mweiss

In our dining room, we keep a whiteboard for teaching our daughter, Amanda, about alphabet, numbers and pictures. This evening, after our Thanksgiving dinner, she drew a rooster on the whiteboard... only one slight problem: the rooster had FOUR LEGS. When I pointed out to my wife, who's from the Philippines and who lived around fowl much of her life, she was absolutely mortified! It was the best laugh I've had all month. :hyper: 'Just thought I would share that. You can user your imagination about what she drew on that whiteboard. ;)

Michael, Let me ask you a question: Do you hold the position that because a person is born (as you say "happened"), that he has an innate right to the spoils of others (Ie., the labor and production of others)? This is a very fundamental point that separates Objectivists from Socialists and Fascists.

There is a saying, "The older a man gets, the farther he's had to walk to school as a boy." Oh geeze, I did not realize til now that this is the teenie bopper's forum.. the 'search todays' messages' encompasses all forums... oops... I'll go back to my Geriatric forums now.. :aww:

I don't believe that it is a "slap in the face any person who has worked an honest day in his life" to feel a "metaphysical" gratitude for being alive, being born and living in a land where things grow with ease rather than the North Pole, and having a rational capacity to be able to produce to begin with. I also don't think it is "slap in the face any person who has worked an honest day in his life" to set aside a day where it is OK to feel benevolent toward the weak and fragile among us and nurture feelings of wishing to share our abundance and make like easier for them. And I also don't think it is "slap in the face any person who has worked an honest day in his life" to reflect on what existence as a human being means in terms of basic survival and wishing well for all of humanity. We all have to die, anyway, so we might as well go out on a full belly. As a producer, I see nothing wrong in feeling all of this AND thanking the other people who produce, including myself. One set of feelings does not wipe out the other. What an idiotic false alternative. I HATE this side of Objectivism where people try to ape and twist Ayn Rand's rhetoric, holding it a virtue to try to eradicate their empathy and feelings of gratitude for being alive, and finding fault with decency towards others as a member of the human species. It is perfectly possible to be a rational and productive egoist, be aware that the universe is larger than oneself and feel lucky to be a part of it, and even care about other people, all without becoming Hank Rearden before he joined the strike. In fact, it is good to be that way. Michael Frankly, on the surface, I find nothing wrong with the two paragraphs you cited. I myself have been in situations where I slaved for hours, preparing a breathtaking TG day meal, and one of the guests thanks God. I felt like throwing that woman out on her ear! It was MY labor that put that meal on the table for all of us to enjoy that day. Some people are so stuck in the religious that they almost think it's a part of required table ediquette to thank "God". While I agree that charity to those less fortunate is perfectly okay and a good thing to do, I don't think Gary's point was to bash those who practice it. That you can interpret the above paragraph in that manner disturbs me slightly. It means that the dozen or so Socialists that I sent it via e-mail to this afternoon will probably take it even farther and call me a "God-hating, poor person-hating heathen". I think those two paragraphs sum up my own stance on the issue, and I believe in giving to those less fortunate. My friends know that I, a person living below the Federal poverty level for most of my life, am very generous with the little bit of surplus that I do have. While I agree with you that there are those with genuine hardships and that it's good to help them, I think you misread Gary's overall position with this article. He is simply pointing out the difference between the producers and the slothful parasites (by their own choice).

Gary Hull published a wonderful article on the Objective meaning of Thanksgiving in Capitalism Magazine. He argues that it is man's mind, not God, we have to thank for the plentifulness of our existence in America today. Read the full article here: http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3279

Well, as much as I love her writing, it's fortunate she's not everything there is out there... Some people not only find the liberation in her work, but sometimes they also get comfortable with the structure. There's always going to be mystery in life, praise be. The thing is how you decide to be knowing that fact. To be secure in the not knowing part. The thing is, dyed-in-the-wool Objectivists will make a very logical argument for the nonexistence of that which they have no evidence exists, and will tell you to check your premises or go read up on the Metaphysics portion of Rand's essays. I've heard some pretty complex arguments that essentially, between the lines, suggest that after you have read all there is on Objectivism, if you still believe in the unexplained, then you've not "gotten" Objectivism. I'm not so sure about that. Especially the older we get. I don't know how much time I have left, but I think that it would be nicer if there was some pleasant form of existence after I leave this mortal coil. The older I get (and the more relatives I've outlived) the more I contemplate the state of my being after death.

I'm more or less retired, but still working when I can find work, but when I'm not doing that, I'm either at the Kurzweil synthesizers, composing my next symphony, or just relaxing and playing the piano. If I'm in a mood to work on visual projects, I might spend some time in Alias Maya, constructing scenery for an animation that I've been working on for the past 24 years. Or I might be editing videos of my various travels to faraway places, or of my daughter. In between all that, I post on "heathen" forums that are filled with Socialists and Statists and try to annoy them with Objectivist ethics. And when I'm not there, annoying heathens, I'm here, looking for my sanity.

Aout 20 some odd years ago, I think it was in an issue of Prevention magazine that I saw a comic strip which portreyed two doctors having a discussion. One doctor said to the other, "There's no doubt about it.... LIVING causes cancer." So if we all die, we won't get cancer, right? Sounds preposterous. I'll go back to eating my egg pie and Danish butter cookies now...

I think you're right about this, because I remember when I had my second stroke in 1992, I had eaten McDonald's food in the morning, and then a friend took me out to Subway that same evening for a sandwich. Hours later, I had a stroke, and I can remember thinking about it in the days that followed, how I had had an exceptionally fatty diet that day. The combinatio of McD's and Subway is deadly. Regrettably, my diet has shifted away from healthfoods to pleasure foods. My wife loves to cook, but sometimes it is my turn to cook, and frequently I make Fettucine Alfredo, which everyone knows is "a heart attack on a plate." We're having a traditional turkey dinner tomorrow, with mached potatoes, corn and stringbeans, and turkey stuffing with cranberry as the sideshows to the main attraction. We'll of course have lots of leftovers and be eating a lot of turkey sandwiches for the next two weeks. Hard to believe another holiday season is upon us already!

Oh Lord, what would Miss Rand say about that? I think that this is one of the downsides of Objectivism: it shuts down any propensity to believe in miracles, so one's life is completely shut out from experiencing the benefit of the Law of Attraction.

Wow... Being a self-UNemployed bum, I never realized all the fun I was missing. 'Sure glad I took early retirement in '84. The BS you kids live with today, strains my ability for belief!

Here's something historical about the pipe organ: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx8FQju0SXk But the most unique organ work I've ever heard was this rendition of Saint-Saëns, Danse Macabre:

What's with all the washing machines on stage?

Somehow I just KNEW you were going to bring up that cartoon. ;) The fact that my Jewish friend considers Rand a joke, fits about right with the comic strip and that YT video.

I stumbled into this video about a month ago while searching "Ayn Rand" in the YouTube search field. It made me want to puke. They can't even pronounce her name right. C'mon, what a pathetic attempt at satire.

Okay, since someone started a YouTube music video thread, I thought I'd start a parents' kid vid thread. Have you caught your kid expressing his or herself in a humorous and entertaining way? If so, post it here and let's all enjoy it. Last Christmas, my daughter, Amanda, received a Cabbage Patch doll from our relatives in Florida. Here was her amusing reaction. I set it to Quebert's Canasta, which adds a nice mood to the whole thing:

Okay, not really a "music video" but it's one of my early YouTube uploads... ...it's a Bass Pig thing, if you catch my drift......

Our daughter turned 2 in April. While we have had some minor success at teaching her to feed herself solid food and drink from a cup, lately she has regressed to refusing to eat and wanting her milk bottle. Last spring, I grew rather frustrated. She becomes violent when asked to do something she does not want to do, such as eat what's on her plate. One particular time, we were eating in the livingroom, which has w/w carpeting, because our dining room was being renovated. We were trying to guide her to take a forkful of spaghetti and put it in her mouth. She resisted and the second time we tried, before I could register what was happening, she took the entire plate and tossed it overboard, landing it face down on the carpet. Fettucine Alfredo, on the rug. What a mess. I gave her a little slap (which was minor compared to what my dad did to me when I was two and threw my plate over in the high chair). I found that for a while, she started to behave and eat her food after that slap. But as time went on, we got lenient with her and her lack of interest in solid food became more of a resistance to being fed. I did discover that she likes cookies though. She has no problem with cookies, potato chips and cashew nuts. In fact, she asks for them by name. But at the dinner table, unless it's something she really likes, 95% of the food we serve to her is met with 100% resistance. No matter how hard we try, she resists with almost super-human physical strength, pushing the arm holding the fork away from her face. She looks at what's on the fork and if it doesn't match the image of what she thinks she likes, there's no way that food's going to enter her mouth. And that's final, so asserts Amanda, age 2-1/2. My wife is concerned because she only weighs about 26 lbs and she thinks the girl isn't eating enough. She's also constapated as an eighty year old woman, having painful and strained bowel movements every 3 to 5 days. This is likely because she drinks so much milk and not enough roughage. Fortunately, she will eat Oatmeal, which is very good for brain development and is a source of roughage, but the rest of the meals are met with impossible resistance. So my question to the parents here.... how do you overcome your kid's resistance to accepting and eating what is served for dinner? Do you give in and let them eat cookies instead of supper? Do you spank until they eat? Do you send them to bed hungry if they don't? What methods work? I would love to hear your comments.

I have accumulated several questions over the course of my life with regard to certain dreams, experiences and emotions as a toddler, but now that I am raising one of my own, I'm even more keenly interested in the display of what I perceive to be certain innate preconceptions. For instance, my daughter, who is two years of age, reacts with intense fear to a little plastic figurine that a friend gave me from a McDonald's happy meal. It looks like a Nick Park character, a fat man with a long nose, perhaps the nose of a mouse. My daughter, when shown this toy, runs from the room and becomes very agitated, such that her heart pounds that I can feel it when I pick her up. Last year, she displayed great contempt for a cabbage patch doll that she got for Christmas from a relative. She was not afraid of it, but she treated it like a piece of trash, always throwing it down on the floor. One time, she even stripped the doll or all it's clothes and left it lying face-down on the floor. Now, as far as I can tell, no one taught her to be afraid of the plastic figurine, or to dislike the cabbage patch doll. Curiously, she has developed some fears that she did not possess before. A year ago, she was not afraid of anything. Where do these fears come from? If she has not had a man who looked like the plastic figurine abuse her in some terrible way, why would that figure upset her so? As to my own childhood, I have often wondered where the rich and often alien content of my nightmares and dreams came from. When I was between 2 and 3 years of age, I had a series of nightmares about falling backwards down a flight of stairs. That I can understand. I had seen stairs and the stairs in my dream were recognizeable as the celler stairs in the house that we lived in at the time. I also had nightmares of being in a yellow room, and the feeling of being asphixiated. I was always alone in these dreams, the only one in the room. Those were the most terrifying dreams because I believed I was dying in those. Years later, I formed a hypothesis that I was recalling a past life--that I was put to death in a gas chamber. Then there were the dreams where I was surrounded by refrigerators--their backs facing me with the condenser coils, and they were on fire. I had never experienced these things by the age of two, yet I was dreaming about these things. Where do these images come from, if not from some level of memory we don't understand? My daughter developed fears of some of her toys, where she had none as a baby. My daughter also has a very well-defined set of asthetics. She likes only certain toys and hates most others. Usually these toys are 'realistic' and not 'distorted' in their features, for instance stuffed animals and dolls. She picks all her own toys and has done so since age 1. Anything a relative sends to her, she disdains and summarily tosses aside. I find this curious that she has formed such definitive likes and dislikes at this early age.

You certainly make a good case for the quality of the story, as a spy story, but only if we don't look at it through the filter of "James Bond" expectations. It was not the gadgets so much as Bond's problem solving ability that made his character in the earliest Bond movies. However, many will not remember those early films, and hence this new characterization of Bond will be confusing to many expecting more of the same as the last handful of Bond movies. I think I'll rent it when it comes out on DVD.

Hi Michael, I think that government has created this monster that now, as a result of emulating the ethics of corrupt government cronyism, needs to be regulated. I've been torn over the issue of regulation of business, because on the one hand, what right does government have to interfere with private sector business? On the other hand, we see almost weekly, major scandals uncovered that went on with big business, often swindling the public out of large sums. Another area where I'm undecided is common carriers and whether some regulation is necessary there. Cable and telco providers have ensured monopolies in their given markets. Without competition, the prices rise and customer service becomes a sneering, unfriendly "we're the telephone company, we'll do as we damned please" attitude. But it is true that ultimately, government always benefits from regulation, whether it be rising taxes as price of commodities rise, or from fines and sanctions against these corporations. The problem of regulation is that it distorts the market. California's electric energy industry is a classic example of this. Forcing power companies to sell power at a fixed price, even when that price is lower than what they paid an out of area provider--all because environmental laws prevented the power companies from building enough generation facilities to supply California's increasing demands for electricity. I agree that big business has learned to use government to it's advantage, and that condition is detrimental to us. Lobbying should be illegal. It destroys the impartiality of government and it's ability to act as a neutral force of law and order. Special interests imbalance government so that it empowers the rich and hurts the poor. Eminent domain law is one example of this. There is probably more I can say on this, but another time...

Now that's a scenario I would give my right arm to witness!

Well I think if you had the initial impression that Objectivist people were "strict" and "intolerant" of people who were less than strictly "orthodox" Objectivists, you'll find this place a refreshing relief. My late mother was one of the intolerant Objectivists. I can remember having dinner at their place a few times when my father would bring a guest home from work. Usually that guest was religious to some degree due to background, and my mother would always begin probing. When she'd find out about a person's religious thinking, she'd do her darnedest to "convert" him to Reason. If that didn't work (and I can recall no instance where it did), she'd start procelitizing in more and more ascerbic ways, until it was almost a shouting match. At least once, I can remember the guest getting up in the middle of dinner and leaving. That's why we never had many friends. Dad was a bit more "liberal" and made friends easily. I should also note about mom that she was writing a book about Jesus and the Stoics, had spent 8 years studying the Dead Sea Scrolls and other writings from early Greek philosophy and was about to release a book that would be a major step in the understanding of who Jesus was. That never happend. It would have been interesting to see how it could have turned out if she had lived long enough to complete it. I've had over 40 yeras to digest it. In my early years, I was rabidly crusading the Objectivist way, and that's probably why I have little to no friends today. But as the years went buy, after my mom's death, I began meeting my dad at a diner daily and discussing ideas that were outside the realm of Objectivism. We decided to not to close our minds to any new information about "eternality" (reincarnation) or the existence of some intelligence that could create a universe so organized that the laws work in so predictable a manner. While I reject the Church's image of God as a Holy Ghost of Jesus' father smiling down on us from "Heaven", I do believe in the possibility that there is some inate intelligence at work and that things did not come about entirely randomly. In this regard, Objectivism seems cut & dried and oversimplified about God, simply holding the position that if you can't perceive it with your sense, then it does not exist. What if there are forms of energy we cannot measure yet? 300 years ago, no one knew electricity existed because we could not measure or perceive it. Now look at us today. In regard to your search for knowledge in Objectivism, another very important writer is Dr. Leonard Peikoff. He is the intellectual heir to Ayn Rand and is her official spokesman. He is doing a series of lectures now on his "DIM Hypothesis" which stands for Disintigration, Integration, Misintegration. It seeks to explain events in the world from the viewpoint of this tricotomy. Another book I highly recommend is "The Ominous Parallels" as it predicts what will happen in the US, based on philosophical premises that are present here and in Nazi Germany. Branden also wrote many good books. I have several of his lectures on LP records from the 1960s. He and Rand had a grave disagreement, a parting of ways in 1968. You will find that the general angle of people here is more in favor of Branden than Rand. Some here seem to think Peikoff is strange, while I'm a defender of Rand and Peikoff (probably much to the chagrin of forum VIP Barbara Branden). I am probably one of the few people on this forum that have been with the movement for most of it's existence and I have nearly all of the early publications and reference materials that I've saved since 1962. My perspective will differ from some others here as a result. I myself married a Catholic girl from the Philippines. I was afraid of dying alone, and started to reach out beyond US borders, having learned something about the nonjudgemental quality of Asian women. Filipinos are especially "blind" about age and looks. That's why you see so many of us potbellied, bald old men with young Filipinas. Although I ocassionly got strangers referring to my wife as "daughter", but that diminished after we had our first child. Some people just look at us strangely now. "Pooey" to them. This is one of the more engaging forums out there. In fact, I am having a pretty good time here and feel more relaxed about discussing my ideas on the creation of the universe without fear of being ostracized. That said, I follow Objectivist morality and political thinking closely and agree with it completely. I abhore all existing governments, taxes, conscription, censorship (FCC), regulation of business to the extreme that it is and tax on free trade. Taxes are my #1 blight that has done more damage to my parents and to my own life, so it is the #1 issue you'll see me ranting about. Welcome to the forum!

Given that both my parents died at the hands of doctors, you'll excuse me if I'm a bit skeptical about their ability to help me. I've got a great lineage: let's see... dimentia from mother's side, ulcers and tumours from father's side. Both of them were on the naturopathic route for a number of years, but when Miss Rand passed away, mom went downhill at blinding speed and was dead within 4 years of Rand's death, spending her final years in a state mental facility. Dad developed Leukemia and died from complications of that. Presently, I have no family doctor. I simply don't know anyone I can trust. My wife has doctors for her prenatal care, but that's all. I have a good dentist, and that's all at the moment. I don't believe in medical solutions to epistomological and ethical problems. The problem to me is quite clear: I cannot bear to live in this irrational world because the laws of this world are encroaching on my right to exist as I wish, to live my life in the manner I choose. Ayn Rand went through a period like this in her own life. I'm certain that astute Objectivists know what I'm talking about. I'm trying to deal with addressing the law part of it, since in America it is a crime to be poor. If you can't pay your taxes, they come with SWAT teams and take you out--dead if they have to. So I'm struggling to become a millionaire. Trouble is, while the company is terrific, I'm not on of the type of people that do well in this business, because it's all about people, and I have been a misanthropic xenophobe for most of my life. Dealing with the mental abuse of finding myself stuck reduced to resorting to being a telemarketer, I'm under a lot of stress and getting no positive reward. I may have to call 10,000 people before I gain one genuine adherent that gets me a foot in the door, so to speak. In the meantime, I stave off tax liens and sheriff's visits. It's an ugly mess, while I'm trying to repair my home to make it liveable. (We've got neighbors that don't live anywhere near us but have written complaint letters to the town about our home and that it should be bulldozed and so on.) I'll admit it's not the most picturesque house in the world, but with a lot of fixup, it can be a home for us until we earn our first million and can think about upgrading. Everything seems like it's against me, and this has been the status quo for decades. I don't believe this is entirely a physical health problem, although I do feel better and can think more clearly when I've been working outdoors or doing a lot of physical outdoor activities for at least a month. Now that winter's here, I'm not getting exercise and fresh air, so I'm on that natural decline that I go through every year. If I lived in a free world, I think I would be a lot happier. 95% of my day to day problems are directly connected with the government wanting money from me that I don't have.

I find it curious that everybody's bitching about the oil companies making profit when in reality, the only entity making a windfall profit is the STATE! Connecticut gets about 45 cents per gallon in gasolene taxes and the higher the price of gas, the bigger CT's profits go. The state has made hundreds of millions in extra revenue over the summer. Our governor, Jodi Rell, has chosen not to lower the gasolene tax in proportion to the price increase so CT, and other states too, are enjoying unearned benefits (well, taxes are always unearned, but this just goes over the edge of reasonable) at the consumers' expense. Talk about hypocracy!