owe this guy my honesty since it wasn't his fault that I was in trouble with the law? The contract is that I give him a certain number of hours and he pays me in the form of a letter to the judge verifying my completion of those hours. However, since I'm operating under coersion, and he is in collusion with the courts, I think this renders the contract morally invalid. But I would like to hear your thoughts. Did I "cheat" this man out of something that was rightfully his?

I was wondering if anybody had some ideas for a set of YouTube video's that where an "album" of Objectivist themed "rap" songs like the ones they did for Stephen Hawking (the MC Hawkins videos). This is the link to the MC Hawkin stuff. So would it not be cool to have a MC Rand nerd-core?

Rand's classic and oft-repeated statement, Existence exists, and that means something exists of which one is aware, and you exist, being conscious that it is so, is surely the starting place to understand the import of that phrase. The foundational value lies in being able to begin any specific discussion with the reality of a world of things, and with conscious beings who are in touch with it, taken for granted. You don't want to find yourself being asked about your evidence for something, to prove that an event nobody witnessed indeed occurred. You say, "Existence exists," and pause leisurely to let them consider the wisdom of attempting to refute that. The primacy of existence and the efficacy of consciousness are incontestable (logically.) That doesn't stop people from contesting them. The statement, "Existence exists," is a concise "argument" for those two axioms and their interconnection. ("Argument" of axioms consists in pointing to their manifestations in reality.) You make the assertion as an ostensive summary, and no argument is needed (nor could there be one.) Dissenters are then in the position to try to refute all of existence (themselves included) and the possibility of knowledge (their own included.) Mindy

Ben, it seems you've only known the girl for two weeks (in my opinion, not enough time for her to be staying over, but that neither here nor there.). Two weeks is a very short period to time. If there's someone else in the picture, of course she's going to be conflicted in her feelings. You two can hardly know each other at this point, and maybe that's what you should be concentrating on. Give her some space, share a meal, go to a movie, yada yada yada. Get to know each other, for pete's sake. And did you expect her to come without a past. There's an old boyfriend in her life whom she still has regards for. What's so weird about that? God may have made the world in seven days, but as far as I know, he still doesn't have a girlfriend, so creating a relationship just takes a bit more time.