Reidy

Loeb was a founder of E. F. Hutton and the author of popular investment books. He and Rand both planned in the 1940s to build houses with Wright in Redding CT, but neither went through with it. As an informal financial adviser to Wright he advised him to take the job designing for the movie version of The Fountainhead and chided him over this in later years when he complained about lack of money. He also knew Jack and Harry Warner, who would have been the clients for the job, having helped to take the studio public. The quote comes from Letters p. 154.

While I'm not a heavy-duty student of the topic, I've enjoyed the writings of Hubert Dreyfus (What Computers Can't Do and Mind Over Machine) and The Improbable Machine by Jeremy Campbell. They treat AI as a case of rationalism, the mistaken attempt to treat all intellectual activity as rule-bound deduction. Campbell draws an explicit analogy to Hayek on this point, digital AI being the counterpart of centralized economic planning. Dreyfus allows that formal calculation can simulate the real thing ever more skillfully but still argues that such simulation won't amount to human reason. Software is much better at this than it was when he wrote, but I suspect I'd still agree with him if I were to revisit the question.

Tonie Nathan, LP VP candidate in 1972, was the first woman to receive an electoral vote.

How Branden died is a matter of record, though I don't know offhand what it is. Why you posted this is a mystery I cannot fathom.

1. Somebody other than Branden, perhaps not a member of the collective at all; not my burden of proof. 2. Don't remember. I wonder if the industrialist Mr. X mentions was the Bogart character in Sabrina. The problem is that it would have been a current movie at the time, not an oldie.

He's not NB, even allowing that Rand may have changed minor details for confidentiality. Mr. X was in therapy, and he suffered what appears to be chronic depression. Branden in his twenties had no romantic failures behind him. He was married to his first serious partner and - well, you know the rest. Those major features eliminate him. Mr. X was probably someone in the inner circle, though, given that she was willing to spend time with him. I've heard that they were all Branden's patients at one time or another. I've never heard of any of them being an engineer, and I don't know how old they were when they met her (NB was nineteen and making a career in psychology; those count as minor details). For that matter Mr. X may have been a woman. I don't see that it's a coincidence. She was writing an accurate-enough account of someone she'd known.

BB also told the phone-book story.

My hunch is that the name-change remark is a version of the discredited Ben-Rand story that's been knocking around for decades. (It's at least as old as Nora Ephron's 1968 article in the NYT Sunday book review.) The reporter, guessing goes, wasn't quite confident enough go into print with that one, and this is what's left.

This strikes me as silly. Branden was a niche figure, popular with the (non-orthodox) Objectivist audience and with the pop-psych audience. He was not newsworthy in his own right even when he was turning out new books and publicizing them personally. A test of the present claim would be to see how the media handled his public doings and sayings on days when ARI did not issue press releases. Short answer: they didn't handle them. It cuts both ways in any case. Alan Gotthelf belongs in Objectivist history for his part in bringing Rand into the academic big time. He co-founded and for many years chaired the ARS/APA and edited its anthologies. TAS cites him on several occasions but didn't note his death. My guess is that ARI issued the press release to coincide with the publishers' settling on a cover design.

It wasn't the first This raises the horrifying possibility that it won't be the last.

This would be a kick if you were stoned.

Sounds like Jonathan Gruber without the PowerPoints, and about as credible.

The monolithic movement you describe in #55 is NBI-era Objectivism (except that it had two leaders instead of one). That ended near enough to fifty years ago, and Objectivism is still here, still gaining influence. (Curious as to what you would consider cases in point of your historical thesis. Christianity, Marxism, Psychoanalysis and the Montessori method all count against it.)

Shoshana Knapp is at work on the authorized biography. We'll see what she produces. I suspect that once Peikoff is dead the ARI people will do much what they're doing now. They've been phasing out of their sectarian hostilities for several years.

$.10 5 minutes 47 days

The very fact of public cenral heating is telling. This is a technology that was common in the US a century ago, before individual home heating systems replaced it.

Ted Cruz calls it "Obamacare for the internet". For that alone he deserves to be president.

That was quick. (S)he stuck around for weeks previously.

Right

(S?)he's back on OL as well. Over there, this individual is still in the make-nice phase of his/her well-established modus operandi. Here (s)he moved on more quickly to insults (#4) such as (s)he has directed in the past at sexuality and age. The good news is that (s)he has learned not to pretend to know French, Greek or Latin.

More testimony to Rand's irascibility comes from John Hospers, with whom she was friendly ca. 1960: http://johnhospers.com/Articles/Conversations2.html (do a text search on "Aesthetics" and read his account of her behavior at an academic conference). As Nerian mentions, there's another side of the story, which we get from Peikoff, Valliant and others. One reason I'm inclined to be skeptical of them is that the people who say that she could be unreasonably angry are evenhanded and enormously respectful of Rand - NB, BB, Hospers and others. The Peikoff/Valliant circle, by contrast, are capable only of badmouthing anybody who crosses them.

Moralist, If you want to feel butch, download a John Wayne movie. Not Seven Sinners, though, because Marlene Dietrich is in it and everybody at Netflix will think you're a fag.

Of related interest

The video is getting attention: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/391610/how-far-left-hijacked-cat-calling-debate-and-started-eat-itself-charles-c-w-cooke/page/0/1 http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/30/catcalls-rude-people-discovered-in-new-york/

She'd have a big future if they still made silent movies.