syrakusos

Selene, I cannot believe that the main point (humor aside) was lost on you. It certainly cannot have been lost on everyone. Mikee and Dee seemed quite clear about it. I will spell it out for you: We (men) make an issue of PMS, but no one makes an issue of male aggression. Some years back, I went to an anger management counselor. Mikee said, "sometimes the adrenalin has to go somewhere." The counselor addressed that: no it does not. We used to believe, he said, that "blowing off steam" reduces anger. It does not. Displays of violence are self-validating and self-reinforcing. It is a "high." And it is not necessary. Repression is not the right response either. That counselor said - and I believe that it is consonant with Nathaniel Branden and others - that you must identify honestly the nature of your feelings, their cause and your response to that. This defuses the anger, removes its power. As Dee said: "Women do not have control over the biology of their bodies, but they do have control over their behavior." That applies to men, also.

Sorry, Selene, I see that the humor was lost on you.

You probably know that RT is Russian Television. Right wingers like it for its constant barrage of anti-American propaganda, which they take as being "anti-government." It is the Putin Party Line: anything that makes America look bad. It would be hard to say how "widespread" the problem is without independent facts and figures.

In her "Louder with Crowder" interview, Carly Fiorina pointed out that no one asks if a man is unfit to serve in the Oval Office because of his hormones. Back in April and May, I went through two weekends of boot camp ("regional basic orientation training") and the sergeants - all males - acted in stereotypical fashion, yelling at anyone for any mistake, displaying overt anger and aggression in order to intimidate and control. "Where is your battle buddy?! Answer me!!" No one questioned it. (Well, I do.) So... What if the sergeants had been women, not just army women, but stereotypical females. The platoon leader is short one soldier. (The soldier went to the head without informing her leader.) The sergeant get huffy... starts to cry... "How could you be so inconsiderate of my feelings..." See? That would be ridiculous. So, too, is male aggression ridiculous: truly, subject to ridicule. Yet we accept it, or many people do. I do not. A man's levels of androgen and testosterone are not constant, any more than cholesterol or any other chemicals are, even if you have a "set point" about which you fluctuate. Just put "male hormone cycle" in your search engine and read to your heart's content. Of the overt signs, perhaps the easiest is male pattern baldness. You see a guy like that and you are looking at someone who could go off his rocker at the least provocation. Even if he does not attack, he will yell, raise and wave his arms, and dance about in a display of territoriality. Mindful of your own safety, it can be amusing to watch.

Thanks! I downloaded that and archived it into a folder that I have for "Political Speeches." I also followed the other links you offered. She is highly intelligent and highly capable. As for her ability to draw voters, I leave aside the "shmooze-em-or-lose-em" theory of advertising. Yes, I understand that Mountain Dew wants you to believe that opening one will bring the X-games to your porch. Before we moved from Michigan, back in 2010, Rick Snyder ran for governor with ads on NUMB3RS calling himself "the toughest nerd in politics." It was not his only campaign line. And the disastrous state of the state pretty much doomed the incumbent Democrat. Nonetheless, in our time, here and now, with Big Bang Theory being the leading prime time show, there is no reason to shy away from being smart -- and she is smart. She has a clear vision and she articulates it well. Thanks, again, for the insights.

"Engineers of Jihad" here http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=15358 It has long been known that revolutionaries are not the underprivileged. You do not want to keep out Muslims (or Mongols). You want to keep out educated Muslims (or Mongols).

You are the best Mom in the world.

If only we could all live on farms! I will grant that a child's place in the economic production activities is clearer on a farm. Kids have chores, simple enough to understand, important enough to need doing. In the city, it is a bit more complicated, and to that end, getting good grades in school is, indeed, the child's job. In my day, the paper route was a standard activity, but those are gone. The fact remains that kids could do other activities if you want to extend their range beyond school. After working those MSNS shows for a few years, my daughter had no problem getting hired underage and off the books at a pizza parlor. City life is just more complex. The essentials of good living still apply. … and just to say, if we all lived on farms, progress would stop. Tractors were not built on farms because the internal combustion engine was not invented on a farm.

Thanks for the insightful suggestions. I do not know what arguments your wife used, but what is sauce for the gosling must also cook the gander and goose. Who earns what income in what proportion? Based on that, everyone should be charged for everything. It is not fair to "give" the kid $50 and then charge her for water, unless you, too, have to pony up in some way from your earnings in proportion. Do you make less but consume more water because you are larger? Eat more food? If you earn 60% of the household income, then can you be limited to only 50% more food than your wife's share? For years, my wife insisted that her allergies allowed her almond butter, but I could get by with peanut butter. Of course, she earned more than I, but what about the times that I earned more? Could I put the almond butter in the freezer, escrowing it until she could pull her weight again? I do not see that leading anywhere productive... Long, long ago, in the Libertarian Connection there was a parody of a value-for-value love-making session. It ended with the rental of a towel. (ahem) For us, it worked out best when our daughter found work outside the home at 11. A friend is a coin dealer and his kids were Young Numismatists. In Michigan, the YNs work the conventions as pages, being paid in tips to run food orders and other errands for the dealers. Inevitably, they spend that money at the show, also, which teaches other lessons. Coin collecting in particular is a good hobby for teaching a kid value. Let them spend a few hours searching coins for errors and such and then sell them to a dealer. They'll catch on soon enough... There's other things a kid can do, but largely, I think that just earning money outside of the context of the home is best. Allowance for grades is a fair trade, but is mostly an exercise like piano scales versus actually playing a song. PS: $50 a week for the expenses of raising a child? (Note the Comic Sans font.) Ha! You have no idea… Basically, you will retire with an extra one million dollars for each child you do not have.

My tribute is this anthem:

I am astounded, not so much by the technology (though there is that), but by your use of it. To give me the same software would be to give paints to a chimpanzee.

Back in the 90s when I was flying, I went to a local FAA meeting on safety. One of the FAA representatives said that their goal was to have half the pilots in Alaska licensed by the end of the century. You do not need any license to fly point to point on your own property and here in Texas and the West generally, you might do that. Also, you probably know that more pilots were killed learning to recover from spins than were killed in actual spins, so that was taken out of the basic certification and added to the advanced certifications. But the fact remains that students pilot were killed (unnecessarily) to meet federal regulations.

Look, Selene, I do not know who you think you are arguing with, or what you think the topic is. Jeremiah the American bemoaned the invasion of alien immigrants who create slums and bring crime and destroy the American Republican. You got that much with your "Gregorian" nod. Then, you asked, rhetorically, if they had government welfare, Title 8 housing, Obamacare, etc., etc. I took that to mean that you think that those structures are the cause of the present conditions in the inner cities. So, I pointed out that they had analogous social structures for time which promised to serve them, but only made their conditions worse, as ours do now. Now you are on some other kind of rant. In Part 3, later this week, Jeremiah has a dream about life in America in 1967.

New Dan, October 18, 1859, Dear Greg Moralist, Your letter arrived yesterday just ahead of the first big snow to close the passes. I will post it in the Spring, though we may have a thaw after this. I assume that you saw one of the advertisements that I placed in newspapers in Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, and other cities. I do not know what a "slum" or a "leftist" would be, but I recognize the Negro and burned out hulk of what appeared to be a modernistic home. Let me assure you that you are not alone in replying. In the past two years several dozen families have found their way to the general area. We are spread out over an area surpassing a hundred square miles. The community is thriving as we plant our own crops, tend our own livestock, mill our own grains, cobble our own shoes, dress our own wounds, and bury our own dead. Please be assured that we have no Negroes in New Dan. They have no place in our society. We have no need for slavery because we plant our own crops, tend our own livesto. We do not want their shiftless, aimless, craftiness for thievery and worse. We have no Chinamen or Redskins. We did have two families and some individual squarehead Swedes, but they proved to be communards which is the common state of Scandinavia with its degenerate monarchies and degenerate breeding pools of stultified serfs. As a result, all of us are hard-working, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. Some of the latest arrivals told of railroads being laid West of the Mississippi. We hardly believed them. What purpose a railroad could serve except to scare cows and chickens with its hellish noise and infernal smoke is beyond me. I look forward to your arrival, should you choose to join us. I would be pleased to show you the new axle that I just turned. I will bet that I can ride it 25 miles before it needs to be redressed with bear fat. May God Speed You and Keep You, Jeremiah

Well said. Xenophobia and illegal aliens play out in science fiction, of course, but only because they are expressions of these basic fears. It is known that in the 1920s, many German Jews who had served in the war joined right wing groups like the NSDAP in reaction to the influx of immigrants who were Eastern Jews. The last group to arrive always wants to close the door on the next one trying to get in. When I worked at Kawasaki, many of the Japanese were less than sanguine about having to go home when their rotation was up. The company treasurer suggested that there exists a kind of "international people" from all over, going all over, but different from the people they left behind. I believe that immigrants are like that, generally, they made an extraordinary effort that those who stayed behind would not.

The roughest welcome of all would be in Boston, Massachusetts, an Anglo-Saxon city with a population of about 115,000. ... their city was undergoing nothing short of an unwanted "social revolution" as described by Ephraim Peabody, member of an old Yankee family. In 1847, the first big year of Famine emigration, the city was swamped with 37,000 Irish Catholics arriving by sea and land. And once again, they fell victim to unscrupulous landlords. This time it was Boston landlords who sub-divided former Yankee dwellings into cheap housing, charging Irish families up to $1.50 a week to live in a single nine-by-eleven foot room with no water, sanitation, ventilation or daylight. In Boston, as well as other American cities in the mid-1800s, there was no enforcement of sanitary regulations and no building or fire safety codes. Landlords could do as they pleased. A single family three-story house along the waterfront that once belonged to a prosperous Yankee merchant could be divided-up room by room into housing for a hundred Irish, bringing a nice profit. The overflow Irish would settle into the gardens, back yards and alleys surrounding the house, living in wooden shacks. Demand for housing of any quality was extraordinary. People lived in musty cellars with low ceilings that partially flooded with every tide. Old warehouses and other buildings within the Irish enclave were hastily converted into rooming houses using flimsy wooden partitions that provided no privacy. A Boston Committee of Internal Health studying the situation described the resulting Irish slum as "a perfect hive of human beings, without comforts and mostly without common necessaries; in many cases huddled together like brutes, without regard to age or sex or sense of decency. Under such circumstances self-respect, forethought, all the high and noble virtues soon die out, and sullen indifference and despair or disorder, intemperance and utter degradation reign supreme." The unsanitary conditions were breeding grounds for disease, particularly cholera. Sixty percent of the Irish children born in Boston during this period didn't live to see their sixth birthday. Adult Irish lived on average just six years after stepping off the boat onto American soil. […] Immediately upon arrival in New York harbor, they were met by Irishmen known as 'runners' speaking in Gaelic and promising to 'help' their fellow countrymen. Many of the new arrivals, quite frightened at the mere prospect of America, gladly accepted. Those who hesitated were usually bullied into submission. The runner's first con was to suggest a good place to stay in New York; a boarding house operated by a friend, supposedly with good meals and comfortable rooms at very affordable rates, including free storage of any luggage. The boarding houses were actually filthy hell-holes in lower Manhattan. Instead of comfortable rooms, the confused arrivals were shoved into vermin-infested hovels with eight or ten other unfortunate souls, at prices three or four times higher than what they had been told. They remained as 'boarders' until their money ran out at which time their luggage was confiscated for back-rent and they were tossed out into the streets, homeless and penniless. […] The penniless Irish who remained in Manhattan stayed crowded together close to the docks where they sought work as unskilled dock workers. They found cheap housing wherever they could, with many families living in musty cellars. Abandoned houses near the waterfront that once belonged to wealthy merchants were converted into crowded tenements. Shoddy wooded tenements also sprang up overnight ... See much more here (where the consequential crime is also discussed): http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/america.htm And, as Jeremiah predicted, the Irish wormed their way into America, first taking over the police departments, and the Army, and eventually placing one of their own in the White House. And then came the Italians.

Would it make sense to leave New Orleans in 2000 because Katrina was coming in 2005? I do grant that cities have cultures. On RoR, I took flak for an essay that contrasted the Big Apple on 9/11 with the Big Easy in the last week of August 2005. My old neighborhood in Cleveland went through a decline in the 70s and 80s… and 90s… but then it gentrified to meet the needs of the huge Metropolitan General Hospital complex. That is on the West Side. The Cleveland Clinic is on the East Side. They compete against places the Mayo Clinic in the socialist hellhole of Minneapolis. When you need a new heart valve in Greg's Gulch, is he going to pound one out on his anvil for you? Austin is not Detroit. Minneapolis is not Charleston. San Francisco is not only not Los Angeles, it is not Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine. In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote about the broad vitality of urbanism. She also contrasted the failure of Manchester with the success of Birmingham.

July 26, 1849 at New Dan in the Rocky Mountains Philadelphia and New York reek of pestilence. Boston is already a hellhole of filthy immigrants. The health and sanitation department is overwhelmed. In addition to the over 37,000 Irish in Boston, another 52,000 have invaded New York City with no end in sight. As in Boston, they swarm into teeming, pestilent hovels, and infect the city with their diseases, their ignorance, and their pagan Roman Popery. It is all too easy to predict the future downfall of the once-great American Republic. The turmoil in Europe will bring an army of Jews who preach communism and practice merchandizing. They will infest New York, continue to St. Louis, and even settle in Albuquerque. In every city - Boston, New York, Baltimore, Charleston, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati - they will establish synagogues within their secretive enclaves and begin breeding more of their kind. Eventually, the vermin from the underbelly of Europe will follow their Popish Irish vanguard and by the end of the century an invasion of Italians will begin until 20 million are on our shore. Jews and Italians will sit on the Supreme Court. An Irish Catholic will become President of the United States. The Constitution will be amended into a shambles. Then will come the great Negro Rebellion instigated by the moneyed banking Jews of New York City. Former slaves will invade America's cities, living in festering, swelling urban decay, drinking and dancing and generating countless offspring for generations to come. Negroes will sit on the Supreme Court. An African will become President of the United States. Mexican immigration will be next and Mexicans will be elected to high office. The next invasion will come from across the Pacific with millions of Chinamen swarming the coasts from British Columbia to California. They will bring opium and other evils too evil to mention. That will stop all White settlement in the West. Within 100 years, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American will be a rare creature. The disease, crime, and moral degradation will cut in half the average lifespan of the city dweller. City dwellers will be reduced to eating dead horses as great famines sweep the land caused by the collapse of agriculture when slaves abandon hard work for carefree lives lined up at the troughs of public charity. Invention and enterprise will cease and the former American Republic will be drowned forever in an Eternal Dark Age of Popery, Jewery, and Dominance by the Brown, Black, and Yellow Races. But you can save yourself. Here, in a secret location, high and deep within the Rocky Mountains, I am building a new life for myself. I plant my own crops, raise my own animals, mine my own ores, smelt my own metals, forge my own tools, melt my own glass, tan my own hides, weave my own fabrics, build my own simple contrivances, tend my own medical needs, explore my own science, enjoy my own art, create my own gold coins to buy the things I make, and live my own life in full, free, and open liberty. You should do this too. If you do not, then may God have mercy on your soul.

You are all too nice. It is a dumb question, as posed. Grammatically, it is sensible. What it lacks is context. See "Malaria" in Wikipedia for the conquerors Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran Carlos Finlay, Josiah C. Nott, Sir Patrick Manson, Sir Ronald Ross, and William C. Gorgas. Everyone knows that Sir Edmund Hillary was the first to conquer Mount Everest. In 2012 Felicity Aston skied solo across the Antarctic. http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/05/travel/felicity-aston-antarctic-explorer/ See this list of Antarctic Firsts (including first skiing and first broken leg from skiing) http://www.antarctic-circle.org/firsts.htm Lore Harp (with Bob Harp) and Clare Ely created the Vector Graphics computer company in 1977. "In April 1977, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak rented a booth at … the First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. … Byte magazine's report on the conference mentioned Vector but spilled no ink on Apple… " http://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-housewives-helped-create-the-pc-industry John Harrison conquered the problem of longitude. Andrew Weyl conquered Fermat's Last Theorem. William Smith (1769 – 1839) drew the first geological maps of England based on fossil evidence, 20 years before The Origin of Species was published. (On my blog here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-map-that-changed-world.html)

Thanks! I have been on board with this for decades. Your summary is better than I could have done - and written better than Richard Stallman speaks it, though, of course, he is always compelling. You are right, that Objectivists dislike the FSM for all the wrong reasons. Most misunderstand the word "free". Beyond that, they believe that you have a right to control the licensing of your work. I agree. You also have the right to be a Fundamentalist Christian. Your "right" is not the topic here. Your self-interest is. (I decoded your ASCII sigline when I first noticed it a few months back. Have you seen my Fortune Cookie?)

Welcome to the board, Thom. You are obviously a talented and productive artist. Your comment in another topic on the perception (or misperception) of color inspired me to post a new item under Epistemology.

More people going into space is better for everyone. Also, realize that expansion changes a culture. Look at all the curry shops in London. I googled "Qu'ran planets" and expected Old Testament ignorance. Instead, I found this surprise: Not an isolated example... Last here, but not the least if you care to explore on your own: Face it, Bob, the Muslims are not all irrevocably evil. They are just a funny kind of Jews, like Mormons, or Unitarians. PS: Good to see you posting, I was worried.

You just do not know about the crimes. Rich men beat their wives. Rich uncles rape their nephews. Rich kids vandalize property. But the police response is different, and a lawyer can make a lot of problems go away. It is now an axiom in criminology that crime knows no neighborhood. In other words, no special place is the home of crime while other special places remain crime free. In the 19th century, criminology was not so far along in development. Then, it was believed that crime was a disease of poverty and ignorance. Back then, it was believed that an inverse relationship existed between social class (income) and crime. The richest people were the most moral, while the middle class was corruptible, and the unemployed all criminals by nature. I have a book of jokes for businessmen's dinners from 1925. The banker says, "Officer, my clerk is missing." The cop asks, "Was he tall or short?" The banker replies, "Both." But the banker himself would not be a criminal... Except that we know that the banker is, indeed, a criminal on a grand scale. So, in your expensive rural community, in addition to the batterers and rapists, you have embezzlers and doctors committing Medicaid fraud. But you feel safe because they do not break into your garage… but their hoodlum kids do… and Dad gets them a lawyer. Yes, you can link to stories about the federal housing project that was terrorized by gangs, but I must insist that you seldom find a horror story about the homeowners' association that was victimized by a real estate developer. Not that the crime did not happen, but only that it was not fit for the mass mediated hyper-reality of crime.

I already offered this here http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=15358 No one was interested. The comments in this thread are evidence of a lack of intellectual vigor. William Scherk trashed the speaker. Robin Reborn had no need to actually watch the video before replying. It went downhill from there. Eric Hoffer dissected the problem in The True Believer in 1951. The current situation of the islamist jihadi is a just a case in point.

It would be an achievement if I could say something here that I did not in the other two cross-posts. I would share this with my friends on Facebook, but I do not have any friends, depending on what you mean by that. It is the cost of individualism. I read The Fountainhead at 15. I am listening to Rachmaninoff as I write this. My ex and I are on good terms, always have been. I wrote her up for the Galt's Gulch website. But enough about me... On RoR, I posted a link to a fortune cookie program that I wrote in hex, a minor achievement. Let me place here the link to CSI: Flint (2011), a website (blog format) that I created for a presentation that I gave to middle schoolers. That was for "Super Science Friday" at the University of Michigan Flint. Everyone is crazy for CSI, and I told them that CSI shows are to criminal investigation what Star Trek is to physics. However, if you have a passion for science and law enforcement, then consider working for a university institutional review board or perhaps for a federal granting agency such as Health and Human Services. Anyway, that was one of my small achievements that make life marginally better for other people.