Fran

Do we know who the actors are going to be for any of the other parts, such as Francisco, Hank, John, James Taggart, Lillian Rearden, Eddie Willers, etc.? If they're expecting it to be due out in Spring 2008, they must have cast most of the parts by now surely?

I agree that men shouldn't have to pay for a child that was conceived through fraudulent means. Although I think this would be tricky for a court to determine. For a guy to ensure that he doesn't end up in this mess is tough as most contraception, bar the condom, has been developed for the woman to use. As a woman, even if there was contraception available for men, I'd still want to use contraception myself, unless he'd a vasectomy. Thank you Roger for highlighting the father's side of the situation.

Brant, Jeff is still in high school and has only read a couple of Rand's books, much to the chagrin of his mother who apparently is not Objectivism-friendly. His questioning is more striving to understand than it is preaching, albeit his style suits his age at times. He is questioning some very basic premises right now (abortion is one of them) and that is not easy when you have grown up Christian. I think he is extremely bright and I enjoy making him think. He takes ideas seriously and is not afraid to put himself out on a limb if that's what it takes to remain true to himself. He has even made me think on occasion with some unusual but highly interesting comments. Michael Thanks for this clarity Michael, it's really helped me understand Jeff's context.

Jeff, okay for argument's sake let's say that that the foetus is a life. So is a starving boy in Africa. This child will die unless you help him. Are you going to give up school and do so?

I realise that I'm using your example to qualify my point, without really answering your overall question. I have a book called 'Drawing on the right side of the brain' by Betty Edwards. She has taught hundreds of people to draw and includes their before and after pictures. The difference in these pictures is phenomenal. Yet, many of her students claimed beforehand that they would be her Waterloo. Her argument is that drawing is not taught in schools in a way that allows people to develop this 'talent'. To draw well, the so-called 'right' brain is involved, whereas the way that drawing is taught means that the 'left' brain tries to do the drawing. This is why most people can't draw. As a quick example, turning a picture upside down to copy it makes the left brain switch off and the right brain is able to draw what it sactually sees, line by line, rather than what it thinks it sees (which is what the left brain does). I also think that a lot of it has to do with motivation. If you enjoy drawing then naturally you will spend a great deal of time partaking of this activity and your skill level will increase accordingly. Plus, the brain works better when it is doing something that is enjoyable and is free of anxiety and the fear of 'getting it wrong'. Many years ago I read a great book called 'How Children Fail,' by John Holt. His theory is that children fail because they are bored - stuck at a desk all day does not engage the mind's natural way of learning which is through play; they are confused - adults frequently contradict themselves; and they are afraid. Afraid of being told off, afraid of getting it wrong and being ridiculed by their peers, etc. I think stress is a huge inhibitor to learning. I've just been reading about fiction writers who were split into two groups. One group was told that they were writing for extrinsic rewards such as the praise from their tutor and getting a good grade. The other group was writing purely for their own pleasure of writing. Their next written piece was compared with some of their own previous work -those who were told they were writing for extrinsic rewards, i.e. were going to be judged by someone else; produced work that was significantly worse than previously. The group that was writing for their own pleasure, produced a similar standard to what they had previously written. Er, I saw Victor's post and replied to it before realising that there were 30 other pages of replies... Sorry if I've leapt in the middle of a conversation which will have no connection to what anybody else has put.

One answer to punishment being a crime preventative measure: in the UK teenagers who cause serious social disruption are often given ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders), which restricts their movements in the areas in which they committed the crimes and also the time at which they can be outside of their homes. ASBOs are now being seen as a badge of honour by these groups of teenagers. It's 'cool' to have an ASBO - hardly preventative. The majority of people who commit crimes come from deprived backgrounds - they were probably emotionally, sexually or physically abused as children and didn't receive the necessary moral guidance. So, you take these 'damaged' people and chuck them in prison where their peer group is now hundreds of other criminals - how is this going to give them the necessary guidance to change their actions? One alternative is restorative justice. This has been used successfully in Reading, UK. Burglars meet the people whose homes they burgled - by hearing and understanding the suffering that they've caused, and receiving empathy for their own reasons for committing the crime, they're far less likely to do it again. Here's a link to an article on restorative justice for anybody who is interested: http://www.cnvc.org/diankillian.htm

Now if we can only get Objectivists to call this man a hero... Michael I would like to live in a world where people help others, so I would say that it was in my own self-interest to help this abandoned child. When people stop me and ask for directions, I always try to help unless it's not in my interest to do so (e.g. I'm running late for something or it's late at night). Thing is, the parents are not going to come forward because they're sure they will only receive punishment rather than people trying to understand why they abandoned her. I'm not saying that the baby should just be handed back to them, I'm simply questioning how helpful it will be to anybody to punish the parents for what they've done. Judging by the number of people who re-offend, I don't think punishing people is a particularly helpful strategy in preventing crime.

Here's an excellent article on how two entrepreneurs help 25 families out of poverty every day. They developed man-powered water pumps that increased the crop yield of the farmers' land by 6-10 times, which they SOLD to the farmers through their not-for-profit organisation. This meant that with their increased revenue, the farmers themselves could pay for food, medical care, their children's education, etc. Dream Harvest A simple water pump has lifted thousands of African families out of poverty. Miles Bredin meets Nick Moon and Martin Fisher, creators of the device. Just five years ago, Kenyan farmer Samuel Mburu was nearly destitute. He’d often had to fight with other unlicensed hawkers and with police on the streets of Nairobi, just to sell the meagre produce from his small vegetable patch. Today his is a very different story. Mburu and his wife, Faith, educate their seven children privately, they go to a doctor when they are ill and there is always food on the table. They achieved all this with the sweat of their brows but they were shown the way by two clever men – Nick Moon and Martin Fisher of KickStart, a non-profit organisation that develops and markets new technologies in Africa. The pair designed, manufactured and sold Mburu a MoneyMaker water-pump, which has allowed him to increase the size of his farm, cultivate more of it and reap three or four harvests a year when before there was only one. Mburu’s small farm just outside Nairobi may look like an earthly paradise when the sun is shining and the crops are growing, but cultivating the plot without pumped water was back-breaking work and it was physically impossible to do much more than subsist. “We used to have to water everything with a bucket,” says Faith. Of course Mburu and his family are not the only people British partners Moon and Fisher have helped. They have a mission. They gave up being aid workers to invent and market tools that they hope will help create a middle class from the poverty-stricken masses of Africa. Without a middle class they – like many others – believe that there will be no democracy in Africa. They have already lifted 80,000 families out of poverty – not by giving them things they didn’t really need but by selling them practical and simple solutions to everyday problems. “People at the bottom of society’s pyramid are exactly the same as everybody else,” says Moon. “All they want to do is look after their families. We say, ‘Here is a chance’ but we insist on offering solutions for sale through the market place.” By doing so, KickStart builds sustainability into its assistance and ensures that people like Mburu have a stake in their future. KickStart has been hailed around the world, winning awards for its products and funding for research. Already it has expanded its range to sell pumps, oil presses and brick makers in three African countries. Over the next few years, it plans further expansion. Moon and Fisher both criss-crossed the globe before ending up in Kenya in the Eighties. Moon was born in 1954 in Bombay, where his father was P&O executive. His family came to the UK when he was eight. He left school at 17 and, after a number of jobs, joined the VSO and first went to Kenya in 1982. Fisher was born in Golders Green in 1958 and moved with his family to the USA when he was eight. Armed with a Master’s degree and a PhD, he went trekking in Peru to ponder his career options, and that was where he encountered ‘real poverty’ for the first time. He returned to the States determined to do something to help and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to visit Kenya to see how technology was being used in rural development. He ended up at ActionAid, where he met Moon. He now lives in San Francisco, where he drums up funding for Moon. Moon lives in Nairobi with Rose, his Kenyan wife, and their five children. He handles the day-to-day running of KickStart, making MoneyMaker pumps and other vital equipment for people like the Mburu family. Both Moon and Fisher maintain close links with the UK, “coming home” as often as possible to visit family and friends. Moon is an ardent supporter of arsenal. He says the thing he misses the most is a pint of bitter. Fisher has clung to his British accent. “Although I sound very American to most Brits, Americans seem to think that I have a very strong British accent – it’s mid-Atlantic, I guess.” While working for ActionAid, Moon and Fisher helped Kenyans build schools, water projects and small industries. But they became disillusioned with setting up women’s and youth groups with developments projects that collapsed soon after they left. They realised that in many cases they were doing more harm than good. By subsidising community groups to launch enterprises in which the people had little interest, they were in fact penalising local entrepreneurs who were unable to compete with a charity. “It dawned on us over time,” says Fisher. “We just thought, ‘this isn’t working – why?’” In 1991 they left their comfortable jobs and set up KickStart as a “social enterprise that fights poverty by assisting cash-poor rural people to start profitable and productive enterprises to create wealth and contribute to economic growth.” Their basic premise was that the poor of Africa live in a cash economy and don’t need education and healthcare per se, but the cash with which to buy them. Having designed water projects and set up classrooms in the past, they decided to address poverty in other ways. They worked out that the quickest way to get a return was to use the capital and energy available. There was plenty of intelligent unemployed energy, and the land was capital. They combined the two by using human energy to pump the water that would make land more profitable. Like a pulley system, the MoneyMaker pump magnifies available human energy. The mongrel offspring of a bicycle pump and a StairMaster gym machine, its ingenuity lies in the fact that it uses the body weight of the pumper and the strength of his legs and upper body rather than the weaker arms. KickStart has sold 66,354 MoneyMakers and poor entrepreneurs have invested $5 million of their own money to set up 44,000 family enterprises that at present earn more than $47 million in annual profits. The maths is staggeringly simple. “In Kenya without irrigation,” says Fisher, “you get $150 per acre per year. Irrigate that and you get $3,000 per season. That’s with very fancy irrigation, of course. We don’t do as well as that but when someone buys one of our pumps the net farm income goes up six to ten times.” Back at Mburu’s farm, you can see the impact irrigation makes, but to buy a MoneyMaker is a giant leap of faith. At just under $100 in a country where most survive on a dollar a day, buying a pump is no small step. Faith says, “We were doing the watering with a bucket and I used to have to pick cashews but now I don’t. I’m very happy that my husband saw that far ahead to buy it – although at first I didn’t think it was a good idea.” It took them a few months to decide to buy the pump on credit in Saba Saba, the local town. After a couple of initial payments the dealer allowed Mburu to take the pump and pay the balance after his first harvest. They paid in full and on time. Their farm now stands out from neighbours’ plots, where children and grandmothers still water with buckets to produce patchy and inferior crops. At the start of the rains, the area looks green and pleasant, but it lies only 100km from the equator and, without irrigation, it can turn arid after only a couple of weeks of drought. Two of their neighbours are now saving for pumps. Now the Mburu’s seven children no longer have to remain at home while their mother works and their father risks arrest to hawk vegetables in faraway Nairobi. “I have been able to dig a well with income from the farm,” says Mburu. “I send my kids to school and two are at technical college. I buy medicines. I have bought dairy cows and goats. I can now buy a motorised pump and I employ people and pay rent for several parcels of land.” “Poor people are just like us,” says Moon, “If you give them the opportunity to make money, they can buy the things they need like food, education and healthcare. We want to create dignity, not dependence.” I am now treated with respect within the community,” says Mburu. I am chairman of a group of 25 farmers and we supply an export company in Nairobi.” Before MoneyMaker, his parched vegetables were hard to sell in Nairobi; today his beans are sold on British supermarket shelves. “You can grow a variety of crops with a pump,” he says. “You can plan with a pump.” Thus he grows vegetables that need plenty of water in the dry season, ensuring that he is paid premium prices for his labour. With such obvious contentment stemming from their ideas, Moon and Fisher would be entitled to feel smug. But instead they are refreshingly ambitious. They are now working on a “Deep Lift Pump” which can draw water up from a much deeper level. “It will be human-powered and hopefully should cost less than $150. A number of prototypes are already working the field. It will enable many more people to get into irrigated agriculture in places where the existing models cannot work,” says Moon. KickStart is also designing a manual borehole drilling machine and testing an entry-level hip pump, which will sell for just $35. The organisation has a 25% funded three-year plan to raise another 400,000 people from poverty. Ambitious? Maybe, but Moon explains: “I stay keen because I love what we do, and the results are so visible, tangible and satisfying.” By fulfilling their ideals and discarding well-meaning but ineffective ideas, they have achieved what African governments, donors and international aid agencies spend millions failing to do. Every day KickStart lifts 25 families out of poverty. But most importantly, by making them pay for the privilege, Nick Moon and Martin Fisher ensure that they stay there. For more details see http://kickstart.org/tech/pumps/ Taken from Saga magazine, January 2007 http://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/

My warmest congratulations to you both!!! I'm really happy that you've found each other - all the best for the future. At last you can enjoy each other in person and not just on the telephone or over cyberspace.

Please read all my other posts for why I believe it's freedom of choice. Birth control not being 100% reliable was never meant to be taken as a stand-alone reason, but taken within the context of individual choice.

Sex is a need and a strategy for meeting other needs. No, I don't need it for my survival, in the same way that I don't need a partner, friends, love, work that gives me fulfillment, etc., but they do have a huge bearing on my pursuit of happiness. I do have the right to the pursuit of happiness. Like I said, I'm not a sacrificial schmoo. If I become pregnant I will have an abortion because it is anti MY life to continue with the pregnancy. My life is my own. My body is my own, to do with as I please - I'm not merely some biological baby-making machine.

This child's view of the nativity is so messed up that it has me crying with laughter when I read it. The article is copyrighted so I've only provided a link. http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/t...t20041223.shtml It's from BBC Radio 4's 'Thought for the Day' - the religious connotations don't spoilt it though.

Happy Birthday Kat! :queen: Three cheers (British tradition) for Kat: Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hope you have a wonderful day and get to do all of the things that you want to do, and none of the things that you don't want to do Here's a smiley for you and MSK: :hug:

To abstain from sex because it incurs a risk of pregnancy would be too great a sacrifice on my part. I value my life and my happiness. I am NOT some sacrificial schmoo. Therefore, I am not willing to deny myself the wonderful connection, intense joy and multiple other needs that the sexual act gives me. As far as I am concerned, using a reliable form of birth control is my taking as full responsibility for preventing a pregnancy as I am rationally able to do, without incurring massive self-sacrifice on my part [abstinence].

I was impressed by this video. She does have an extremely valid point. As a society we do go on about violence in TV and video games and yet ignore the explicit violence in the Bible and religion. I wish I'd had YouTube when I was a kid - I also thought that the emperor had no clothes on, but was told I was wicked to say such a thing. The emperor does have no clothes on, but too many adults are too afraid to admit it, because of what it will mean for their lives.

I regret my comment about the foetus being a parasite. With hindsight I understand that it would offend and apologise for saying it. For clarity, you took my quote out of context, I was looking at it purely from a biological slant. I am not looking to upset people, so I take back what I said. Blackhorse: "I'm having a difficult time trying to see how you can put starving diseased children who have been put in that situation through no fault of their own along with abortion." If I take a reliable form of birth control in order to prevent the pregnancy, but still become pregnant, then I would argue that I have been put in a situation (pregnancy), through no fault of my own. The pregnancy was outside of my volitional control, therefore, why should I be denied the right to do with my body and my life as I see fit, by having an abortion? How can you place value on the life of the foetus, yet not place value on MY LIFE. I need freedom and autonomy in order to fully enjoy my life and being forced to have a child against my will is against my right to freedom. It is true the African child is in a situation through no fault of his or her own, and probably cannot do anything to help him or herself. Whereas if I become pregnant, I can do something about it and don't want to be denied that opportunity. My point about the African child is this: you value the life of the foetus enough to want to save it, because it does not involve any sacrifice on your part. If you value human life, why are you not out in Africa saving the starving children (i.e. what's the difference between saving a starving child and saving a foetus)? I'm presuming that you are not helping the starving children because it would involve a sacrifice on your part, one which you are not prepared to make. This is perfectly acceptable. My point is that carrying a pregnancy to term would involve a sacrifice on my part, one which I am not prepared to make. I do value human life, but I am pro-abortion for this reason: pregnancy can happen despite all my best attempts to prevent it. Abortion would be wrong if I volitionally chose when to release an ovum and no ovum was released unless and until I made this conscious decision. Then the pregnancy would be within my own control and thus I would be responsible for it happening. Blackhorse, I am assuming you are a man. You can therefore never become pregnant. It is easy for you to condemn an act as immoral because pregnancy and all that this entails will never affect you.

Because pregnancy is NOT just a simple, walk in the park with no risk of death, no pain, no discomfort, no post-natal depression, no weight-gain, no upheaval, no potential long-term health complications (incontinence and backache being just two of them) for the mother. I have an irreplaceable, finite life and I do not want to sacrifice 18 months of it (9 months pregnant and a further 9 months to recover) feeling dreadful and putting on a huge amount of weight which I will find hard to shift, for somebody else. The pregnancy or childbirth may also kill me, of course. It just seems odd to me that we don't expect people to sacrifice 18 months of their irreplaceable lives living in Africa with the heat, flies, diseases, and parasites, preventing a baby from starving to death, so why do we expect a mother to sacrifice 18 months of her life for a ball of cells (which, biologically, is a parasite on her body anyway)?

My hackles rose on this. No contraception is 100% reliable and removing the ovaries or womb has serious consequences for the woman's health (the potential killer osteoporosis being one of them). Removing just the womb makes the ovaries stop working after a few years. If you force a woman to carry the baby to full term and that pregnancy or childbirth kills her (as it does 1 in 10,000 women every year), does that not constitute as murder of the mother? My life is my own. My body is my own. I am not some potential biological baby-making machine. If contraception fails I have no choice over whether I become pregnant or not, it is my body working against me, therefore why should I suffer the consequences of something that is outside of my volitional control? I am not prepared to give up sex, one of the most wonderful human experiences, to eliminate the risk of pregnancy. All I can do is use contraception and if I do become pregnant have an abortion whilst it is at the earliest stage of development. I would never force any woman to have a child against her wishes. I would like to add: either my life is my own, or it is not. No caveats.

Not a film, but I'm really enjoying the Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood, which is currently airing on TV. It has the omnisexual and enigmatic Captain Jack Harkness, who was my favourite character from series one of Doctor Who.

That must be one of the best things about being an actor/actress - you get to be someone else for a day (or several months, more like) and get paid for it! It's funny how many say that they love playing the 'baddies'. In real-life one cannot go around being a cantankerous old lady without suffering the consequences of loneliness. But as an actress, one can do it and thorougly enjoy it, knowing that you're not damaging any relationships by being so. Isn't it funny how we all strive for harmony in our lives, and yet would probably find watching a film that involved a family, say, all living harmoniously together quite dull. We strive for harmony and yet also seem to crave drama (conflict, contrast).

I have another quote (not sure who it's attributed to): "I like children, but I couldn't eat a whole one." Thanks Judith, it's very reassuring to know that I'm not alone

Michael, that is a great quote! There's something else about pregnancy that I want to add. Whilst I understand the biological reasons for it, does any other woman find it somewhat disturbing that a part of her body will go against her will and become pregnant? A condition that can have serious physical, mental and immunological implications; not to mention one that can kill her. I don't like having parts of my body working against me rather than for me. Yeah, I know it's all about passing on genes, and my statement here could be viewed as fighting reality, etc., but there's something worker-beeish about it - giving up one's life for the good of the hive, or in this case, the good of one's genes. As has already been mentioned - the person who invented contraception should be made a saint. I shall add him to my list of heroes - the guy who invented the automatic washing machine also being one of them.

Wow! It seems there IS medical evidence about the sensitivity of the foreskin - suddenly male circumcision becomes male genital mutilation. Here's a couple of links about it's importance. http://research.cirp.org/faq1.html http://research.cirp.org/func1.html

Leonardo da Vinci. I am in awe of his genius. It would also be extremely interesting to experience being a man for a day. Although Da Vinci is said to have been gay - so maybe I wouldn't get the sexual experience that I was after. No disrespect intended of gays. I'd quite like to see the world through a male brain and have the male's balance of hormones. If we're talking purely fictional characters here, I'd like to be Doctor Who. I'd use the TARDIS (it's a time and space machine for those who don't know), to go back in time and give a copy of Ayn Rand's works to Aristotle. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if his works on ethics had been a bit more robust... No criticism of Aristotle. It'd be fantastic - like playing God and re-writing history. And think of all the millions of lives that would be saved...

I'm grateful for your post Mark. Whilst I don't want children myself, I want them to be happy and so I'm glad that you enjoy your daughter. I've just re-read Charles' post. What caught my attention was the part about how loving solitude can be a problem in raising children. I spent the week before the TOC conference touring Santa Barbara, LA, Las Vegas and Zion with a friend. We had a great time together and I loved Las Vegas the most - it's just soooooo ostentatious and a part of me really loves things that are OTT. Knowing how much I like solitude, I regret now that I didn't plan any solitude into our time together. By the end of the week (the Friday before the conference started), I felt like I was going nuts. I remember finally being alone on the Friday evening and feeling a huge amount of relief. It was simply wonderful to not have to be concerned about anybody else, what they wanted to do, or their needs. We're not talking twenty years here. This was after only one week! This experience made me realise that I would find the constant, relentless demands on my time by a child or children completely intolerable. Whilst I can appreciate that children can be a joy, I think I can tap into that joy from spending time with my nephew and niece. I like children and find them wonderful - for short spans of time. I would now like to extol the virtues of being an aunty: it's like having all the advantages of being a grandparent, without having to go through the parent bit first.