dream_weaver

Danzas Argentinas 
Song by Alberto Ginastera

This is completely ridiculous and the clown is you, as it will result from the following.
0. The FACTS: it seems, as of today, that Ukraine was trying to knock down a Russian missile, but the Ukrainian anti-missile fell a few km inside the Polish border and killed two persons.
The Russian Missile was probably directed at Lviv, some dozen of km from the Polish border, and was part of the Russian campaign of destroying mostly civilian energy infrastructure before the approaching winter. This is arguably a war crime. The aim of this campaign was publicly admitted by Russia’s military
1. Looking retrospectively, it was a serious PR blunder; besides, no Zelensky’s words are capable of making NATO invoke Article 5 and possibly start WWIII
2. WW3 would not be in Zelensky’s interest at all, because Ukraine would be the first victim; his interest would be in getting more, and more performing weapons. And also to convince NATO of the obvious: that Russian military logistics inside Russia is fair game for Ukraine.
3. During this incident USA and NATO were from the beginning extremely prudent; this alone refutes all claims that USA/NATO looks for an excuse to attack Russia.
4. In a war shit happens, and the principal responsibility lies on the aggressor – unless there is proof that the other party targeted civilians. 
Now, who is the clown?
No, I do NOT take back my support for Ukraine just because of someone’s blunder: my support is much more principled than that.

What is behind the conspiracy of conspiracies?
Who or what conspires to cause so many seemingly normal people to distrust power, distrust government, distrust institutions and organizations?  IS there some nefarious source of the multiple allegations against so many of the trusted and established authorities of the world?  Is it because some teenage archetype of the psyche wants a bad orange man to write mean tweets?  Is it because of patriarchal racism or sexism? Is it Chinese disinformation or Russian mind control?  Why so much push back against...
what is the pushback against?  on a wide integration .. some of these things are just like the others... but what is the common thread.. what is the one in the many?  Its like they are resisting being herded.
Why wont the herd be herded?  it's almost like... they are rebelling against being herded at all?  Like they are not accepting coercion?  They want to decide for themselves and act independently of our great establishment Parents ... the Global arisen God...
 
The conspiracy behind all conspiracies is a deep sense of individual freedom...
and it just
wont
die.
 
Rationalize that.
 

Yes, it works !!!
Thank you very much, Greg !

Kalandra - Brave New World (Lyric Video)
 

Jacob, is the Nitin Desai of the Facebook link the same person written about here?
I like the priority he gives to federal budgets getting out of the red, as well as his not neglecting the deficit spending by either the Left welfare boosters and the Right war boosters (and delighted I'm not the only one who remembers VP Cheney's statement to G.W. Bush that Reagan had shown that deficits don't matter).
The author Desai at his FB page takes for granted that the American Founding Fathers knew what was capitalism and approved of it. I think that moves too fast. From the fact that WE know private property and freedom leads to capitalism it does not follow that because the FF supported private property and freedom, they would have supported what we call laissez-faire capitalism. Historical developments should not, I think, be seen as driven by logical implications, even when the logic is not the Hegelian silliness. Consider.
I appreciate he author's holding high religious tolerance and the Enlightenment. 
Greek states became more democratic during the era of classical efflorescence. I am not aware of any scholarship showing that democracy brought on the fall of classical Greece.*
A good book on the long history culminating in the concept of individual rights protected in the US constitution is:

(Click on image for ease of reading.)
It is not illegal in the US to refer to the retarded as "retarded." In the US, also, there are not any laws against hate speech. As for the rules on this forum, hate speech might be treading near the cliff, but I doubt writing "retarded person" is precarious with the rules.
When you wrote "illiterate", did you mean literally that they did not learn to read or that they learned to read, but choose not to read, or that they read only junk, or that any reading they do conveying ideas, they do not learn from such reading?
 
 

The reason is being investigated with Invision. 
Editing a post after it has been submitted appears to be the contributing factor.

Frederick Cookinham has given the following notice on Facebook today: 
I just got an email with some sad news. My friend Anne C. Heller has died of cancer at 71. She was the author of AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE (2009), the second biography of Rand after THE PASSION OF AYN RAND (1986), by Barbara Branden. The email came from Anne's husband, David De Weese.   I first met Anne in 2003. She came to one of my Ayn Rand-themed walking tours. She said that she was thinking of writing a biography of Rand; she had not made up her mind. She took all five of my Rand tours, and we had a lot of fun for the next six years, sharing information on Rand. She said when we met that she did not know much about Rand. I said that this was a good thing. Barbara's strength was also her weakness as a biographer: she had been close to Rand for 18 years, and then had a rather explosive parting of the ways. So you couldn't beat Barbara for access and knowledge of her subject, but she had her own agenda. She was too close to her subject. Anne would be coming to the subject with a fresh pair of eyes, as we proofreaders say. No ax of her own to grind. In 2009, Anne published a fair and objective biography. I like to say that in a world of Rand idolators and Rand bashers, some of us aspire to be Rand scholars, and present the public with accurate and complete information on the life and thought of a world-famous writer.   Anne next wrote a biography called HANNAH ARENDT: A LIFE IN DARK TIMES. I heard Anne being interviewed on the radio about her new book. The interviewer said that Rand and Arendt had nothing in common. Anne set him straight. Rand and Arendt were both world-famous twentieth century Jewish women writers. They both came to America as European refugees from totalitarianism.

There's evidence that I've seen but don't have. I can't present it to you because I don't have it anymore, but there are sources that keep producing more, and it's consistent with information going back decades. I have a long memory.
I actually get frustrated with news websites that present useful information (often with quotes, pictures, etc.) only for it to "scroll off the screen" in a day or two.
Like the time when Nancy Pelosi claimed that her house was vandalized, there was a picture of something spray-painted on her garage door, but looking at the picture you could see that the spray-paint mysteriously stopped at the exact edge of the door and did not intrude onto the brick next to the door, where it would have been much harder to clean off. It was as if someone used a board or something to protect the brick from the spray-paint. Why would real vandals be so kind? Unfortunately I doubt if I could find that article or that picture today. It's not like Google would be of any use, because of their own political leanings.
Sometimes I "print to PDF" but often I don't, there is just too much.
Occasionally these sources remind me of something they said six months ago, and I'm like, hey, I remember that! That wouldn't mean anything to somebody who didn't see it the first time, though.
I think a lot of the people here who agree with me know what I am talking about, though.
By contrast, certain people in power would like to suppress information that is inconvenient to them. They create "disinformation boards" and such to do it officially, too. That's a good reason not to trust them. As I've indicated before, I don't trust that general approach to knowledge.
I trust reality, and the approach of starting with reality, and following it wherever it leads -- not ignoring it or suppressing it, either because it's inconvenient or for any other reason.
Reality still exists even if you do ignore it, and ultimately it can't be suppressed.
There is more than one Western philosophy and some value reality and some don't. (Also, there are degrees of valuing reality, and there are some philosophies that value it different amounts in different contexts.) In that sense, we might want to choose carefully which Western values are worth defending. I would generally side with Ayn Rand.

Famine and war versus more mean tweets.   I'd pick the tweets every time.  Trump was the only president in decades to have not started a new war or military intervention.  Of course that was the main reason he had to go.

The focus is still that the concern is placed on the CoViD-19 virus and what it is reported to be doing to others.
The fuel, you say, is provided by people, . . . i.e., by others . . . not taking the CoViD-19 viral aspect seriously. 
Altruism is Other-ism. 
Even in the response to the altruistic element, the claim is that it is by people . . . i.e., others . . . not knowing how to react to the altruistic element in the response. 
I read, recently, that the media may not be able to tell people what to think, yet have a great deal of influence on what people think about. 
Are you reading/hearing stories about the freedom and liberty to try preventative approaches such as Vitamin D might offer? Or are the stories of late a variation on the trolly car problem of who should the first thousand doses of vaccine be allocated to today, and in which hands should the divining rod be placed tomorrow?
What of the freedom and liberty to volunteer to take a potential treatment? Or is the focus, in such matters, on the need to protect foolish irrationality from buying snake-oil, or a company from destroying its reputation by premature marketing of a product. 
Are businesses being offered the freedom and liberty to seek the advice of competent experts to advise them how to provide a safe environment for their customers, the same customers that trust the judgment of the business to provide them with the quality of merchandise for the prices they are willing to pay? Or are government servants to be elevated to positions of authority over arts and sciences they have never studied, to choose which 'expert(s)' should be 'listened' to (i.e., obeyed.) . . . Should this be done at the freedom and liberty of the individual level? Or should it be delegated to a city level? Or should it be established at a township, parish, or county level? Or at a state or a national level?

Well Done!
Ken Danagger asks Dagny Taggart:
Dr. Chris Sciabarra is ending his long labor of love The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He produced the journal for 22 years, which means a total of 44 issues of the journal. I list here some tidbit teasers from the first 10 years of the journal.
 
V1N1
“But something changes. At the end of the book, Roark is no longer a seemingly isolated young man, alone with his thoughts in the depths of the countryside. He is just as individual as he was at the beginning, but now he stands at the heart of his country’s economic life, building its most conspicuous symbol, with the glad permission of his fellow citizens. Of the many inversions of perspective and expectation that are suggested by Roark’s dive into the sky, this is one of the most remarkable.”
–Stephen Cox
 
V1N2
“Although both Andrei and Wynand are men guilty of their own tragedy, Rand presents their falls more as the logical outcome of their mistakes than as the just desert of their sins. As in the Aristotelian tradition of tragic ‘hamorita’, theirs is a type of transgression that must be distinguished from pure evil, making their fatal ends deserving of respectful pity rather than righteous condemnation.”
–Kirsti Minsaas
 
V2N1
“You can live any way you choose within a regime of well-drawn non-conflictng individual rights. But again, to know what those rights are, to better be able to shape them coordinately, to limit all but procedural distinctions, we require minarchy.”
–Murray Franck
 
V2N2
“The character may be embroiled in highly implausible situations, but he must still ‘live and breathe before us’ as an actual human being, with motivations we find at least intellibible, else we cannot empathize with the character or imaginatively share his fate. There is much more to it than this, and I am greatly condensing the account. But when I presented it once to Rand she agreed with it, and was pleased by my Aristotelianism on this issue.”
–John Hospers
 
V3N1
“The data the sensations provide us with must come from somewhere, and this somewhere cannot be, as on the Cartesian account, from the physical objects. On pain of rendering incomprehensible why we all largely agree in our empirical beliefs, something that the formal agreement in geometrical belief cannot suffice to explain, there must be some common data source. Given the Kantian account of the physical world, this data source must be supra-physical.”
–R. Kevin Hill
 
V3N2
“It isn’t just Rand who stumbled over the implicit. It gets under psychologists, feet, too.”
–Robert L. Campbell
 
V4N1
“Indeed, I would argue that we can see Rand’s epistemology as an updating of the project that Abelard pursued over 800 years ago.”
–Peter Saint-Andre
 
V4N2
“There is the marked disparity between her popularity as a novelist and the number of articles of literary criticism written about her work, though this too is not without precedent. It took some time for John Steinbeck to achieve recognition by certain sectors of the critical establishment. His work was disdained for its popularity, sentimentality, and the fact that it is accessible even to high school students.”
–Mimi Reisel Gladstein
 
V5N1
“Considerations of self-esteem and self-esteem-based happiness THEMSELVES do not provide an agent with a reason that makes the difference in how he should act.”
–Eric Mack
 
V5N2
“Rand’s measurement-omission analysis of concepts could be correct even if her account of their genesis were incorrect.”
–Stephen Boydstun
 
V6N1
“Dr. Stadler’s complaint that he almost froze to death and numerous references to city-dwellers exposed to the elements for the first time in their lives [also] describe the first winters of Communist rule.”
--Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal
 
V6N2
“I find it tempting to believe that we can gain knowledge through the faculty of reason both in an a priori way and from experience. . . . These two ways could work together.”
--Richard C. B. Johnsson
 
V7N1
“Rand’s trader principle does not suffer from the problems of [Adam] Smith’s invisible hand principle because she explicitly grounds her defense of trade in an individual’s right to exist for his or her own sake. . . . I do not sacrifice my interests for your sake, and you do not sacrifice your interests for my sake.”
--Robert White
 
V7N2
“If you want a deconstructionist, go to the English Department. Philosophy departments in Anglophone countries are still predominantly homes for linguistic and logical analysis, the whole tone and tenor of which are very much in opposition to subjectivist nihilism. In fact, analytic philosophy of all styles began in self-conscious opposition to such German gobbledlygook.”
--Max Hocutt
 
V8N1
“That worry is precisely the worry that being unmarried ISN’T a necessary property of anything, prior to and apart from the convention in question. . . . It’s only qua bachelors that those entities are necessarily unmarried, and the worry is that what it is to be something qua bachelor is an artifact of the convention, not a fact about the world. / I believe this worry can be met, but that the way to meet it is to show that it can arise only from OUTSIDE the linguistic practice in question, and cannot coherently be raised from within it. No one who assents to the proposition that bachelors are necessarily unmarried (thereby participating in the practice) can consistently add “oh, but that’s not a fact about the world.”
--Roderick T. Long
 
V8N2
“To be fair, Objectivists do not deny the existence and importance of ‘spiritual’ qualities. Objectivists argue strongly against any sort of reductive materialism such as behaviorism or eliminativism. But, for Objectivists, material entities are the ultimate reality and conscious beings somehow supervene upon this underlying reality. Thus, the existence of any sort of supernatural entity, such as God, is ruled out.”
--Stephen E. Parrish
 
V9N1
“A human being is a coherent unity of mind and body, yet this way of stating the fact still leaves ‘mind’ and ‘body’ conceptually separate. The concept ORGANISM conceptually integrates these two facets of human nature in a graceful and unit-economical way.”
--Andrew Schwartz
 
V9N2
“Both see rationality as our distinctive means of avoiding threats and securing our survival, given our animal vulnerabilities. However, where MacIntyre diverges from Rand is in relation to the implications of this in respect of our ongoing dependence on others.”
--Ron Beadle
 
V10N1
“We do not believe there are untethered and dispositionless will acts made in complete freedom of antecedent conditions. . . . We endeavored to use notions of self-direction in ‘common-sense’ ways not packed with a lot of philosophical baggage, because we believed that ordinary usage (say, ordinary common law usage of choice and intent) were sufficient to complete the political argument.”
--Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen
 
V10N2
“He [Nietzsche] insists, as she does, that it is absurd to live for the sake of the collective (i.e., what he calls ‘’the majority’), but the reason he gives is not the one that she would give. Her reason would be that it is absurd to live FOR ANYONE [who is not oneself]. The answer he gives is the aristocratic one, that one should live for the best and the rarest. Even here, though, his position still overlaps with hers IN A WAY: for what he is saying here can be captured by a phrase that Rand sometimes applies to herself, namely, hero-worship. Nietzsche’s aristocratic hero-worship I think is the key to understanding the collectivist-sounding language in . . . .”
--Lester Hunt

Spherical Gear – Active Ball Joint

Interview with Marsha Enright by David Kelley

Additionally, “existence is identity” in mathematics means not only that any mathematical fact will be correct statement of an identity, but that the identity is the existence. Concerning concrete existence, “existence is identity” must include in that identity: specification of spatial and temporal relations, for it to be the case that the identity is the existence.
If we add that all existence outside existence in mathematics (or in logic, e.g. Löenheim-Skolem Theorem) is existence in physical space and time, then the ontological argument, of Anselm and Descartes, for the existence of God fails with respect to non-mathematical existence. From a set of predicates not including specification of spatial and temporal relations, the existence of God cannot be inferred, and inclusion by fiat of Its spatial relations (everywhere) and temporal relations (everywhen) in a mere conception does amount to the existence of God in that usual intended sense of existence.* Whereas, Existence itself is not something concluded from a conception, but is simply there all around us and is the physical and epistemological context for any knowing of any existent or identity.
* Cf. Christian August Crusius (1745) in Leibniz & Kant, Brandon C. Look, editor, (Oxford 2021), pp. 61–66.

The way I've tried to grasp them, intelligence carries a sense of causality, while information is more akin to identity. 

Did I influence Thomas Massie to call health bureaucrats snake oil salesman? I think I did! 😁

Well yes and no ,too.
Humans can not fly , we do build machines that operate on the principles of lift in a gaseous media and ride them. That is not the same thing as over coming the inability to fly. An inability , or describing the 'edges' of an inability as a limitation is just extending a floating abstraction , it's a form of rationalism and a failure to integrate. An 'inability' points to a nonexistent, a zero not a potential. Akin to understanding poverty as a lack of capital accumulation , you can not get rid of poverty , 'it' isn't a 'thing' , you can create wealth or capital or you can destroy the capital but you can not' create poverty' or 'destroy poverty', thinking in those terms in an inversion of causality.
Similarly with omniscience and knowledge, human epistemology is the 'science' of how humans create concepts and use reason to understand of the data of the universe , the data is omnipresent, knowledge is the product of human minds not a quality to be incorporated.

The part I liked the best in the essays was where the author was discussing how the west’s reaction related to changes in the societal zeitgeist, philosophy and how it shows the weakening of Lockean based view to a more Hobbes focused frame.

Stephen Boydstun provided the following as an example of the government's attack on the gold standard.
“Genuine free banking, as we have noted, exists where entry into the banking business is totally free, where banks are neither subsidized nor controlled, and where at the first sign of failure to redeem in specie, the bank is forced to declare insolvency and close its doors.”
Doug, it looks like Murray Rothbard's book The Mystery of Banking is a good resource on this controversy, including the historical record. The book is available online. Pages 197-234 of the book (220-257 in the PDF pagination) look to be exactly the pertinent material, though it is challenging and probably requires some portions earlier in the book to understand it well.
(i would suggest starting one page earlier.)
 

In each of the following your friends may have additional questions, so try to be prepared to answer such.
"Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”"
"Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite."
It can help in both these cases to provide context from the novel.  Also, make the point that the encounter between Roark and Dominique is an unusual encounter between unusual people, not a guide to ordinary relationships.
"Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.
And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good."
No one should rule the world.  Such positions should be eliminated, not just filled by someone from a different faction.
"Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good."
Neither "illegal" immigrants nor anyone else should be put in cages or concentration camps.  Imprisonment should only be for people convicted of serious crimes, which does not include "illegal" immigration, and should be done in a properly thought-out manner, especially if children are involved. 
Rand's personal life is not relevant to evaluating her philosophy.  If anyone insists on digging into her personal life, we need to sort out actual imperfections from smears.
" Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” "
The working class are producers, not looters.  The looters are politicians who seize people's wealth.  Government should not "help" anyone at anyone else's expense.  Its sole proper function is to keep physical coercion out of it, leaving everyone free to produce and trade and to enjoy the fruits thereof.
 Of course Ayn Rand disagrees with the traditional Judaeo-Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, for reasons which she has explained.  It might be helpful to explain about metaethics here, for those people that are willing to listen.
"Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982,"
Government takes a lot more from us in direct and indirect taxes and reduced economic efficiency than it ever gives back.  Anyone who leads a basically productive life and does not vote or advocate for government handouts is entitled to take whatever government is willing to give back to them.  Ayn Rand first explained this in "The Question of Scholarships", written long before she got cancer.
"over a million dead Americans from Covid"
I don't think Ayn Rand would be a vaccine denier or a vaccine skeptic.
Lockdowns kill people too.
"an epidemic of homelessness, and the collapse of this nation’s working class."
This is the result of mixed-economy statism, certainly not of laissez-faire capitalism, which we haven't even approximated for a long time.  (Here you may have to persuade people that this is a well-thought=out position, even if they still don't agree.)
"the Republican Great Depression"
(If people want to argue with the following, you may have to research it.)  The gold standard provided a natural discipline which prevented monetary and financial matters from getting too far out of balance.  The government sabotaged the gold standard and moved further and further away from it, giving more and more control to the Federal Reserve.  In the buildup to the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve loosened money and banking up too much, creating a speculative bubble which had to burst sooner or later, creating a massive dislocation.  The specific trigger that burst it was a combination of crop failure and financial panic.  Then Herbert Hoover intervened in ways that may have been well-intentioned, but made things worse.  He propped up wages and prices, pricing people, goods, and services out of the market.  He signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, which restricted trade when it needed to be opened up, and provoked retaliatory restrictions from other countries.  If Hoover had been a do-nothing President as some people say, the Depression would not have lasted as long or been as bad.
"pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing people every day." 
It is mixed-economy statism that does this, not laissez-faire capitalism.  Mixed-economy statism pits people against each other in pressure-group warfare and impairs the functioning of the economy.
"get billionaires and their money out of politics"
The way to do this is to get away from mixed-economy statism and the resulting pressure-group warfare, and establish laissez-faire capitalism.
(Sorry, I can't get rid of the bolding here.)
 
 

The most important response to something like this is to explain, as fully as necessary, what Ayn Rand's philosophy really is.
It would take a long time to refute every error in this rant, and I'm not sure how worthwhile such an effort would be.
 

Samuel Barber's violin concerto, first movement

Here is another to complement the Barber: Korngold Violin Concerto
 

In the Greenhouse *
Wagner Song – he used this melody also in Parsifal