Roger Bissell

I think that's exactly correct. REB

Even before. You can back into Teddy Roosevelt's administration. Also Woodrow Wilson was a Statist from Hell. Yup. Andrew Napolitano wrote an interesting/appalling book called "Teddy and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom." Here's a link to Reason TV's interview with him:

And Trump sounded like he either had a cold/allergy or some aftereffects of a cocaine hit...

She must have been on some sort of happy drugs. Totally fake smile pasted on. REB

I'd date it back to at least 1913. Think Federal Income Tax and Anti-Trust. 93 years and counting. But FDR's New Deal was just a ramping up of all the statist stuff done half-heartedly by Herbert Hoover, who walked to the abyss of outright statism and then recoiled in horror. FDR campaigned - believe it or not - as the laissez-faire candidate, then did a total 180 once in office. He was basically the American Bismark, who gave the socialists half a loaf (way less than they were demanding) with the world's first social security program. REB

What was the election of 1803??

Dayammmm - yet another vote robbed from Gary Johnson! REB

Where, Roger? Provide a link, please! You can find it yourself, unless you've been barred from accessing Michelle's blog. In the late June discussion of Rothko, two sizeable posts by you remain UNcensored, in all their glory. Michelle may not be the last word or final authority on visual art, but she recognizes a nihilistic take-over artist when she sees one. Even then, she allows your non-redundant rude remarks to remain. Rather magnanimous, considering. REB

Earlier today, I saw some comments on Michelle Marder Kamhi's blog that were posted by a rather ill-tempered feller named Jonathan Smith. Any relation to our semi-anonymous chum? (I mean "chum" in the sense pertaining to fishing bait.) REB

These essays are wonderful for all of the obvious reasons, and one perhaps more subtle as well: GHS is an outstanding writer. When discussing complicated issues, the presence of outstanding, crystal-clear writing has a multiplier effect in helping others to understand those issues. Thank you George. Yes, I second that. And he's been doing this - crystal-clear writing about complicated issues - for over forty years! Amazing. REB

It's going to be HOT this summer. How hot? This hot...

George, I'll bet you've commented on just about everything that a libertarian or Objectivist might want to know about Immanuel Kant. Wait! What about his sense of humor? (Huh? Kant had a sense of humor? Yup. And his explanation of humor was surprisingly similar to that of Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation, 1964.) REB

Sterile and banal. I would not want to live in that... I agree with Bob. Looks like it could be a scaled-down version of The State Science Institute. REB

I find Hillary to be rather uninteresting. She is about 1/16 of an inch deep. There is not enough there for me to be even annoyed about. To paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli -- she is not even wrong... Thanks, Bob - you've done it again! Exactly what I had in mind. REB

Better late than never! REB

Bob, I like both of these profiles. They sound dead-on to me. Please feel free to do more of this sort of thing! (One on Hillary would be interesting and insightful, I'm sure.) REB

1. Spell and grammar check: F#%k is only capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. 2. Thank God and Greyhound for the Block function. <swoosh> REB

The latest national poll (Reuters/Ipsos) results: http://www.aol.com/article/2016/06/11/poll-clinton-leads-trump-by-11-points-in-white-house-race/21393418/?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl1|sec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D-825802372_htmlws-main-bb June 10 (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 11 points in the U.S. presidential race, showing little change after she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee this week, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday. The online poll, conducted from Monday to Friday, shows 46 percent of likely voters support Clinton while 34.8 percent back Trump. Another 19.2 percent support neither candidate. Their parties hold conventions in July ahead of a Nov. 8 election. Clinton's lead was nearly the same a week ago, before she had amassed enough convention delegates to win the nomination and before Trump drew criticism from leaders of both parties for questioning the impartiality of a Mexican-American judge. Trump, 69, enjoyed a bigger boost after becoming the presumptive Republican nominee in May. Having trailed Clinton, 68, for most of the year, Trump briefly erased a double-digit gap and pulled about even with the former secretary of state. [....] I think this will tighten up, so that Hillary gets around 50% and Trump gets in the low to mid-40s. (Assuming that Trump stops making sexist and racist remarks, and assuming that Hillary isn't hauled off to jail.) REB

How about the third term of Bill? We could only hope (against hope) that it would be that non-bad. REB

Kant seems so reasonable on so many issues (including this one). It's hard to integrate that with the idea that he is "the most evil man in history." REB

Stephen, that didn't look a bit like you - but you have my vote, anyway! Seriously, his rapid-fire litany of bad stuff about Trump and Hillary was pretty effective. I don't know how many conservatives he will win over - or how many disaffected freedom-oriented liberals - but when you have both the Objectivists and the anarcho-purist libertarians pissed off at you, you must be doing something right! REB

One hot summer day, when I was about 12, I helped Dad clear out a stretch several hundred feet long of hemp plants, taller than either of us, in a ditch north of our farmstead. (This was on orders from the Iowa Department of Agriculture.) I still have wistful thoughts of the fortune we could have made by making...um...agricultural commodity use of the plants instead of just hacking them down and leaving them to wither away. Gary Johnson for President! 12% and rising! A chicken in every pot - and pot in every chicken! REB

Do you really want to stand by this claim? Since you apparently have not read my essay, which is the impetus for this thread, I'll just quote a couple of points from it, to show how both Aristotle and Kant were very close to Rand's way of viewing art, contrary to your quoted remark above: Butcher ([1894] 1951), citing Aristotle’s On the Soul (1952c; 3.428a5–16; 3.427b17–20; 10.433a10), notes that the human creative power spontaneously “fuses together the things of thought and sense and forms a new world of its own, recombining and transmuting the materials of experience” (126–27; emphasis added). The imitative artist, Butcher continues, “carries forward . . . the general movement of organic life . . . to a more perfect conclusion” by the use of a “mimic world” (152; emphasis added). Kant (1790, 528), echoing this philosophy, said: “The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature” (emphasis added). Your uninformed Kant-bashing should be a good qualification for employment at the Ayn Rand Institute. Let me know how the job interview turns out. REB

Kant acknowledges that consciousness has identity. He goes to great lengths to discuss what he thinks it is. Rand's point is that Kant thinks that the identity of consciousness disqualifies it from knowing reality as it really is. (This is discussed in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) REB