hi

[anthony]

Hello all,

I think it's about time I introduced myself [ I feel a little like a voyeur ].

I am a fairly shy 58 year old Objectivist - photographer living in South Africa, name of Tony Garland.

Shy O'ist, is that a contradiction in terms? In fact, I don't know why I mentioned it!!

However, I can become a tiger when confronting irrationality,untruth, and injustice. And in this country that happens a lot.

Icame upon Ayn Rand in my early 20's, and with huge input from Nathaniel Branden, have never,as they say,looked back. Hope to talk to you again Thanks

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Tony,

Welcome aboard. Glad to see you here.

Shy is cool...

Michael

[anthony]

Tony,

Welcome aboard. Glad to see you here.

Shy is cool...

Michael

Hi Michael,

Mypleasure.

May I say that I enjoy the sense of life of this forum,and it's owner.

Tony

[Christopher]

Nice to meet you. This is a great forum for discussions, and I'm looking forward to you sharing your thoughts!

Christopher

[galtgulch]

Hello Tony Garland,

If you have been here watching you know what I am about.

www.campaignforliberty.com 29Apr 11PM 150171, 30Apr 150345 There are two members from South Africa!

One little project is to encourage our congressmen to cosponsor HR1207 the Federal Reserve Transparency Act and now there are actually 100 of them as well as a senate version.

Welcome aboard.

I am also a once shy O'vist who somehow has lived to be 69 years of age! Many think I must be a kid because of my idealism, optimism, immaturity, naivete, gullibility and enjoyment of tilting at windmills.

galtgulch aka gulch

Edited April 30, 2009 by galtgulch

[Selene]

Evening Tony Garland or your good morning:

This is a fine place to be "shy" with. I prefer reserved or wise to describe "shy".

I have always been intrigued by the entire "South African history".

Did you ever read Allan Drury's - A Very Strange Society?

Welcome aboard.

Adam

[Alfonso Jones]

Hello all,

I think it's about time I introduced myself [ I feel a little like a voyeur ].

I am a fairly shy 58 year old Objectivist - photographer living in South Africa, name of Tony Garland.

Shy O'ist, is that a contradiction in terms? In fact, I don't know why I mentioned it!!

However, I can become a tiger when confronting irrationality,untruth, and injustice. And in this country that happens a lot.

Icame upon Ayn Rand in my early 20's, and with huge input from Nathaniel Branden, have never,as they say,looked back. Hope to talk to you again Thanks

Tony -

Welcome to OL! Make yourself at home, and post. Ask questions, share your observations.

Enjoy,

Bill P

[anthony]

Evening Tony Garland or your good morning:

This is a fine place to be "shy" with. I prefer reserved or wise to describe "shy".

I have always been intrigued by the entire "South African history".

Did you ever read Allan Drury's - A Very Strange Society?

Welcome aboard.

Adam

Hi again people,and thank you.

Yes Selene,there's an 8 hour difference between us,so I'll say 'good day'.

And yes, Allen Drury novels were a favourite of mine.Now, I don't think he was the greatest writer,but I had just [early 70,s] been devouring Rand's fiction and nonfiction, and Drury gave me added insight into that unique and wonderful entity - the U.S.Constitution,as well as it's Government.

I remember two titles Advise and Consent, and Preserve and Protect. A Very Strange Society { I'll say!} was of course a non fiction work about the RSA in the 60's,and I think it was banned for a while here for being critical of apartheid policies.

As for S.A. history,well it seems to be unfolding every day. Blink,and you've missed something. I n more positive moments I feel the country is going through growth pangs;but mostly, I realise it has always been an unhappy place, and will be for a long time. Oh for a rational,stable,free Nation!

I have got to pick my words more carefully,especially here.

I'm now going to ALWAYS be that 'shy guy'. Damn.

Galtgulch has a far better selection,all of which I relate to.

I drink to naivete forever !!

TonyG

I

[Chris Grieb]

Welcome; I'm glad to also see someone else who liked Allan Drury. I liked all of the Advise and Consent series. I also liked some of his other works of which my favorite is "A Senate Journal". Sadly many of his works are out of print.

I must add I hope you will tell about life in South Africa.

Again Welcome. Have fun here. Best Chris Grieb

[Alfonso Jones]

Welcome; I'm glad to also see someone else who liked Allan Drury. I liked all of the Advise and Consent series. I also liked some of his other works of which my favorite is "A Senate Journal". Sadly many of his works are out of print.

I must add I hope you will tell about life in South Africa.

Again Welcome. Have fun here. Best Chris Grieb

I'll chime in also. I greatly enjoyed the Advise and Consent series, and in fact reread all six books in the series recently. I enjoyed them just as much as the first time through.

Regards,

Bill P

[Reidy]

I'm a fan of Drury's, too, though he fell way off in his later work.

Did you know that the Rand circle liked him? Barbara Branden and Erika Holzer wrote favorable reviews of Preserve and Protect and Capable of Honor, and Susan Ludel interviewed him in The Objectivist. They seem to have liked him more as a social critic than as an artist. Then Holzer panned Throne of Saturn and they never mentioned him again.

[Selene]

Ahh, the Church of Objectivism burns another candle that burns another bridge.

I thought he was an excellent writer.

I think the dirty little secret is that he was not an athiest and of course you had that whole William Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, conservative hatred that existed after the review in National Review which was frankly sad, sexist and plain stupid in terms of being biased from the second paragraph on, e.g., "I find it a remarkably silly book."

Geez, I have not read this asshole's review in three decades! Excuse me while I shower!

"Big Sister is Watching You!

Several years ago, Miss Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. Despite a generally poor press, it is said to have sold some four hundred thousand copies. Thus, it became a wonder of the book trade of a kind that publishers dream about after taxes. So Atlas Shrugged (Random House, $6.95) had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. It appears to be slowly climbing the best seller lists.

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously, and that apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: "Excruciatingly awful." I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes. Government ownership, Labor, etc. etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. "This," she is saying in effect, "is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from."

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive story-telling. And, in fact, the somewhat ferro-concrete fairy tale the author pours here is, basically, the old one known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides of it are caricatures.

The Children of Light are largely operatic caricatures. In so far as any of them suggests anything known to the business community, they resemble the occasional curmudgeon millionaire, tales about whose outrageously crude and shrewd eccentricities sometimes provide the lighter moments in Board rooms. Otherwise, the Children of Light are geniuses. One of them is named (the only smile you see will be your own): Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Antonio. This electrifying youth is the world's biggest copper tycoon. Another, no less electrifying, is named: Ragnar Danesjold. He becomes a twentieth-century pirate. All Miss Rand's chief heroes are also breathtakingly beautiful. So is her heroine (she is rather fetchingly vice-president in charge of management of a transcontinental railroad). So much radiant energy might seem to serve an eugenic purpose. For, in this story as in Mark Twain's, "all the knights marry the princess" — though without benefit of clergy. Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of heroine and three of the heroes, no children — it suddenly strikes you — ever result. The possibility is never entertained. And indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults, you can't fool little boys and girls with such stuff — not for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily.

Children of Darkness are caricatures, too; and they are really oozy. But at least they are caricatures of something identifiable. Their archetypes are Left Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies. (And neither Right nor Left, be it noted in passing, has a monopoly of such dreamers, though the horrors in their nightmares wear radically different masks and labels.)

In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as "looters." This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares here the plaguy** business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed. Namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.

"Looters" loot because they believe in Robin Hood, and have a lot of other people believing in him, too. Robin Hood is the author's image of absolute evil — robbing the strong (and hence good) to give to the weak (and hence no good). All "looters" are base, envious, twisted, malignant minds, motivated wholly by greed for power, combined with the lust of the weak to tear down the strong, out of a deep-seated hatred of life and secret longing for destruction and death. There happens to be a tiny (repeat: tiny) seed of truth in this. The full clinical diagnosis can be read into the pages of Friedrich Nietzsche. (Here I must break in with an aside. Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous Leftists are Nietzsche's "last men," both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria. And much else comes, consciously on not, from the same source.) Happily, in Atlas Shrugged (though not in life), all the children of Darkness are utterly incompetent.

So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book's last line, that a character traces in the air, "over the desolate earth," the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the "mysticism of mind" and the "mysticism of muscle").

That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand's ideas that the good life is one which "has resolved personal worth into exchange value," "has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.'" The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: "and I mean it." But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired "naked self-interest" (in its time and place), and for much of the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment.

The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent. And as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is a sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the state of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.

At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his "hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe." Or, 2) Man's fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man's fate, without God, is up to him. And to him alone. His happiness, is strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand's words, "the moral purpose of his life." Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist Socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence on "man as a heroic being" "with productive achievement as his noblest activity." For, if man's "heroism" (some will prefer to say: "human dignity") no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness. And this, of course, suits the author's economics and the politics that must arise from them.

For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact it is, essentially — a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world's atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In a age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

One Big Brother is of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls "productive achievement" man's "noblest activity," she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast, with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious — as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be. Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left, first surprisingly resemble, then in action tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purposed, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind, which finds this one natural to it, shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: " To the gas chambers — go!" The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture — that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the differences between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

We struggle to be just. For we cannot help feel at least a sympathetic pain before the sheer labor, discipline and patient craftsmanship that went to making this mountain of words. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything. Nor would we, ordinarily, place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse.

Copyright © 1957 by National Review, Inc., 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Reprinted with permission

**Adj. 1. plaguy - causing irritation or annoyance; "tapping an annoying rhythm on his glass with his fork"; "aircraft noise is particularly bothersome near the airport"; "found it galling to have to ask permission"; "an irritating delay"; "nettlesome paperwork"; "a pesky mosquito"; "swarms of pestering gnats"; "a plaguey newfangled safety catch"; "a teasing and persistent thought annoyed him"; "a vexatious child"; "it is vexing to have to admit you are wrong"

annoying, bothersome, galling, irritating, nettlesome, pesky, pestering, vexatious, vexing, plaguey, teasing, pestiferous

disagreeable - not to your liking; "a disagreeable situation"

Adv. 1. plaguy - in a disagreeable manner; "it's so plaguey cold!"

Edited April 30, 2009 by Selene

[Brant Gaede]

Chambers wrote a novel. He burned the manuscript. Probably did us all a favor. I don't know why he committed suicide, but it seemed to be part of the same impulse.

--Brant

[Alfonso Jones]

I was too young when that review came out to remember it (4 years old), but have read the damnable thing before.

It still leaves a bad taste in the mouth. That review was a slimy, dishonest piece of work.

Bill P

[Selene]

Bill:

He was a Commie who rolled on another Commie both of them were trying to take this Republic and destroy it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker_Chambers Piece of garbage should have gotten the Trotsky ice pick in the neck.

"Whittaker Chambers (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961), born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker[1], was an American writer and editor. A Communist party member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent. He is best known for his testimony about the perjury and espionage of Alger Hiss."

From Columbia, Chambers also knew Isaiah Oggins, who went into the Soviet underground a few years earlier; Chambers' wife Esther Shemitz Chambers knew Oggins' wife Nerma Berman Oggins from the Rand School of Social Science, the ILGWU, and The World Tomorrow.[12]

Now that is amusing the "Rand School of Social Science"!

So at the age of 24 the prick became a Marxist and went to work in the FDR administration in his mid-thirties with all his other Commie friends.

Now doesn't that give you a feeling of peace to know that marxists are pouring into the super agencies as little dysfunctional infants who never grew up looking for revenge and hating the able folks who produce.

"Living in New York City placed the Deweys at the center of America's cultural and political life. Dewey pursued his scholarship, actively supported the Progressive party, and, in 1929, helped organize the League for Independent Political Action to further the cause of a new party. He also served as a contributing editor of the New Republic magazine and helped found both the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University Professors. After World War I, reaching the peak of his influence, he became a worldwide traveler, lecturing in Japan at the Imperial Institute and spending 2 years teaching at the Chinese universities of Peking and Nanking. In 1924 he went to study the schools in Turkey and 2 years later visited the University of Mexico. His praise for the Russian educational system he inspected on a 1928 trip to the Soviet Union earned him much criticism."

Perfect, he was at Columbia when the other marxist was a key teacher at Columbia.

I am sure he knew the Rosenburgs.

"According to Feklisov, Julius provided thousands of classified reports from Emerson Radio, including a complete proximity fuse, the same design that was used to shoot down Gary Powers' U-2 in 1960. Under Feklisov's administration, Julius Rosenberg is said to have recruited sympathetic individuals to the KGB’s service, including Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl and Morton Sobell.[10]" (sic)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

I have had non stop arguments with the left since I was 12 about how the Rosenburgs were railroaded and until 1992 when in the post Reagan collapse of the Soviet Union and documents came from the KGB did we have irrefutable proof, e.g. pay vouchers and copies of checks to the Rosenburgs, that they were traitors and justly executed.

I have always, as much as I admire Bill Buckley, never forgiven his hatchet job on Ayn. Broke my heart when I read it a few years later.

Sorry to meander lol

Adam

[DavidMcK]

It is also amazing how many people think this review is the final retort to 'Atlas'; many people (usually conservatives?) just refer to this as their answer whenever Ayn Rand's name is brought up.

[Alfonso Jones]

It is also amazing how many people think this review is the final retort to 'Atlas'; many people (usually conservatives?) just refer to this as their answer whenever Ayn Rand's name is brought up.

In my estimation, looking back at the history of National Review, that review was a clear declaration that National Review was to remain firmly grounded in WFB's Roman Catholicism. Reason was going to be subject to faith, in NR-land.

I suspect that for Buckley and his followers, the repeated phrases such as "moth-eaten mystics" were extremely grating, and the sign of the dollar at the end (which I have always viewed as an eloquent touch) was just not tolerable.

Bill P

[Selene]

Correct Bill. I would never abandon such a great mind, but he was a Catholic to the end. I wonder what he would think of the canonization of Saint Ayn by the Church of "O".

Hmmm sounds like a California Tantric Sex School... - ahhhommmmm - Dp I hear some Moody Blues over yonder hill? Om mani padme hum

*

"Meaning

The mantra with the six syllables coloured.

Mantras may be interpreted by practitioners in many ways, or even as mere sequences of sound whose effects lie beyond strict meaning.

The middle part of the mantra, maṇi padme, is often interpreted as "jewel in the lotus," Sanskrit maṇí "jewel, gem, cintamani" and the locative of padma "lotus", but according to Donald Lopez it is much more likely that Maṇipadme is in fact a vocative, not a locative, addressing a bodhisattva called Maṇipadma, "Jewel-Lotus"- an alternate epithet of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara.[2] The oṃ is the harmonic tone of non-duality and corresponds to the crown chakra visualized as white light.The hūṃ is the harmonic tone of limitless compassion and corresponds to the heart chakra visualized as blue light.

Lopez also notes that the majority of Tibetan Buddhist texts have regarded the translation of the mantra as secondary, focusing instead on the correspondence of the six syllables of the mantra to various other groupings of six in the Buddhist tradition.[3] For example, in the Chenrezig Saddhana, Tsangsar Tulku Rinpoche expands upon the mantra's meaning, taking its six syllables to represent the purification of the six realms of existence:[4]

Syllable Six Pāramitās Purifies Samsaric realm Colours Symbol of the Deity (Wish them) To be born in

Om Meditation Pride / Bliss Devas White Wisdom Perfect Realm of Potala

Ma Patience Jealousy / Lust for entertainment Asuras Green Compassion Perfect Realm of Potala

Ni Discipline Passion / desire Humans Yellow Body, speech, mind

quality and activity Dewachen

Pad Wisdom Ignorance / prejudice Animals Blue Equanimity the presence of Protector (Chenrezig)

Me Generosity Poverty / possessiveness Pretas (hungry ghosts) Red Bliss Perfect Realm of Potala

Hum Diligence Aggression / hatred Naraka Black Quality of Compassion the presence of the Lotus Throne (of Chenrezig)

Religions fascinate me.

David: "...usually conservatives?..."

I would say not to self identified conservatives. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, the Boston talk radio guy all praise Rand to the heights.

So, I would say that is not correct anymore, at one time yes.

Adam

[Brant Gaede]

Nice story. How'd u get in here with this spam?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

The spam is probably from a forum bot called X*rumer (without the asterisk).

I think I got all of this sucker this time.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Brant,

The spam is probably from a forum bot called X*rumer (without the asterisk).

I think I got all of this sucker this time.

Michael

Kinda wish you left it up. It wasn't half bad. Sneaky, tho. First I've seen like it.

--Brant