mweiss

I'm new here, but having a 2 year old daughter myself, I felt compelled to add my thoughts to this thread. My wife and I were undecided about children for many years. I, being much older and realizing that I may not be around when my child graduates high school, and my wife getting into the risky age where child bearing becomes less of a safe process than for younger females, we had some consideration to both sides of the issue. We were always broke and waiting for financial success. That never happened, so then we had to make a decision based on other qualifications. My reasons against having a child were that I was concerned about bringing a child into a world that was most certainly headed for global suffering under totalitarian dictatorship. With the wars and loss of moral ideals rampant, who would want to be alive in such a terrible place? But then I thought, our child might also be the one to contribute something that might change the world for the better. We decided to go ahead with our plan to have a child. We had a little girl. Well, I can tell you what it's like to imagine having a child, and the fact that actually having one is vastly different than imagining it. I always felt icky about other people's babies. But when we had Amanda, she was different. Call it chemistry of parents to child, I don't know what it was, but that little girl won our hearts from the first moment I laid eyes on her in the hospital. As she grew, she would make us laugh. Amanda has been a tremendous source of joy and happiness for us and as we watch her develop and grow, it is the most amazing thing. Yes, it involves incredible patience, but in my perspective, it's worth it. There is nothing like the pleasure we get from our little girl climbing up onto our laps and giving us a big hug. Thinking back to my single years, that would sound corny, but the fact today is that most of the joy in my life comes from this little girl. Choosing whether or not to have a child is not something where there is a right or wrong answer. But for sure, you cannot imagine what it's like to have one by merely holding someone else's baby for a few minutes. When that child is your child, you see her in a completely different light.

Dr. Leonard Peikoff devoted one of his radio progams to this topic some time in the late 1990s. The discussion really raised my awareness of the issue. I think that if Peikoff's assertion that 80% of sensation comes from the sensory input from the foreskin, then the possible reason why so many post baby boomer males resort to Viagra and other stimulants is quite possibly revealed by this.

Being an older dad myself, this raises some concerns about how to identify the more subtle symptoms of autism. I have a 2 year old girl. Although I still look pretty young for my age, a number of strangers have mistaken my wife for my daughter, that is, prior to the birth of our child, so there is quite an age difference between myself and my wife. Our daughter seems pretty normal, but either due to isolation from other children (we have no friends with children her age and we don't have money for daycare) she seems rather wrapped up in herself, self-centered. She is starting to speak a little here and there, but often times resorts to some sort of babble that neither my wife nor myself can understand. I wasn't too concerned about my child's development until last year, a mother and her 1 year old daughter were out by the street as we passed by with my daughter in the carriage and the 1 year old said "Hi baby" as we drew near. The kid didn't have any hair yet, but was speaking clear English. Ever since then, I have wondered about this. Usually, the doctors prefer to do some sort of a blood test on the father over a certain age, before conceiving a child, but we just went ahead not thinking about this. I was wondering if there is any source of information on early detection. I just want to make sure that we don't have a problem developing, or that we can deal with it early on and have the best chance of a normal life for our little girl.

Hi Michael, John Mills-Cockell's Concerto of Deliverance can be heard in excerpts on the web here: http://www.starshipaurora.com/concertoofdeliverance.html From my sampling of those excerpts. I was not impressed. Moreover, I think the composer is trying to capitalize on the name oF Ayn Rand to further his marketing of his own music. My own impression of the music is that it's minimalist in some ways, and lacks the uplifting qualities that I envisioned when I tried to imagine what Rand had in mind. The Prelude was like a Russian waltz, but seemed marred by a superfluous use of synthesizers over the acoustic intruments. All in all, this piece was one of the better of the bunch. The Gathering seemed to lack real melody and has an anapestic beat, or emphasis on counterbeat, much the way rock music does. Departure at Dawn seemed to be dragging out a sense of anticipation but never delivering a climax. Trio has a more theatrical tension to it, and as such seems more interesting, but some added rhythms later in the piece seem extraneous. Wolfskin on the Fire is a little short to really place into context, but it didn't fit the image of a symphony of deliverance. You'll Find Me again seemed to have mediocre melody and sometimes had the sense of life of some of the "New Age" music common today. Overall, the performance was mechanical and uninspiring. The orchestra's skills, particularly the 1st violinist, seemed mediocre to me. These works are rather simple, unsophisticated and boring, in my humble opinion. I have heard MUCH more ebuliant and uplifting music from Japan. Wasn't there an Objectivist estheticist by the name of Rukovina (I can remember my father mentioning a name like Anna, but it may be Mary Ann Rukovina that he was referring to) who did an in-depth course on the philosophical meaning of music and how to evaluate music in that realm?

Thank you (both you and Victor) for your warm welcome. Yes, I have a lot of ideas I would love to discuss. Sorry for the long introduction, but I wanted to present a pretty clear picture of my present philosophical state. The civility of the forum is one of the things that drew me to register. Plus it seems that there are people here who have been alive for a while and know a bit about the world before Viet Nam. Another forum I've been to seemed to be mostly college kids and the views didn't hit me as classical Objectivist in nature. Hopefully I will learn more over here.

Greetings Fellow Objectivists and Students of Objectivism, I found this forum while Googling the name of Dr. Alan Blumenthal, recently. Out of curiousity, I looked around to see what sort of people are frequenting the place and sensed that the maturity level was somewhat higher than at another Objectivist forum of which I am also a member. I also noted that some notable persons frequent this discussion venue, which adds a bit more credibility to the value of discussions here. And last, the atmosphere seems non-combatant. I’ve been reading some of the posts in the Meet & Greet area and so for the sake of comparison, on the surface, my current relationship to Objectivism is somewhat similar to that of Robert Jones and Paul Mawdsley. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve “given up” on O’ism, but let’s just say that I too find that while it is a great philosophy for living on Earth, there is a little missing between Heaven and Earth in terms of remaining open to phenomena that are not explainable by current-day science. That said, I don’t wish to give the false impression of being a mystic—I am quite far from it. But I would not call myself an Atheist either. More like an Agnostic. I think that I was much better at Objectivism in the late 1960s, when I was busy reading all of the books by Ayn Rand and Nathanial Branden, as well as listening to the many lectures of both on records and tapes. I came out of a Christian Science background in 1964 and both my parents and I discovered Objectivism through a mutual friend who introduced us to it and convinced us to come to some lectures in New York City. That was in the summer of ’64. Life changed dramatically after that. I was never satisfied with the oblique and evasive “answers” that church administrators would give me in response to my deeper questions about theology. Ayn Rand’s clear, no-nonsense writing, however, answered all of my questions in a manner that always made sense to me. This awakened the “crusading spirit” in me, and I wore my Objectivist premises out in the open for all to see throughout the next 15 years. My openness with these ideas did not earn me many friends. However, the few friends I have are quality friends, though not Objectivist themselves. My mother was a rigid Objectivist (though my parents referred to themselves as ‘students of Objectivism’ –they felt that the only true Objectivists were Ayn Rand and Dr. Leonard Peikoff and to a lesser extent, Nathaniel Branden (though they sided with Ayn Rand when that dispute between Branden and Rand broke in the early 1970s) and was intolerant of those guests my father would bring home as dinner guests who had any mixed premises or mystical thinking. My father was also Objectivist, but I would say he was the more liberal of the two, being tolerant of ‘normal’ people’s ideas. Neither one enjoyed robust health after the 1960s and there were many problems. When Ayn Rand passed away in 1982, my mother completely “lost it.” She rapidly deteriorated after that day. I’ll never forget that day. It snowed just a bit early in the day, almost as if the weather were signaling Ayn’s passing. The news shattered our lives—especially Mom’s. For her, her last great hope had died. A light had gone out in the world and we were sunk into darkness. For Mom, it was over. And she died a few years later. Dad hung on for another decade and passed too. After Mom’s passing, Dad became more and more religious. While he still believed Objectivist ideas, he began to dabble in the concept (almost the hope) of an afterlife. He read lots of books on the subject and believed that there were some cases with evidence presented in which people who had ‘near death’ experiences were able to remember events and places that their living self had no knowledge of. I began to consider the possibility of an organizing force in the universe, though I was pretty sure there wasn’t a man called Jesus that was promoted to some Holy Ghost status. I believe that there is “intelligence” that unites all of the universe and governs the laws therein, as if the entire universe were one big neural network, “God’s brain”. Getting back to my views on Objectivism, I was much better at it in the 1960s than I am today. The last serious reading I did was in 1976. But in my younger years, I was logical, fairly intelligent and thought things through. But Objectivism didn’t seem to solve my problem with my inability to appeal to the opposite sex. I was very lonely for most of my adult life. I could not find any Objectivist women when I was an eligible batchelor and had been on a few ‘blind dates’ over the decades. By the mid 1980s, I had sagged into severe depression. Seeing my love interests passing me by and getting older and older, I began to believe that love just wasn’t in the cards. So I went through about 15 years of acceptance, after a very low period where I drank my sorrows away and killed a few billion brain cells, and forced out of the corporate world, I struck out on my own as a typesetter, later graphic designer, struggling in a losing battle to make a living. Ironically, my most successful venture, was a federal crime: building and running a homebrew FM radio station without a license. Out of that success, came a change of career, of working in the legal end of the radio field, as an engineer. Industry professionals, impressed by my “ultimate thesis” of having built a working radio station from scratch—not from pieces of commercial equipment, having achieved a level of technical performance unsurpassed by any commercial equipment in existance at the time—I was introduced to the field of broadcast engineering and highly recommended by some influential radio people. You could say it was a lucky break. And for about seven years, I carved out a living. Throughout the late 1970s, a series of unpleasant tanglings with the IRS taught me to have a strong hatred of government. I began to discover the Big Lie about America—that we are not a free country, as I was taught so many decades earlier in school—but that we are a Fascist Totalitarian state, and that ‘might makes right’, not morality in the philosophical sense. This, added to my sense of injustice that I felt about the military draft during the 1960s, just cummulatively added to my dislike of this hypocritical government. My understanding of Objectivism was directly responsible for my hatred of any kind of enslavement, whether it be conscription to the military, or economic enslavement. Now, today, as I battle to keep my home from seizure by the town, as skyrocketing property taxes have exceeded my annual gross income, the anger has reached unparalled levels. But I got a little ahead of myself… Let’s go back to the 1990s. After my father passed away, that was the last of my close living relatives. We were good friends—we’d meet for coffee daily at a run down diner and shoot the breeze about stuff. After his passing, I was really alone, with no one to turn to. In 1999, I met a young lady in Taiwan, via the marvels of the Internet. We corresponded for a while and eventually her assignment ended and she returned to the Philippines. She could discuss almost anything, and was a real techie. We started having conversations by telephone and I started having $1200/month phone bills. When she suggested my visiting her in the Philippines, at first I didn’t know what to do. I had no money and limited income. This is where the “God” part comes into my story. Through a series of unexplained events, not only did this relationship start and grow strong, but out of the blue, I had offers from a radio station to buy the homebrew equipment that I had built two decades earlier, for thousands of dollars. So I sold it and used the money to finance my travel. We hit it off, and got engaged. Somehow I just “knew” I had met the right one. Try explaining that in Objective terms. My second trip 3 months later was to help her get through the US Embassy interview and ensure a smooth acquisition of a K1 visa. That wasn’t to be the case. Due to the fact that my income was far below the poverty standards, the consular officer refused our application. That touched off a week of pain and struggle, the likes of which were like something out of a bad spy movie. To make a long story short, we prevailed by finding a total stranger who had heard of our plight through a mailing list on Fil-Am relations, and sponsored my wife’s visa. The gentleman was an air traffic controller in Texas, and he had been in my shoes ten years earlier with bringing his Filipino fiancee to the US. Serious Objectivists will chastise me over the fact that I married a Catholic girl. But there are two things that went into consideration: I had a conversation with the guy that had introduced us to Objectivism in the spring of 1964. He confided to me that he had married a Catholic in 1976. I was somewhat shocked by this, but his encouragement reduced my sense of guilt and concern. The other factor was that my wife was Catholic in affiliation, but non-practicing. From our many conversations, I’d say she was brought up because her parents were Catholic and well, the Philippines was converted to Catholic by the Spanish and not by their own choice. My wife, the entire time I was in the Philippines, never went to any church ceremony. Nor did her family. So I would say she was not as close-minded to ideas. In fact, long before we got engaged, I spoke at length against religious ideas and she listened to me and continued to stick with me. Today, she and I both agree that religion is the root of much evil in the world, with radical Islam as our example. She was long aware of the evil of Islam in her own country, so it was not hard to leap to the conclusion with her that religion is a convention of man, invented to comfort and control men. So here I am, married and we have a two year old daughter now, who has taken center stage in my life. If ever there was a miracle, it is my daughter. How we managed to have such a cute little girl, so perfect in every way, eludes me. I didn’t get the good end of the genetic stick, which largely played a role in my inability to date when I was a young man, so every time I look at my little girl, I am amazed at how fortunate we are to have such a darling who is smart, funny and adorably cute. People stop is in shopping malls to tell us what a beautiful little girl we have. I’ve been told more than once that we should enroll her as a model for children’s clothing. We briefly considered, but decided it was not a good idea. So in this far-too-lengthy introduction, I will conclude by stating that I feel that there are benefits and disadvantages that can be had with Objectivism. We all know the benefits, clarity of thinking, ability to identify reality without the cover of mysticism, etc. But some of the disadvantages, as experienced in my life are that knowledge of the truth can be painful—to try and be rational in a world gone mad is frustrating. I cannot bear the immorality and injustice of property taxes, an issue which plays a very threatening role in my life right now. But on a deeper level, Objectivism taught me to be practical. I am unable to imagine anything fanciful. It’s hard for me to have hope for a better tomorrow when I am so grounded in reality and knowing full well the outcome. The old saying “ignorance is bliss” never range more true. When you know the truth, it makes you want to commit suicide and get it over with. And my mother knew that after Miss Rand died and she got her fulfilling prophecy just four years later. But years earlier, she knew we ‘weren’t going to make it’ financially or in terms of reaching her goals and dreams. I too, have been fighting off feelings of impending doom for decades. I too have been struggling to make a wealthy sum, but I run into roadblocks at every turn. In my latest effort at turning the tide of my now-failing radio business, joined a financial services company, but due to my lack of friends and relatives, find myself doing cold-calling in an attempt to market my newly-gained financial services skills and to recruit others into the business. After hundreds of phone calls, and a couple of false positives, I am back to square one. Broke, out a lot of time and some money invested in education and licensing, but still not giving up. But it dawns on me that I am the only one, out of 203 people in our regional office, who is having such difficulty doing business. I feel as if I carry a curse. My lack of success at telemarketing reminded me of my lack of success at meeting the opposite sex when I was younger. I sometimes wonder if my ability to invoke the Law of Attraction by envisioning what I want is limited by my being grounded so deeply in reality that I cannot open that part of my mind which can communicate on a different level than we do in the practical sense. I sometimes feel that maybe I don’t want success, but that I want suffering and pain, which seems a ridiculous notion, but is not one I have not encountered in talking with other miserable people. Which brings me to why I was searching out the name of Alan Blumenthal once again. I had a consulation with him in 1971, which, at the time, he pronounced me to be intelligent and in good mental health. But now I am curious as to his whereabouts and whether he still practices. Now onto other thoughts… Sometime in the 1990s, I read Ellen Plaisel’s book THERAPIST (interesting title, if you hyphenate after the first three letters), and for the first time, the notion of scandel and imperfection enterd the Objectivist community. Just hearing Blumenthal’s name mentioned in the book gave me the shakes. But then a few years later, I bought a DVD entitled “A Sense of Life” and I think it was somewhere in there that I learned there was more to the breakup between Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden than just what I recalled from 1972. I may have done a search on the internet and stumbled into “The Passion of Ayn Rand” and when I read the accounts of this fiasco, it made me angry. It was like some sort of revenge against Miss Rand for expelling Branden from her collective. But I do not know the truth. And since Miss Rand is no longer among us to present her side of the story, perhaps we’ll never know. Seeing that Barbara Branden is present among this forum’s contributors, I suppose I’ll get to hear a lot of Branden’s side of the story. Now I have had other highly-intelligent people tell me that Ayn Rand had some shortcomings and that even her philosophy was underdeveloped and lacking in many areas. In 1998, I had one such conversation with a young man who used to work for DARPA, who later developed his own philosophy called “Innovism” and he seemed to have limited respect for Rand, but also criticized her, claiming that her philosophy came up short in areas where his thinking expanded beyond. Well, one person can only do so much, and if Miss Rand laid out the foundation, I think she did well enough. But that was just another one of the chinks in the armour of Objectivism that had been brought to my attention. So in conclusion, my philosophy of life today draws 90% of it’s ethics, 40% of its metaphysics and an unknown amount of its esthetics from Objectivism. I’m a bit lost in the judgement of music because I see a lot of self-proclaimed Objectivists that are listening to rock music and think it’s esthetically compatible with Objectivism. I had always held a belief, not necessarily tied to reality, that a fine symphony of exhaultation was more in line with the esthetics of Objectivism. And I’m pretty sure I’ve found that music, but not in America. As for metaphysics, I’ve formed my own “open” opinion—I am always learning, so I draw no closed conclusions about the nature of existence beyond what we perceive with our senses. As a side note, I find that my writing skills have deteriorated tremendously from where they were 30-40 years ago when my mind was actively studying Objectivism. I knew many of the arguments by heart or could develop them through inductive reasoning when needed. I also noticed that as I moved toward a more pragmatic philosophy, my chess game started to become worse. I used to play in tournaments around the time Bobby Fischer was popular (1970-73) and during that period, I won a lot of games and played often. I thought through my moves carefully. But by 1976, I had changed. Either I no longer cared, so I just pragmatically played my chess games, or I became mentally lazy. Whatever the case, I began to lose a lot of matches from then on. I stopped playing altogether in 1984. Nowadays, I live a selfish life, going after material goals that I held most of my life, and within limited horizons. I have no ability to dream big, to believe that I can attain a million dollar mansion, even though I did manage to attain a $50,000 stereo system over a span of 30 years. I live within what are probably artificial mental limitations, and one of my goals is to find out what’s preventing me from reaching my potential, so that I can work on removing those limits. It is hoped that I may gain some useful insite by joining this forum.