Reidy

And DID you know that Carter Manny, who designed the FBI building in Washington, was once an apprentice of Wright? In addition to his buildings (including also the one behind the famous Picasso in Chicago) he gave us some historically important footage of Taliesin West, Wright's home and office in Scottsdale. Note the resemblance of the TWest drafting room to the old Denny's corporate style.

That Comcast operator is going to go far.

Was Ayn Rand: a Sense of Life an ARI project? My understanding is ARI gave the director its approval and full access to its archives but didn't actually produce it. The movie didn't entirely omit NB and BB, though it downplayed them implausibly.

No. Rand distinguished the 'metaphysical' (which we can't change) from the 'man-made' (which we can). The very word 'Objectivism' implies a recognition of this difference. She said contra Hume that you can get 'ought' from 'is', which isn't the same as refusing to distinguish them.

Hugo's short prolog to Notre Dame is worth reading in this connection. He says without expounding that the whole story grew out of his discovery in the cathedral of a Greek inscription for 'necessity' or 'fate.' One could argue that the whole story belies this and that an author's stated convictions needn't match his sense of life, but the fact remains that Hugo thought most un-Randianly that fate was a romantic notion.

Black was part of a 6-1 majority, so his personal opinions don't figure seriously.

The bad news is that they grew big, floppy ears and little white tails.

Ellen's quote from Rand in #10 seems to say that the plan ca. 1968 was to rewrite the Basic Principles course, not to put it into print.

Is this the Baron-Cohen who made the Borat movies?

I wonder if anything does. Lack of falsifiability is one symptom of a pseudo-science. "Climate change" (which used to be global warming), confirmed by any weather pattern and contradicted by none, is the classic example.

Still curious as to which publications carried it. Probably not the Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell would just die.

Whether Asperger's is junk science (as I suspect) or not, the people you name are fluent, confident talkers, which weighs against the diagnosis.

Do you know where that ad ran?

Looks like Bidinotto's story is coming true: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06/25/more-missing-emails-crashed-hard-drives-this-time-at-epa/

Doesn't follow. What follows is that Google's search algorithm found some associative path from "anarchobjectivism" to "ayn rand" and from there to "conservative" (or maybe the latter two are reversed). ARI does not control Google and the workings of its product. I didn't get this result for "anarchobjectivism" (at least not on the first page), but I did get it from "anarchobjectivism conservative conferences". Bing doesn't find it either.

Do we know for a fact that the movies are inspiring people to read the book? The Fountainhead put the book back on the best-seller list. Do we have any such data for Atlas Shrugged? The inclusion of celebrity non-actors is a bad idea dramatically, distracting viewers from the story. It looks to me like the moviemakers' concession that it's going to flop and they might as well have fun making it.

I don't get it. Why is the FoxNews story bad news? It could be better - the opposition rolls over without protest, Jindal comes out for full privatization statewide, congress decides to repeal Common Core - but Jindal's move looks to be a net improvement.

I'm eager to see it, too. It contains some of her most beautiful imagery and language, and the main character is unmistakably Garbo, a favorite of mine. The ARI circle's penchant for messing with the texts is a threat.

Correction to #97: I helped to document Berliner's tampering with the letters, not Harriman's with the journals.

Actually I said in #11 that Rand's decision not to destroy her notes and her decision not to make any other provision regarding their posthumous handling (not just the former) are what convinces me that she assented to this. She had a lawyer and she knew the score. What NB and BB said is true about Rand's wishes during her lifetime but tells us nothing about what she wanted after her death. If the Brandens' recollections and her actual behavior contradicted each other (as they don't), the latter would take precedence. I said in #94 that I don't care whether Rand wanted The Little Street in print or not. Our stock of knowledge about her literary and intellectual growing-up is greater for Peikoff's decision, and I'm glad he made it. Are you willing to state for the record that you wish we'd stayed ignorant? (Rand may not have wanted word to get out about her fling with Branden, but that didn't stop NB and BB from publishing three books about it, plus part of a fourth, between them.)

The fact that these people hadn't heard of The Little House strikes me as all the more reason to publish it. It's a genuine addition to what we know about Rand, and in saving it she tacitly consented to publication. Even if she'd destroyed her unpublished manuscripts (rather than keeping them in a climate-controlled warehouse) and you could somehow recover them, they'd still be worth disseminating. Authors are no more entitled to decide what the public knows than political figures are, least of all after their deaths. Harriman's tampering with the text (which I've helped to document) is a separate question. I hope that eventually these papers will become available as online scans (not typed transcriptions).

Among actors you omitted John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty and Marilyn Monroe. Among titles, every stage or screen musical ever produced.

His debate with Bernstein of ARI would be a good place to learn about his religiosity.

Concerning the "crossover" question in #9, #11 and elsewhere: The open-primary rules mean that Democrats did not change their registration in order to vote for Brat, but it doesn't rule out the possibility that voters who consider themselves Democrats and plan to vote Democratic in November voted yesterday for Brat. This is a checkable claim of fact. What do your data look like? Some pre-election indicators might be: a Democratic ad campaign promoting this plan; heavy news coverage of such a plan; polls or interviews indicating that lots of Democrats planned to cast such a vote; tallies showing that the Democratic primary candidates got conspicuously fewer total votes than usual and that Brat's totals plausibly included all of the "lost" votes. Post-election indicators might be followup polls or interviews confirming this. I'm skeptical that any significant number of voters would be devious enough to go along with a crossover plan. Such skepticism leaves me to conclude, as Occam would advise me to conclude, that Brat's voters were Republicans who wanted to see him in Congress. Show me some hard data to the contrary and I'll stand corrected.

I couldn't find the Brat article itself, but here is a citation. Here is an article that points up both the best and the worst about him. He refuses to play along with James Taggart and his drinking companions. On the other hand, on the immigration issue he advocates coercive social planning in expressly anti-business, anti-market populist language. The article establishes that what what De Voon says (or is he quoting?) in #3 is incorrect. Brat does not simply oppose illegal immigration; he wants to raise barriers to legal immigration as well.