Reidy

Isn't this a trip down memory lane? Eleven years ago in this very thread I declined to nominate California's high-speed rail on the grounds that it might never happen. It still hasn't happened.

An article that makes for interesting reading in connection with The Fountainhead and Rand's theories about art. Sullivan was her model for Henry Cameron. The author's observation that highrise is on the decline in the US but going strong in China raises a question: has technology decentralized work so that such buildings are obsolete? If so, you'd expect freer markets to catch on sooner. On the other hand, maybe politics brought this on by making big cities more expensive, dilapidated and dangerous.

NBI sold a limited, personally autographed 10th anniversary edition.

Another suggestion: minds (i.e. certain capacities and activities of certain living organisms) are a part of reality. They require (which is not to say that they are) certain physical equipment in the external world. Try to give an account of even the most primitive consciousness without it.

An interesting footnote to this is the ship's decanter, which implements your engineering suggestion.

Somebody has done a 3-D rendering of the house Wright designed for Rand. It's only a couple of still pictures, not a full walkthrough such as digital reconstructors have done with many of Wright's demolished or never-built designs. Such a treatment for the Rand design may be impossible, since the project never got to the detail stage. In the meantime, the most beautiful of the full realizations is a tour of the Imperial Hotel, which stood for almost 50 years in Tokyo.

So says CNN, of all sources.

Queer as a coot

Sciabarra tracked down her academic transcripts several years ago.

Vocabulary question: I thought a visa was an authorization to enter a country. If you're trying to leave your home country, don't you want a passport?

I second your analysis. If the Republicans get control of the House we'll be in for two years of rancorous, bad-willed divided government that won't be able to move any big legislation, and that's the best we could have hoped for. Another piece of good news is that the state-level abortion initiatives went the way I hoped. At National Review they're already trying to rationalize it away.

Friedman was making the point even longer ago than that.

The AtlasSphere was in that business several years ago, welcoming both straight and gay. I don't know if it's still active.

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.