MisterSwig

There is no your way or your terms anymore. That potential disappeared, I'm guessing, a decade or so ago--certainly since the time your mother started asking. Just tell her what she probably already knows, and deal with the consequences. I don't recommend bringing up your resentment of her past behavior or trying to make her feel worse than she already does. Focus on her current behavior and current beliefs. And don't accuse her of trying to control you. She spent her life trying to raise you and guide you as a kid. It's in her nature now. Besides, my guess is that she's just trying to understand you better, because she's concerned about you. Are you afraid that she'll disown you?

I watch a lot of movies. Unmistakably, supernaturalism has dominated cinema for nearly two decades now. Since 2001, each year's top-grossing movie concerned main characters or worlds with supernatural powers (2008's The Dark Knight being the only exception). Wizards in the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises; Jedi knights in the new Star Wars trilogies; and teams of superheroes in the Avengers series; these characters, along with many other magical beings, have absolutely ruled theater screens. Of the top ten franchises in recent film history, eight are explicitly supernatural. Only James Bond and The Fast and the Furious represent a real world. Why is supernaturalism growing so rapidly in popularity?
In the '80s and '90s, the top-grossing movies each year were usually set in realistic (Top Gun, Fatal Attraction, Rain Man, Titanic) or scientifically advanced future worlds (Back to the Future, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park). Only a few (Star Wars, Ghost, Aladdin) had strong supernatural elements. But the switch to supernaturalism came rather abruptly in 2001, and hasn't abated yet. Could this have something to do with 9/11? Was there a national re-orientation away from the real world after those planes brought down the Twin Towers? Or was Hollywood simply headed in this cinematic direction due to other factors?

Maybe the problem is that this should be in Member Writing. My impression is that Misc Topics is for single topics that otherwise don't have an appropriate forum.
While I'm here, I'll suggest adding a couple lines of description or opinion with each forum post. This might help stimulate interest or debate. Just posting a link potentially kills a thread later on, if the link goes dead. Having some substance in the post itself will keep the thread viable, even if the blog disappears.

As far as I've seen, most atheists hate on philosophy, and are at best reactionary without standing for anything. The term atheist is pretty empty of meaning. In a comparative discussion, it is useful to point out someone as an atheist, but it is not substantive. Agnostic is a little more substantive, because it is something like an epistemelogical position. These words aren't going to tell anyone anything useful really.
If you really want to get what he's saying, focus on scientism. Science is prioritized, philosophy viewed as subjective opinion. This is another example of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROe28Ma_tYM
So yeah, it's not surprising that science minded people would make bad philosophical arguments (while somehow being completely ignorant of the fact that the positions they hold are philosophical).

NDT and the value of philosophy
Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at CUNY who also has a PhD in biology.

I don't know about "hopelessly," but I think your concept of time is flawed. Before getting into it, maybe you could address Peikoff's view in the Lexicon entry. I note that you say time is not a measurement, whereas Peikoff has it as the genus of the definition.

It seems that your premise is also your purpose. Except that a few concepts have been corrupted in the process. "A state of full, conscious awareness" has become "pure consciousness." And "the fullest perception of reality" has become "the fundamentals of reality."
This is what tends to happen with people who mistake virtue for value, action for object. You make life about the pursuit, and so your goal must always be vague and unattainable, because if you actually achieved it, your life would be over. You would have nothing left to achieve, except a "shallow and meaningless existence."  

I am largely agreed, except for "the process is not where happiness comes. It comes at the end of the process". Only for starters, aren't there innumerable values one finds/makes/"achieves" along the way? You are developing your conceptual knowledge base, your skills, your virtues (e.g. self-esteem) and discovering the values in certain others, and more. I think it's important to not adopt the mindset that - I will be happy when I have it all completed. One can learn to take pleasure and happiness from the - perhaps - lesser value-achievements gained in the shorter-term, while not losing sight of the major one/s.

But God is your starting point. You defined him as having a power "above nature." Then you claim that such power violates a law of nature. Yet it's not part of nature. It's above nature, by definition. It's an ability of God. So you're contradicting your own starting point.
Yes, that was the implication of my scare quotes around "prove."
Except that you have not defined those animals as having supernatural chess-playing powers.
You're presenting a hypothetical of water turning into wine. In such a supernatural scenario, the cause would be a supernatural force, i.e., God. It doesn't make sense to set up the supernatural event and then claim it can't happen because it's not natural. You're not dealing with a natural event to begin with.
Real water doesn't turn into ice on its own, just like the hypothetical water couldn't turn into wine on its own. Something else must force them to change. Real water turns to ice because of a natural reaction to temperature, which is caused by various environmental factors. The hypothetical water turns to wine because of a supernatural reaction to God's power of miracles. You can't grant God a nature-violating power and then complain that he's violating the nature of water. It's inconsistent.     

I'll respect your holding off going into a full blown exploration.
So I'll only remind you of this:  Whenever you get around to it, whatever your conception of mental things, which consist of themselves, and do not have physical "components", recall that they are causally and necessarily linked to the natural world - their very existence, and their nature,  i.e. their identity, is wholly dependent upon the natural world.  Whatever concept you come up for mental things, it must be consistent with what we know about mental things' dependence upon the existence of a brain and the brain's function and configuration, as when either of these is interfered with or destroyed so also are mental things interfered with or destroyed.  Moreover, mental things do not and cannot exist in any way independently of a functioning brain, and as such mental things exhibit a one way absolute metaphysical dependence upon the configuration and functioning of a natural material system. 
This undeniable one way absolute dependence has metaphysical philosophical consequences which should not be ignored during the full blown exploration.
Good luck!

If a figurative or metaphorical explanation is presented as literal truth, I think that can be disastrous, on par with religious myths that people faithfully believe. But metaphor presented as such can be useful in understanding difficult concepts.
Also, I considered arguing that "gravity thread" is an anti-concept, until I realized what you were doing and that there was no real epistemological issue to fix. Even if there were, it is risky to begin by accusing someone of rationalism. I prefer addressing the cause of the conceptual error, which is the original misidentification of the existent in question.

To say something is possible means that you have some evidence for its existence. I don't see any evidence for gravity threads. There is clear observational evidence of various individual falling objects creating parabolic paths through the air. And the fact that everything free falls back to Earth suggests a force coming from the Earth. But where is the evidence that Earth creates gravity threads? When I asked about this, you said it hasn't been discovered how Earth creates them, but we know about them because of the way things move. Isn't this arbitrary? Why not imagine projectile elves that live in every object and guide it according to elven magic, which happens to make parabolas that fit with the math? That seems just as possible as gravity threads which mysteriously emerge from the Earth.   

To say something is possible means that you have some evidence for its existence. I don't see any evidence for gravity threads. There is clear observational evidence of various individual falling objects creating parabolic paths through the air. And the fact that everything free falls back to Earth suggests a force coming from the Earth. But where is the evidence that Earth creates gravity threads? When I asked about this, you said it hasn't been discovered how Earth creates them, but we know about them because of the way things move. Isn't this arbitrary? Why not imagine projectile elves that live in every object and guide it according to elven magic, which happens to make parabolas that fit with the math? That seems just as possible as gravity threads which mysteriously emerge from the Earth.   

The math leads to Galileo's experiments with projectile motion, right? The parabola is therefore a relational existent between the object and its trajectory. A gravity thread represents the reification of a relational existent that has been separated from its object. Without the cannonball flying through the air, there is no objective basis for the parabola's existence.

A great mind once said: "Things having possible attributes or properties can always be mentally inverted with a background of attribute or property having a propensity to manifest as a thing."

I'll begin with some specific items:
1. I am puzzled by the use of "infinite" to describe the threads. Do you mean they are "without a limit" or "impossible to count"? If they have a limit, perhaps using "innumerable" in the beginning would help. I notice you used that adjective in the end.
2. Why do gravity threads emerge from points in space? What causes them to emerge and how? You say Earth creates them, but how?
3. How does an object attach to a gravity thread? What does "attach" mean here?
4. When an object shifts from one thread to another, what is its thread status while in transition? Is it attached to a thread even while shifting from one to the other?
5. You say that "absent other influence" an object is attached to its "perfect gravity thread." But isn't an object always influenced by Earth's atmosphere, unless you place it in a vacuum? So, under normal circumstances, would the object ever be attached to its perfect gravity thread?
More generally, when I think of gravity, I think of Isaac Newton. What do you think he got wrong, if anything?

The linked page has a Libraries button. When I clicked it, the title wasn't auto-fed to the new page. However, entering the title and clicking Find a Library gives search results as a list of titles. Clicking on a title there may help in locating a copy of the book in a library not too far away.
A good review of the book is here.
 

In general, we know patterns of inference as codifications of regularly successful mental policies. In particular, we know logically valid inference patterns as means to certain conclusions, the denial of which results in contradiction. But seeing as conceptual knowledge and method are indivisible, valid forms of inference are less what we may know than that by which we know (conceptually). The knowing of logic and of basic inference patterns are in large part the faculty of knowledge turning back in on itself, and stating the implicit causal relations by which one knows as explicit propositional forms or rules for one to know.
Modus ponens is an explicit statement of the indivisibility of cause and effect, a principle implicit in every mental consequence as caused by the apprehension of some object of consciousness. "p therefore q" underscores the premise behind all valuation and recognition, for it is in recognizing the necessary connection between q and its cause that motivation may find real purchase.

One most definitely cannot extrapolate that Rand would be against full-term abortions, when ...
the quote above has no such implication; and, she clearly said otherwise Not that it matters that much, but just want to set that record straight

This is backwards. First you need philosophical clarity regarding national borders, then you can apply that knowledge to practical problems related to the war on drugs or the welfare state.
I agree in principle, and, look, we didn't even have to solve the drug war first. Though we might disagree on what qualifies as "a very real threat to individual rights." For example, you don't mention anti-individual rights ideologies, like socialism. Binswanger has argued against controlling for political ideology at the border. I disagree and have debated the point at length on the "Immigration Restrictions" thread.
http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?/topic/31452-immigration-restrictions/

I rented First Man and thought it was very good. Its story is told from the perspective of Neil Armstrong and the personal challenges he faced in order to become the first human being on the moon. The style tries to blend both the emotional and rational aspects to his journey. It does a good job at that and really puts you into the boots of this amazing character as he struggles with his daughter's death, the fear of dying, and all the technical things he must figure out in the spaceships he controls. The tone is serious and deliberate, backdropped by the potential for chaos and catastrophe. The film looks great. The effects seem like they belong in every scene and don't distract from the suspension of disbelief. Nothing really popped out at me to criticize, except a minor impatience with some slow parts.
The movie really takes Armstrong's famous words to heart. It's about one man representing mankind's desire to reach the moon. It's an epic, hero's journey. But a real hero's journey.
This is another film from director Damien Chazelle, who also did Whiplash, one of Peikoff's favorite movies, which I thought was excellent as well. Chazelle is apparently working on a TV series now. I hope it's as good as his movies so far.

Potential is identity viewed from epistemological perspective, a mind with memory and imagination.   All that exists are particulars, doing particular definite things in accordance with their identities.   It takes imagination or memory to divert the mind's attention away from what the object of the mind's attention is doing right this moment.  
'Potential energy' is a concept taught in elementary physics classes.  Pendulum motion is described using the principle of conservation of energy such that the sum of the pendulums kinetic energy of motion and its potential energy of position must remain constant (neglecting friction for the moment).  Here the so-called potential energy is real and actual because the pendulum is a real and actual existent with a real and actual position within a gravity field at every instant.   One can avoid the potential confusion of thinking of potentials as real because it appears in an equation describing the pendulum's motion by using the term 'energy of position' instead.   
This kind of statement "a sea battle either will happen tomorrow or not happen tomorrow" is formally true because the alternatives are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, but it does not constitute knowledge and cannot be categorized as a fact because it does not predicate anything.  (It predicates two perfect contradictories which cancel to net zero predication.)  The grammar of the statement is correct, the logic of the posited alternatives is flawless, yet it remains entirely an exercise in method.  It is an unfalsifiable statement of the kind Popper scorned.  The statement employs the useful and valid concept of "tomorrow", but that does not transform the referent of "tomorrow" from an epistemological construct (a 'concept of method' in Objectivist jargon) into an existential fact.
Tree rings exist in the present as an effect with a cause in the past.  The cause existed, then the effect existed.  The present existence of the effect does not require the present existence of the cause.
Going back to your argument:
No beginning and no end can still be literally true if a finite Universe had some kind of strange asymptotic boundary conditions governing time.  For example, space and time are related such that a very high mass density implies a very high space time curvature such that time slows to a crawl relative to a lesser curvature. The Big Bang would have played out very slowly, and extrapolating backward in time beyond the Big Bang requires crossing an inflection point where time would not pass at all.   A remote future in which all matter had entered black holes and then been re-radiated as Hawking radiation until all the black holes were gone would be a perfectly static universe in which time had no meaning.

It was in the Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy to be found:
The climax of the "miraculous" view of existence is represented by those existentialists who echo Heidegger, demanding: "Why is there any being at all and not rather nothing?"—i.e., why does existence exist? This is the projection of a zero as an alternative to existence, with the demand that one explain why existence exists and not the zero.
Granted the claim of the "miraculous" view is not stated explicitly in your lines leading up to it, but Heidegger's demand resonates in the cited portion. The denial that it is "NOT Reification of the Zero" brushes aside just 'what' is the alternative to existence.
 

There are plenty of good books on how the Nazis gained power, including Ominous Parallels. Street-brawling with communists is not how they took power. That's partly how they became more popular. But generally people loved Hitler's philosophy. They voted for the Nazis, made them the dominant party in the Reichstag. They passed the Enabling Act, giving Hitler dictatorial powers. Citizens were free to leave the country up until WW2. Very few left. In the end, Hitler didn't need to use violence. He was a brilliant speaker and wooed the masses.

There might be an argument for restricting immigration based on individual IQ, but not racial IQ. In the future, if we discover that a certain IQ is necessary to understand the political principles of a nation, then perhaps those with insufficient IQ should not be made citizens. (We already kind of do this with a citizenship test.) Also I could concoct emergency situations in which an IQ policy might be of critical importance. For example, if the survival of the country depended on genius-level problem-solving during a war or other crisis, then priority for citizenship should be given to genius-level immigrants.