Unconquered

I took a look at some of your websites. It appears that you have talents for dealing with music synthesizers and a great deal of knowledge related to audio processing and related electronics. I can think of many ways of using that knowledge to make a lot more money than bad manual labor jobs. If you designed the equipment on mwcomms.com, that in itself obviously makes you able to find good work being employed as an audio equipment designer. Probably not where you live though.

The "physical world" is most of existence. It "just is" - that's the way existence exists, and there is no why for it, and one is not needed. The existence of consciousness is axiomatic, not because consciousness "has to" exist, but because to have any discussion of philosophy or anything else, you need to be conscious. It is conceivable, it is even depressingly possible, that some man-made or natural event could destroy all consciousness on earth. If that happened, the rest of existence would keep right on existing, but there would be nobody (except possibly *other* consciousness in the universe) to be aware of it. The main point of the axiom of consciousness is to automatically refute anybody who goes around saying that human beings are not conscious. To utter such a statement is to engage in a self-refuting contradiction.

Well said, I agree with everything you wrote. I have been fairly anti-NASA for some years now. What's more, everybody that I know who used to do work for NASA, including a still practicing aerospace engineer, has antipathy towards the organization. I understand how somebody can admire the activity itself, but the organization, and the philosophy that backs it, is just plain corrupt. It is totally the fallacy of the broken window to suppose that private organizations would ignore space had it not been for NASA. Count up the money taken by the U.S. government every year and imagine that it had been available in private hands over the entire economy - and subtract the omnipresent chilling influence of a well funded government competitor with a boatland of regulations on its side as well - and then dare to suggest that the resources would not have existed for private entities to have formed orbiting hotels and moon bases by now.

Heinlein is my second favorite author, after Ayn Rand, and I love many of his stories, but he was not an Objectivist, and one shouldn't expect either the comments of his characters or his own comments to reflect a position from Objectivism. In some cases he was an ardent individualist, in others, an advocate of the view that the value of somebody is reflected in how much good he does for how many people (Utilitarianism basically.) I am glad that I got to meet and talk with him for about 5 minutes at one of the L5 Space Development Conferences, in Houston, years ago. It wasn't too long before he died.

You might want to look up Peter Schwartz's old articles in The Intellectual Activist. He makes a well reasoned case that Russian capability in terms of both offensive strike capability, and defensive measures, greatly exceed the U.S. It would not be "just a few American cities", it would likely be all of the major and a lot of the minor ones. Things like that remind me of an interview I read about once. A veteran captain of an oil tanker was being interviewed about the Exxon Valdez that ran aground and spilled millions of barrels of oil. The reporter asked the captain what he would have done had he been in the situation. His reply: "I wouldn't have been there in the first place." i.e. he wouldn't have been too drunk or stupid to have run it aground. Unfortunately all too many things in the world today are threats exactly because the U.S. did not nip them in the bud at the right time. After Iran gets nuclear weapons, the situation will only get worse.

Suppose I rephrased what follows with this: America defeated Nazi Germany and Japan in WW2 not by convincing the rest of the world that rationality was a good thing, but by destroying their countries to a sufficient degree to utterly and absolutely neutralize their ability to wage war - in less time, incidentally, than has passed since 9/11/01. What's more, the U.S. has certainly *not* focused on the military defeat of its real enemies. Iran and Saudi Arabia and Syria and "Palestine" and Pakistan remain untouched, and they are the primary sources of religious terrorism. Ideally, this is a philosophic battle - but that's a much longer term goal, particularly when the U.S. itself is light years away from generally holding to a fully rational philosophy. When terrorists are killing thousands of Americans and knocking down skyscrapers in the U.S., the essential and immediately required response is to kill enough of them, and their supporters, so that they simply don't exist anymore. If that means incinerating 100 million Muslims with thermonuclear weapons, so be it (though it is almost certain that it would only take a demonstration of the real unleashed power of this country to achieve the same effect.) It is granting far too much to the enemy to suppose that "there will always be another." Everything is finite - in the 1940s, today, and any time. A religious terrorist converted to radioactive plasma is an ineffective terrorist. In 2006, the U.S. doesn't have to worry about German Nazis or Japanese militarists - they became solved problems by 1945. Can anybody imagine an American soldier in the 1940s worrying that killing Nazis and Japanese fanatics might just make them madder so we'd better be careful?? You cannot reason with a wild animal either, any more than a religious mentality. You just kill it if it poses a threat.

They wouldn't. They're acting as paid mercenaries, like the French, and I'm sure don't give a damn about the Iranians per se except as a source of cash. They're willing to be paid to give the Iranians nuclear and missile technology, and I hope it bites them in the butt sooner rather than later - maybe some nukes deployed in Moscow, courtesy of Chechnyan muslims supplied by Iran.

Different *in what way*? Do you think that a man-made fact of existence can be wished away because you can imagine a superior alternative? It is different only because *it could have* been different. Once it exists, it's as real as anything else - and that is the point here. And if evil could be quashed by wishful thinking, Atlas Shrugged would have been a boring book.

Context is important. I think you are basically correct in what you said. There's a big confusion among people who differentiate "metaphysical" from "man-made" as though the actual existing products of the man-made are not "fully metaphysical". The Empire State building - or a particular existing government organization - are man made and *could have been otherwise* - but once existing they are "just as real" as the Rocky Mountains. Of course, they can also in the future be changed by men - but that is true of any existent. It is a proper recognition of reality to treat some government organization as real and to act accordingly. To do otherwise *is* to fail to properly recognize and to properly act in your own self-interest. Whether it should exist or not, or should have a different nature, is a valid question that can be acted upon (without any guarantee that change will occur in any particular timeframe), but *that it does exist and has a certain nature that affects you* is most certainly real as well.

I was there for 3 weeks. It's actually quite a beautiful place if you ever get the chance to go.

Then you are not an Objectivist and you should not call yourself one. That is *much* worse than any outright antagonism to Objectivism. As Ayn Rand noted about the religious right, they have done far more damage to capitalism by posing themselves as defenders of it while being, in reality, philosophically opposed to it, than have the outright communists. In point of actual fact and in reality, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, Objectivism and any religion are utterly, absolutely, irresolutely contradictory and incompatible. Period. At best it is delusional and at worst wholly dishonest to say otherwise. Somebody had to say it.

Will all due respect, that is like saying that everything is the same as long as you agree that A doesn't have to be A, or that literal division by zero is a permissible operation in mathematics. Rationality is not rationalization ("reconciliation in definition"). As with any other mythology, over and above the irrationality of positing a god, there's an enormous amount of silly nonsense in the beliefs of the Mormon religion. For example, some people may not be aware of the reasons why the church takes such an interest in genealogy. That's because in the religion, one's ancestors can be inducted into the church (as I've heard it, if you spiritually commune with them and ask for their permission )

Because, among many reasons, as many recent events have shown including particularly the Blackberry case that may end up shutting down RIM, it is unduly difficult to know when you're violating a software patent. Also, many such patents are unreasonably broad or trivial or represent (often obvious) prior art. As such they are non-objective. By contrast it is very easy to detect copyright violations of copyrighted source or object code. That's because there's a clear and objective definition of what is copyrighted. Also, software patents cover much of what could be dubbed abstract ideas or mathematical algorithms. So, to contrast the two: imagine that Ayn Rand could have (or wanted to, which I'm sure she didn't) patented the ideas of Objectivism. That would cover any instantiation of rational thought. Clearly that is absurdly broad, even though, as a whole, Objectivism is indeed novel and non-obvious. But she does have copyright protection on the actual words that she wrote to explicate Objectivism, and it is easy to detect violations of that copyright. That's an illustration of the difference. Historically, patents cover particular creative arrangements of mechanical devices (extended to other realms later on, such as chemistry). You might be able to patent a particular kind of vehicle that uses 3 wheels in a certain non-obvious configuration legitimately, but not the wheel itself, which is obvious and unavoidable, or the idea of vehicle. Patenting software is pretty much akin to patenting an abstract idea such as the wheel or the concept of vehicle, and I think that's where the basic idea of software patents is flawed. A *particular* instantiation of an algorithm is exactly a piece of computer code, and that ought to be covered by copyright law.

Something like a recipe is covered by patent law, potentially. There are unfortunate gray areas now that undercut IP protection (patents covering software that should be covered by copyright, is one huge example), but the general idea is sound - copyright for protecting specific artistic (literary, musical, sculptural, etc.) expressions, and patents for protecting "utilitarian" expressions of invention (hence the term utility patents). Trademarks are a kind of in-between - a specific artistic rendering of a company's mark, used to identify and sell goods.

Only if the West (basically, the U.S. and to a degree, Britain) keeps playing footsy with these people rather than decimating them ala WW2, for which the capability exists in spades. It would not have taken many thermonuclear explosions over key Islamic theocracy targets to stop them forever. The scenario is the U.S. announcing on 9/12/01: "This is the price you pay for attacking us (satellite images of Tehran, Riyadh, Mecca, Islamabad, Damascus, and various parts of Afghanistan, converted into a cloud of radioactive plasma). We have 5,990 thermonuclear warheads left - go ahead and make our day. Additionally, American troops have now secured all Middle Eastern oil fields, and the U.S. now declares them the property of the U.S. government, to be auctioned off to Western oil companies. Any further terrorist or warlike actions against the U.S. will be treated with the total annihilation of the countries sponsoring them." That's if the any of the politicians today had 1/10 of the sense of the men in 1945. A man in body armor, bristling with weapons capable of killing all of his enemies, but unwilling to use them, is worse off than a practically naked savage with a bow and arrow who has no qualms about using it.

Well, New York City is chock full of lefty liberals, and the city is hardly at the forefront of the view that the Islamic terrorists should be erased from the earth, despite being the primary victim of 9/11 - so if that's your destination, you needn't worry.

Congratulations. Have you read any Ayn Rand yet? I've been a programmer (in America) for going on 30 years and do not have a degree. The issue seldom arises, and when it does, it's in the context of the most bureaucratic organizations: government, and very large corporations. Bureaucracies don't have thinking individuals who can assess the real nature of a potential employee, so they default to a checklist of requirements. That said, a degree could still benefit you, particularly if you want to do anything in a scientific field, where a degree is basically mandantory. I suggest that it be in an area that you truly like and getting the crap courses (e.g. modern humanities) out of the way as soon as possible. Money, it all depends. Expect less at first, particularly as an immigrant. Don't forget that in America, and some parts of Europe, you can be more entrepeneurial than you could be in your native country - you can try being in business for yourself, or starting one with competent friends.

But replace that with "Doctors on strike against socialized medicine" and would it be "socially acceptable"?

I wouldn't say they are unconditionally immoral but I share Sebastian's antipathy towards tattoos, especially if you concretize the issue by looking at their use in current culture. Tattoos are designed to be permanent fixtures on your skin. That means, barring painful, expensive, and not really satisfactory (scarring is left, apparently) laser removal, that somebody is deciding on that for the rest of entire lives - no matter what their future thoughts or feelings may be about it. There is only a finite amount of skin as well. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that most of these tattoos are done without any such regard for the future or their actual aesthetic appeal. Most of them are done because it's *fashionable* among a certain young crowd today. But clothing, if one is into that kind of fashion, can be easily changed and discarded. Who would decide that a particular piece of jewelry or clothing is going to suit them for the next 50 years? If you put it that way, almost nobody. But then they think nothing of a permanent fixture on their body that represents a similar fashion - a particular design in a particular place on their body at a particular point in time, but with permanent consequences. Personally I think *for the most part* that tattoos are indicative of a shallow, range of the moment disregard for the future. On the other hand, if one is really fully aware of the future consequences, there might be a rational justification for one. It might make sense for somebody to have one to signify, say, their military service, after being in a life threatening battle that they wish to remember and commemorate for the rest of their lives. That at least would be a seriously considered reason with a rationale for lifelong permanence - a statement to the effect: This event has touched me permanently inside, and I want to express that visually in an externally perceivable way.

I was going to avoid commenting on this but one thing seems starkly obvious to me in your situation - you keep naming your hopeless house as a central issue. Well, if the property values keep going up, that's either a problem for you, or a good thing - if you just sell the land and use the money to deal with other problems. Move into an apartment. Let somebody else knock down the piece of crap and build something nice on it, and then you can move on to deal with other issues. Let somebody else do the maintainance (apartment). Let somebody else deal with the taxes (accountant). Focus on the important stuff and stop wasting time on things you couldn't change in your lifetime if you were Bill Gates, much less in your situation. After a time it just becomes an excuse to feel like a victim and do nothing - it sounds to me.

I wouldn't put it that way. It doesn't really make sense to divorce the rest of the context from that one event. It is the fact of their entrapment in a dictatorship that sets the stage for the disintegration to follow. In a free or semi-free society, both Kira and Leo could pursue their values and their love and no such situation would arise. Also, it is clear that Leo is a very proud man - as he exists qua Leo, and not the degraded entity that he becomes, it is within his character that he would rather die than to see Kira sleep with Andrei in order to get money for him to have a chance to live. And it is consistent with Kira's character that she knows that, and in fact would be disappointed in Leo if he did not feel that way. But in the emergency situation in which they exist, she chooses to do so and to personally accept the consequences in order to save one of her highest values. Bear in mind as well that Andrei is not really a terrible villain. She doesn't "sell herself" randomly - Andrei is portrayed as an essentially honorable man with terribly mistaken ideas, who commits suicide once he realizes how wrong he was and the damage he's helped to create - one more casualty of communism.

I tried my hand at writing SF a (very) long time ago and submitted a few stories to Isaac Asimov's SF Mag, when George Scithers was the editor. I actually received a specific typewritten postcard rejecting the first submission, but only printed standard rejection slips after that. I would strongly suggest that you focus on writing short stories rather than something as long as a novel or novelette. Short-shorts would be even better (i.e., say, 1-4 pages long). There are arguments that it's actually more productive and challenging to write a good short story than a novel. I think you are much more likely to get feedback from editors or professional writers if your first stories are short enough to read in a reasonable time. As you note, they are busy people, and reading/commenting on a few pages is a lot faster than wading through 100 pages. It's probable that something of that size from an unproven writer will not even be read past the first few pages anyway, once a decision is made to reject it.

I think it's straightforward - Kira knows that Leo will die unless he goes south, and "failure is not an option". If she tells him that the money came from Andrei, he'll reject it, and reject her. Then he'll die. The context to keep in mind here is that Kira and Leo's lives are in a continuous state of emergency, not a normal state of being. Every second of their existence is at the mercy and whim of brutes with guns who have annihilated the country and taken them prisoners. They are effectively living in a giant prison run by evil men. That's the entire point of the story - no level of effort could make such conditions livable to human beings such as Kira and Leo. Kira does survive intact, psychologically, until the end - Leo is saved bodily but dies psychologically. So, in the end, they are both gone. The only option for life was to escape. You might wonder why the end is such a downer. As I recall, Ayn Rand said (my paraphrasing) that Kira has to die attempting to escape because literarily it represents the impossibility of most Russians to escape that hell, in that time. In fact she spent years trying to extract her family from Russia, without success, and her parents died in WW2. She found out later that her sister had survived, but she, like Leo, had long ago lost herself, and was an embittered Soviet citizen who hated America - she visited New York City with A.R.'s help, but chose to return to Russia.

Any socialist paradise will eventually get exactly what it deserves: national collapse. Especially when there are better alternatives that can hasten its demise.

Your evidence for this is the evolution of predominantly "handsome" men over the past few hundred thousand years...? It's not clear to me why you're selecting *males* in terms of "attractiveness", and it is also not clear in what sense you are using the term, which seems ambiguous in your context. What makes a man attractive to a woman, and what makes a woman attractive to a man, are not symmetrical. Beautiful appearance (of a woman) counts for far more to men, statistically, and statistically, there are many more beautiful women than "beautiful" men. Furthermore, this *is* the result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution already. Further evidence of the asymmetry is provided by the statistical distribution of nude/porn photography. The vast majority of such images are focused on females, and the proportion that are males are usually targeted at gays.