Reidy

Remember Ma Chalmers and her soybeans?

Squadster Cori Bush wants to be rid of police forces, and she's a client of a private defense agency. Murray Rothbard must be smiling from wherever he is.

Say what you will about Dobbs, the recent EPA decision is shaping up as very good news. Here's an example of just how happy we should be.

PS: Don't forget chronic fatigue syndrome.

Part of the reason for increases in autism diagnoses, I suspect, is simply that it's become a fashionable diagnosis, like gender dysphoria and ADD. Fifty years ago it was hypoglycemia. It will always be something.

Apparently it's not available online. The cheapest edition is a $5.95 booklet.

Maybe times are changing at the Post. A year and a half after the New York Post and a week after the New York Times, they got around to admitting the truth about the Biden laptop. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-washington-post-finally-gets-around-to-confirming-the-hunter-biden-laptop-story/

This brings up a related question: how does the novel's historical setting affect first-time readers today? It was a bit of a period piece in 1957 (execs no longer took cross-country business trips by train; network radio was no longer the primary news and entertainment medium) and a bit more when I first read it. For most newcomers today it's a book of their great-grandparents' era. Does this make it harder or easier (or neither) to get into?

Historical question: What did Peikoff and his circle find wrong with Kelley in the first place? What touched off the Schwartz piece that in turn elicited Kelley's reply?

Side point: Rand got one detail wrong about The Best Years of our Lives. On p. 367-368 of Journals she says that the movie shows a rich businessman bouncing a war hero from a flight, when in fact the opening scene establishes that the businessman has a reservation while the vet is on standby. Most Americans of the era would have recognized that this is what "space available" means. She asks "What is the point of this episode - if not the implication that the vicious, unpatriotic rich are grossly indifferent to war heroes?" The point might be that the military is ungrateful to its vets for not buying them reserved seats, but more likely it's simply a way of heightening the character's tension, and the audience's, about seeing him safely home.

Dominique could also ride a horse. The main point about Rand’s not being a driver is that she had time and energy for her work that would otherwise have gone for shopping and commuting.

She settled on her characteristic hairstyle sooner than I’d realized. The scarf in the second photo looks like it would have been a terribly avant-garde futurist design in its day.

Angi has posted digital realizations of some of FLlW's unbuilt houses, including one for Rand and her husband. Unfortunately it's only still pictures, not a 3-D walkthrough. (For a great example of the latter, see the Imperial Hotel.) I'd hate to have to open and close all those louvered windows each day.

Here is the "major UK newspaper" article Lomborg mentions in his column. I have a sizable collection of links like this one.

Wars, coups and political collapse have accomplished this: Germany, Japan and (some of) their allies and occupied territories after WW2; eastern Europe and the USSR ca. 1990; the military coup in Chile in the 70s led in the short run to dictatorship, but this in turn gave way to freedom.