Reidy

Seikan in Japan is 14.5 miles. Daishimizu is 13.8; people died of carbon monoxde while building it but not while traveling in it. Simplon is 12.3.

And all these years I've thought it was a wig.

Looks like it might be interesting. Let me know what you think or, better yet, give me a copy for Christmas.

I'm skeptical of anybody who writes about "Objectivist economics", but maybe the editor had nothing to do with the publisher's blurb. We'll see. Somebody will, but, at those prices, not I.

Another interesting fact about Jackson is that in 1948 FLl Wright built a house there that incorporated a natural spring, so he named it "Fountainhead".

I haven't seen the movie, but as people on this thread are describing the character he seems to have more in common with Robert Stadler than with Howard Roark.

I got into Merwin & Webster a very long time ago at the now-defunct Acres of Books in Long Beach CA. Favorite of the ones I've read is Comrade John , at once a satire and an adventure story that pits an architect against a flimflamming prophet based unmistakably on Elbert Hubbard. I suspect it was where Rand got the idea for the architectural ghosting that Roark does for Keating. (In the NYT interview that Boydstun mentioned, Rand also said that Dagny and John would marry. One of the Objectivist forums once had a thread on what practical difficulties the characters would face in picki

Roark's hair may be, after Samson's and Rapunzel's, the most famous in literature, and it's not blond.

Nikki Haley is looking hard core. The point of the Ponnuru article is what Haley said, not what Ponnuru thinks of it.

You have to keep in mind that she died in 1982 and was well into retirement several years before that. Computers figured your bank statement and your utility bills, but that was as close as most people got to them. (Did anybody have a personal computer that long ago?) In one of her lectures (I think it was Philosophy: Who Needs It at West Point circa 1976) she cited the adage of "computer operators" as she put it, "garbage in, garbage out", observing that it applies to our minds as well as to software. She probably meant developers, not operators, who in those days mounted tapes, fed card

Coming late to the conversation. Am I hijacking if I go back to the original question? The most important point here is one that the participants have barely touched on if they have touched on it at all: to the extent that an idea is the cultural norm, people won't be aware of it as somebody's philosophy at all. As long as the only people who accept Objectivist ideas are the ones who got it from Rand and could tell you that they did, those ideas are not the cultural default. Once they are, people will treat them as ordinary common sense. Many Americans, perhaps most, would accept tha

The Objectivist Ethics had a limited print edition, as an NBI pamphlet, at least as early as 1962. In the background here you see a shelf of such pamphlets, which sold for $.25 - $.50.

Another Rand-Pittsburgh link is Fallingwater, some 60 miles away, clearly enough her source for the Wynand country house. It was originally a weekend place for Edgar Kaufmann, a department store president, and his family.

Some impostors are gathering names for a sucker list. I hope you didn't give them your contact information.

Historical note: Rand was more enthusiastic about Nixon in 68 than in 72. She endorsed him in the June Objectivist (which actually came out in the fall), mainly for his opposition to the draft and his support of the Anti-Ballistic Missile system. She also said that "spokesman for capitalism" would get a hearing in a Nixon administration. Presumably she meant Greenspan, who worked for Nixon's campaign at the time, though she didn't mention him by name.