Nicky

I haven't read the books either, so this conversation is borderline meaningless, but I would love to find out more about this sentence, from the Shermer book's summary: It's a little unclear what that means. Does it mean that science is the best tool to determine whether ANY belief matches reality? Because it's clearly not. To talk about tools, you must first define the problem you're trying to solve. So what's the best tool to do that? What tool is he using to define the problem he's trying to solve with science? Specifically, what tool did he use to determine that there's such a thing as reality, and that he is conscious of it? Just asking, obviously. Hopefully someone who actually read the book comes along, and tells us about what's in it. So that we have something more than guesses, to discuss.

I can't think of any that have the unbreakable conviction of a Rand hero, because 99.9% of modern writers think that writing characters who aren't at least a little bit hesitant in their beliefs makes you a bad writer, but, other than that, the formula is pretty common. Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man is an obvious one. A less obvious one is Tyrion Lannister, in Game of Thrones. Sure, he's a dwarf, but he's charming, intelligent, and has that same public/private life duality (if I wanted to be fancy and pretend I know something about Greek mythology, I would say that he's a charming, more scrupulous version of the Hermes archetype). Also similar, but with a comedy angle added in, is Harrison Ford in pretty much every movie he's in (including Star Wars and Indiana Jones). He just plays the same character over and over again. I haven't actually seen the Johnny Depp pirate movies, but, judging from the trailers, that too. Captain Kirk in (the original) Star Trek movies is pretty much Han Solo, as well. [edit] Oh yeah, Batman's pretends to be alcoholic playboy to hide his true identity, too, right? I'm sure there are others as well, but I stopped watching these movies.

I appreciate that, but it's really not what I'm after. I promise. Regenerative farming is an extremely important, and, on top of that, extremely interesting and exciting subject (for anyone, not just farmers...I'm not a farmer, and I'm as entertained by a good video on regenerative farming as I am by a new episode of Westworld). So please find out for yourself. If you want a starting point that doesn't involve tedious "study" and "research", there's a Vimeo channel with professionally done, interesting vids about both the research that goes into it, and the people actually doing it. Here's a vid mostly about the research: And a few about the people doing it: https://vimeo.com/80518559 https://vimeo.com/170413226 https://vimeo.com/201215707 [Note: the research I mentioned above was funded by Shell...I don't have an issue with that, but potential conflicts of interest should always be disclosed, so I'm disclosing it] Alternatively, here's an amateur channel, from an actual farmer, who built a beautiful and extremely profitable (for its size...a two owner + 2-3 employee farm that generates an executive level income for the two owners) farm in Sweden. He adds content every week, so it's a lot. But it's great content, especially lately: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3111rvadtBPUY9JJBqdmzg

Galt's Gulch is not a very helpful literary device for explaining the Oist view of politics, to be honest. It confuses people (who don't understand the limitations of a literary device) into thinking Rand advocated anarchy (because Galt's Gulch didn't really have a government). I don't know the answer to your question, Gio (I don't know about this Q&A), but I can't imagine Rand thought Galt's Gulch is a realistic, viable community. That notion contradicts her politics, imo (which is why, in Bodystun's quote above, she clarifies that it's not an example of Oist politics). So the answer to the thread title is "the more people in Atlantis, the better, because it becomes harder to change through outside pressure...which is inevitable, in a free country (that's very different from Galt's Gulch...Galt's Gulch was in fact NOT free... private = not free)".

Meh. I'm still hoping I can get you to do two things: 1. consider how ridiculous the proposition that "20% of all greenhouse emissions on Earth come from cows belching and farting" is. 2. As a result, re-read the articles you posted, to find the disclaimer they buried deep within, where it's explained that the click-bait, simplistic headline is in fact misleading, and they added together a bunch of other emissions that have nothing to do with cows belching or farting, to come up with that estimate of 20%. Had they stuck with just cows belching and farting, it would be a far smaller number, no one would care, no one would click on the article, and then the writer would have to get a real job, that produces some actual value.

Nope. Lions need to go to jail until they give up meat and start wearing thick framed glasses and fedoras.

And yet, you insist that cows belching produces 20% of all greenhouse gases on Earth.

I wasn't being pedantic, and differentiating between belching and farting. You can call all of it flatulence, it's fine. The article doesn't claim that gases farted out and belched out by cows add up to 20%. It claims that the livestock industry, with everything they do, is responsible for 20% of global warming. They include things like the destruction of sea ecosystems due to fertilizer runoff, desertification, etc., etc. Cow flatulence, belching, and whatever else cows do is a tiny portion of that. I'm beginning to suspect that you don't read the posts you're responding to... or the articles you're linking to. What I said above, in a nutshell, is this: pasture that is managed according to regenerative principles sequesters more carbon in the soil than a typical temperate climate forest (like the ones in Europe, most of North America, and most of Asia). Meanwhile, your article compares rain forests and massive eucalyptus forests to semi-arid grassland it specifically says is "little grazed" (and, not mentioned in the article, they regularly burn down, which ensures that all the above ground carbon is released right back into the atmosphere). P.S. Regenerative farming isn't about replacing forest with grassland, so I hope I didn't give that impression. Plant diversity is a fundamental principle of regenerative farming, so regenerative ranchers do often grow trees, not just grass, on their pastures (that's called a silvopasture...sometimes it makes economic sense, sometimes it doesn't...when it doesn't, grassland by itself also acts as a net carbon sink, so it should be fine from an "environmentalist" perspective).

Those articles don't claim that methane from cow flatulence amounts to 20% of greenhouse emissions. They claim that the overall effects of raising livestock cause 20% of emissions. Methane from flatulence is only a small part of that 20%. All the other practices that lead to greenhouse emissions are very much avoidable (flatulence is avoidable too, there are cows that don't fart as much, but it's not worth the effort, because it's not as big a deal as popular myths paint it to be). Not only that, but livestock farming can have a net positive effect (assuming "positive" means less greenhouse gases). Take "deforestation" for instance, which is one of the things they're harping on: sure, you can't really graze livestock in a forest (except pigs, they love it). But guess what these partisan, alarmist reports always leave out: grass sequesters more carbon than forests. So deforestation, as long as it's done for the purpose of creating a healthy pasture, prevents global warming. We don't need virgin forests to prevent global warming. On the contrary, replacing them with grassland would create far more vibrant ecosystems across Asia and North America. Note: I don't really know much about jungle ecology, and what effect deforestation has there...but rain forests only cover a small fraction of Earth, anyway...everywhere else, deforestation doesn't have to be a bad thing. It's only a bad thing when the forest is replaced with a heavily fertilized, frequently tilled monoculture that depletes the soil of all other biology, and essentially treats land as a chemistry lab that's supposed to be kept as sterile as possible. That, obviously, is worse than anything else you can do to soil, including leaving it as a relatively infertile forest. And, because in most climates forests are the result of the disappearance of large herbivore herds (which are the greatest "deforestors" on Earth), most forests are unnatural and therefor infertile. There's a reason why a lot of Africa is grassland: they didn't kill all their herbivores. The natural state of most land on Earth is grassland, grazed by even more herbivores than these 1.5 billion cattle the environmentalist movement is upset about. It's just that the grazing is supposed to be cyclical and regenerative, not constant and destructive, like it is now. If you keep it cyclical, you can actually graze more, so even "over-grazing" is a misleading term. That's what makes grasses different than any other plant: it's not supposed to be protected, it's supposed to be absolutely obliterated from time to time. You can (and should) graze/trample a pasture barren every few months (or at least once a year, but you can do it 3-4 times a year no problem, as long as you let it grow to seed once in a while), because a few weeks after the destruction there's an explosion of life both above and below the surface, where the herbivore herd passed through, that couldn't have happened any other way.

Where did you get the 20% from? I can't imagine it's that much. Half of the global methane emissions come from anaerobic decomposition of organic matter in soils (in wetlands, landfills and rice paddies), not from cows...so, for what you're saying to be true, methane would have to be the main greenhouse gas, not CO2. As for countering the effects, that's fairly easy: trap carbon in the soil, using regenerative agriculture principles. Pasture raised animals, when managed properly, regenerate soil incredibly fast. In the past 200 years, the removal of massive amounts of herbivores (most of them ruminants, like cattle), have depleted soils on Earth (in North America and Asia, especially) severely. There's nothing we can do about that, those millions strong buffalo herds that roamed freely across the landscape, chased by wolf packs and migrating tribes, can't coexist with modern human society. But planning the grazing of domesticated herbivores in a way that mimics the movement of wild animals (they moved in massive herds, grazing/trampling the soil bare periodically, adding fertilizer to it as they went, then allowing it long recovery periods) builds soil. It also reduces/eliminates the need for the chemical fertilizers that kill soil biology. Healthy soil has many benefits, but the main two are: 1. It traps a lot of carbon (including methane...read up on how well drained soil acts as a methane sink). Farms that follow regenerative principles have multiplied the organic matter content in their existing soil, and are building deeper soil (healthy soil biology leads to healthier plants, which then send roots down deeper into the ground, expanding the depth of the top soil ... this can also be accelerated, using a keyline plow). The reason individual farmers (who aren't paid to produce less, by the government) want this is because it increases yields, with fewer input costs. The reason why the rest of us want it is because it produces healthier food (not just because it contains fewer harmful substances...also because it's far more nutrient rich) and counteracts global warming. 2. high organic content in soil leads to dramatically higher water retention (again, by an order of magnitude higher, soils go from retaining half an inch of rain per hour to retaining ALL the rain that could possibly fall in an hour, allowing virtually no run-off), which counteracts drought and prevents soil from being washed away into rivers. Drought is the single biggest enemy of modern farmers, followed closely by soil erosion. Coupling soil building with more advanced methods of retaining rain water (like keyline design, developed in Australia) has successfully prevented crop failure due to drought in some very dry places on Earth. In other words, there's nothing to worry about. Herbivores (for now, mainly cows, but the ideal animal for the job would be the woolly mammoth) have a huge role to play in counteracting both global warming itself, and the purported effects of the combination of global warming and population growth. We will at some point need to move away from growing our meat indoors, though, and let animals out into the ecosystems we're supposedly protecting by not allowing farming on them. Because the removal of herbivores is destroying those ecosystems from the soil up.

When there's a threat. Please note that I'm using the verb "is" in contrast to your use of the expression "comes across as". The former suggests objectivity and a desire to be exact, the latter subjectivity and a desire to be vague.

What something "comes across as" is irrelevant. Only thing that matters is what it is.

Productive? Only thing you're producing in this thread is nonsense, crazy lady. How am I gonna make you any less productive with a side argument?

I bet you can't prove that my answer isn't of the highest degree of acceptability, goodness, quality, or any other word you wish to use. So the question "Is the pen in your hand blue?" is also an open ended question, because it also depends on who's answering it? Sure. That's because you asked a meaningful question. The quality of a person's answer to your question can be evaluated objectively...because there is an objective standard for evaluating people's goals and decisions. That standard is Ethics. Specifically, rational selfishness. That's what makes the answer "I want to be the next Mother Theresa", for instance, an objectively bad answer. On the other hand, I have not been made aware of any standard you might use to evaluate my answer above, and objectively call it worse than yours. So it's not worse than yours. You can't even pick on "potato" not being a number, because we're using a digital medium, so it is.

Elegance can mean all kinds of things, but the common meanings tend to range between two polar opposites: practical simplicity and pretentious sophistication. So you can tell a lot about a person from their definition of elegance.

He was a recovering drug addict (he was able to quit hard drugs before he became successful). More recently (through the famous years), he wrote about how he abused alcohol to "treat' depression caused by his divorce...and it's unclear if he ever managed to pull out of that cycle.

That the more seriously you take an irrational belief system, the less likely you are to be able to keep your sanity while living in a reality that contradicts your beliefs at every turn...and altruism and religion are two such irrational belief systems. There are many other beliefs and practices that lead to mental illness (depression is a side effect of addiction, for instance), and mental illness can also have genetic causes, but altruism and religion are definitely worth mentioning first. And the main cause of suicide in current societies (except for Switzerland) is mental illness. As for Switzerland, assisted suicide is legal there, and the chief cause of suicide is rational choice, in response to a terminal illness diagnosis. I don't see why that would be a problem Objectivists would want to solve. Objectivism doesn't pass moral judgement on such decisions...and therefor, I don't see why reducing suicide rates would be a goal for Objectivists. The goal should be to prevent suicides caused by mental illness...not all suicides.

Well, I have a standard answer to all "open ended problems" (because that way I don't have to read them first), but, presumably, it's just as good as any of the other answers, right? That's what "open ended" means? So: 1) the answer is potato, to all of them. 2) the "different" answer is still potato...but a different one. 3 and 4) the first potato, because I don't like different potatoes. I like all my potatoes the same.

George Costanza has this all figured out.

In the original post, the bill was described as "legislation to allow Americans with life-threatening conditions access to unapproved, experimental drugs". I posted that such a bill would not pass Congress. And it didn't. And it won't, anytime soon. This bill gives DYING patients access to medication that PASSED phase one of the FDA's approval process. Access they already had, through a different mechanism. So it's a meaningless bill, with no consequences (positive or negative) whatsoever.

Just saw this shirt, while watching a (dirty hippy, organic) gardening vid totally unrelated to Oism (really surprised me, too, that the guy even knows who Ayn Rand is): Any idea where you can order these from? Because it looks great.

I like these dystopian/alternate reality shows too (Man in the High Castle, SS-GB, all the way back to Amerika...1987 show with Kris Kristofferson and Sam Neill...I don't know if it still holds up now), but, for some reason, The Handmaid's Tale turned me off after 4-5 episodes. One interesting thing about it was that, as far as I remember, they stuck to the "first person narration" from the book...we only see what the main character sees. I just wish she saw something else from time to time, besides just creative, over the top, unrealistic ways in which women are abused by society. And sure, there was some kind of vague, mysterious plot, but it was moving along very, very slowly, because all the show-makers' focus seemed to be on laying the "message" on as thick as possible. Maybe that changes later, and I just wasn't patient enough for it. But it didn't seem like it would, from the episodes I saw.

The most notable of the retirees is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan -------------- He's quitting that job, I don't think he's retiring from politics. He's probably doing it to avoid becoming permanently associated with Trump...because he's planning to run for President at some point. There's really not much Republicans can do, right now. Trump won the election on the Republican ticket, they can't openly oppose him, they just have to wait this out while trying to minimize the damage. But they are keeping him in check to some extent. The people running the DOJ, for instance, are Republicans, and they're standing up to him pretty well. The newest SCOTUS justice is a principled conservative as well, and he has a majority behind him when it comes to blocking anything abusive that Trump might try to do. Also note how there's no wall being built. The ideas Trump's been throwing around about tariffs against US allies are also being walked back. That's because there's no support for any of that, in the Republican Party. P.S. Also, Mitt Romney's running for Senate, and he's doing it in Utah, which is a conservative, anti-Trump stronghold. He's gonna be an automatic, high profile no vote on every idea Trump might have.

No. Ayn Rand agreed with what most of the world has believed since the Renaissance: art is something you do for its own sake, not for a utilitarian purpose.

As natural languages evolve, words often end up referring to different concepts in different contexts. Take the word "man", for instance: it can be used to mean humans the species, a single human, or it can be used to mean a biological male. There's no reason to get hung up on it, you can get the meaning from context, and accept that no, someone using man in one sense is not trying to refer to the word's other meanings (unless you're a feminist, then apparently you lose that ability). Same here: artist is used to mean a master of a craft (an artisan). It simply denotes excellence in a field or activity, and has nothing to do with the modern definition of art in the context of Aesthetics. This (excellence at a craft) is actually the original meaning of the word, it only started being used to refer to the profession of someone who creates 'art for the sake of art' after the Renaissance.