Mike Renzulli

I got an e-mail about a GREAT idea from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Text of it is below: Friends, The Competitive Enterprise Institute has initiated the celebration of ‘Human Achievement Hour’ (HAH) between 8:30pm and 9:30pm on March 28, 2009 in response to and coinciding with Earth Hour, a period during which governments, individuals, and corporations have agreed to dim or shut off lights in an effort to draw attention to climate change. Unlike Earth Hour, the purpose Human Achievement Hour is to salute the people who keep the lights on and produce the energy that helps make human achievement possible. Many organizations and average folks around the world will show their support for human achievement by simply going about their daily lives. The celebration of Human Achievement Hour has already garnered sneers and criticism from some of those supporting Earth Hour—they have even had the HAH Wikipedia entry deleted. In spite of all this, we believe that it is important that people around the world participate with us in acknowledging the achievements accomplished by the human race. Please check out these links to the great new video and other info below, and help us spread the word about HAH--and let’s utilize the social web to do so! Thanks, Gary Howard Jr. http://cei.org/

Happy (belated) birthday, Kat. All the best to you!

This is unfortunate and it is also disappointing that Disney decided to do their own thing with regards to how the show would be done. After The Fountainhead was released on film, Ayn Rand vowed to never again allow any of her fiction books to be made into movies. This was due mainly to her constant fighting with Warner Bros. studios to keep her script intact. I suspect, in terms of Terry Goodkind's case, that he decided he wanted to see what would happen after signing over the rights to Disney. I am not implying that Goodkind was weak. But it would seem that he made a mistake with giving Disney a blank check with the series. So far the series isn't too bad but I lack having read the book series to compare and contrast. Last week's episode had a fairly freedom-oriented message to it and, overall, I like Legend. How about we start an e-mail campaign of some kind to pressure Disney to remain closer to or totally true to the novels? I am up for it. Anyone else? I haven't dug into the production side of the house, but it seems to fall along the same lines as Hercules and Xena. I'd consider this a step above them in acting, costuming/props and special effects. Unfortunately, Terry sold the rights to Disney and doesn't have any input into the show. In a letter written to me by Terry, he explains... "TV has to make compromises that a book does not have to make. Worse than that, executives who have never read the books make important decisions based on marketing demographics, for example casting people who they think will attract pre-teens rather than casting the right person for the part. The people who put up the money call the shots and not even Sam Raimi can change it. I'm hoping the show will at least be a bit of fun, but there is no way it will be anywhere near as good as the books." That about sums it up...lol. ~ Shane

I have some great news! I have just learned that author Terry Goodkind's best selling fantasy Sword of Truth book series is going to be adopted for television! The name of the TV series is: The Legend of the Seeker. For those of you who do not know, Terry Goodkind has largely been influenced by the books of Ayn Rand, is a strong supporter of her works and is an Objectivist. Also, two books from Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, Naked Empire and Chainfire, were nominated for Prometheus awards, respectfully. The TV series is being filmed in New Zealand and co-produced by Sam Raimi (Spiderman 1,2 & 3) and a Rob Tapert. The story is about Zedd, a wise and powerful old wizard who accompanies Richard Cypher and Kahlan Amnell on their epic journey to prevent a bloodthirsty tyrant named Darken Rahl from unleashing an ancient, terrifying evil that can enslave the world. The Legend of the Seeker kicks off with a thrilling two-hour premiere event on November 1st, and will be broadcast on local TV stations. If you want to find out which one near you will broadcast it, you can find out at the show's website (link below). Legend of the Seeker website: http://www.legendoftheseeker.com/ Terry Goodkind website: http://www.terrygoodkind.com/

When: Sunday October 12, 2008 from 2:00pm - 4:00pm Where: One Night Cinema 1825 E Elliot Road Tempe, Arizona 85284 Theater website: http://www.onenightcinema.com Movie website: http://www.singingrevolution.com Price: $9.50 Event Details: This critically acclaimed documentary tells the true story of how the citizens of the Republic of Estonia peacefully resisted their country's occupation by The Soviet Union and its puppet government by doing one of few things they could do without fear of retaliation: sing. Thanks to the Estonians they inspired similar efforts that took place the neighboring countries of Luthuania and Latvia with crowds by the hundreds of thousands demonstrating their defiance of Communist rule that lead to the people of all three Baltic countries to win their independence and freedom. Running time for the film is 94 minutes. Phoenix Objectivists will attend the Sunday screening of this documentary. After the its conclusion we will go to a local restaurant or coffee shop for general discussion about the film and upcoming events for our group. For more information about our group or Objectivist philosophy, please visit our website: http://phoenixobjectivists.blogspot.com

Hey Everyone, I went to see Hamlet 2 over the weekend and thought it was a pretty funny film. Its about a struggling actor, Dana Marschz, who ends up teaching drama classes at a Tucson, AZ highschool who inherit problem students from other classes that get axed by the school district in which Dana Marschz's drama class gets cut. To fund it for another semester, Marschz comes up with this controversial play called Hamlet 2 which the school tries to stop but the ACLU gets involved. The New York Times said: "[Hamlet 2] made sure to take shots at Christians, gays, Latinos, Jews, the American Civil Liberties Union and Elisabeth Shue, one of its lead actresses."

Hey Everyone, Just an FYI yours truly turned 40 yesterday.

I ended my subscription with Reason about 1999 and, as far as I am concerned, they do not live up to their title. Reason has not only has gone out of its way to insult Libertarian Party candidates (like Harry Browne) but also they have an interventionist tinge to them that doesn't set well with me. Your pointing out their support of maintaining the 21 year old drinking age is an example. Justin Raimondo had some very interesting things to point out about Reason and how they ended up being taken over by Liberventionists. They backed Gulf Wars I & II, for instance. It was Raimondo's missives at Antiwar.com (which are heavily researched) that finally convinced me to stop subscribing to it. I find Liberty magazine to be a better choice.

Hey Everyone, I just got back from seeing Hellboy 2 and, as far as I am concerned, this is another excellent flick Hollywood has cranked out. It is done by Guellermo Del Toro who did Pan's Labrynth and I think won an Academy Award. While I didn't first Hellboy, you can see this film without having to have seen the first. Its got a good story, very good acting, excellent special effects and action with humor sprinkled in to lighten the film's dark feel. The whole movie is geared towards the climax at the end and its a whopper! Hopefully, it will do well enough for a Hellboy 3. None the less, I give Hellboy 2 high marks and hope you all feel the same.

Michael, I think your letter to Sarah is a very thoughful attempt to communicate with these people. However, my impression is that many of them don't know what Objectivism truly is. For example, on one blog I took the author to task stating that a person cannot be a Christian and Objectivist at the same time and outlined why using Ayn Rand's outlook on religion and later quoting from Leonard Piekoff's statement in OPAR. I suggested instead that they may want to consider themselves Christian Libertarians since libertarianism draws from the writings, ideas and activism of religious and non-religious philosophers. One person from this group angrily responded that Christianity is objective and pointed me to a book written by a Harvard-educated attorney who used the federal rules of evidence as a way to prove the existence of Jesus/God. One blogger bluntly stated that an Objectivist Christian is not a contradiction. I have no doubt in my mind that, in their heart of hearts, they believe in some semblance of freedom. However, I think as Objectivists we have an obligation to point out their error in judgement and, yes, go so far as to tell them they cannot be Objectivists while stating they embrace religious beliefs, mysticism or a belief in the paranormal since, by their doing so, they prefer faith over reason.

I took my girlfriend to see the movie Wanted staring Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman. The film is loosely based on a DC comic series of the same name and encompasses elements of The Matrix, Blade Runner, Watchmen, and Fight Club. Wesley Gibson is living a pathetic life with a disloyal girlfriend having an affair with an idiot he considers his best friend, and works in a job he hates with a boss everyone in his department (including him) loathes and has singled him out for harrassment. During his visit to a pharmacy to fill a prescription, he is approached by a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie). There Fox discloses to Wesley in the pharmacy that someone, later identified as an assassin named Cross, just murdered Gibson's father. After both escape near death that involves a hair raising gunfight and car chase with Cross, Fox takes him to the headquarters of a thousand-year old, secretive league of assassins she belongs to known as The Fraternity. Wesley is invited by the group's leader, Sloan (Morgan Freeman), to join them since he holds a special gift involving heightened sensory perception that is a trait Sloan looks for when recruiting people to join his organization and simultaneoulsy offers Wesley the opportunity to take revenge upon Cross for his father's death. Gibson initially declines but reconsiders and joins the group soon after having a heated, yet humorous, altercation with his boss which is the result of his realizing that Sloan's offer will give him a new lease on life. I will leave it to you to find out if Wesley survives the group's intense training sessions, finds and kills Cross and why Cross is killing members of The Fraternity. Like Iron Man and The Dark Knight, Wanted is one of the best movies I have seen so far this year. Not only is Wanted an intense action flick that takes you on a nail-biting, adrenaline-filled roller coaster ride from near start to finish, it also has a libertarian message underneath its surface. The Fraternity is a religious-based organization and Wesley is told to take Sloan and the tenets of the organization on faith and Wesley finds out the true intent of Sloan and the reason for The Fraternity's existence. In the beginning, the audience is lead to believe there maybe more than meets the eye with The Fraternity and Sloan's true intent as well as the mystically-oriented weavings that name the group's targets which Sloan gives to Fraternity members to carry out missions. Wanted points out that not only is it best for people to find and know the truth on their own but it is also a film that defends holding fast to one's principles, celebrates individuality and knowledge while debunking the Platonic idea that a group of elites can direct or give balance to society and the absurd, immoral idea held by futilitarians that to one person's rights must be violated for the benefit society or to save others. Towards the end of the film Wesley reasserts his individuality and sense of justice thanks, in part, to the emplowerment he obtains as a result of training and much of the symbolism I witnessed in Wanted had me quietly cheering. I envy James McAvoy (Wesley Gibson) for being able to kiss Angelina Jolie. If she wasn't married to Brad Pitt and if I wasn't in a relationship I would give my right arm to have that opportunity. Jolie is absolutely alluring in this film and I can't wait to see her playing Dagny Taggart when Atlas Shrugged is released in theaters. The entire cast did a great job with their roles even though Jolie, Freeman, and McAvoy were the ones who acted in the most scenes due to the centrality of their characters and the action was a central feature of the film. Fortunately, Wanted is doing very well at the box office since its release in June. Unfortunately, the amount of movie theaters showing it is shrinking since its popularity is wearing off. If you want to see it before it leaves theaters; I would suggest doing so before new movie releases next Friday. I regret I did not see this movie until now. Better late than never.

I saw The Incredible Hulk last weekend and recommend it! It has a good story with a very strong libertarian theme to it. Bruce banner is being pursued by a corrupt officer of the U.S. Army who wants to replicate his genes to create a race of super warriors. The acting and special effects are great too! I am also told it is by far much better than the original Hulk movie that came out in 2003. Unfortunately, it is not doing as well at the box office and may bomb like the first movie did. None the less, The Incredible Hulk is definitely worth the ticket price and seeing in theaters!

My constant parusing of SOLO's website leads to the same conclusion, Michael. I pointed out SOLO as being a third faction since it seems they are in a similar vain as the Tibetan faction of Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism doesn't seem to have spread outside of Tibet itself much similar to SOLO's version of Objectivism. Now, how much for that statue? ;-)

Thanks for clarifying, Robert. This does explain the open vs. closed system debate alot better for me. In terms of the open system, while the core principles of Objectivism should remain unchanged, the other fundamentals could be subject to change or revision. For example, on Wikipedia there is an article (link below) pointing out that after Ayn Rand died and after stating he disagreed with her on the subject, Leonard Piekoff changed or revised Objectivism's official stance on homosexuality. I am not saying this to be facetious towards Piekoff (despite the fact that I loathe some of the things he has done). But to point out that there are times that even that even ARI folks have changed some semblances of the philosophy. I would not be surprised if it was due to them coming to the same conclusions as you point out in last paragraph of your statement, though they will not openly say it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism,_...d_homosexuality It comes from the question and answer period following her 1971 Ford Hall Forum talk, and is now included in Ayn Rand Answers. (By the way, it is part of a blast at people who call themselves Objectivists but do not believe in moral perfection. I doubt that this was a coincidence.) In her preface to the first issue of The Objectivist Forum, in 1980, Ayn Rand restated her demand. But now the alternative was "flights of fancy" instead of "contradictions" (the former is not an improvement over the latter, from Rand's point of view). The "closed system" advocates love these quotations, as you might imagine. There are three obstacles that they consequently run smack into: (1) On other occasions, Rand envisioned significant developments in Objectivism continuing in future generations--which could never happen were the system truly closed. (2) Rand was demanding adherence to an allegedly closed system when the system was (i) of uncertain extent; (ii) seriously incomplete; and (iii) not always internally consistent. The ARIans deal with the uncertain extent problem by taking certain views that embarrass them (Rand's insistence that no psychologically healthy woman could be President of the United States; her moral condemnation of homosexuality) and redefining them as "non-philosophical." I am sure that the roll of "non-philosophical" beliefs will grow in future years. They deal with the incompleteness problem by pretending that the incompleteness isn't there, or that it doesn't matter, or that Leonard Peikoff and David Harriman are fixing it (but then their contributions will never count as "Objectivism"), or that Dr. Peikoff has been granted temporary authority to Hex the Pentateuch, or that the completions are "Objectivist philosophy" though not "Objectivism" or... stay tuned. They deal with the internal consistency problem by anathematizing anyone who raises it. (3) If Objectivism is truly a closed system that must be accepted or rejected in toto, it stopped growing when Ayn Rand died. And it must be dead, in its turn, because a single false "philosophical" proposition in the Randian corpus gives Randians the choice between deliberately accepting a system that includes falsehoods, or hitting the road out of Rand-land. Rand's belief that newborn infants experience pure sensations has turned out to be false; she enunciated it as part of her epistemology; therefore, the whole "system" is already dead. Needless to say, this last line of reasoning doesn't play well in Irvine. Robert Campbell

Thank you, Ellen. This is what I mean with regards to Islam. I appreciate Robert clarifying the role Muhammad plays in Islam but deduced that Muslims do revere him like a saint or god despite the fact that, as Robert points out, that Muslims consider Muahmmad a human being.

The third branch of Objectivism are the Sense of Life Objectivists (aka SOLO) started by Lindsay Perigo. As opposed to ARI & TAS, SOLO embraces the closed system but considers themselves superior to TAS and ARI. In what way they consider themselves superior I am not sure. Perhaps SOLO's website would explain it better: http://www.solopassion.com/

The third faction is Vajarayana which is the Tibetan version. The third faction of Objectivism I refer to is SOLO.

I have have just read part 3 of Neal Parille's review of Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics at Objectivist Living and (despite not having read PARC or PAR) completely agree with his assessment. Its PARC's author's silence or lack of rebuttal to Neal Parille's review that speaks volumes of Mr. Valliant's credibility (or lack thereof). Aside from David Kelley's split from ARI which mirror's the split of protestants from the Catholic Church, I could not help but notice that the debate over what Ayn Rand was like is similar to a debate that occured in Buddhism. When Buddha was out teaching his philosophy, he made it emphatically clear to his followers that he just wanted people to learn his philosophy and did not want to be "deified". Unfortunately, after he passed away, one faction of the Buddhist movement did just that. Instead of focusing on the teachings of Buddha, the mystic Buddhists made their philosophy into a religion and portrayed Buddha as superhuman (i.e. a god). Christianity did the same with Jesus. Islam did the same with Muhammed. And now the orthodox Objectivists with the Ayn Rand Institute want to do the same thing with Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was a wonderul individual and I love her philosophy. But I could not think of any way to better insult Ms. Rand's memory by making her out to be a victim which is what Valliant and the ARI folks do while trying to "deify" her at the same time. I think one or two people who post on these boards practice Buddism too and could give more insights into the philosophy and split that occured. There are also 3 main factions of Objectivism and it just so happens that there are 3 main factions of Buddhism too. Anyone care to comment?

I have read all 3 of Neal Parille's review of PARC and (despite not having read PARC or PAR) completely agree with his assessment. Its PARC's author's silence or lack of rebuttal to Neal Parille's review that speaks volumes of Mr. Valliant's credibility (or lack thereof). When Buddha was out teaching his philosophy, he made it emphatically clear to his followers that he did not want to be "deified". Unfortunately, after he passed away, one faction of the Buddhist movement did just that. Instead of focusing on the teachings of Buddha, the mystic Buddhists made their philosophy into a religion and made Buddha into a god. Christianity did the same with Jesus. Islam did the same with Muhammed. And now the orthodox Objectivists with the Ayn Rand Institute want to do the same thing with Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was a wonderul individual and I love her philosophy. But I could not think of any way to better insult Ms. Rand's memory by making her out to be a victim which is what Valliant and the ARI folks do while trying to "deify" her at the same time.

I think I read it also and what you are refering to is in the book Ayn Rand Answers. I looked the statement (s) up and while she seems to give conflicting views if taking into her statements on pages 95 & 97 of the book, but she did have this to say on page 114: Even as a writer, I can barely project a situation in which a man must kill an innocent person to defend his own life. But suppose someone lives in a dictatorship, and needs a disguise to escape. Personally, I would say that the man is immoral if he takes an innocent life. So he must kill an innocent bystander to get a coat. But formally, as a moral philosopher, I'd say that in such emergency situations, no one could prescribe what action is appropriate. That's my answer to all lifeboat questions. Moral rules cannot be prescribed for these situations, because only life is the basis on which to eastablish a moral code. Whatever a man chooses in such cases is right - subjectively. Taking this into account, its as if she is saying there is no right answer.

Correct on the oil leases and I agree with your statement on the role of the military. I was addressing Rand's point pertaining to her views on the situation in Iran during the Donahue interview at the time. It would have been something if U.S. forces would have done that. It is not the role of our military to enforce private contracts with foreign nations. Especially contracts that were made by a dictator set up by western forces. Also the companies that had their oil leases seized were not even American they were British (I believe). --Dustan

Thanks, Neil. However, ARI Watch states ARI looks to FDR's Generals for inspiration on how to fight the Iraq war. I don't see in ARI W's essay that ARI has praised FDR himself.

ARI gave the nod to FDR? I haven't seen anything that leads me to believe this. Can you cite the source?

I agree wholeheartedly. Furthermore, I think its important to make a distinction. I am not antiwar but, rather, anti-imperialist. Like Rothbard, Rand knew the difference between imperialism and legitimate military responses to aggression (i.e. war) on the part of other countries. I am not sure if she considered the details as much as Rothbard did. I am still not clear on (though I can understand) her logic with regards to foreign policy in the middle east. For example, in her last interview on Donahue in 1979-80 she seemed to approve of the U.S. government taking some sort of action with regards to Iran nationalizing its oil fields saying the country violated its contract rights with the oil companies by doing so though seemed to stop short of endorsing regime change. It would have been one thing if the U.S. military stepped in to enforce contract rights by guarding or retaking the oil fields from the Iranian government originally owned and operated by U.S. oil companies. However, unless the armed forces returned home shortly after completing their mission, even this can degenerate into full blow occupation if not invasion of a country (like Iran) over time with the people who replace the decision makes who approved of this action decide to institute a regime change since they have armed forces already present in the country. Or a situation similar to the East Indian Trading Company or Haliburton being given exclusive contract rights by the U.S. government to rebuild Iraq (i.e. mercantilism).