Boydstun

PS – Any choice to live is made from one who is living. Whether it is a square-on choice or an indirect one, it is a choice of one with a living body and the vegetative values within it. Choosing to live in the larger-arch sense doable in conscious human choice is not made from nowhere, and making the choice as drawn by, according with, and overarching the vegetative values of one's body renders farcical all talk of such a choice being arbitrary or any talk of having the value of continued living get its value merely from choice-making.

Additional Thought on the Choice to Live The choice to live is at hand not only in moments of contemplating suicide. One is in a continuous ongoing choice to think and to value, and these are choices to live. One’s thinking and valuing in one’s actions of the day are operations peculiar to life form, to those parts of the world that are living things. Nonetheless there is a bit from wider metaphysics than living things for consideration, a bit recurring in the question of any rational bases for choosing to live. There are things within the universe that do not apply to the universe as a whole. Such would be electric potential differences. The universe as a whole can have no potential difference with something not itself because there is nothing but the universe, or what Rand called existence as a whole (e.g. ITOE App. 273). We say that a thing within the universe has no electric potential difference with itself. Whether we think of the concept of a things’s electric potential difference with itself as absolutely nothing or as the limit of a thing’s potential difference with some other thing as the one and the other become the same thing, it is plain, again, that electric potential difference, an existent within the universe, does not apply to the universe itself, as a whole. The universe has no other with which it might have an electric potential, therefore, electric potential difference is not a trait belonging to the universe as a whole. There are other things within the universe that apply also to the universe as a whole, at least if the universe is finite. These are things in the universe that can be summed over all the parts of the universe: such as electric charge, mass-energy, or angular momentum. Our question so perennial in Objectivism is whether value and the value of reason within a human form of life are sensibly ascribed in its moments to a human life as a whole. Is the choice to live, carrying in its wake the choice to value and to live rationally, itself a rational choice, a meritoriously rational one? Is talk of one’s life itself being a good thing actually sensible talk? The outgoing-beyond-itself of life (emphasized by Guyau 1885), the growth character of anything living (as talked of in N. Branden’s old essay “The Divine Right of Stagnation”), and the fundamental agape character of human love and creativity (as I’ve spoken of in the preceding post) seem characters extendable from within life to the whole of it. Not by summation, but by the characters of life just mentioned. Those characteristics recommend insistently the rationality and goodness of choosing life in the suicide fork and in the actions in each day of waking life down the river. Some Objectivist writings on the choice to live and criticisms of those writings: Leonard Peikoff’s OPAR (1991) 211–14, 220–21, 233, 244–48. Roderick Long’s REASON AND VALUE which is OBJECTIVIST STUDIES V3 (2000). Douglas Rasmussen’s “Rand on Obligation and Virtue” in THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES (2002, V4N2). Tibor Machan’s “Rand and Choice” in JARS (2006, V7N2). Douglas Rasmussen’s “Regarding Choice and the Foundations of Morality” (2006 in JARS V7N2). Allan Gotthelf’s “The Choice to Value” in METAETHICS, EGOISM, AND VIRTUE (2011).

The Legal Concept of Evidence Necovore, I don't know if the preponderance-of-the-evidence rule for civil suits is itself from the Common Law Mr. Brooks purports he would like to be maintained, but most tort law is developed by the Common Law. So he might well need to blame the Common Law for that standard of proof in a charge such as that brought by Ms. Carroll; I don't know. What was the evidence for her claims rated by the jury as having more than 50% likelihood of being true? (I'd imagine Mr. Trump's former boast that you can grab 'em by the pussy if you are a star [entered as pertinent evidence in the present case] probably added some weight against his claim of innocence in the present case.) Mr. Brooks provided no specifics to his claim that "over several generations Marxist intellectuals have been transforming the American justice system" to their political ends. Which intellectuals of any stripe transform the American justice system. Did Posner's economic analysis of law? Did Epstein's writings on the takings clause in the Constitution? (No on Epstein's, though I wish that they do, and I've still hope they will.) Where in Mr. Brooks's article are specified the law review articles by and names of these alleged Marxist intellectuals who have transformed the American justice system? Surely he knows that such Marxist intellectuals would have to be specific individuals, not air through which his hand waves, and surely he knows that if he speaks the truth in naming such individuals, he is defended against libel by the truth of his claim (proven by preponderance of the evidence). So far as I know, we've the same old common law in this sector of it, undermine confidence in the legal system day after day by hollering "Marxist", "prejudiced", or "rigged" for your political ends as a Mr. Brooks might. Are intellectuals who think there is "social justice" over and above "justice" (which is a myopic view of "justice") people who have influence on the American legal system? Specifics are lacking for the sweeping declarations of Mr. Brooks. Are such intellectuals all Marxist? Can't intellectuals have wrong-headed social ideas without being Marxist or brainlessly led by Marxists? Of course they can and do. It's easier to cry "Marxist"—and catchier to an audience stuck in whatever learning they or their elders got of social thought 50 years ago—than relaying Rawl's A Theory of Justice with its Principles, including the Principle of Liberty, or the writer in jurisprudence A. J. David Richards based on Rawls or relaying Nozick's counters to Rawl's theory. Or rendering the illuminating classics: Hart's The Concept of Law and Fuller's The Morality of Law. Of course Mr. Brooks likely has read much from those works at some point and has a fair guess as to what quarters hear which of them sympathetically or with hostility. His piece is the usual for broad public consumption: name-calling and lies for a political cause.

AI and supercomputing enlisted to find a new solid-state electrolyte in only days. The battery works, and it reduces the amount of Lithium required by 70 percent. Emily Conover's report.

My collection In the Gathers of the World. (Scroll down from the photo – 29 poems.)

Thanks for the response, George. Rand agreed that there are limits to reason, but she meant only that reason is tied to the senses. Reason in her meaning is the power of identifying and integrating what is given in perception (including in our actions). Such powers have definite limited characters. For Kant, reason usually means a narrower faculty which is boss of the faculty of the understanding, and this reason does not deal with what is in experience directly, only through the understanding. His reason and understanding together might approximate what Rand defined as reason (hers is a sort of theoretical and explanatory definition of reason friending the dictionary definition from ordinary usage). Even with his limitations on reason, Kant did make a top god of reason, both in his usual narrow sense and that reason in its commerce with the understanding. His ethical theory attempts to replace God with Reason. It is reason and its needed autonomy that is the source of true morality in his view. As for his idea that knowledge, which is product of sensory experience, the understanding, and reason, needed to be reined in from the German rationalists (Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, . . .): that was for the purpose of shielding religious faith from the growing body of scientific knowledge and the philosophers assimilating it and weighing it. The limitations he argued were, accordingly, on letting knowledge intrude on religious turf (and especially while a religious zealot had the ear of the King). Kant would be in one way sour over what Gödel discovered in his fabled incompleteness theorem, the one showing that some arithmetic truths we know to be true cannot be proven true in a purely deductive system. (The case of the unprovability either way of the Axiom of Choice in set theory is not the famed theorem of Gödel, if I recall correctly; maybe I'll look it up tomorrow.) For it strongly suggests that in arithmetic at least, we have some intellectual intuition after all, which Kant denied we have. On the other hand, he could smile and take this limitative result of Gödel's as showing that arithmetic as a science is synthetic a priori knowledge, Kant's way of characterizing it, not the way the Logicists were trying to characterize it. Kant would not take that Incompleteness theorem as supporting the limitations he was concerned to place on knowledge. I do not myself take it as limiting knowledge, but as adding to our knowledge of deductive systems, specifically some limitations of them. We seem still to have endless rational knowledge of arithmetic; there is no indication that there are any truths in arithmetic we as a species cannot come to know. Similarly, the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle is a discovery of fact about the nature of physical quantities having the physical quantity called 'action' as their product. Those are known as the canonically conjugate pairs in classical Hamiltonian mechanics. Such are the pairs: linear momentum of a body and position of that body; energy of a body and time of that occasion, if my memory is approximately correct. The discovery was that the quantity 'action' comes in a minute minimum value. The discovery and mathematical development and precise experiments in the physics that is quantum mechanics is one of the most extended and magnificent attainments in human knowledge.

George Adams, like Peter, I was also wondering why you had the painting of Kant on the wall. It is natural to conclude that something in his thought found serious favor with you. Might it be his doctrine that individuals are ends in themselves and should be treated as that? Might it be the deontological character of his ethics? Might it be that he carries along the perfectionist school of thought among German ethicists?*

Necessity and Form in Truths –SB

Don't Tread on USA! The US has said they will not attack targets inside Iran for their use of terrorist organizations to attack Iranian opponents. I hope, however, that the US has not taken destruction, sooner or later, of the entire Iranian navy off the table as among US retaliatory response actions.*

I have not read the more famous biography of Ayn Rand, the one by Barbara Branden, which was made into a movie. I have read the following biography by Nathaniel Branden. The book MY YEARS WITH AYN RAND is a recounting of all the years the author Nathaniel Branden was connected with Ayn Rand and his years beyond direct connection up to the time of Rand’s death in 1982. The story begins when Nathan was 14 years old (1944) and first read THE FOUNTAINHEAD. The story has a lot more autobiography of the author than I had expected, but as it went along, I could see how that was sensible for the sort of personal-psychology reflectiveness with which the author is saturated and saturates this story. Near the end of the book, Branden writes: “Here is what I believe: Ayn was a great thinker and a great woman. She was also a struggling human being, as we all are. If one cannot understand her humanity, shortcomings included, one cannot fully appreciate her greatness; one cannot know Ayn Rand.” It is those “shortcomings” which the author thinks he has conveyed within his book (and which I do not accede to as being shortcomings) that might bring others not myself to conclude that the book reflects negatively on the person Ayn Rand. The author may have had that as part of his purpose, but it does not succeed with me. Late in life, I have asked myself the common question: Would you do anything different were you able to live your life again? The first thing that came to my mind was that I wished I were more patient and gentler with some of my immediate family (now deceased), not cutting them (and other people) off and out of my life for long periods so brutally (even if deserved). But then I think on it a little further and realize that that is ridiculous. Supposing I were the same person of the moments in the hypothetical reliving, I would have made the same choices and behaviors. (I say that from knowing that my personality in that respect has not changed.) And a 20-20 hindsight perspective on a whole life is simply garbage anyway. Real life is, at most all times of it, with an unknown and indeed not-yet-set course, among potential distant-future courses growing out of present choices. I can think of a “shortcoming” in my personality: that I was pretty shy and, in some situations, insecure. But what on earth does such a thought mean? That I would have been better off as a youth had I not been me in those respects? Honestly, fully, the “I” would be an equivocation. Such an exercise is foolishness. There are some things simple to change and still be oneself. When I was a youth, I hunted. I killed wildlife, which we ate, not that we couldn’t go to the grocery store. When I learned Rand’s theory of ethics, though there seemed no implication about hunting (mainly for sport), hunting seemed to me out of tune in sensibility with that ethical basis I had come to accept. I stopped going hunting, later sold my shotgun, and remained the same essential self. So, I do not accede to the usual easy talk of “shortcomings” of real persons concerning their personalities. Furthermore, insofar as “shortcomings” is meant to entail a moral failing, there can be no such thing for characteristic behavioral responses over which one has no originative genuine choice. I gather that, in context, the “shortcomings” in Rand the person, referred to in Branden’s paragraph I quoted above, were mainly responsive behaviors towards persons in her presence and with backdrop for her a love affair with the author, whom Rand had greatly admired. That it had been and had ended, and her attitude towards it all in old age, seemed natural and nothing “shortcoming” to me. I take issue with an assertion, additionally, in that quoted paragraph. That is the idea that in knowing personal particulars about a person—such as how went the dinner party we made for a couple last night or what physical labor I like most to do or who all turns me on or who was my unrequited would-be lover—are NOT more my humanity or more who I am than my prose writing, most of all, my scholarly papers. Nothing is more me than my mind, and nothing shows that thing so much as my written works. I earnestly suggest the same is so for the person Ayn Rand or any writer.

Black History in My Home State –by me

Appellate court for D.C. federal court in the case United States of America v. Donald J. Trump has ruled that the former President does not have immunity against criminal prosecutions. I expect the U.S. Supreme Court to let the ruling and its reasoning stand by not accepting an appeal.

Tad, from whom is this quoted "Privileged and Confidential" opinion? Was it composed after the decision in Moore v. Harper? I gather it was not, since it refers to VP Pence in the present tense. I defer to the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the quoted scheme. What they imply about such a scheme might be gleaned from full study of the majority opinion in Moore v. Harper, which I'll leave to you, as I'm smelling the blood in a really important article on the Analytic-Synthetic distinction I'm bringing to conclusion at this time. I'll likely post it in Facebook (because they are generous with size of photos there) and link to it from OO. This is Black History month, and I'd like to contribute a bit of it that is related to what NC was trying to do, which came to be struck down in Moore v. Harper. This did not involve gerrymander by the state legislature, but its restrictions on voter eligibility. The Oklahoma Democrats, a bigoted Party in power there and then, figured Black voters would vote Republican.

Let's make sure the point in that last quote is not lost: "The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, takes an extreme position on the ISL theory in its brief. The document was written and submitted by John Eastman, Trump’s legal advisor and a central figure in the attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In fact, Eastman used the most radical version of the ISL theory to advance his argument before Jan. 6, 2021: In a memo, he spelled out a frightening, unconstitutional plan of how then-Vice President Mike Pence could declare Trump the winner of the Electoral College and the presidency. Unsurprisingly, given its author, Eastman’s amicus brief in support of Moore states that the power conferred to state legislatures by not only the Elections Clause, but also the Presidential Electors Clause is “plenary,” meaning absolute. The ISL theory is inconsistent with cases from the past century, the brief writes, so the suggested solution is to simply overturn three decisions. . . ." –among the amicus briefs This brief was on the losing side (the Moore side) of the decision (6-3) of the US Supreme Court. Afoot now is the campaign by a good many Republicans for defying this ruling at the State level (defy any court) and any other rulings on election law by the Court that is unfavorable (in these Republicans' estimate) to their candidates. It's as though many Republicans are assuming great losses ahead for their candidates if elections continue to be decided by eligible voting citizens. So they are putting about ways of circumventing that anticipated result by claiming as legal what is decidedly illegal under US law. (That portion of Republicans are united in their rationale [a lie, not merely a falsehood, for they are not really that stupid] that any elections not in their favor must have been fraudulent. There is no Confederate Army, and there is not going to be any warring between US military and National Guard or within the latter. Those troops are overwhelmingly genuinely committed to the survival of our constitutional democratic republic, just as the majority of the present US Supreme Court.)

And that any such law cannot be exempt from the judicial review, state or federal, of state law for federal elections, which was being attempted in NC (so that the state legislature could dictate election law with no constraints from other divisions of government). Moore v. Harper has lain to rest the Independent State Legislature Theory (ISL) in election law.

Economic Freedom – Haley! Vote for Haley in the Primary in your State! Anti-intellectualism is one reason, which, joined with others, Rand condemned the Presidential candidate of '68 George Wallace and his movement as proto-fascist. Trump should be condemned just as Wallace and for those same reasons and more. Wallace was not the nominee of either Party. Still, he won seven Southern states and a million votes. Had he gotten the Democratic nomination, as earlier in that century he could have, he could have won the presidency. Support for our constitutional democratic form of government is actually pretty weak, I gather, among the anti-intellectual portion of the citizens. Mr. Trump stirs that weak portion for support. Plenty of shallow sloganeering all around, of course, as ever. I gather Haley will be in this at least through Super Tuesday, with her bloc-dollars from Mr. Koch and pals, with at least that money source. Her turn to raising the issue of economic freedom, I notice, coincides with the unwavering support of that by Koch across the decades.

Umar, you can search with Google for the answer. Then educate all of us with what you find. It sounds interesting, and particulars of your food chain startup would also be interesting to us, however far you are able to share particulars at this stage.

Jon, if you are on a jury, that thinking is against your logical and legal responsibility. I can believe that Mr. Trump never earned an honest dollar in his life. But if I am on a jury in a case against him, that is not pertinent to any case that might be brought against him in the law. All that rightly matters for the juror is whether the evidence allowed for consideration in the proceeding and credence in the presentation thereof suffice to show the accused guilty beyond a reasonable doubt or (in civil suit) more likely to have done the proscribed deed than not have done the deed.

Sexual Assault Statute of Limitations Accusors of rape by Kavanaugh had no court adjudication supporting their claims by "a preponderance of the evidence." And I'd think it reasonable to suppose him innocent until there is such a legal proceeding finding that he did it (supposing it is possible to file suit against a Justice at all).

Tad, I've gathered that when hyperbolic arguments are posed in briefs or court opinions or oral questions from the appellate bench occur it is by way of thinking through logical implications of a position. Such was a question was recently posed from an appellate judge to a Trump attorney who was arguing that a former President should be subsequently immune to all criminal prosecution. Hyperbolically and hypothetically, could President Biden order the killing of his political opponents and be immune to criminal prosecution for the rest of Biden's life? (The attorney waved his hands that the present case is somehow qualifiable so that it can be set off from such a scenario. Without the differentiating qualifications in hand, the attorney looked to be evading the question; it's my impression that for your case, you should not fail to actually answer a question from the bench.) Back to the case Moore v. Harper. Elections Clause of US Constitution Holding in Moore v. Harper at US Supreme Court: (re)affirmed for the plantiffs.

They certainly do replay on and on statements of Trump's taken out of context, and these are easily spotted. After all, we are not confined to television or radio. We can look up full remarks on the internet. Television does de-contexting with Trump's remark about being dictator for his first day in office. Serious business instead requires looking into specific plans he and his campaign team have lain out for what he would direct being done during his coming administration (assuming the practical conditions that he gets the nomination, gets more electoral votes than his Democratic opponent, and then does not have his actual edicts among those proposed overruled by the judiciary). We should look also into what "emergency powers" the Executive has; that facility is a regular step in states that have transitioned from democratic republic to dictatorship. As opposed to much of the political talk on television, we should take seriously the charges of prosecutors and the verdicts of juries or judges. Prosecution wins so often in the cases they bring, even with procedure stacked so heavily in favor of the accused, because prosecutors select for prosecution only cases which, with the evidence they have, are highly likely to result in conviction. Trump has been adjudicated in a civil trial to have committed a rape. That is something to be taken more seriously than mere allegations or talk on partisan television. It is not objective and not credible that every time a judge or jury rules against one's favored candidate or Party (what some of the Party imagines would be in the Party's interest) the decision was made due to outside pressure or bribery or political preferences. A judge recently ruled in Illinois that keeping Trump's name off the Primary ballot would be unconstitutional. To pass off the decision as simply favoritism towards Trump is not rational. The rule of law in this country is not a joke, not a farce, and not comprehensible to those who would rather talk about people than the ideas and reasoning in our legal system. Again, the most important case before the US Supreme Court last year halted a Republican Party effort to have State Legislatures have more power in deciding election outcomes.* Passing off the Court decision to the Court being against success of the Republican party would be plum ignorant. I don't think so. It seems there must be a focal event (such as the murder of MLK) or violence organized by organizations with a specific civil-disobedience or resistance-to-government purpose, focused by its leadership for a particular date of gathering (such as busting into the Capitol and busting its security staff on 6 January 2021, and a lot of those criminals are locked up, unavailable for a rerun). In a speech in Waco several months ago, candidate Trump urged supportive population in general to gather in New York on a court date he had coming up—gather and protest the legal proceedings against him or anyway such was going to happen spontaneously and with violence. Few, if any, showed in the street. Relatively few had shown up at his inauguration (I imagine too many were too frail with age for that sort of assembly.) Even with a Presidential candidate himself advocating or rationalizing or predicting violence over an unfavorable election outcome, I'd bet a Coke there will be civil order. Pro-Choice and anti-abortionists were vehemently opposed across decades, but there were only a few acts of violence (arson of abortion clinics). Overwhelmingly, people will stay here in this country and not commit violence, even under law they rate as highly unjust, to have a peaceful place under law to live.

Trump urging election fraud in Georgia I know people who supported Trump in 2016, but after such public displays of his illegal attempts to change vote counts (under a subjective faith, or at least a sales-front, "I won by a landslide"), they were not supporting him again. (That is not to say they are going to vote Democratic!) They told me that even before his indictment for illegal acts attempting to invert the results of the election. Naturally, I couldn't help but wonder why such a voter did not perceive salesman Trump back in 2016 as I thought obvious (and posted): a blowhard and con man. But there were other supporters, some parading themselves as Objectivists, who proved to be not such innocent supporters of Mr. Trump for President in 2016 and subsequently. These are the ones who relish his subjectivism and bold lies, which they repeat. Not simply falsehoods, but repeat as lies. I've not known them in person, but One of them I thought I knew a fair bit from online talk. As the Trump term in office unfolded, it turned out that there was nothing against the free market that Trump might do which One would not rationalize away. Then, it turned out (I learned from a long-time in-person friend) that One was in fact himself, of himself, the most deceitful online companion I'd happened into. Not that those depraved Trump ones are 100% in agreement with everything Trump says in public. They have some independent judgment on when an old lie should have been retold instead of Trump giving his honest commonsense take on something involving elections. When Trump gave a sensible look as to why Republicans did not pick up more seats in the Congress than they did in the 2022 election, these cohorts in viciousness and subjectivism would have none of it; rather, if their side lost some, it should be proclaimed as due to election fraud. Still, there is no indication yet of a bloc of voters willing to support candidates of such proclaimed autocratic ambitions as Trump's, but are candidates who are not connecting themselves personally to Trump. Because there are not fast principles or public-affairs policies distinctive to Mr. Trump (i.e., not just Republican principles and policies had without Trump), a lot of that depravity-faction will crawl back under the rocks as the personal Madoff-sunset is repeated for Mr. Trump. Should he win re-election this year, I remain confident that the judiciary upholding the continuance of our constitutional democratic republic and the substantial continued public support for that will block the maneuvers from Trump proto-fascism to fascism. (And between you and me and the fence post, I'd expect his first interest in winning presidential power this time is to try trumping any possible criminal convictions of him in judicial process.)

The Original Sham – Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 PS – Again, the original sham is that mortality is not naturally inherent in life. The idea of the natural as in contrast to the supernatural was unlikely to be an intelligible distinction for Moses and his tribes. I gather that our meaning to that distinction is a transfiguration of Aristotle's distinction of the sublunary world (natural) and the world beyond that, namely, the heavens (supernatural). The supernatural today does not mean that at all. As against the natural motion of a thrown baseball, Aristotle would have the catching of the ball as an intervention against the natural motion. So he did have a distinction of the natural trajectory as distinct from the artifice of the players catching the ball and powering it in a new natural trajectory back to his mate. The supernatural today is that sort of artificial, intelligent intervention, but by an invisible agent who in principle could redraft what are the natural trajectories among the plethora presented by geometry. Anyway, in the original sham in the Garden of Eden story, we should notice and add that all bad things—death, suffering, setbacks in production—are to be blamed on the humans. This blaming continues today, whether within a religious or a secular head: if there is a calamity, then it should be blamed on human behaviors. Some say that in such blaming, people are being impelled to conceive themselves as in more control of things than in fact they are. A hailstorm or a death in the family may well have been purely a course in nature. Humans or invisible engineers are not in control in what happened nor rightly to blame. That is, people are exaggerating what control they have, and in the same stroke, they are struggling to regain control and stabilize their course of life. I conjecture an additional reason humans so often fall into blaming themselves or other humans for natural calamities. They have some inkling of the Morality of Life, eventually found and articulated publicly by Rand, which says that right action is from the nature of life and that engaging in right actions supports life. They are often mistaken that their behavior caused the calamity, but their continuation of life with a renewed sense of holiness in the actions they will take might have at least a symbolic relationship to the truth, often subconscious, that is the Morality of Life.

Race for Small Nuclear Reactors