Reidy

This is an unrealistically large order. If I knew where to send you (I don't), what you're asking for would be too long and detailed to absorb during the current turn. Here's an alternative course of action: Listen and learn. You've learned when you can give a coherent account of the cases your teacher is making for these institutions and can cite at least some facts in favor of these cases. Then, when the class is over, as time permits, get to know the case against them and, as you work through it, connect your new knowledge to ("integrate it with" would be the standard Objectivist jargon) the arguments you learned in class. Rational understanding takes nothing less.

Something old and shoddy gets blasted out the way so that somebody can create something new. That's (in part) what I love about America.

Yes, he's a libertarian, but modern-day statists have taken up his supercilious tone; Mencken's booboisie are Obama's bitter clingers to god and guns.

Thanks for the lead. Mencken seems to have been the model for (I forget the name) Roark's first client. I haven't listened yet. What little of his that I've come across has not worn well. He seems to be the original liberal snob, founder of a tradition that includes Galbraith, Obama, Krugman and Maddow. This is not to say that he was a liberal in the modern sense (a welfare / regulatory statist), but these are the people who adopted his tone.

It inspires any number of "If there were a god..." remarks.

Franklin Toker says in Fallingwater Rising that Rand kept a copy of the 1938 Time cover story(login required) mentioned in #6 for the rest of her life. He also recounts that the Museum of Modern Art had an exhibition on the house in 1938 which, since she lived in New York and was an admirer, she may well have seen. The Stoddard Temple seems to derive from Wright's autobiographical account of Unity Temple, a UU church in Oak Park IL, amply documented on the web, and Enright House from the St. Mark's Tower. The latter was never built, but a drawing of it appears in the autobiography.

The Fountainhead, p. 610: The Wynand house stood on the hill above them. The earth spread out in terraced flights and rose gradually to make the elevation of the hill. The house was a shape of horizontal rectangles rising toward a slashing vertical projection; a group of diminishing setbacks, each a separate room, its size and form making the successive steps in a series of interlocking floor lines. It was as if from the wide living room on the first level a hand had moved slowly, shaping the next steps by a sustained touch, then had stopped, had continued in separate movements, each shorter, brusquer, and had ended, torn off, remaining somewhere in the sky. So that it seemed as if the slow rhythm of the rising fields had been picked up, stressed, accelerated and broken into the staccato chords of the finale.

I don't know where to find a recording or transcript, but Mayhew quotes it (inaccurately as memory serves) in his Q&A book, so some record of it must be out there. I saw the original broadcast; I had just discovered Rand, and it was the first time I heard her voice. The Objectivist cheering section had packed the audience and went wild every time she spoke. BB and NB were on camera at least once.

Do you have any record of these plays? New writing from Rand would be valuable.

Does anyone here know if the spy story that comes up briefly in the movie is historically accurate? As the movie presents the incident it seems to conflate Bletchley Park with the Manhattan project.

These are impressive numbers, but they don't strictly prove that Muslims are on their way to a majority by 2050 (or any other date). Note that the quote says "90 percent of the population growth" [emphasis added]. If that continues indefinitely they will eventually be a majority, but you'd have to know how quickly the population is growing to calculate when they'll overtake the rest of the population. In addition, you can't be sure that the imbalance will continue. Most Muslims in western Europe are immigrants, with lower incomes; people with lower incomes tend to have more children than better-off people. To the extent that Muslims make more money we would expect them to have fewer children. If 30% of the under-20s in France are Muslim and if this continues (a big if, as I noted), then eventually they will be 30% of the population; if 50% as in the Netherlands, 50%. Neither is a majority.

Here's an apparently reliable examination of the same claim about the UK, finding it hard to credit: http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-will-britain-have-a-muslim-majority-by-2050/13690

And probably will within the next week.

Okay, you adopted Objectivism in less than a day. What did you do the rest of that day and in the subsequent days that compares to Anderson's part in ending the draft?

Ninotchka is always a hit with Objectivist audiences, though Rand herself expresses mixed feelings about it in the Mayhew Q&A book. Ernst Lubitsch, the director, was the movies' great master of high-style romcom. He seems to be Rand's model for the hot-tempered director in Her Second Career. Trouble in Paradise is my other favorite among his movies. It lacks the star (Garbo) and the political satire of Ninotchka, but it may be a better piece of moviemaking. Monte Carlo is worth watching for the Blue Horizon sequence.

Thales, the first philosopher in history, foresaw a good harvest and leased every olive press he could. His prediction turned out right, and he made a killing.

BB's biography suggests that she learned most of it conversationally from Isabel Paterson. The only Hayek she ever read, according to BB, was Road to Serfdom, and she hated it (Letters 299, 308). On 308 she also mentions having read Omnipotent Government by von Mises. She knew von Mises and Hazlitt personally. In one of her speeches she recommended Snyder's Capitalism the Creator.

Yes, but they weren't enforced against Turing. Being on the books isn't the same as being actively enforced, particularly against people who are minding their own business and practicing their so-called vices in private. Wilde provoked his prosecution by (for unknown reasons) filing a libel action, and in any case his day was two or three generations before Turing's. To take this further we'd need hard numbers about arrests and convictions.

The story I've seen (David Leavitt's biography?) is that Turing had always been out. Everybody knew it, and nobody cared until the arrival of the medical/welfare state, which proceeded to make his sexuality a crime.

Rand herself had a bad experience with the Saturday Evening Post. They ran a profile in 1961, and she wrote to them with intimations of a libel action (Letters 586 - 591). I can't believe she would have had a case, even before the public-figure doctrine. I wonder what that problem was and what she thought Hoover could do about it.

Don't remember.

Of all the people listed in the mail message, two to my knowledge are foreign-born (Brook and Ghate). Anu Seppala, Tsvet Tsonevski, Tierra Murguia, Cecilia Cervantes and Rituparna Basu may well be. At least two are gay. Any one of them would make it more diverse than the Sierra Club. NBI was more diverse than you might think, having had one lecturer in good standing (Joan Mitchell Blumenthal) who was not of Jewish ancestry. Neither was Frank O'Connor, but he had no formal affiliation with NBI.

Do we have any record of what Aristotle she read, at any time in her life? The final chapter of Atlas Shrugged contains a brief quote from the Metaphysics, and she had a favorite remark from the Poetics which she apparently first found in Nock.

She may also have studied Windelband's history, ca.1900, which Peikoff reviewed for The Objectivist Newsletter. I expect that she also studied H.W.B. Joseph's Introduction to Logic and that this is where she got the erroneous idea that Aristotle said "law of identity" and "A is A." Joseph does not actually say this, but, not being a historian, he doesn't always distinguish between Aristotle (who didn't say this) and the Aristotelian tradition (which did).

The photo (or another from the same session) ran in Look in the fall of 64. Nathaniel Branden mentioned the map in one of his annual progress report articles, saying that it was Barbara's project and that she was especially proud of one pinned into the ocean, denoting a course aboard a nuclear sub. I still have some of those pamphlets. The author doesn't know much about Rand, yet, oddly, she seems conversant with the format of her early movie diaries, which ARI published a few years ago.