Mark2

FeatherFall’s linked to article on DXM tends to tell against his point, for it concludes: “Explaining OOBEs [out of body experiences] is difficult and is in my opinion currently beyond neuroscience.”

I don’t have much to offer on this subject except to say I’ve always found the debunking of vitalism a boor. You only have to experience the death of a loved one to realize that life is more than a body. (Added: I don't mean to imply that there’s life after death though.)

I don’t think there need be any contradiction between that and the unity of mind and body, or with the Greek idea expressed by “a healthy mind in a healthy body.”

This replies to just the initial post.


It’s a most peculiar stability where goods that twenty years ago took 100 dollar bills to purchase today take 170.

One could say relative stability, but it would be relative to an even worse performing currency, say one in South America.


This is our standard of stability? If you aren’t wiped out – unadorned with Make-Light Of-It quotes – everything’s OK? Not having been completely wiped out, just robbed somewhat – a mere 40%.

From the linked-to article:
“As 17th-century Latin American silver production dropped, debtors flooded the Dutch economy with debased foreign silver coinage, creating a stagflation risk. The [Dutch] Bank experimented with a bullion standard, converting different coins to paper at fixed exchange rates, but it could never get the rates right for long, triggering Gresham’s Law events where bad money drove out good.”

First off it wasn’t the fault of gold or silver that some crooks debased it – meaning filing off the edges of coins or counterfeiting them using mostly tin or lead.

Second, comparing paper money to coins, paper money is no harder to debase, easier in fact per unit value.

Third, the Dutch Bank didn’t really experiment with gold as money because then there would have been no set rate of conversion to a quantity of paper money. Using gold as money means the users (buyers and sellers) decide how much of what goods an ounce buys, not a government bank.

A bank (or the bank, if it’s a government monopoly) can still issue paper money in this system, but the piece of paper saying “1” on it must mean there really is 1 ounce of gold in the bank’s vault payable to the bearer. (A bank – or the bank – issuing more paper than gold on hand, in this system, would be defrauding each bearer. His loss would be inflation.)

Fourth, only the author of the linked-to article knows what he meant by bad money drives out good when all the paper money is the same. Maybe he meant people abandoned the money in favor of gold, or vice versa. It’s hard to believe vice versa.

I didn’t read much more, so many hours in the day, just skimmed. The introduction is loaded with emotional, over-the-top phrases: “otherworldly purity,” “stomach-churning,” etc. The style of writing is obscure, the above quote about debased coinage is typical.

Just noticed: The article is published by the American Enterprise Institute, a hardcore neoconservative think-tank, if anti-Americanism masquerading as Americanism can be called thoughtful. John Yoo of torture infamy is there, and Michael Ledeen (author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago – I’m not making this up) used to be. In 2003 they hosted a dinner celebrating Irving Kristol.

Now they’re debunking gold backed currency. Makes me want to buy more gold, at least in the short term. Even if gold’s a bubble it looks like it has a way to go before it bursts.

This replies to just the initial post.


It’s a most peculiar stability where goods that twenty years ago took 100 dollar bills to purchase today take 170.

One could say relative stability, but it would be relative to an even worse performing currency, say one in South America.


This is our standard of stability? If you aren’t wiped out – unadorned with Make-Light Of-It quotes – everything’s OK? Not having been completely wiped out, just robbed somewhat – a mere 40%.

From the linked-to article:
“As 17th-century Latin American silver production dropped, debtors flooded the Dutch economy with debased foreign silver coinage, creating a stagflation risk. The [Dutch] Bank experimented with a bullion standard, converting different coins to paper at fixed exchange rates, but it could never get the rates right for long, triggering Gresham’s Law events where bad money drove out good.”

First off it wasn’t the fault of gold or silver that some crooks debased it – meaning filing off the edges of coins or counterfeiting them using mostly tin or lead.

Second, comparing paper money to coins, paper money is no harder to debase, easier in fact per unit value.

Third, the Dutch Bank didn’t really experiment with gold as money because then there would have been no set rate of conversion to a quantity of paper money. Using gold as money means the users (buyers and sellers) decide how much of what goods an ounce buys, not a government bank.

A bank (or the bank, if it’s a government monopoly) can still issue paper money in this system, but the piece of paper saying “1” on it must mean there really is 1 ounce of gold in the bank’s vault payable to the bearer. (A bank – or the bank – issuing more paper than gold on hand, in this system, would be defrauding each bearer. His loss would be inflation.)

Fourth, only the author of the linked-to article knows what he meant by bad money drives out good when all the paper money is the same. Maybe he meant people abandoned the money in favor of gold, or vice versa. It’s hard to believe vice versa.

I didn’t read much more, so many hours in the day, just skimmed. The introduction is loaded with emotional, over-the-top phrases: “otherworldly purity,” “stomach-churning,” etc. The style of writing is obscure, the above quote about debased coinage is typical.

Just noticed: The article is published by the American Enterprise Institute, a hardcore neoconservative think-tank, if anti-Americanism masquerading as Americanism can be called thoughtful. John Yoo of torture infamy is there, and Michael Ledeen (author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago – I’m not making this up) used to be. In 2003 they hosted a dinner celebrating Irving Kristol.

Now they’re debunking gold backed currency. Makes me want to buy more gold, at least in the short term. Even if gold’s a bubble it looks like it has a way to go before it bursts.

This replies to just the initial post.


It’s a most peculiar stability where goods that twenty years ago took 100 dollar bills to purchase today take 170.

One could say relative stability, but it would be relative to an even worse performing currency, say one in South America.


This is our standard of stability? If you aren’t wiped out – unadorned with Make-Light Of-It quotes – everything’s OK? Not having been completely wiped out, just robbed somewhat – a mere 40%.

From the linked-to article:
“As 17th-century Latin American silver production dropped, debtors flooded the Dutch economy with debased foreign silver coinage, creating a stagflation risk. The [Dutch] Bank experimented with a bullion standard, converting different coins to paper at fixed exchange rates, but it could never get the rates right for long, triggering Gresham’s Law events where bad money drove out good.”

First off it wasn’t the fault of gold or silver that some crooks debased it – meaning filing off the edges of coins or counterfeiting them using mostly tin or lead.

Second, comparing paper money to coins, paper money is no harder to debase, easier in fact per unit value.

Third, the Dutch Bank didn’t really experiment with gold as money because then there would have been no set rate of conversion to a quantity of paper money. Using gold as money means the users (buyers and sellers) decide how much of what goods an ounce buys, not a government bank.

A bank (or the bank, if it’s a government monopoly) can still issue paper money in this system, but the piece of paper saying “1” on it must mean there really is 1 ounce of gold in the bank’s vault payable to the bearer. (A bank – or the bank – issuing more paper than gold on hand, in this system, would be defrauding each bearer. His loss would be inflation.)

Fourth, only the author of the linked-to article knows what he meant by bad money drives out good when all the paper money is the same. Maybe he meant people abandoned the money in favor of gold, or vice versa. It’s hard to believe vice versa.

I didn’t read much more, so many hours in the day, just skimmed. The introduction is loaded with emotional, over-the-top phrases: “otherworldly purity,” “stomach-churning,” etc. The style of writing is obscure, the above quote about debased coinage is typical.

Just noticed: The article is published by the American Enterprise Institute, a hardcore neoconservative think-tank, if anti-Americanism masquerading as Americanism can be called thoughtful. John Yoo of torture infamy is there, and Michael Ledeen (author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago – I’m not making this up) used to be. In 2003 they hosted a dinner celebrating Irving Kristol.

Now they’re debunking gold backed currency. Makes me want to buy more gold, at least in the short term. Even if gold’s a bubble it looks like it has a way to go before it bursts.

This sidesteps the question but still needs to be said.

1. Unlike real abuse, which is extraordinarily rare, fat is hard to define even approximately. The same goes for skinny. Look what CPS – Child Protective Services, or whatever it’s called – did to one vegetarian couple. When CPS took their children away from them they tried to get their children back by force. The eventual trial, with Edgar Steele as defense lawyer, was featured on TV (I don’t watch such things and only read about it). The mother, Ruth Christine, spent 7 years in prison, the father will have served 12 when released in 2013.

(By the way, the defense lawyer was a free speech advocate who once defended the founder of Aryan Nations, losing. Recently he was charged and convicted of attempting to murder his wife and mother-in-law, which is as authentic as the Christine’s child abuse. The fact that some of his views are disagreeable, to say the least, is irrelevant here.)

2. CPS has a long history of itself abusing children. The late Nancy Schaefer spoke and wrote about this:
The Corrupt Business of Child Protective Services
Look what they did to Kelly Michaels and children she was alleged to have abused, one of several cases described in No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times
by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal. I think we’d be better off without CPS, assault and battery was illegal without it. At least don’t add another quiver to their bow.

Don’t know what whYNOT is talking about. Nothing I wrote should be construed to mean what he’s arguing against.


Tanaka is mistaken not only about Dreamspirit’s post, but about Ayn Rand ever writing about Hickman in an essay. It was in her very early private journals where she wrote about him, blown way out of proportion by her detractors.

Defending Ayn Rand by saying she was perfect, never made a mistake, only helps them.

Just who are these “rebels”?

I’m reminded of the so-called rebels in the Kosovo War of the late 1990’s, the “Kosovo Liberation Army”. We were forced to pay for their so-called liberation of Kosovo, which some people might not have done had they a choice.

Current events sound like the same old story: replace a recalcitrant dictatorial government with another, more compliant, dictatorial government.

It’s interesting to note that many Objectivists (not very Objective in this case) approve of regime change in Libya but not in Egypt. The change in Egypt really was spontaneous: unlike in Kosovo and Libya where NATO was the driving force.

Relevant ancient history: The Lockerbie Pan Am flight 103 crash in December 1988 was not perpetrated by Libya but rather Iran (in retaliation for the USS Vincennes downing of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988 when the U.S. was supporting Saddam Hussein) – see the work of Rodney Stich. The terrorist attack in France in 1986 that was blamed on Libya was only made to look like it was done by Libya, after which Reagan bombed Tripoli and other Libyan areas killing about 40 civilians – see The Other Side of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky.

Why are we forced to pay for the “liberation” of Libya? There’s only one reason: the powerlust of elements within the administration.

And they will spin the war as in your self-interest, per usual.

They did it all for you, us Americans I mean, so be grateful lil chilins.