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Tom Hall

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Everything posted by Tom Hall

  1. It works for me without any non-standard compatibility settings (I upgraded from 8 to 10) , but I have to re-enter the registration key nearly every time I use it.
  2. I'm down in Colorado Springs.
  3. Let's assume we have a shutdown. How can we take advantage of it ? Can we make it permanent ??
  4. So the Republican-run House sent a funding bill to the Democrat-run Senate that omits support for Obamacare, and the Senate sent it back without any other proposals than adding back in funding for Obamacare, threatening a government shut-down if a funding bill isn't passed. How exactly does this make the Republicans "anarcho-capitalists", "extremists", "arsonists", or "terrorists" ? Sounds like the other way around to me.
  5. Well, after hearing "the rest of the story", I'm sadly disappointed. It sounded like a great idea, but ended up just being a lot of adolescent romance :-(
  6. I haven't seen the movie yet but I'm listening to the audio book and so far I'm really enjoying this novel. The "souls" remind me somewhat of the "Goa'uld" of Stargate, but instead of being megalomaniacs, they're "altruists" of the modern-liberal types, taking blatantly immoral actions in the name of "the greater good". There's a bunch of "green" propaganda, but I guess that's to be expected these days.
  7. I've also been looking for this kind of information. James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics has some new insights taken from Rand's as-yet unpublished journals. There's not a lot, but there are a few. I would also recommend Harry Binswanger's course on Psycho-Epistemology. His Emotions course is probably good, too, but I haven't heard it yet.
  8. There have been more showings added at atlasshruggeddocumentary.com It's playing in Austin TX next week, 1/28/2012. I'm kind of surprised to see ARI say "Less a conventional work of fiction than a philosophical manifesto in the form of a romantic novel"; which seems to downplay it's excellence as a novel.
  9. I would recommend John Lewis' Early Greek Lawgivers I would also appreciate it if someone would objectively review "The Enterprise of Law" by Bruce Benson. This isn't a "good" book - it's an unknown book (to me at least). I've heard that it's about anarcho-capitalism and since I'm kind of short on reading time these days, I don't want to squander it on something silly. But I have also heard that it has some good historical information about an effective form of government ("tens, hundreds, thousands") that has existed in history but isn't well documented elsewhere.
  10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5AKsXVmS3E Here were Monckton’s closing remarks, as dictated from my audio recording: At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it. I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement. How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it. [laughter] And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it. So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not. But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire – it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it. So I end by saying to you the words that Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow: Sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! I wouldn't exactly recommend the source, but that's not really the point: http://www.infowars.com/obama-poised-to-ce...s-british-lord/
  11. In Ayn Rand Answers, page 55, Rand talks about whether it would be appropriate today for producers to "shrug" as in the novel. She says and goes on to give some good advice about how one needs to reject today's dominant philosophy. I wonder if we could expand this topic beyond economic sanction, and think of ways to avoid more subtle and common forms of it ?
  12. I haven't read the book so I don't know. The post about the book describes some benefits people claim to gain from nudity which was kind of the original question. I came across the study while looking for the first one, and Maximus said the first one sounded like "hooey", so I thought I'd post a link to the study to show that there's some evidence for the claims. I haven't read the study carefully, but it seems to study how people feel about their bodies and attitudes that pertain more to men than women, older to younger, etc. It has several conclusions, but the one I quoted was the relevant one. Peikoff talks about this some in his Q&A collection "Love, Sex and Romance". My interpretation of what he says is that casual nudity has the harmful effect of desensitizing one to nudity, making it less of a "special occasion". This is harmful because having nudity be special is an important part of the value of sex. But if someone has psychological issues I can see how it might be worth it to them to risk reducing their enjoyment of sex if it improves their general sense of well being.
  13. Here's an answer I found at this web site
  14. The "Bioshock" video games are full of warped references to Ayn Rand.
  15. http://developers.facebook.com/get_started.php?tab=tutorial
  16. On the topic of Facebook Activism: I almost accepted some virtual plants from people on Facebook. I looked into it a bit and found that if I accepted those, I'd be agreeing to a connection of a Facebook "application" to my account. This "application" is called "(Lil) Green Patch" and somehow raises money to "save the Rainforests" and fight "global warming". http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7629233915 I was at first annoyed by this, it reminded me of the flowers that the Hare Krishna's used to give people at airports. But then I started to wonder - could we set up something like this for Objectivism ? Give people virtual books and somehow raise money for, say, the Ayn Rand Institute ? Does anyone know how to do this ? It's much better for people to deliberately choose to support Objectivism, not to support it accidentally by accepting a virtual gift from a friend. But this would help to 'spread the word'.
  17. I liked your movie - quite funny and well done (considering the budget). I'm going to try to get my credit union friends to watch it. As far as anti-capitalist propaganda - hardly. Look at some of the credit union ads on TV if you want examples of that. You didn't say "credit unions want to help you - banks want to make a profit off you". (Of course, the more a bank helps you, the more business they get and the more profit they make). I suppose it's a little misleading to say that non-profit means lower interest on loans and higher returns on investments, but its not necessarily false; it depends on how it's done. Good luck - I hope you win !
  18. In a sense I paid more than that, since I attended the course at OCON 2006. I found it interesting to see how much of an influence Quine is on modern scientific thought, and I think Bayer does a very good job of presenting the information. I'd have to review my notes for the details, but I do recall that Quine's theory of how we acquire (more like create in his theory) scientific knowledge is basically representationalist and retains the Kantian premise that our minds can not know reality. I'd recommend this course as a good overview of Quine; if there's a campus club near you, they may have a copy you could borrow.
  19. This is pretty amazing; I thought it was such a great article that I wanted to come here and recommend that people read it. I thought it was refreshingly illuminating the way Biddle lays down the premise "What one advocates in the realm of political philosophy depends on what one regards as true in the realm of moral philosophy.", then proceeds to give examples in the areas of economic controls, health care, and national defense, and uses these to both demonstrate this premise and show that the two candidates are fundamentally indistinguishable.
  20. Tom Hall

    The Secret

    Rand's article The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made actually answers this question; for example: So the harm is primarily to the person himself who adopts a viewpoint based on the Primacy of Consciousness. The harm to me would be if I interacted with this person and by adopting this viewpoint they became a less valuable trading partner due to an increase in "the nagging uncertainty, the quiet hopelessness, the gray despair of their daily inner state".
  21. Tom Hall

    The Secret

    I agree - it's basically primacy of consciousness (POC). I think a lot of the advice is good, such as don't focus obsessively on the outcomes you fear or want to avoid, and have confidence that you can succeed in achieving your goals. I particularly like the part where they say there's no big blackboard in the sky that has your life's purpose written on it; that it's up to you. But the metaphysics is POC. It seems to me what actually happens is that by having clear goals, confidence in their achievement, and not fretting about them, you allow your subconscious to work more smoothly, make connections and present them to your conscious mind - things you'd miss if you were too busy worrying. (I just noticed I'm repeating what Luke wrote) If someone isn't interested in learning and adopting a fully consistent philosophy, what would be the harm in their adopting this viewpoint ? Couldn't they correct their understanding later if/when they decided to get more philosophical ?
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