Boydstun

So extend lower taxes to everyone. I've never visited such a place, but many have reported it runs well and underscore the cleanliness of its streets. Continuation of the regulation and staffing the regulating committee with your political cronies is not genuine reversal.

On the US Horizon

SL, The "deep state" is not a useful concept for attaining better protections of individual rights against the government. The term means different things to different people who find it useful to say. Many of them have no concept of individual rights (which admittedly is not an easy concept). Different people with allegiance to the term and its shifty idea include different things in it. It is witch-doctor fakery to list what is part of the "deep state". On the face of the term, the deepest state in America is the US Constitution together with acknowledgement by citizens and law enforcement that that is the source of power to make any laws at all and how they may be executed. Many of us are in favor of that "deep state" and its social compact here, which gives us what protection of individual rights effected here there are against the government and against private aggressors. For many the "deep state" is whatever politically the don't like, bundled into a personification, like the workings of the Devil in the world. Each morning they wake to the new task set for themselves of divining the latest doings of this imaginary coherent beast. Some of my high school classmates do the same activity each day with regard to the Devil, and they gravitate to each other as a sort of club over the internet in which they compose what they pass off online, as a supposed prayer to God, whatever they have imagined in the tea leaves. "Deep State" rhetoric is not thought nor helpful. In its place can always be placed specific things in established terms with settled definitions, and with those one can proceed to call out what is wrong in it for individual rights.

Nuclear Power in Germany No advances in types of reactors will dissuade the anti-nuclear political faction from the complete elimination of nuclear generation of electricity. And no advances in design can ensure there are no human-operator errors. The safety of nuclear operations in West Germany and then in Reunited Germany has been superb; no major accidents.* The reactors in East Germany had to be closed immediately, upon reunification, because they were unsafe. There are safe means also for storage of spent fuel and other radioactive waste. The anti-nuclear faction in Germany has along the way gotten the government to halt research on new sorts of reactors in Germany. They have fought the continued operation of existing reactors as well as all plans for dealing with spent fuel. They are just against nuclear power, and there is no level-headed basis for it.* Fortunately, in the US, after the accident in Japan, President Obama reaffirmed that we are keeping open the nuclear sector of electrical generation. When we were children in mid-century USA, our dreams of the technological future assumed a lot of work getting done by nuclear means. More than was feasible, given the danger from exposure to radioactive materials. We also dreamed there would be breakthroughs in physics such that means for powering every electrical machine from within the machine itself would be developed. Then central production of electricity would be no longer required, and all of these debated issues today on central generation would be irrelevant. Unfortunately, such a discovery in physics has not occurred, and that of course could be simply because there is no such energy source, waiting to be discovered. Still, for all we know, such a decentralizing breakthrough in the future cannot be ruled out.

Left and Right: Codependent Foes

The anti-nuclear Greens in Germany have at last succeeded in ending production of electricity by nuclear fission for their country.

The moral is what should be done or permissibly may be done given certain sorts of factors marked off as moral considerations. In Rand’s view, and in mine, rational process is what distinctively moral process comes to. What is the nature of rational process? For the imagined scenario, if it is being asked whether the entertained action would be moral, within the Objectivist ethics, then I’d argue No. It would not be morally permissible on account of the virtues of Pride, Productivity, and Justice. The last entails treating people as ends in themselves. Even if they are losing their powers for autonomy, homage to autonomous life-making they formerly had or had possible is within what may and should be respected by the rational agent in Rand’s sense of human rationality. Rand’s virtuous human buoys the best possible to humans. Similarly, if a person said all their life that they wished their body to be cremated upon their death, it is against human rationality to instead bury the body upon their death, assuming cremation was indeed feasible, with the rationalization: “Well, it can’t matter to the deceased.” Respectful behavior for a life and autonomous person that had been or had been a potential in youth is within the ambit of Randian rationality and self-respect. To focus on the getting of money by lottery, inheritance, or design of tort, is betrayal of the virtue of production and trade in the context of human existence and failure at holding productivity as the central organizing purpose of one’s life. Then too, as Rand had it, the getting of money is not the only rational human pursuit, and the pretension that her ethics entails such foolishness concerning values is a patent distortion of her thought (one she denounced expressly). The virtue of Pride in the Objectivist system of ethics entails moral ambitiousness. The making of objectively grounded self-esteem has a precondition: “that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit.”

Really good set of objections and replies.

If the federal-court ruling in the fifth circuit outlawing the abortifacient component Mifepristone throughout the US goes to the US Supreme Court, I'd be surprised if any but Thomas and Alito side with the anti-abortion ruling of that fifth-circuit judge. We'll see. Meanwhile, here are some things the Supreme Court would be taking into account.

Sidebar In my initial Part titled “Kelley and Rand on Kant,” I said that Kelley had erred in taking Kant’s appearance to be as in contrast to reality, and that the proper contrast for understanding Kant correctly was to take appearance as in contrast to things in themselves. I observed that Kant’s conception of things in themselves included that such things are not in any relation to things not itself. On Rand’s metaphysics, such a thing does not exist, I concluded (see ITOE 39). Kant’s thing in itself is not any thing as it is. I want to add: The power of reason that Kant was trying to curtail was the power of reason as conceived by his Leibnizian, rationalist predecessors and contemporaries. Such reason had the power to recognize logical truths and other necessary truths such as that a triangle is trilateral. Such reason had also the power to discern and characterize things in themselves and noumena such as monads, which were conceived as beyond sensory perceptual powers. Reason as conceived by Rand has no need of a power to discern things in themselves or monads, for there are no such beings to be discerned. So Rand and Kant share an aim to bind reason, rightly reformed in their two different ways, to being only a tool for discovery in the empirical world (and in mathematics). But there is a grave difference in Kant’s notion of reason and Rand’s, perhaps partly an artifact of him thinking there were things in themselves; whereas she did not, or anyway should not when one incorporates ITOE 39 into her metaphysics. Leibnizians took the noumena that are monads as integrally part of the world we perceive sensorily, poorly as we do, in going about ordinary life and in experimental scientific investigations. Theirs was a unitary faculty of reason able to range over all that wide unitary world, monads and all. Kant was insistent against them that a faculty of reason able to know of such things as monads had to be radically distinct from the faculty of perception (KrV A270–79 B326–35; “What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?" 20:278). Kant failed to jettison the idea that there are any such things as things in themselves or such things as noumena; he failed to jettison the faculty of reason as he thought it would have to be were it, counterfactually, to be up to the task of knowing such objects. He held on to there being a faculty of reason not born of perception. He finds other work for said faculty of reason, pure reason. It manages our faculty of understanding, which is our faculty of concepts, and the power of logical inference is among its powers. Rand had all that work of Kant’s reason as well as the work of the understanding under the single faculty she termed reason, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses. And for Rand, the rules of logic do not come down from some sort of faculty of reason that passes out rules entirely independently of sensory experience.

First Step to Restoring Right to Procure Elective Abortion in Wisconsin

I have fired myself from cleaning the house. I didn't like my attitude, and I was caught drinking on the job.

Frette for the poor, Frette for the poor, . . . You are correct, Tad. The offenses had begun at least as far back as 2005 and continued each year to the indictment in July 2021. Until then the defendant had even failed to disclose that he was a resident of the state of New York, thereby avoiding the State tax! It seems very possible that the spotlight would not have come and exposed this scheme but for Mr. Trump becoming President. I doubt that anyone prosecuting the former President has been aiming to have a negative impact on his coming campaign. Every opponent of his that I heard address his impending indictment, which did come about, yesterday, thought indictments would boost his chances for getting the Republican nomination, the first necessity for a chance to win in the general in 2024. Perhaps some prosecutors have hoped he will be the nominee because they suppose he can again be defeated in the general, and more soundly that other possible Republican nominees. But any such motives and hopes are irrelevant to correctness of any charges brought. Thomas Paine wrote a dream when law would be king in America. And so it is.

Weisselberg was indicted on 15 charges of grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, scheme to defraud, conspiracy, falsifying business records and offering a false instrument for filing. He pleaded guilty to all charges. His plea-deal included him paying $2 million in back taxes and penalties, which he has been doing. The list I recall of his misrepresentations for tax purposes included a lot of personal and family items, even his Manhattan luxury high-rise residence, claimed to be business expenses in his tax filings. Over on Madison Avenue, I get our bed linens from the shop for Frette. Those are medical expenses, no?

Weisselberg fulfilled the conditions of his plea agreement, including testifying as a State’s witness. The prosecution attested to the truthfulness of Weisselberg’s testimony. The five-month sentence (in a prison infirmary) was part of the guilty-plea agreement up front, and without the agreement, he could have served up to fifteen years for the tax frauds they had him on. Prosecutors and defendants, such as defendant Schurr in another pending case, can be not nice people. But as you know, though it is worth rehearsing, the case rightly proceeds only on the issues in the charges. Christopher Schurr shot a man in the back of the head; whether it was a crime is the trial issue.

“The participants also took steps that mischaracterize, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.” (p. 1) “The Trump Organization CFO then doubled that amount to $360,000 so that Lawyer A could characterize the payment as income on his tax returns, instead of a reimbursement, and Lawyer A would be left with $180,000 after paying approximately 50% in income taxes.” (p. 8 ) The $180,000 included $50,000 in actual legal fees, which were combined with the $130,000 that was misrepresented as legal fees and were really a reimbursement. It is the misrepresentation in the business records that crosses the law. Whether the facts are as stated in the indictment will be a question for the jury based on the evidence if the case comes to trial (about a year from now). The legal reasoning in the case will be judged by the judge, and so far as I see in the prosecution's case, I don't see any real chance a judge would go along with a pretrial motion to dismiss the case due to plainly flawed legal reasoning in the prosecution's indictment.

Tad, what about the intent for NY State election law violation and the defendant eye to tax misrepresentation? Under NY law, aren't these where the criminality of each of the 34 actions comes from? (i.e., white-collar crimes that result in fines, not jail [at least if you are rich].)

At least the "death and destruction" Trump warned of were he indicted has not come about. Some have suggested that was because too many of the really violent loons are currently in jail from their behaviors at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Trump supporters who took to the street for the NYC process today were law abiding. I imagine that talk of "death and destruction" was wishful thinking about what supporters would do for him. Like when people bandy about punishment in hell in the afterlife, which is human wishful thinking (fantasy).

I thought it was the misrepresentation for taxes that was illegal. Oddly, though this may not apply to NY tax, if you have income from a bribe, it has to be included in US Income Tax filing. Likewise, if you have income from selling illegal drugs!

Statement of Facts in the Indictment – 4/4/23

Correct. I should add, nec, that not all violent attacks on the existing system of law are out of concern for protecting individual rights. For example, the man who was executed for blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He was a mass murderer, and what he did is rightly prohibited by law.

Yes, I don't think they are necessary in the longer run. I suspect that the freedom for innovation for profit in the market economy helped the US and NATO stay ahead of the Soviet Union, an enormously clamped down society, in advancing technologies, including for war. Also, quite possibly the Aswan Dam could have eventually been achieved by private consortiums for profits. I guess that dam is another monument to collective action by coercive taxes in the USA and in Brittain. Apart from military usefulness, I think the US advances into space (or under the ocean) should be by private commercial venture for profit. That is the natural way to go and stay grounded to the bundle of needs of human populations.

Yes, it was one of mankind's crowning achievements to date. And guess what: It was accomplished by the US government, the contractors, and the taxpayers. It greatest benefit was as a monument to scientific and technical level of the USA in the twentieth century. And a monument of American productivity and wealth. Cost in 2020 dollars. I gather it was not profitable (which was not its point), although there were spinoff technical benefits in service to people on earth. From ancient Mesopotamia to the present, government activities have fostered technological advances. Twin sister of Apollo is Artemis, which program will bring humans and robots to the moon and aims to start a colony there. These moon-landing programs are indeed monuments to the American government and the American civilization. However, I should support such US programs only insofar as they can be justified purely by their advancement, if any, of national defense.

Welcome to Objectivism Online, HRSD. What specifically were your reactions to The Fountainhead? Were there characters in FH you identified with in their psychology? I've known some readers of FH who found elements of Peter Keating in themselves, which they regarded as undesirable upon reading FH. They just changed their habitual ways, replaced with more or less Howard Roark. They did it themselves. Is there a fiction writer whose style you enjoy more than Rand's? I urge you to read Atlas Shrugged before anything else, for the adventure and the characters. You may find yourself in some mind in there, something in them and in you to esteem. You don't need to already know the philosophy set forth in Atlas to enjoy the book. Quite the contrary order is exciting for reading that book. Give the author a chance to offer the philosophy to you in that fictional creation. Since you have an inclination for the theoretical side, I urge you to then read all of OPAR. Because I read Rand's fiction when I was around 18, which is fairly early in life, it is no longer clear to me altogether what was already second nature to me before reading them and what was to become second nature to me later due to reading them. I'm only just like me. Not just like every bit of Rand's mind or Howard Roark's. But when it comes to many basic ideas and elements of character and personality, another novelist said it: "I don't know what souls are made of, but yours and mine are the same."

Background materials online: Perceptual Experience and Perceptual Justification Evidence and Justification The Contents of Perception Action-Based Theories of Perception The Computational Theory of Mind