A.West

I'd be shocked if there was even one longish paragraph in this book that Objectivists would not find in error. Unless one is looking for "horror file" material.

I have not read the book but have come across Ms. Klein's articles. She is competing to be a leading voice in the protest against capitalism, free trade, corporations, etc., and sympathizes with muslim terrorists. Sounds like the New New Left. Here is the best summary I've seen of Ms. Klein, submitted by Christopher Hitchens in response to an extra irrational essay of hers: Another small but interesting development has occurred among my former comrades at The Nation magazine. In its "GOP Convention Issue" dated Sept. 13, the editors decided to run a piece by Naomi Klein titled "Bring Najaf to New York." If you think this sounds suspiciously like an endorsement of Muqtada Sadr and his black-masked clerical bandits, you are not mistaken. The article, indeed, went somewhat further, and lower, than the headline did. Ms. Klein is known as a salient figure in the so-called antiglobalization movement, and for a book proclaiming her hostility to logos and other forms of oppression: She's not marginal to what remains of the left. Her nasty, stupid article has evoked two excellent blog responses from two pillars of the Nation family: Marc Cooper in Los Angeles and Doug Ireland in New York. What gives, they want to know, with a supposed socialist-feminist offering swooning support to theocratic fascists? It's a good question, and I understand that it's ignited quite a debate among the magazine's staff and periphery. When I quit writing my column for The Nation a couple of years ago, I wrote semi-sarcastically that it had become an echo chamber for those who were more afraid of John Ashcroft than Osama Bin Laden. I honestly did not then expect to find it publishing actual endorsements of jihad. But, as Marxism taught me, the logic of history and politics is a pitiless one. The antiwar isolationist "left" started by being merely "status quo": opposing regime change and hinting at moral equivalence between Bush's "terrorism" and the other sort. This conservative position didn't take very long to metastasize into a flat-out reactionary one, with Michael Moore saying that the Iraqi "resistance" was the equivalent of the Revolutionary Minutemen, Tariq Ali calling for solidarity with the "insurgents," and now Ms. Klein, among many others, wanting to bring the war home because any kind of anti-Americanism is better than none at all. These fellow-travelers with fascism are also changing ships on a falling tide: Their applause for the holy warriors comes at a time when wide swathes of the Arab and Muslim world are sickening of the mindless blasphemy and the sectarian bigotry. It took an effort for American pseudo-radicals to be outflanked on the left by Ayatollah Sistani, but they managed it somehow.

If you cannot distinguish between fundamental and non-fundamental similarities and differences, after plenty of advice and directions, that's your problem to deal with, not ours. Maybe you need to study Objectivism before you can fully understand Ayn Rand's characters. Stadler was certainly not egoistic in the Objectivist sense. Perhaps in the neitzschian sense.

I think it's dangerous to give advice to anonymous, unfamiliar people, but here's my advice: My guess, this man isn't proud of his work, and may believe that he's failing to live up to his ideals. Perhaps he knows that changing his ways would be painful, possibly expensive, or wrenching. There may be short-term "pain" involved in getting on the right track long term. I think the best thing to do is say - you need to change your life & career in a direction consistent with your virtues, and I will support that regardless of the near-term consequences.

I use one piece of open source software, R (www.r-project.org), a statistics program. I have been on the websites and help lists for over a year and have yet to see any anti-capitalistic comments from any of its developers, at least no more so than one would see in any public discussion. R is based on the same language used by a competing commercial product, S-Plus. R has some features that are better than S-Plus, but has a much more difficult interface, because R is built by and mostly designed for academics, while S-Plus needs to make its features more user friendly to non-statistician. Since I'm not a statistician, I'd use S-Plus if my company would pay for it, but I'm very grateful to the R developers that their interest in making something for themselves provided the nice side-effect of a useful tool for me. Incidentally, the developers have earned something from me for their efforts- I've bought a couple of books to help me improve my ability to use the software. I'd say the people who are developing R have as their goal making the best, most theoretically sound, statistics software available, because they are statisticians and that's what they want to use for their efforts, and they see the GPL as the best way to draw lots of contributions for improvements to the software.

I read Atlas non-stop in a week or two during summer break between fourth and fifth grade. I had been reading longer and longer books in fourth grade, and wanted to read the biggest and best one I could find. My mother had Atlas Shrugged in her library and it looked like about the biggest book available besides the Encyclopedia Brittanicas, plus I really liked Greek mythology so found the name interesting. My mom is a professional mystic but still said nice things about Ayn Rand, but she's far, far from being an Objectivist. I came back to it every year or two, and at age 15, surrounded by a sea of non-Objectivity, and looking for answers about life, I was able to grasp the significance of Atlas Shrugged, and began really studying Objectivism.

See Andy Bernstein's summary here: http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNot...pageNum-40.html The chapter title "The Man Who Belonged On Earth" provides your key to understanding Stadler's most fundamental problem. I think that the title had a double meaning referring to both Stadler and Galt in different contexts. As I said before the 2 key elements to Stadler = Platonic disconnect of mind from reality, and people are fundamentally bad.

Speak for yourself when it comes to memory, re-orientation, and reading capabilities on this matter. I've experienced no such difficulties. And I'd describe it as "indulge in the pleasure" rather than "go through the labor" of reading the speech.

I read Galt's speech when I first read A.S., even though I was only 9 year old at the time. I even absorbed some of its ideas, mostly that one's mind and reason was of the utmost importance in your life. I didn't understand it all (probably not even most of it), but I did at least put in an effort. I never even considered skipping it. It provides the resolution to most of the moral questions raised previously, for goodness sakes, and thus it is moving the plot and action along, at least for someone who was perceiving the moral/philosophical questions that arose among the characters. To skip the speech is to me like skipping the ending of a mystery novel, and I think that to not read the speech is to not read the novel. At age 9, Atlas Shrugged immediately became my favorite novel, jumping ahead of "Watership Down" at that time. So then I excitedly started reading "The Fountainhead," and found that I could not understand it at all, and put it down after about 20 pages. Even at age 15, when I returned to The Fountainhead, I found it more difficult to read, because I saw it primarily as a psychological character study, with Dominique being a difficult character for me to understand at that time.

Thanks for the comments. Sometimes I can listen to a work and find it difficult to listen to, then come back to it a year later, possibly with a different performance, and enjoy it more. That happened to me with Rachmaninoff's Etudes, which at first sounded chaotic to me, then after listening to some of his easier to listen to works for a while, the Etudes made sense to me a year later. My view on Alkan is positive, some of his works are very interesting, embracing melody and tonality yet being extremely different from peers like Chopin or Liszt. It's too bad you can't get some of the orchestra time allocated to modern garbage up here in NY.

I'm somewhat reserved and I've functioned effectively in the business world for over ten years. But I've also become less reserved over time, and have made efforts to be more outgoing and to speak publicly at times. In undergrad and grad business school, I took courses which required presentations, and improved somewhat due to that. In my work I have made numerous presentations to full rooms (some small some large.) I was even interviewed on national TV, briefly, a couple month ago. The best defense against nervousness is to be confident that you know your subject matter. Still, I'm an analyst and most of my communication is written. There are certain functions that require more gregariousness, some less. To Whyz: I disagree with your analysis of Roark and Stadler. Their main difference wasn't political philosophy. In my opinion, their differences were much more fundamental, derived from metaphysical worldviews. Roark was interested in the world, and had reverence for mankind. Stadler was fundamentally uninterested in the world around him (he was interested in ideas primarily in an escapist, Platonic way) and was disgusted by mankind.

I'm a music listener not a musician. Thanks for making this available. I listened to it and liked certain parts of it. I thought the ending of the first movement was quite interesting in the way it brought together the earlier themes. I mostly listen to classical symphonies, concertos and solo piano pieces, mostly Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. In pop, I occasionally listen to some music from my teenage years - Devo, King Crimson. I wonder did you compose this with synthesizer in mind, or would it be playable by orchestra? I can enjoy some synthesized pop (see above) but I really don't enjoy synthesized classical or new age type music, in general. Sometimes I think the synthesizer leads to musical choices that I don't like (e.g. the ease of repetition of sequences, the ease of repeating rhythms.) It sounds to me that this piece could be transferred to organ more readily than orchestra. I noticed that the symphony tends to have many short notes rather than long sustained ones. (Forgive me for expressing myself as a listener rather than using musical terms that I don't know). Listening, I thought there was a bit of a monotony of pace, with everything going at a pretty rapid pace. Thinking of Rach's Second Symphony, there are some rapid parts, and then there are also slow long undercurrents, such as its very slow beginning. Have you heard Alkan? The approach I heard in your music reminded me a bit of his Concerto for Solo Piano. Lots of notes and rhythm, not much sweep. Perhaps if I listened multiple times, I'd be able to catch the big picture of your symphony. But on first listen, I really couldn't integrate it into a whole. Anyway, every music has people attracted to it and not. I'm not suggesting you change something. I'm just trying to examine what I like about certain kinds of music and not others. Do you have something like a listener's guide to this music, suggesting what the audience should in particular listen for? E.g. did you introduce conflict into the music, and if so, how would you say it's resolved?

The catch is that the profit is philosophical, cultural, and intellectual, and that I'm allowed to deduct my donation to ARI from my income taxes.

When I previously said "most jealousy," I was thinking of very strong and/or persistant cases of jealousy, not a transient twinge.

Here's a link to a Psychology Today article contrasting envy with jealousy: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art...rticlekey=34894 Their conclusions: "ENVY Feelings of inferiority Longing Resentment of circumstances Ill will towards envied person often accompanied by guilt about these feelings Motivation to improve Desire to possess the attractive rival's qualities Disapproval of feelings JEALOUSY Fear of loss Suspicion or anger about betrayal Low self-esteem and sadness over loss Uncertainty and loneliness Fear of losing an important person to an attractive other Distrust " I don't think they identified envy properly, but jealousy looks approximately right. My view is that a relationship that involves much jealousy is probably doomed to an unhappy ending. If the jealousy is based on imagined threats that do not exist, then the jealous party is being irrational. If the jealousy is based on real concerns, such as the likelyhood that the other party really does aspire to be with someone else, with a set of values/characteristics different from one's own , then that suggests they may truly be unfulfilled with the jealous party. If you and your romantic other are both fully happy with one another, and are both confident of that mutual conclusion, then I don't see where jealousy can rationally enter. If I was in a relationship that made me jealous, I'd ask myself the following: Why do I think this woman would be interested in someone other than myself? Does this indicate that I have misjudged what she values in a partner, or what she sees in me? If she values another sort of person more than me, then should I consider finding a partner more compatible with the values I offer? Have I or my partner changed from the time we intitially began our relationship, and has the value-provision & value-requirement relationship changed? I've felt jealous in the past, on rare occasions. In retrospect, it was the result of me mistakenly thinking that the values I offered were exactly what the woman "should have" wanted in a man. Later I discovered to my disappointment that this is not always the case.

I think Ayn Rand considered Jealousy an irrational or negative state of mind. Look at how she handled Francisco and Rearden after they ultimately lost in the romantic competition for Dagny. If there was ever a situation for jealousy, that would seem to be it, but Ayn Rand went out of their way to show them as not jealous, and to the extent they did show some form of jealousy, it was shown as an error on their part. I think most jealousy comes from either wanting something unearned from another person, inaccurately judging another person, or expecting something unreasonable from another person.

I haven't seen Orgazmo, but the premise of a Mormon porn star sounds funny. Parker/Stone recently did a whole South Park episode about how ridiculous the Mormon founding dogma is, while noting that most Mormons seem to act like really nice people. I've seen Stone/Parker's first college film, Cannibal: The Musical, and it was not that funny. The funniest part of the movie was listening to the director's commentary track after watching the movie once. That oral sex scene in T.A. was just gratuitously unpleasant to me, much like in South Park BLU, the death of "The Mole" seemed designed mostly to make people uncomfortable. I thought T.A.'s mix of action scenes was pretty good, actually. The weird thing is that I saw one action scene from previews that was left out of the film. I thought the main problem of T.A. was that too much of the humor was derivative, based on "inside hollywood" humor and ridiculing action movie bromides. South Park BLU, on the other hand, was a much more original creation (though it still was derivative.) I think I would have liked T.A. better if it had been more politically/ideologically focused. It's the anti-P.C. ideological satire that keeps me watching South Park.

During the winter I don't always get as much exercise as the rest of the year, because it's always dark outside. I think exercise can help the proper function of the brain. So in some past winters I've played "Dance Dance Revolution" on the Playstation 2. Maybe it's the darkness and shorter days bothering you, so you may also want to make at least one room really unusually brightly lit.

Reasons for forming a company (in random order) Limited legal liability for owners. Creating a legal entity of indefinite life, that exists independent of specific individuals. Pooling resources in a formal way, including capital. Can organize people and assets according to formal conceptual & contractual structures rather than those of a single person (though a single person can still control and singly own a corporation, and in theory one can have a one-man corp.) I think these reasons would continue regardless of technological changes. Legal changes perhaps. I don't want to get into your specific ideas of how nanotech would change the world, but I do think technological and productivity progress would make people more long-term oriented and thus more interested in indefinite-life corporate structures. Corporations would adapt to the needs of the economy as it exists, I guess be more intellectual-property focused, combining near-term tactics with long term strategic visions (which is already done). One values securities by estimating the value of the spread between economic inputs and economic outputs now and into the future. Great value-creators create lots of value with the least amount of resources. Economic inputs include labor, capital, materials. Only materials would be dramatically affected by your nanotech scenario as I see it, capital and labor would be transformed somewhat but not fundamentally. A large basket of productive enterprises would collectively produce most of what people wanted or wanted done for them. An individual company produces value at some ratio of total production. So there's a ratio amongst companies on that level. On a security valuation level, expectations of the future play an important role, such that a company that produces 10% of total economic wealth (approx. "earnings") but is expected to grow below average may only be valued by valuers at say 5% of the total market value of all securities. There is no universal law of valuation for all people at all times, expectations, reputations, and the decisions/perceptions of valuers play a role. Think of it this way, we could say that the companies representing the total market create profit of $1 million. That represents the excess of produced value over consumed value. Each company contributes some portion of that, in a specific ratio to the total. Embedded in valuation expectations is all of the future profit values to be produced by the total market (e.g. $2 mn next year, $3 mn after that, etc.) and each company's contribution to that total. Looking at these present facts and future expectations people can decide a ratio of company vs company and also company vs total production, as well as company vs. specific things one wants. Given that these ratios are set, one can take a piece of this, divide it into units, and create a unit of exchange/standard of value that all participants could accept. It does sound circular, but the economy is actually circular that way. Gold as money for example serves primarily as an intermediary between people doing and making things for one another. It's good protection against govt. intervention too. Private banks could conceivably take that intermediation process themselves. Among people who are well advanced economically, I think they would see a unitized claim on a pool of productive assets as a rational standard of value. They would not often try to use it just as traders rarely used gold. (Though it could be used in gaining control over other companies, etc.) Who decides what goes into an index at the base of a monetary unit? The market created by valuers of securities, and the big financial institution or network of institutions that decide what they will use as an index. It could be every security, it could be a subset, it could be the lowest risk slice of a basket, little effected by say, changes in overall market valuation, like a commercial paper fund. I favor a gold standard in our world, but you say that gold could be produced practically without cost. From a certain perspective, the fiat U.S. dollar already represents a claim on the sum effort of productive Americans, it's just unfortunately the govt that is the intermediary in this process, which is value-destructive overall. A better society would do this in a value-additive way, which I think my proposal represents.

I thought about it further, and what I would expect is that the largest financial institution would create something like a low-risk index fund. This would essentially represent a diversified stake in the productive capacity of most or all enterprises. The financial institution could design the product in a way such that the value of these units remained stable (perhaps by breaking the fund into 2 units like income and growth, with the income tranche becoming the standardized currency unit, and the growth unit trading as the residual claim). The key concept is that the unit is private, it's issued by one or more financial enterprises (an index fund is reproducable, after all) and it essentially represents a claim on value produced by productive enterprises. Instead of saying I own $1000 of the S&P500, one could say I own 1/1,000,000,000th (?) of the S&P500 companies, or one unit of "Westrands" or whatever the bank wanted to call the units.

RadCap, I'm not challenging your starting point, but I would challenge your subsequent conclusions. Nanotech or fantasy technology wouldn't change the economy as much as you think, fundamentally, it would just make everyone massively more productive and wealthy. One thing I've stated for a while is that the economy has ALWAYS been a knowledge economy, even during the supposed industrial age, it was primarily a knowledge economy. Carl Menger, the first Austrian economist, doesn't get enough credit for identifying this. So how would an economy change due to fantastic technology? Time horizons would lengthen, time preference would drop, along with interest rates. In a way, reputation would become more obviously important. My guess is that people would use shares in productive enterprises as a medium of exchange. Productive enterprises (corporations) connect knowledge assets into the provision of useful goods and services. With everyone rich, people would be more focused on reinvesting their savings in further productive endeavors. One of the most valuable assets a company has is its reputation for knowing how to produce value, deliver results to shareholders and clients, etc. Because companies are valued based on infinite time horizons of expected economic value added, that looks much like "reputation". Even now, the best way to maintain and enhance your wealth is to own enterprises that are and will produce economic value added. So my conclusion is that under your premises, people would use shares of enterprises as their medium of exchange. Furthermore, financial markets could plausibly be so advanced that even tiny organizations were able to "go public", their values would be constantly tracked on a network such that every grocery store (or equivalent) or vending machine would be able to handle your transaction, regardless of what company or companies you sell to buy something else. BTW, under these premises, Intellectual Property, copyrights, Int. Property protection and theft, or Int.Prop. secrecy would be crucially important to all enterprises, and thus the value of their shares. How's that for an off-the-cuff hypothesis?

In theory, I'd like to see a national sales tax replacing and eliminating the income tax. A few years back Richard Salsman gave a lecture on taxation, and I wish I had my notes on that. By my imperfect recollection and own opinion, the major benefits of the sales tax is that it's very noticable to the public (not a stealth tax) and that it is not a tax on capital or productivity. Thus it's pro-growth long term. There are some major hurdles to a national sales tax in my opinion. I don't think people consider the sticker shock of paying a large sales tax on the sale of their car or house. A large sales tax on housing would totally change the way people think about relocating around the country. I've never seen a VAT being a country's sole source of revenue. The VAT seems designed to be a stealth supplementary tax to boost total government revenues without people realizing it. A flat tax would be better than a progressive income tax, but the many influence groups that benefit from the current setup (e.g. the many people who depend on the mortgage interest tax shield) would have to be fought. And the biggest obstacle to this or any other tax change would be the code of altruism. The only way to make a major change for the better in taxation is to convince most people that egoism, independence, and productivity is superior to altruism and dependency. Altruism demands a large government budget and thus large taxation. As long as government spending is >30 - 40% of the economy, people will consider it scandalous for "the poor" to contribute an equal share of that. Given the huge current share of government spending in the economy, and given that altruism will be the dominant ethics for at least another generation, I think the best a politician can acheive near-term is tax simplification, with fewer special deductions hopefully being offset by lower overall tax rates, and possibly a bit less "progressivity". Major tax reform and cuts would have to be simultaneous with major government spending cuts, both of which would have to come after an ethical revolution against altruism. I predict that any politician who now tries to smuggle major anti-progressivity into a tax reform law under the cover of efficiency/simplicity will be evicerated by altruist politicians who will spell out every anti-altruist implication of the changes. As for Bush now, I suspect he'll let some Republicans come out with sales tax/ flat tax proposals, let them take the heat, and then compromise back to get slightly more flattening and more simplification of the current income tax, combined with making some existing tax cuts permanent. I think the current talk is just part of a negotiating strategy, where you start out asking for much more than you expect to get.

I think Baldwin's leading role was earned as sort of a lifetime achievement award for political activism for an actor. He's been a well-known left-wing activist for over a decade, right up there with Sarandon/Robbins. Note that in "South Park:Bigger Longer Uncut" the Baldwin compound was bombed to rubble by Canada. The big shocker was that Barbara Streisand was not given a significant role in the Film Actors Guild. I'm sure she must yearn to discuss peace with Kim Jong Il. I should say that Team America might be pretty funny if you go into it with low or no expectations. My expectations were high before seeing the movie, and found it a bit disappointing, compared to some of their best work in the past.

That's a good contradiction to exploit when criticizing the policies of the upcoming Bush administration. The government shouldn't take money from people and use it to attack their values or to impose religious values. Maybe you would like to write an editorial about it for the majority of the population that doesn't already understand this.

I'd say that you're focusing too much about what other people think of you and your philosophy, and too much about preaching and gathering fans for your philosophy. Philosophy, first and foremost, is about you and reality, not you and other people, or what clubs or friends it involves. Your job is to improve your own life and understanding, not others'. If you figure that out, and practice it, maybe you can stop being a "tortured one". Look at what you just wrote - it's all about how you're perceived by others, how others perceive you, what various groups you find yourself in or out of, who you plan to persuade or entice into "baby steps." My tip is that you spend some time alone with philosophy, lay off the clubs, lay off the internet forums, and have some quality time being happy with yourself and your ideas.