Reidy

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Everything posted by Reidy

  1. Donald Trump and Paris Hilton share an occupation: publicity whore. Paris Hilton is better at it. This is my last post to OL. I cannot respect anyone who takes Trump seriously.
  2. If this was a drinking song they must have been very good musicians in the eighteenth century. The guys in the video are working hard at it, and they seem to be sober.
  3. And did you know that The Objectivist liked Drury? BB reviewed Preserve and Protect and Erika Holzer Capable of Honor, both favorably. They ran an interview with him in 1970. Then EH hated Throne of Saturn and they never mentioned him again. The recent Dennis Hastert revelations were like one of Drury's subplots.
  4. I like the figure she cuts, even when she's wrong. Watch how she deals with Tapper in the clip just past the midpoint: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421537/pro-life-republicans-planned-parenthood. They say she's really running for VP or a cabinet job, maybe Secretary of Defense. I'd welcome here there.
  5. No. They initiated coercion. Next question.
  6. No need to. Look up trump eminent domain atlantic city in Bing or Google.
  7. Interesting story. Communist China, at least some of the time, understands property rights better than Trump does.
  8. The lectures as taped couldn't have been before 1960, as both the full course and the single lecture in the NBI basic series allude to the Quemoy-Matsu debate in the 1960 election.
  9. The link is to a crackpot site. I can't take it seriously, and, if you do, I can't take you seriously.
  10. Actually Breakfast at Tiffany's was a book before it was a movie. If the movie weren't so entertaining on its own you'd call it a trashing of the book. It depends on what the numismatist does with the coins.
  11. More on immigration and crime I found the article through this one, which is itself an interesting read full of links worth following.
  12. More for the Trump fans to deny and well-poison: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mythical-connection-between-immigrants-and-crime-1436916798 To follow up, try https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Mythical+Connection+Between+Immigrants+and+Crime&oq=The+Mythical+Connection+Between+Immigrants+and+Crime&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.94j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8
  13. The hits keep coming. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419853/witless-ape-rides-escalator-kevin-d-williamson?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=JVL+07_15_15 http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421236/donald-trump-university-scam-candidate-2016 Leftist bias, I know - who more so than National Review? - but still interesting reads.
  14. I haven't been following the current thread, but if it's about Trump (weirder things have happened) here's a story that will be of interest: http://www.nationalreview.com/node/265171/print
  15. I'm not clear: did the moderator ban all mention of Rand or just the link to the interview? In the first case, saying she was not a philosopher is clearly wrong. In the second, the interview took up philosophy and and literature, careers for women and current events as well. Whether the moderator is wrong would depend on just how strictly he enforces the philosophy-only rule for other philosophers. If list members regularly talk about Russell on child-raising or about Wittgenstein's reading tastes but enforce the rule strictly for Rand, the moderator is wrong. In either case, anyone who wants to talk about her has plenty of opportunities to do so.
  16. The judge backed down. This reminds me of the recent Woody Allen stories: the mother is definitely a wackadoodle, but she might be telling the truth no less for that.
  17. Those rumors I reported in #4 have come true. Kindle now, iTunes and print to follow. http://atlassociety.org/about-us/about-us-archive/5763-the-literary-art-of-ayn-rand-now-in-ebook-form?utm_source=newsletter4&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=literary-art&utm_content=litbook&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=lit&utm_campaign=LiteraryArt http://www.amazon.com/Literary-Art-Ayn-Rand-2nd-ebook/dp/B00ZPWC9LQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436582186&sr=1-1&keywords=peter+reidy
  18. Said by Hospers to be the funniest thing Rand ever heard: Behaviorist comes across a colleague on campus and says "You're fine. How am I?"
  19. Say what you will, the cathedrals are amazing.
  20. One explanation I've seen is that medieval Europe was an experiment in selective breeding. Intellectually talented Christians went into the religious life and had no children. An intellectually talented Jew was a prime marital catch and was encouraged to marry and raise a family.
  21. The Wikipedia article on Nietzsche backs this up. I wonder why the story isn't better known.
  22. Reidy

    it's coming...

    Throughout history, a reliable way to become famous and wealthy has been to predict disaster. More specifically, it's been to predict the kind of disaster that one can avoid by ponying up to join the elect. This is how religions have used judgement day, armageddon or the rapture. During the Kennedy era it was bomb shelters, which morphed straightforwardly into Y2K disaster kits and, in California, earthquake preparedness kits. Books, seminars and investment services that predict imminent doom are yet another version of this. Harry Browne got on to the bestseller list this way, Casey and Ruff rode his momentum, and Ravi Bhatra sold a leftist version of the same. Browne was, like the bomb-shelter crowd, even recommending that we lay in a survival kit of bottled water, guns and silver dimes. I remember seeing an article in Esquire some years ago which looked back on various pop investment books including Browne, Casey and Ruff. It reported how the books had sold and calculated what an investor would have made following their advice. The doomsdayers had sold plenty of books, but their advice, by then, would have cost an investor money. The only one whose advice turned out well had said, in 1982, the bottom of the Volcker downturn, that stocks are undervalued and that one would be wise to get into the market. It sank without a trace.
  23. This is like trying to talk nuclear strategy with Barbra Streisand.
  24. This is hard to credit. If you say "this room is too hot" or "this spaghetti needs salt" and I say "no, it's just right as it is", we have an obvious difference between subjective views, but I wonder what moral standards have to do with it.