Teachers Request a Quarter Million Ayn Rand Novels
IRVINE, CA--This school year began with a flood of requests from high school English teachers who wish to teach Ayn Rand's novels in their classrooms. As we go to press, ARI has received requests for approximately 257,000 copies of Anthem or The Fountainhead.
This figure far exceeds the combined total number of requests received since the program began three years ago.
In 2002-03 ARI mailed out 9,000 books; 54,000 the following year; and 100,955 last year. Including this year's (still growing) total, ARI will have fulfilled requests for more than 420,000 copies of Ayn Rand's novels. If each of these books is used for five years, ARI's program will have reached more than two million students.
The project's phenomenal growth has been made possible in part by a specially earmarked million-dollar gift to the Institute. The donation was both the largest single contribution in the Institute's history and the most the Institute has so far received from a single donor during one fiscal year. The donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, made the gift in July. To help fulfill the requests for books that have been pouring in from around the country, ARI has used the $1 million gift to create a matching fund.
More information on this program is available at the Ayn Rand Institute's Web site.
Copyright (c) 2005 Ayn Rand(R) Institute. All rights reserved.
If you would like to help support ARI's efforts, please make an online contribution.
I've been reading and enjoying your blog for quite some time (and occasionally dropping in a snarky comment); after seeing your posts on FROG and watching it become increasingly successful, I felt compelled to write.Michael was kind enough to give me permission to post his e-mail and my reply on NoodleFood. I wanted to do so, as I hope that other folks might might have something interesting to add. So here's my reply:
Several recent books, including "Bowling Alone" and "Married to the Job," have focused on an increasing lack of "community" in modern American life. They note declining levels of civic involvement, including voter registration, social and political clubs and sporting associations, even reduced marriage statistics. In the view of these works, American culture is turning away from social interaction and instead engaging in longer working hours or in individual entertainment.
Scholars like John Lewis have reminded us that the healthy early Greek culture viewed social interaction -- the city as a community where men interact and can do so rationally -- as absolutely necessary to human life. However, today's culture offers very few constructive social outlets that aren't somehow tinged with bad ideas. Many non-religious people I know attend church, solely because of the sociability it affords them. Similarly, many (myself included) find ourselves working longer hours to compensate for the lack of healthy social outlets. Arguing with people who enjoy the camaraderie of Habitat for Humanity gets increasingly difficult when you still end up sitting at home alone.
Groups like FROG seem to buck the trend -- they form individualists' communities. But their existence still leaves big philosophical questions: what should the value of "community" -- whether it be the formal, civic kind or the informal, dinner party kind -- be to the rational man? In an Objectivist-majority society, what would form a healthy level of civic involvement, if any, take? Unless we provide a compelling alternative view of the proper relationship of social interaction to individualism, the communitarian view seen on both the left and right will be the one which wins the cultural debate.
Would you be willing to address, through your blog, either "community" as a concept or, more specifically, how to successfully establish a group like FROG?
Thanks in advance!
I've been trying to think of how to reply to your recently e-mail about community, but I haven't thought of anything particularly interesting! Personally, I don't think of community in any grand terms. It's just a group of people who come together due to shared values, then discover that they enjoy spending time together (to degrees varying with each person) due to the discovery of further shared values.Thoughts?
For example, I enjoy my Titan Toastmasters meetings beyond my original purpose of developing and practicing my public speaking skills because many of my fellow members are far more interested in ideas than most people. That makes them more interesting for me to talk to than most people.
With the people involved with FROG, I have a much deeper affinity of values than I ever expected with an Objectivist group, in substantial part because they tend to be far more serious about understanding and practicing the principles of Objectivism than run-of-the-mill many professed Objectivists. With such people, Paul and I have also found plenty of other values in common. We swap meaningful movie, television, and book recommendations. (Many of us have surprisingly similar tastes.) Oh, and food -- I've enjoyed many a fine meal with my friends from FROG! I'm able to get better advice from FROGs than most people. And we have plenty of intellectual issues to discuss.
I would love to see thriving Objectivist communities like FROG in other areas, but I'm not holding my breath. I know that creating and sustaining that requires much diligent effort, thoughtful leadership, and even heroic patience over the course of years. In the meantime, even one good Objectivist friend in the area goes a long way, I know. It's really important, I think, to have even just one person with whom you can be completely at ease.
If I find that I don't have additional shared values with the people in a given social group, then I keep my involvement to a minimum. I hate to waste my time on idle chit-chat with people I don't much like. Speaking generally, I can usually only hope for some kind of minimal visibility with people unfamiliar with Objectivism -- and I have little tolerance for that. I'm particularly tortured by the standard comments about the evils of not recycling, a child's need for religion, the old people wasting "our" health care resources, and the like. In casual conversation with regular people, I'm too often mired in boredom, then jolted into horror. It's so trying just to be polite in those situations. Of course, I do know a few notable exceptions to those general observations. And I can enjoy many people in small doses, particularly if I'm plied with good food!
I've never thought much of the usual communitarian complaints about the barren loneliness of individualism. (I always want to say in reply, "Speak for yourself, brother!") My general impression is that far too many people (particularly those needy communitarians) want others to fill a painful void in themselves that really ought to be occupied by their own soul. And they are willing to be incredibly promiscuous in their social relationships in the attempt. I hate to sound so Roark-ish, but if you can't stand to be alone, then you're not yet fit for company. (And that's just one of many demanding requirements for good social relationships!)
"Some citizens fear for safety if courts uphold S.F.'s voter-approved ban on handguns"
...The measure, which takes effect Jan. 1, also makes it illegal for residents to possess handguns.
And as that date approaches, handgun owners like Hurst are becoming increasingly fearful of the consequences.
"We're exactly the kind of people that should have weapons. We're vulnerable," Hurst said during a recent conversation in her cozy apartment, where she lives with her partner and their two cats. "The guns are not going away unless they absolutely have to."
...Both belong to the NRA, not because they agree with what they call the "right-wing lunatics" running the organization, but mostly because they like the mailers and Second Amendment literature the group offers.
They pride themselves on being responsible gun owners -- they take regular trips to the range to practice and always keep the bullets separate from the guns. It's just, they say, that they have too many friends who have been raped and abused to allow themselves to fall victim to anyone.
...Those who favor banning handguns in the city say that too many innocent people are shot in gun accidents and that handguns are often used in suicides.
They say criminals often get guns by robbing law-abiding gun owners.
Hurst denounces all those arguments, saying that there are simply too many guns out there to ban them all and that having a weapon levels the playing field against an attacker, who is likely to be armed.
"Assuming I'd be able to make a 911 call in the first place, you're looking at six or seven minutes realistically before police can get here," Hurst said. "You can get killed many times over in that length of time."
"Or raped and maimed and then killed," B.C. added.
It seems that the big righty blogs are more likely to link to smaller blogs than the big lefty blogs are.In the Commissar's own words:
I'm not convinced by his explanation, that the lefties are Stalinist, whereas the righties are libertarian. No, the difference is that those on the right are genuinely interested in learning new information, whereas leftists are more interested in having their feelings reinforced by agreement. To get information, go to them that know. But to stay comfortable within the liberal cocoon, just hang out at Daily Kos or Democratic Underground. [links omitted]
Leftie bloggers, by inclination, by personality, tend toward the Statist model. The One Big Nanny-State Blog that will care for its community members, thus: dKos and its diarists, Atrios and its comments, the DU model, Kuro5hin, etc.Perhaps I read Myrhaf wrongly, but I think that he is too hasty to disagree with the Commissar. I would say, instead, that the Commissar made a very good observation on the structural differences between of the left and right sides of the blogosphere, and even on the general "inclinations and personalities" of their respective bloggers, but that he didn't go far enough to explain how these differences arose.
...
Rightie bloggers, again by inclination, by personality, tend toward the Libertarian model, following Milton Friedman's analogy of the pencil, where countless participants, each working for his/her own good, unguidedly worked together to produce a pencil very cheaply. The market analogy does not apply perfectly to blogging, but I'll use the closely-related concept of "specialization." Rightie (i.e. Libertarian) bloggers do NOT aspire to blog-statism. Instead, they aspire to do whatever it is they do, on their own turf!, and refer other stuff to specialists. (The economic concept of 'relative advantage.) For example, during the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, Instapundit didn't try to cover it, he referred readers over to Le Sabot Post-Moderne, a guy on the scene in the Ukraine. [link omitted]
Being able to argue about politics online was exciting, but a website with a comments function is hardly unusual. In October of 2003, though, Moulitsas transferred his site over to a technology called Scoop, which allowed registered readers to maintain diaries -- their own unique weblogs. Suddenly, Moulitsas had transformed his site from something that looked kind of like a newspaper column into a genuinely new, complex community filled not with readers but with writers. "Scoop has the potential to revolutionize political participation," the NDN's Rosenberg told me. "The old model was that you used your body to take part in the political process -- you drove voters to the polls, registered them. Markos's model is: You use your mind. You get to figure out what the party ought to be doing, you get to figure out what's wrong with the Bush administration, you get to be the intellectual. It's an infinitely more involving activity." Soon, Moulitsas's site had spawned eponymous new stars, well-read diarists who carried Moulitsas's crusades forward when he was otherwise engaged or asleep: Billmon, DavidNYC, Bill in Portland, Maine. If they were good -- or outrageous -- enough, he promoted them to the main site, allowing them to share space with him and exposing them to an audience that was growing by the tens of thousands.Note the difference between how "promotions" occur in each side of the blogosphere. A "rightie" blogger, with a good post and a little luck, can get Instalanched, but it's up to him to take advantage of the attention, to cultivate a larger audience as a result. A "lefty" gets promoted as if he's a member of a political party. (And stay with me, that part gets better.) Note also that Kos's idea of "be[ing] the intellectual" isn't really being an intellectual. (The article makes the point numerous times that Kos is not interested in abstract ideas so much as tactics for political power.) Rather, it is the intellectual equivalent of driving a bunch of reliable Democrat lever-pullers to the polls on election day.
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual....I suspect that most on the left and many on the right would agree with that sentiment. And it certainly seems to describe how Kos runs his blog.
This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture.... The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call -- to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness -- idealism. By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men. [bold added]
Talking with Moulitsas, like reading his blog, is a singularly withering experience. He speaks in twenty-minute chunks, so you don't need to ask questions so much as provision buckets to catch the flood. When I nodded to agree with a point he made, he looked mildly disappointed; his conversation tends to circle back over itself, probing, seeking resistance.The article also mentions Kos's public speaking style, which vaguely reminded me of my own very limited impressions of Hitler's style, which I admit could be way off.
He can be so intense and high-strung, so full of kinetic energy, that the sheer performance of his speeches -- he never writes them out, just talks off-the-cuff -- can be distracting, like watching snakes fighting in a bag. ... Moulitsas's audience was one-part bewildered, one-part overwhelmed, and maybe a little inspired. "I'm not sure everyone really knew what to think," one Senate aide told me.But if he has the energy and the ability of inspire crowds, he seems not to be as well-rehearsed.
This record, combined with the sheer vigor and clarity of his online manifestos, has brought Moulitsas, a 34-year-old Californian whom nobody had heard of until three years ago, to the attention of the Democratic establishment, first as a resented adversary and now, increasingly, a kind of part-time sage, an affiliate member. Every third week, Moulitsas has a standing phone call with congressional powerbroker Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-Ill.), and he talks regularly with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). In part, this is raw flattery, a way for Democratic politicians to keep a particularly shrill irritant off their own backs while simultaneously reaching out to his audience, the party's young, liberal, professional grassroots. But it's not just an empty gesture. Moulitsas has become so well incorporated into the party machinery that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) uses him to recruit candidates. "They get calls from, like John Edwards, and maybe Tom Vilsack, and then, always, Markos," one DCCC staffer told me. This legacy has made him the current champion of that wing of the Democratic Party --anti-war, deeply partisan, young, mostly white, and professional.... [all bold added]If Glenn Reynolds had "a standing phone call" from Dennis Hastert, I don't think I would have found out about it only by trudging through a magazine-length article. It would have been all over the mainstream media by now, and there would be a major effort to make such interactions illegal. (Oh wait, but Senator McCain has already taken care of that. Far from this "gotcha" showing why we "need" McCain's bill, it should illustrate just how much danger our freedom of speech is in. If Kos wins a victory for the Democrats, I guarantee that some Republican partisans will enthusiastically revisit restrictions on bloggers.)
That sense of impending judgment suits Moulitsas fine. He is acutely aware of the limits of his moment. "There are technologies that are coming out there that I just don't get -- I try, but I just don't get them the way I got blogs," he told me. "Crooks and Liars is like the second biggest liberal blog now, and it's all video clips. And Friendster -- I have a Friendster account, I understand in the abstract that people would like the web to connect it in a certain way, but I don't get it, I don't understand how it works."
He paused for a minute, looking unusually non-agitated. "So the point is I know I have only a certain amount of time like this, and I'd like to make sure I do something useful with it."
The only nagging question is: What? [bold added]
This is one bus driving itself off a cliff regardless of the fortunes of the Democratic Party, which has not, so far, fared too well when following his advice
On my daily drive to work, I am greeted by a crawling, sprawling traffic jam on the other side of the freeway. I can’t imagine what it must be like to spend an hour or more of one’s life every day in the ridiculous drudgery of a traffic jam – I would go insane if I had to get up at 5 am for the commute, like some of my coworkers. (Luckily, I was able to find an apartment that allows me to be at work in six minutes.)
The sight of thousands of victims inching forward in mind-numbing drudgery reminded me of a similar scene from my childhood in Soviet Ukraine. A few times a month, I would go visit my grandmother in the city, and we would spend a day buying groceries.
A day was necessary, because much of it was spent in line for bread, fish, or the rare “exotic†foods like plums or oranges. Once, we waited four hours for some dried figs, only to find that they had all been sold to the revered yet much-reviled war veterans. I remember someone yelling at the store vendors and accusing them of keeping some figs for themselves and of their apathy towards our fig-less plight. The vendors shouted curses back with the same enthusiasm. Their apathy was indeed obvious, though I would not realize why until many years later.
Why should have Soviet bureaucrats care about how long we had to wait for non-existent figs? Why should the bureaucrats in charge of the Dallas roads care about the lives squandered away in the daily commute?
I know who did care about our plight: the bazaar merchants who sold us chickens and potatoes. They were tough bargainers, but they were very interested in meeting the wants of their customers. The American supermarket is a bazaar on a grand scale, where I can not only find dried figs 24/7, but a dozen other fruits I have never heard of.
We trust entrepreneurs with our bread, so why don’t we trust them with our roads? To a politician, each traffic-plagued driver is a liability, to be appeased by a some highly visible but most likely useless project. How might an entrepreneur look at a traffic jam, if the State did not monopolize transportation?
To an entrepreneur, each tired and miserable driver is a goldmine, an income opportunity waiting to be exploited. The misery of the driver is an unmet need, a value waiting for the right mind to come along and provide it. The idea of a traffic jam would be obscene in a free market: millions of unsatisfied consumers are an irresistible magnet for the right investor.
Are our roads really as bad as Soviet bread lines? They certainly get far more funding (from money taken from more productive enterprises), but the incompetence can be staggering.
I tried to go the bike shop across town today, and ended up stuck in traffic. The lane on the right of me was a HOV lane. It was created by city politicians with good intentions, I’m sure, but since the vast majority of drivers ride alone, it only ends up constricting the lanes available for traffic. Once the volume of cars per lane reaches a critical mass, the traffic slows to a crawl. Do you think political pressure or a calculation by a traffic expert made that decision? Federal funding regulations require new city highways to dedicate an HOV lane, despite studies (from the very highway I was driving) that indicate “a 41-56 percent increase in injury accidents.†Does anyone care?
On the right side of the highway, several lanes on the left were closed for an accident earlier in the day. It had taken most of the day to clean up, and the roads were still closed several hours after that. A hundred thousand drivers were delayed in traffic, but who cares? Certainly the police in cars blocking the roads didn’t, and neither did the road workers. Why should they – they are stuck at work, so why should commuters get of any easier? Maybe they were waiting for someone in dispatch to wake up, or perhaps they preferred to wait till traffic died down to drive home themselves.
By the time I made it to the bike shop, it had closed, so I stopped by to meet some friends at a sandwich place. It was getting late, and the barmaid looked busy and tired from long day, but when I walked in, she walked over, smiled, and asked, “How can I help you?†Sure beats waiting in line for figs.
This contradicts your epistemological and ethical position. Man's mind -- which means: the mind of the individual human being -- is capable of knowing reality, and man is capable of coming to conclusions on the basis of his rational judgment and acting on the basis of his rational self-interest. You imply, without stating it, that if an individual decides to use retaliation, that that decision is somehow subjective and arbitrary. Rather, supposedly the individual should leave such a decision up to government which is -- what? Collective and therefore objective? This is illogical. If man is not capable of making these decisions, then he isn't capable of making them, and no government made up of men is capable of making them, either. By what epistemological criterion is an individual's action classified as "arbitrary," while that of a group of individuals is somehow "objective"?Morally, a man has the right to retaliate against those who initiate force. In fact, as Ayn Rand pointed out, assuming he is able to do so, retaliation is a moral imperative. Refusing to retaliate against an aggressor is to sanction his aggression -- and to welcome more of it. Yet, if he is living in a society of other men, it is not enough that an individual determine in his own mind that his use of force is retaliatory. Since whether an act of force is initiatory or retaliatory is not self-evident, and since a man who initiates force is by that fact a threat to society, any man who engages in force that has not been proved by objective means to be retaliatory must be considered a threat. This is the deepest reason why the use of retaliatory force must be delegated to the government: an act of retaliation that isn't first proved to be an act of retaliation is indistinguishable from an act of aggression -- and must be treated as such.
In Houston alone, there are as many as 131 known sex offenders and 132 people with outstanding arrest warrants, and police there have set up a dragnet to find and arrest any lawbreakers.This comes as no surprise to me.
"We're going to be very actively pursuing these individuals in the very near future," said Lt. Robert Manzo, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department. "I would say within the next 24 hours."
Statewide, 373 registered sex offenders and 255 "wanted persons" sought federal assistance in Texas, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The DPS got the data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency this week, weeks after Gov. Rick Perry asked for it, and has begun distributing the names to law enforcement agencies. It is unknown how many of them are still in the state.
Since nothing is being done about the looters [in New Orleans], I can't help but wonder how many of them will end up being imported, by the busload, into Houston -- if they ever quit threatening their rescuers.In fact, a local minister of the Nation of Islam seemed to agree around that time, saying of Houston's large refugee population that, "[T]he ward wars that take place in New Orleans have now moved to Houston." I'm not sure that the "ward wars" have moved to a new arena, but it looks like plenty of other criminal activity might have.
[Houston Police Chief Harold] Hurtt said many of the killings have resulted from violent disturbances turning deadly, most of them in and around Houston apartment complexes.While the refusal to comment on the origins of this increase could simply reflect lack of knowledge, it could also reflect political correctness. In any case, Houston, which recently had to stop taking additional refugees, has added about 100,000 apartment-dwelling refugees, many lured (even from other evacuation destinations) by vouchers for a free year of housing.
"It's an unfortunate fact that a majority of homicides occur in apartment complexes," said homicide Capt. Dale Brown. "Has it always been that way? The answer is probably no. But that's the case now, and it's something we have to deal with."
Brown would not comment on what impact the influx of Katrina evacuees -- many of whom swelled the populations of a number of low-income apartment complexes in September -- have had on the homicide spike. He did suggest, however, that any sudden increase in population is typically accompanied by a rise in crime.
[Mayor Bill] White said the apartment occupancy rate in the Houston area is now 97.4 percent. Just 3,500 units at apartments that are participating in the city's voucher program remain available, and only about half of those are larger than one bedroom.I have heard several fellow Houstonians complain of an increase in crime and suspicious activity in their neighborhoods since Katrina, and there was recently a large melee, involving arrests, between refugees and native Houstonians in a high school here. (300 of said school's total student body of 2500 hail from the Big Easy.) One reader sent me an email, which I excerpt here, that sounds ... suspicious.
At approximately 11:00 a.m. today, Wednesday, 11/30/05, the door at [redacted] was found kicked in and a crime in progress. The resident was not home, but the mailman while delivering the mail found the door open and the [burglars] in the process of trashing the house so he immediately ran to a neighbor's house where HPD was called.While the particular state on the plates was not specified, there are a ton of Louisiana plates on the roads here in H-Town these days. I have my guess for which state's plates were on the Suburban. And while kick-in burglaries were not unique to New Orleans before the storm, it is notable that this email describes the third such burglary since Katrina in a small subdivision that was relatively crime-free beforehand. It is also interesting that a rather notable (and similar-sounding) kick-in/ransack-style burglary also occurred recently in Baton Rouge, another magnet for the New Orleans diaspora.
The vehicle was a light blue (or maybe a bluegreen) [S]uburban with out of state plates. There were at least 4 culprits (two reported blacks and two Hispanics men with a possible fifth woman driving the get away vehicle). We have reports that this same house has had 2 previous burglaries this year; and note this is not the same house that was previously kicked in on [redacted] last month.
Burglars kicked in a former NFL player's door and stole his rings from Super Bowls I and IV.While it is premature to claim that any of these kick-in burglaries has been committed by New Orleans refugees, it is true that Baton Rouge police have had their "hands full since Katrina", having already made 29,000 arrests this year as opposed to 25,000 last year. However, that same report claims that crime in that city is actually down, a contention echoed by the first story I linked to, in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram .
Frank Pitts, a Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver from 1965-71, is now a sergeant-at-arms for the Louisiana Senate.
...
[T]he rings had been in the second drawer of his bedroom dresser, which was dumped on his bed. Burglars also took a television set from the den, "trashed" another bedroom but passed on other football keepsakes in the living room, Pitts said.
It's still too early to say what effect on the crime rate, if any, the evacuations will have in Texas and elsewhere. According to published reports, Baton Rouge, despite taking in tens of thousands of evacuees, has seen its crime rate drop. New Orleans, meanwhile, which last year reported 265 murders, has been a portrait of calm.So the jury's still out on the question of whether Houston has suffered an increase in crime due to its influx of hurricane refugees, but it doesn't look good.
"In November and December of this year we had 51. Last year we had 30, and that's an increase of 70 percent over those last two months," Hurtt said.Hmmmm. A 70% increase since Katrina, and HPD sounds like its going out of the way to avoid stating what looks almost like a foregone conclusion.
Hurtt and other officials said there are several reasons the number of violent crimes has increased, but said they are most closely watching increased gang violence. Investigators have blamed the increase on family violence, drugs and violent crimes committed by gang members.
"The face of murder in Houston over the last year or so has changed somewhat," HPD Homicide Capt. Dale Brown said. "We are seeing more groups of individuals involved in violent crime."
...
HPD officials have been careful not to blame hurricane evacuees for any increase in crime the Houston area has experienced since September.
A Katrina evacuee was charged Wednesday with leading deputies on a 35-minute chase through northwest Harris County, KPRC Local 2 reported.Something's fishy. They mentioned that he's a Katrina evacuee! There must be a catch.
...
Moore hit four patrol cars and a civilian's pickup truck during the chase, according to Harris County Sheriff's Department Lt. John Martin.
Officers said they found 1 to 2 pounds of marijuana, some cocaine and $1,400 in cash inside the Moore's car.
In recent months, violent crimes appear to be on a dramatic rise, and police say, is undergoing some disturbing changes.This last 'graph sounds like pure multiculturalism to me.
Fifty-one homicides were reported in November and December -- a 70 percent increase from the same period last year, Hurtt said.
Hurtt also said he has seen a "tremendous change" in how killers and victims are acquainted. Twenty to 25 years ago, most killings involved friends or family members, but that is no longer the case -- and it's making murders harder to solve, he said.
"One of the things that is making it so difficult for our homicide investigators is that a lot of these homicides are stranger on stranger," Hurtt said.
Recent killings most commonly start as disturbances that turn deadly, Hurtt said. Other motives include robbery, family violence, gang activity and narcotics.
Eight slayings have involved hurricane evacuees as suspects, victims or both, officials said.
"You're bringing people with different cultures, different backgrounds; they have different lifestyles there in New Orleans than we have in Houston," said Capt. Dale Brown of the homicide division. "The equilibrium was thrown out of whack, with people competing for jobs, competing for turf, or whatever it is."
Homegrown gang activity is not the only concern.From these two stories, Chief Hurtt sounds like he's trying to put a PC spin on this, while Captain Brown is simply being cautious.
Hurtt said that after talking with state and regional officials, he is "pretty certain that (Louisiana) gang members did relocate here to Houston."
Capt. Brown said the department is still gathering intelligence on what role, if any, Louisiana gangs may have played in recent homicides.
"Is it possible and probable that there were gang members involved in some of those, I think the answer's yes," he said. "We're just not prepared to say it's a Louisiana problem at this time."
Hurtt said the department is "making headway" in gathering intelligence about Louisiana gang members in the city, despite difficulties obtaining information from a database of known gang members from Louisiana authorities, whose records were damaged by the hurricane.
The increased security efforts come after a dozen or so significant fights in HISD between Houston students and Hurricane Katrina evacuees, including one earlier this month at Westbury High School that resulted in 27 arrests. In September, five students were arrested after a fight at Jones High School.Houston, we have a problem.
Some Objecivists rely on the first quotation cited by Rod Long in this blog post to argue for total war. I've never seen them grapple with other statements, including -- but not limited to the others cited by Long -- where Rand seems to argue against the killing of civilians and in general for a more measured approach to warfare than that argued for by more hawkish Objectivists.I must admit, I wasn't exactly impressed with referenced post from Rod Long:
Do you know of any Objectivists who have tried to reconcile these varying statements? Is there indeed a single coherent philosophy that can accomodate all of the public statements she made on these matters? Or is Long right, and perhaps Objectivists are making too much of off-the-cuff statements that Rand did fully think out?
If anyone has tried to address these issues, I'd appreciate it if you could point me to the work.
So is it morally permissible to kill innocent people in the course of retaliating against an aggressor? Ooh, good question; let's ask Ayn Rand, a collection of whose responses to such questions has just been published as Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q & A.I was particularly annoyed by Rod Long's claim that Ayn Rand "tended to be rather cavalier with questions of casuistry," since if anyone was careless on this issue, it was him in this very blog post.
A. Ayn Rand says: hell yes, kill the innocentIf we go to war with Russia, I hope the 'innocent' are destroyed with the guilty. ... Nobody has to put up with aggression, and surrender his right of self-defense, for fear of hurting somebody else, guilty or innocent. When someone comes at you with a gun, if you have an ounce of self-esteem, you answer with force, never mind who he is or who's standing behind him. (p. 95)B. Ayn Rand says: hell no, don't kill the innocentWhatever rights the Palestinians may have had -- I don't know the history of the Middle East well enough to know what started the trouble -- they have lost all rights to anything: not only to land, but to human intercourse. If they lost land, and in response resorted to terrorism -- to the slaughter of innocent citizens -- they deserve whatever any commandos anywhere can do to them, and I hope the commandos succeed. (p. 97)C. Ayn Rand says: gee, there's no right answerEven as a writer, I can barely project a situation in which a man must kill an innocent person to defend his own life. ... But suppose someone lives in a dictatorship, and needs a disguise to escape. ... So he must kill an innocent bystander to get a coat. In such a case, morality cannot say what to do. ... Personally, I would say the man is immoral if he takes an innocent life. But formally, as a moral philosopher, I'd say that in such emergency situations, no one could prescribe what action is appropriate. ... Whatever a man chooses in such cases is right -- subjectively. (p. 114)I have a difficult time seeing a consistent principle underlying these different answers: Americans killing innocent Russians strikes Rand as obviously permissible, while Palestinians killing innocent Israelis strikes her as obviously impermissible; but when killer and victim are fellow-subjects of the same dictatorship all this obviousness suddenly vanishes. The acceptability of innocent casualties seems to vary depending on political rather than philosophical considerations; it's hard to avoid the conclusion that she was just giving her knee-jerk emotional reaction to the politics of the actors involved.
In general Rand tended to be rather cavalier with questions of casuistry (the application of moral principles to hard cases) -- a symptom, perhaps, of what I've long considered her chief philosophical failing: impatience. Elsewhere in the Q & A book she notes that "if there's one thing I cannot do mentally, it's handle anything more than two 'ifs'" (p. 170) -- as though this were a feature, not a bug. In fact she's quite mistaken; in plotting a novel she could be enormously painstaking and patient in constructing a complex and detailed structure and making sure every bit of it fit; that's because, as I believe, she loved writing fiction far more than she loved writing nonfiction, taking up the latter primarily as a theoretical biologist might decide to act as a medic during a plague. That, I hypothesise, is why she had so much less patience for detail in her nonfiction than in her fiction (I've written more about this here), which, I further hypothesise, helps to explain why she tended to allow herself (I don't mean consciously) to answer these sorts of questions on the basis of gut feeling rather than a consistent philosophical analysis.
Rand's anti-Communism gave her a motivation to answer (A) in a way that would favour the Americans, but to answer (B) in a way that would favour the Israelis. (Rand's support for Israel, perhaps along with her bizarre judgment that Israel's Arab antagonists are "still practically nomads," seems to have been motivated by the fact that "Soviet Russia ... is sending the Arabs armaments.": p. 96.) As nothing ideological was at stake in (C), she had no political motivation to answer it in any particular way. Hence, I suggest, the inconsistency. (For my own approach to the question of killing innocents see here and here.)
I'm rather surprised that you would be taken in by Rod Long's post. He's totally ignoring the vastly different context of those quotes.I think that much more could be said on this difficult topic, but that's enough for me for now!
In the first, Ayn Rand is speaking of war of self-defense with Russia. The "innocent" in question were the passive supporters of the Soviet Union, i.e. the vast majority of Russians who accepted the horrors of the communist government without significant protest. Those people were morally responsible for their decision not to fight the communists, for their willingness to live as slaves to the Bolsheviks. Without them, the Bolsheviks never could have retained their iron grip on power. Such people were not innocent, but guilty -- albeit perhaps less so than active supporters of the communists. Given their choice to live without any rights whatsoever under the Soviets, they have no grounds on which to protest their death by an American bomb rather than a KGB interrogator. The genuine innocents in Soviet Russia were the opponents of the regime -- and those people would have welcomed an invasion from the US, despite the risk of being caught in the crossfire.
In contrast, the second quote concerns actual innocents, namely the ordinary Israelis conducting their daily, peaceful business within a fundamentally lawful, civilized society who are suddenly blown to bits by Palestinian terrorists. If the Palestinians had legitimate complaints against the Israelis, they ought to have settled them in a peaceful manner consistent with some measure of respect for law. They were not fighting a dictatorship -- and so had no grounds upon which to inflict such senseless death and destruction.
The context of the third quote is substantially different from that of the first two, in that it concerns an ordinary person attempting to escape dictatorship, not a political conflict of any kind. It might be psychologically difficult for an ordinary person to kill under those circumstances, but that has nothing to do with the propriety of killing innocents (whether genuine or supposed) in war. And Ayn Rand's answer in that case is consistent with her general view of the ethics of emergencies.
In "The Roots of War," Ayn Rand said: "Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictatorships. Yet this is what today's alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate--in the name of love for humanity."
The same assessment applies to the rationalistic libertarians claiming that the non-initiation of force principle prohibits self-defensive action against anyone other than a voluntary agent of a force-initiating regime. On that view, if Hitler ever invaded the US, US soldiers would be forbidden from defending the borders, since at least some of the enemy soldiers were unwillingly drafted. Similarly, the US military couldn't bomb Hitler's concentration camps -- and thus save millions of genuinely innocent lives by destroying the machinery of the Holocaust -- because we might kill or maim some of those innocents. The pacifist libertarians fail to appreciate the philosophical context of the non-initiation of force principle, particularly the fact that its purpose is to protect human life by making peaceful co-existence in society possible. Given that purpose, if it ever seems that the principle morally requires us to sacrifice the world to an evil tyrant, then it's long past time to check our premises. If the pacifist libertarian merely claims that we are morally obliged to risk our own lives to prevent harm to those who refuse to fight that tyrant, as Rod Long does, then the checking of premises is still in order.
Just to be clear, I'm not attributing Rod Long's errors to you. However, if you want to raise some questions about Ayn Rand's statements on the proper conduct of war, you'll have to find some more compelling quotes than those cited by Rod Long. (For the reasons you mentioned, her published, edited comments would be more compelling than those off-the-cuff remarks from her Q&As.) For a reasonably clear statement of her views on moral conduct in war, I would recommend her essay "The Lessons of Vietnam" reprinted in The Voice of Reason.
In that essay, Ayn Rand argues that a nation ought only go to war for self-interested reasons, for to do otherwise is to sacrifice our soldiers' lives "in pure compliance with the ethics of altruism, i.e., selflessly and senselessly." The same evaluation applies when the military is prevented from fighting for victory, as seen in the contempt leveled against that "modern monstrosity called a 'no win' war, in which the American forces were not permitted to act, but only to react: they were to 'contain' the enemy, but not to beat him."
We may safely say that Ayn Rand was an advocate of fighting only selfish wars for the purpose of defeating the enemy. That's exactly what it means to fight a total war, in that the guiding purpose of all political and military choices must be to end the conflict as quickly as possible by thoroughly defeating the enemy, with as little loss of life on your own side as possible, never sacrificing the lives of your own soldiers for the sake of the enemy. As a general rule, that method also preserves the most lives of enemy soldiers and civilians, even while eliminating the threat they pose. For example, by dropping the bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, rather than fighting a bloody land war, we saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, particularly and most importantly our own.
Provided that the war itself is legitimate, the responsibility for any and all loss of enemy life, whether soldier or civilian, falls squarely upon the shoulders of the enemy leaders who created the conflict. And ultimately, the majority of people are responsible for their leaders -- whether by active choice in a democracy or passive acceptance in a dictatorship. As for those in genuine opposition, they cannot rightly expect the other countries threatened by their government to sacrifice themselves for their sake. As Ayn Rand so vehemently said in one of those Ford Hall Forum Q&As, that's one reason why our choice of political leaders matters so very much.
The U.S. federal Sarbanes-Oxley Act was created to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures. The act covers issues such as establishing a public company accounting oversight board, auditor independence, corporate responsibility and enhanced financial disclosure.And here's a glimpse at how the government "protects" investors -- at least from their companies expanding too easily or keeping too much of their own profits.
Officially titled the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002 and commonly called SOX or SarbOx, it was signed into law on July 30, 2002 by President George W. Bush. It was designed to review the dated legislative audit requirements, and is considered the most significant change to United States securities laws since the New Deal in the 1930s.
The act came in the wake of a series of corporate financial scandals, including those affecting Enron.... [Original formatting and all links omitted. Bold added.]
Suppose you've got a growing business. You've just opened your 100th restaurant, and your company is making just over a million dollars in annual profits. You want to expand further -- spend a million dollars to rent a new building and hire more cooks and waiters. An accounting firm offers you new services that will cost nearly half that, money you might otherwise spend continuing to expand the business.Those wishing for more information on this major intrusion of the government into our economy should stop by The Evils of Sarbanes Oxley, a blog on the subject by Thrutch coauthor Amit Ghate.
Do you hire more cooks, or do you hire more accountants?
Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, you hire the accountants. The restaurant chain in question is Max & Erma's; its CFO told researchers at the Competitive Enterprise Institute the company will have to pay $500,000 to $600,000 every year to meet the demands of the new anti-fraud law, Congress' attempt to avoid more Enron-like fiascos by making businesses pay accounting firms to keep them in check.
If spending half a million dollars on accounting instead of growth isn't depressing enough, what do you say to $100 million a year? That's what oil giant BP, a British company whose U.S. business generates less than half its income, is paying, according to its CEO. And that figure is just "external costs"; it doesn't include the time the company's own employees spend complying with the new law.
Big-hearted liberals, your writer included, can agree that the rich should shoulder more of the tax burden than the less fortunate. The problem is defining who is rich.Wah! And about the higher cost of living in these blue states.... It's largely self-inflicted. These states saddle themselves with additional taxation and regulatory burdens. Unions make labor costs artificially high. And, as Thomas Sowell points out, the blue-staters themselves are responsible for legislating themselves out of affordable housing -- or into massive appreciation, as the case may be.
Incomes are higher in the blue states, but so generally is the price of housing and everything else. A family making $90,000 in Nutley, N.J., can barely maintain a middle-class existence. Yet by national standards, that family is in the top 25 percent for income. Were this household to move to Tulsa with its $90,000 income intact, it would be living high. But the federal tax code makes no distinction between what it takes to be middle class in Oklahoma and in New Jersey. As a result, the high-income regions -- the generally liberal coasts and upper Midwest -- get milked.
The alternative minimum tax multiplies the regional inequities. Dubbed the blue-state tax, it was created in 1969 to ensure that the top earners pay at least some federal income taxes. (Back then, reports of millionaires' paying no taxes scandalized Americans.)
Conservatives have been prancing around at the sight of liberals demanding that a tax be muzzled. The Wall Street Journal editorial page says it teaches blue-state politicians a lesson and urges them to get with the Republican program to lessen reliance on the income tax.I'll pass over whether Harrop includes "those in the middle class who were subject to the AMT" among her "plutocrats" suddenly relieved of part of their federal tax burden. She just wants a different set of legalized criminals passing out the loot after it is confiscated as taxes.
They ought to sign on. There's nothing to stop liberal states from collecting some of the taxes their top plutocrats no longer send to Washington. Some are already doing it and spending the money on their own priorities.
...
Liberal America should embrace tax reform that serves its interests -- and totally without guilt. It's been carrying the load for far too long. [bold added]
Under very different management, Houston long ago surpassed New Orleans, and now boasts a population more than three times larger, and a vastly more dynamic economy. During the 1990s, the Texas city grew almost six times faster than greater New Orleans. It flourished as a major destination for immigrants, particularly from Latin America.That bit about Houston desegregating (and mostly peacefully) because segregation was "bad for business" reminded me further of a very well-done documentary I saw several years ago about that very story.
One clear area of success has been race. Like New Orleans, Houston was a Southern city with a history of racial discrimination. But in the early 1960s the city decided to desegregate. It did so not as much for moral reasons as because it was perceived to be bad for business.
That phrase, "bad for business," is close to a curse in Houston. Business drive and the search for a better economic future has sustained this city through boom times and crashes, notably the disastrous energy bust of the 1980s. Because of the economic flexibility of the locals, even that disaster was turned into a boon. Collapsed property prices and lots of available space lured hundreds of thousands of new immigrants to the city, sparking a durable new revival, recalls Houston architect Tim Cisnero, whose clients include Mexican, African, Chinese, and Indian entrepreneurs.
With atheists like Robert Camp, who needs theists?
By Keith Lockitch
In his Dec. 2 Op-Ed, "Atheists can't prove it, either," Robert Camp criticized my Nov. 17 lecture in Irvine on "intelligent design" creationism, though without mentioning me by name.
Camp was unhappy that, in addition to discussing the flaws of "intelligent design," I also criticized religion in general. The creationism controversy, he feels, is a "scientific and pedagogical issue," not a clash between reason and religion.
But the view that "intelligent design" is a scientific position, to be answered with scientific arguments, is--as I explained in my talk--precisely the view its promoters are desperate to convey. Though they have no data supporting their claims, their arguments are carefully calculated to appear scientific and non-religious. Why? In hope of skirting the constitutional ban on religion in public schools. This is why the title of my lecture (which Camp also failed to mention) was "Creationism in Camouflage: the 'Intelligent Design' Deception."
What makes "intelligent design" an inherently religious viewpoint is its appeal to a supernatural "designer." This appeal brings it directly into conflict with reason, because the very notion of the supernatural--of something "beyond" nature that defies natural laws--is a contradiction. As I argued in my lecture, one cannot properly oppose the efforts of "intelligent design" creationists without rejecting their attempt to make the "supernatural" part of science.
Although Camp, himself, claims to be "intellectually opposed to supernatural ideas," he finds it troubling that I would dare to proclaim in a public lecture that the idea of the "supernatural" provably contradicts the facts of reality. Ssshhh! Don't let the religious folks hear you!
Especially troubling to Camp, was my rejection of the belief that supernaturalism is necessary for morality--the belief that without God there can be no absolute standards of right and wrong. "The last thing we need," he explains, "is a bunch of people who believe they have no internal moral compass to be running around without their external one."
What he ignores, however, is the possibility of a scientific, provable code of ethics--a moral philosophy based neither on subjective, "internal" feelings nor on "external" religious dogmas. A particularly telling omission was Camp's failure to mention that my lecture was sponsored by The Ayn Rand Institute (my employer). This is relevant because Ayn Rand's ethic of rational egoism provides precisely the alternative moral system that Camp ignores in his critique.
Rand locates absolute standards of right and wrong in the objective requirements of human life. In her view, morality arises from the fact that we, like all living beings, must pursue values in order to survive. Unlike the lower animals, however, we are not pre-programmed for survival. To define our values and guide our choices in life, we need a code of moral principles--principles based on the unalterable facts of human nature and of man's long-range survival needs.
Rand's ethical system--and, more generally, her philosophy of Objectivism--comprises the positive message underlying the ideas in my talk. But apparently, it is the very advancement of a positive system of philosophy that Camp really objects to. He finds it "reasonable" to be an atheist, but not to defend the view that atheism, or any other idea in philosophy, is a provably rational viewpoint. "I think they're wrong, too," he says, "but there is no, nor can there be, proof of it." Strangely, he seems to think it is "unreasonable" to defend the importance of reason.
What his viewpoint dismisses is the essential difference between reason and faith. In reason, one accepts only conclusions one can prove to be true--conclusions based on sensory evidence and logical inference from such evidence. Faith, on the other hand, is belief unsupported by facts or logic--the blind embrace of ideas despite an absence of evidence or proof.
The only ideas that are reasonable to believe are those you know to be true by means of reason. And when you know them to be true, it is perfectly reasonable to argue in their defense and fight against false ideas, like creationism, that stand opposed to them.
Keith Lockitch, Ph.D. in physics, is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand--best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy of Objectivism.
A bunch of Muslim Lebanese jackasses start the ball rolling by standing-over, frightening, assaulting at law, a bunch of skippy whitebreads at Cronulla beach.That's just the start. Read it all.
"She's not worth 55 years" says one leering jackass to another, standing over a skippy teen in a bikini and her friends, blocking the sun from her as she lies on the sand, in an overt reference to gang rapes conducted by Lebanesers a couple years back.
A couple skippy lifeguards try to get the disgusting assaulting wogs off the beach and out of people's faces, and for their trouble get the crap beaten out of them by said wogs.
A week later a bunch of sober appalled skips, including parents of the girls getting assaulted, who have had enough of the Muslim Lebs giving everyone the shits on Cronulla beach when they've behaved leeringly to girls and threateningly in groups to regular punters, decide to protest the whole lifeguard beating. Off to the beach they go.
My two cents worth on the Maroubra beach riots (Eastern suburbs) is this. There's a perception, justified or not, among some Anglo Australians that authorities are not cracking down hard enough on Middle Eastern gangs, who are in Western Sydney. Some days ago, a Lebanese gang supposedly attacked lifeguards, who are an iconic part of Australian beach culture. That's a little bit like spitting on the Flag and writing grafitti on the Liberty Bell. So guys revved up by beer decided it wasn't just Miller Time, but payback time.The last part there in the bold is haunting, for it is the distillation of how the Islamists, aided by multiculturalism (i.e., political correctness as opposed to pluralism based upon respect for individual rights), can ruin our civilization.
I have no doubt that some of the Middle Eastern guys beat up were innocent. But that's what happens when perceived political correctness undermines public confidence. We rely on the state to dispense justice, when that is thought to fail then mob rule steps in and punishes innocent and guilty alike.
I've been warning about this for some time now, both with respect to the torture debate and in an old post called the Three Conjectures. Like most people in Oz, I have Muslim or Middle Eastern friends and the way I got it figured is if we don't start cracking down on the Osamas and the Zawahiris and the al-Arians because they are draped in this bogus human rights shield, then the Joe Samadis and the Bill Mansours of the world are gonna start catching it. What's the use of being innocent if the guilty go scot free? One day if a nuke goes off in Sydney or Manhattan all the bets are off.
I get a little emotional sometimes watching these peacenik types defend blatant murderers because by frustrating justice they are building up tectonic pressures that will go snap one day, and it won't be their necks at the end of a rope. What the world needs isn't the fake sympathy of the Euro-human rights crowd but justice. They should remember that in the absence of justice there is only revenge. [bold added]
If these hoodlums hadn't already run off because they knew what was coming, they would cop a flogging, a kick up the bum, a slap over the head. The young kids were afraid of the police and that's how we controlled and protected the community.It goes on from there.... From the comments at The Belmont Club, I'd say that the Australian left is going to be in the fetal position after this. Multiculturalism takes a well-deserved body blow.
Fear is the only thing a young male understands. That real power is now lost forever.
Let's look at how the new police force would handle the same job.
Firstly, we changed our name to a "service" because it was aggressive to use the word "force". We send two small female officers, wearing silly little yellow caps.
If we want to move these thugs out of the area, we have a very strict procedure we must follow. We have to announce our name and place of duty. The thug laughs and starts calling us by our first name.
We have to tell them why they have to move on. We have to warn them that if they fail to move on, they may be arrested.
If there is more than one thug, we have to do this to each one.
They tell us they don't speak English, start stating their rights and call their friends by mobile phone to come to the location.
The process we have just started doesn't work with a drunk who wants to argue - it just makes it more confusing.
We have to make detailed notes of the conversation and caution them not to say or do anything in case it incriminates them.
Christian radio has seen its market share expand from 2.2% in 1999 to 5.5% today. The Association of American Publishers reports that the market for religious books grew by 37% in 2003. The definition of religious books is vague--but religious publishing is undoubtedly growing much faster than the industry as a whole.From all indications, this influence is only going to continue to grow over the next several years.
Even if the religious bit of the media industry is still relatively small, it accounts for a disproportionate share of the "mega-hits". The Left Behind series of novels on the end of days has brought in $650m. Bantam Dell, a mainstream publisher owned by Germany's Bertelsmann, has reportedly paid Tim La Haye an advance of $45m for the next series. The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, an evangelical preacher, is the best-selling hardcover book in American history, with more than 25m copies sold. Christian blockbusters are dragging a huge flotilla of other Christian products in their wake--from "praise the Lord backpacks", in camouflage colours, to Christian dieting books such as Don Colbert's What Would Jesus Eat.
The reason the religious market is booming is simple: religious America is booming. John Green, of the University of Akron in Ohio, calculates that there are 50m Evangelicals in America. He argues that Evangelicals are growing as a share of the population. They are also getting richer, in part because the Evangelical heartland of the South is booming and in part because richer people are joining the cause.
America's oil companies have earned every penny of their profits.
By Alex Epstein
Politicians and pundits claim that oil companies' recent quarter of higher profits is mostly a "windfall"--which should be "given back" to society via a proposed $20 billion tax. As Representative Dennis Kucinich and others say, they seek "to tax only excess profits, leaving . . . reasonable profits unaffected." Such taxation is justified because the recent low supply and high demand that led to higher profits, explains economist Dean Baker, "is kind of [the oil companies'] good luck. They didn't do anything to earn it."
But America's oil companies have earned every penny of their profits. To characterize any portion of them as an unearned "windfall"--like manna dropped from heaven--is a vicious smear. It is to evade what is truly responsible for their profits this and every quarter: the great value they create and the tremendous thought, effort, and risk-taking that goes into creating it.
Virtually forgotten in the condemnation of oil profits is that the great--and growing--global demand for oil reflects its great value. Producers and consumers have been willing to pay $70 a barrel for oil because it is worth that much to us. Oil is used by us to get quickly from point A to point B by car, train, or jet. It is used by efficient factories overseas to produce the ever-cheaper goods we get at Wal-Mart. In the event of a natural disaster, it allows us to drive to a safer place or to generate power to begin a recovery.
The critics of oil profits take all the benefits of free-flowing oil for granted--with not a word of acknowledgement to those who sell it to them at agreeable prices. They treat oil production as an effortless, risk-less task that requires little more of oil executives than shuffling paper and watching their coffers fill up with mega-profits.
But the continuous mass-production of oil, under all economic conditions, is a tremendous achievement. Oil companies invest billions on new exploration projects. They construct skyscraper-high oil rigs to extract oil from the ocean floor. They develop new technologies like 3-D seismic surveys or new extraction methods to get hundreds of billions of barrels of oil from sand deposits in Canada.
And to profit, they must do all of these things efficiently, while assuming a great amount of risk: the uncertain nature of oil exploration and R&D; the need to deal with unstable foreign governments; the new and shifting government regulations on exploration and refining; the machinations of the OPEC cartel of dictatorships.
Critics emphasize the fact that the oil companies' profits this quarter are partially due to factors that they did not anticipate or control--such as the massive increase in demand from China and India. But every business venture involves factors that its leaders do not (and cannot) anticipate or control--factors that can affect it positively or negatively. These factors are part of the risk that businesses assume. Since they undertake the risk, they deserve any losses or rewards that result. In the 1990s, the oil companies had no right to a bailout when oil unexpectedly fell below $10 a barrel. Likewise, we now have no right to seize their profits when oil unexpectedly rises to over $70 a barrel.
To earn a profit does not mean to be fully responsible for every factor that went into it; it is to take the action necessary to create a product or service--to develop the skills, to invest the time, money, and effort--and to assume the risk that others will value one's product or service, and that one will not be driven out of business by a superior competitor, a new invention, etc.
This principle applies equally to employees as to business owners. Did the many former "nerds" who made hundreds of thousands at Microsoft and elsewhere not deserve their money--should they be forced to "give" it to society (i.e., to other people)--because they had no idea that cultivating programming skills would be so profitable? No--they chose to develop those skills, they staked their livelihoods on them, and their high salaries rightfully belong to them.
Given the value oil companies create and the effort and risk involved, to call their profits a "windfall" is an intellectual crime. A "windfall profits" tax would punish producers for working hard, taking risks, and succeeding. Nothing could be more un-American than that. Let us drop the "windfall" smear, and congratulate the oil industry for a job well-done.
Alex Epstein is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand--best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy of Objectivism.
With less than four days to go before Williams' scheduled Tuesday execution, sporadic-yet-credible threats of civil unrest have prompted the council members and representatives from the city and county human relations commissions to ask religious leaders to emphasize a message of peace during weekend services.And second, we have an interview in which we learn that Williams considers himself innocent and wants not merely to be spared the executioner's needle, but to be freed!
"We picked up information that led us to believe that there were some planned and intentioned acts of violence that could occur in the wake of the decision or the execution planned for Stan "Tookie" Williams," Robin Toma, executive director of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, said during a news conference at City Hall.
Toma declined to list the affected communities or elaborate on the threats. [bold and links added]
WHITFIELD: And so how aware of the publicity surrounding his case is [Williams]?Well-orchestrated, eh? And he's an "active participant". Does this "publicity" include the threats of domestic unrest? Major criminals order murders from prison. Why not coordinate riots?
BRESLAU: He's acutely aware of it.
WHITFIELD: And is he being very much fueled by it as well?
BRESLAU: Well, he's acutely aware of it, and he's been a very active participant. He is at the center of an anti-death penalty campaign, the likes of which California has really not seen for a very long time. This is a very well-orchestrated campaign on his behalf. [bold added]
I hate labels such as "Underclass" for the simple reason that it allows those people to wallow in their own misery while waiting for government programs to fix things for them. Labeling them so just gives them a ready made excuse to fail. Is it any wonder they do fail so often. It is expected of them. And besides, they supply gainful employment for writers of articles about the poor, designers of programs for the poor and lets not forget about the Reverend Jesse Jackson and his ilk. Who would they berate us about if there were no "Underclass"?I first read this e-mail as a sort of criticism of my views.
I was born to a single mother, never new who my father was and didn't and don't care. I was sexually abused from the age of 5 to 9 yrs by a friend of the family who would have qualified as a father figure by the author of the article. I was raised by my grandmother and aunt. I quit school and went to work at 16 and never missed a day when I could drag my ass out of bed, sick or no, for more than 40 years. I was married with 2 daughters of my own at 18. I discovered Ayn Rand in a logging camp when I was 30 and fell in love all over again. I am self taught having read hundreds of books including everything by AR. I understand what I read and while I am no grammarian, I write passably. My wife and I celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary last April.
My family is my greatest achievement. My wife is a wonder and an almost perfect foil to me, in that what I don't get or think of, she does. My oldest daughter is a certified chef who spent 15 yrs in training and then decided she wanted a degree in Economics then switched to English. She worked at her full time job and went to school in the evenings to get her high-school diploma then enrolled in a local community college for her courses. She worked part time and went to school full time and now is in university finishing her last year. My younger daughter quit school at 16 and went to work. She now runs a very successful small business out of her house. By successful I mean $1000-$1500 per week working 8-12 hr six days a week. If you do the math that is a lawyers salary for a grade 9 education.
Did I mention that I am a half-breed Indian who married a white girl?
My point here is not to brag, even though I am very proud of what I have done with my life and especially my family. My point is that sooner or later you have to forget the past and live your life. You forget about the abuse and remember only the good times, of which for me there were many more than bad. It makes no difference whether you are poor or not.
My family poached deer and picked greenery for a local florist wholesaler in order to keep food on the table.
My mother did little to discipline or encourage me. It was my grandmother and my aunt who acted the part of father to me and believe me the were as tough as any man. Therefore, I have no patience with or sorrow for the "Underclass". I was one of them and turned out pretty well. Where is the extended family of these so called unsocialized black males? Are there no aunts, uncles or grandparents to take up the slack? Rent the movie Antwan Fisher and see how it is done. I have walked in his shoes and I know.
Please excuse my venting and bragging but I just get so tired of hearing about the plight of the poor. In the words of the Reverend Ike (who Ayn Rand admired) "The best thing you can do for the poor, is to not be one of them".
I should have been more clear. I am sorry if it seemed that I was ranting at you about the "Underclasses".That's an excellent point. I'd like to see more writing on the accomplishments of those admirable people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps, rather than on the pathetic misery of those who refuse to act as life requires.
The rant was a silent scream type of thing. I wish writers would pick better subjects for their articles. Just once in a while I would like to read an article about people who don't play the victim, who decide to make something of themselves no matter what life has dealt them.
There is a classic in economics called the broken window theory. I goes that a vandal throws a rock through a store owners window and there-by supplies work to the glazier who replaces the window, the makers of the glass in the window, the trucking company who delivers the window, all the way down to the miners of the silicone rock that is used to produce the glass in the window.
The problem is that no one hears about all the people who would have been employed if the store owner had spent the money for the broken window on things that he wanted.
The same idea holds for those who write about the "Underclasses", we never hear about the ordinary people who make successes of themselves in spite of their circumstances.
"History is philosophy and policy teaching by example--every history must be founded in philosophy and some policy."
I've been rereading John Adams & the Spirit of Liberty by C. Bradley Thompson, and I'm again hero-worshiping this incredible man, this mind behind the revolution.
One of the most important, if not the, most important things I've learned in the past two years is that one's philosophy of life must be learned through induction. That is, on sense-perception and inferences based on sense-perception. In my high school and early college days, I had wrongly found Objectivism to be a justification for having (implicitly) built the foundation of my philosophy of life with "I want" rather than "it is." That is, Objectivism was my justification for my rationalized view of the world.
In rereading Thompson's book, I caught something about John Adams that I hadn't caught before: his stubborn insistence on an inductive approach to political science. This approach struck a chord with me, so I wanted to share the relevant passage (p. 119):
At the core of John Adams's political science was the attempt to apply the scientific method of Bacon and Newton to the "moral and intellectual world." He took seriously the possibility that politics could be reduced to a science, not unlike physics or biology. In an unpublished fragment written at about the same time that the Defense [of the Constitutions of Government of the United States] was being composed, Adams set forth his methodology in direct opposition to that of the marquis de Condorcet, whom he mentions by name as his antagonist. Adams wrote his Defense and the Davila essays, in large measure, to counter the a priori hyperrationalist tradition of political science that he associated with Descartes and Condeorcet. He was suspicious, if not overtly contemptuous, of all theories, hypotheses, or conjectures that could not be demonstrated empirically or inferred from observation and the experimental laboratory of history. The scientific method associated with "Imagination," "Hypotheses," and "Conjecture" had consequences for political life that Adams found both dangerous and destructive. The rendency of such theorists was to denigrate common sense for the "fancy" and reasonings of their own genius. Against the rationalist philosophers, Adams thought that a genuine science of politics must rest on two general principles. First, the "Science of Government," he wrote, "can be learned only from experience." Indeed, he thought experience "the only Source of human knowledge." Second, the political sciences, no less than physics, ought to be "founded in or derived from Experiment." Experience and experiment, then, understood and controlled by observation, analogy, and induction--these were the tools used by Adams in establishing methodological guidelines for an empirical approach to the political sciences.
Simply amazing. In addition to this excellent book, I’ve been reading Polybius’s The Rise of the Roman Empire. Perhaps I will have some comments on his work later.
CARLSON: The bottom of this, on your web site, you have a statement: "We find that morality should not be derived from religious texts." What should morality be ... what should it be derived from?The interviewer rightly noted that the appeal to law is a circular argument, and I would add that the appeal to empathy is just as circular, since all such moral sentiments are grounded in prior moral judgments. His appeal to "things that are good for society" is just as vacuous. As Ayn Rand said in "The Objectivist Ethics":
JACKSON: Well, morality is not derived from religious texts. Religious texts actually contradict each other. If you read the Bible, it contradicts itself on nearly every page. And the fact that people can decide which one to go with shows that they are getting their morality from somewhere else.
Morality is actually based off of empathy, and failing empathy, it's based off of fear of reprisal from the law. That is where morality comes from.
CARLSON: Yes. But the law, it's a circular argument. You need to think through it a little bit more, Thomas, because the law itself is based on at least a notion of abstract right and wrong, and that is not rooted in empathy or any emotion, but ... you know, an abstract belief that this is right and this is wrong because someone larger, in control, says so.
JACKSON: Well, no, that's not true. It's based off of things that are good for society. If citizens murder each other, this is bad for society. And you see this across the board in many nations.
Several religions have stumbled upon this, but it's not the religious text that's bringing this to people. They are finding this on their own, and societies that don't find this don't survive.
The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable "will of God" as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with "the good of society," thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as "the standard of the good is that which is good for society." This meant, in logic--and, today, in worldwide practice--that "society" stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since "the good" is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that "society" may do anything it pleases, since "the good" is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And--since there is no such entity as "society," since society is only a number of individual men--this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang's desires.A great many people cite something like "the good of society" as the guiding principle of ethics -- and almost everyone else accepts it as a legitimate answer. That fact is disturbing on a psycho-epistemological level, for it suggests that most people are content to think of ethics solely by means of floating abstractions. The notion of the "good of society" cannot be concretized -- and thus cannot be genuinely understood -- without obviously appealing to some substantive conception of that good. Whenever anyone appeals to such an empty standard of morality, the very next question ought to be, "But what is good for society? Racial purity? Equality? Prosperity? Suffering through Christ?" Yet that question is so rarely asked. (Note to self: Ask it!)
Speaking to the Belgian newspaper La Derniere Heure, Degauque's parents, Jean and Liliane, described the typical growing pains of an adolescent girl. She had a talent, they said "for sticking with the difficult kids" . On one occasion they had to travel 170km to the Ardennes to find her. Of her boyfriends, her mother said: "I don't know how many there were."In response to that last sentence, the first question that comes to my mind is, "Why?" At Capitalism Magazine, the following rings true. Sure. It's about the "American" Taliban, John Walker Lindh, but the lack of parental guidance certainly sounds familiar.
Yes, it is, and it's a pity that that didn't occur to her sooner. If she and Lindh had been less concerned with flaunting their open-mindedness and more concerned with developing their son's moral judgment, he wouldn't be where he is today. Walker is responsible for his own behavior and he will pay the price the law requires. But his road to treason and jihad didn't begin in Afghanistan. It began in Marin County, with parents who never said "No."It is this lack of guidance on the part of liberal parents who are unable or afraid to teach standards of conduct to their children that explains why some Western children are drawn to Islam, and, more generally, why France is in so much trouble today.
The Idea of France, not the hodgepodge of welfare benefits, Marxist obscurantism and world-weariness that is palmed off as sophistication, is what has to present itself as an alternative to the Green Banner of Islam. Otherwise it will be a contest between something and nothing.More broadly speaking than America, or Belgium, or France, the problem is that we are failing to impart Western values to our children. This is why a benighted, impotent culture is able to pluck our youths away from us.
Most people accept the religion they were brought up with, or something close to it. So what would cause a non-Muslim European woman to convert to militant Islam?The lack of effort is appealing, I think, for both moral and psychological reasons. Morally, this is a symptom of an unwillingness to expend the great effort needed to achieve heroism, or even rectitude. Psychologically, many children raised without guidance are unpracticed at best in thinking for themselves, and those without goals haven't the basis to prioritize.
This profile [link added] of the bomber, Muriel Degauque, indicates the kind of person to whom Islam appeals: it appeals to someone who is purposeless, drifting, and without values. For someone with no productive goals and no self-esteem--whether it is an indolent Saudi prince or a Dutch juvenile delinquent--Islam offers the promise of values, goals, and heroism--without the need for independent thinking or purposeful effort.
An important contribution to Muslims' comfort with the United States comes not only from the diversity of the neighborhoods they live in, but from the diversity of the Muslims themselves within those neighborhoods. While Middle Easterners still constitute a plurality of foreign-origin American Muslims--at 49 percent of the American Muslim population--South Asians represent nearly 23 percent of the total American Muslim population, North Africans nearly 15 percent, and Iranians 13 percent. For Patel, the high levels of internal diversity within Muslim communities coupled with high levels of integration and have allowed American Muslims to avoid the theological and ethnic rigidities that often characterize Muslim discourse in the Middle East and South Asia. "There are no Muslim 'apostates' here," he says. "That's a huge thing." [bold added]The word "diversity" explains why I said "close". America, though multicultralism has made significant inroads in recent years, is a truly pluralistic society. Fortunately, the fact that our immigrant Moslem population is not monolithic seems to serve somewhat as a counterweight for the effects of multiculturalism.
Abdul Rauf is as blunt. "If I read something like [Harvard Professor Samuel] Huntington, who posits a clash between the West and Islam, it's very easy for a certain number of individuals to start internalizing that identity." Indeed, at least some already are. Zogby found an astonishingly high proportion--a plurality of 38 percent--of American Muslims believe that Washington is waging a war on Islam, not terrorism. U.S. foreign policy can't be held hostage to threats of domestic terrorism, but policymakers ignore such dissatisfaction at their peril. Indeed, this resentment is especially dangerous given that Logan found that, despite current high levels of integration among American Muslims, segregationist trends are beginning to emerge. "[Muslim] groups are clustering more over time and becoming more separated from whites," he writes. Coupled with the marginal disillusionment observed by Skerry among second- and third-generation American Muslims, the current lack of sensitivity to Islamic concerns could prove disastrous for U.S. national security and American liberalism.I would attribute the "segregationist trends" at least partly to the greater influence of multiculturalist doctrines. I also wonder whether second- and third- generation Moslems are, like so many other immigrant populations, well-enough assimilated to be affected by the more nihilistic elements of American culture in addition to both the worst elements of their native religion and the danger to children uniquely posed by affluence and permissiveness: aimlessness without consequences. I think that we are indeed safer than Europe in the short term, but that our dominant culture and multiculturalism could combine to give us problems later on.
Our isolation seemed almost normal to us. We also knew that isolation was a feeling shared by prisoners everywhere, throughout the ages. Yet unlike in many prisons, we were not allowed to receive packages. (I didn't receive a single package during my entire stay.) The feeling of being isolated in the very place where I lived, to the point of not knowing who else was there or even where the camp was located, seemed particularly inhumane. It wasn't just a way of keeping me in the dark about where I was, it was a means of attacking my identity. After a decade in Yodok, my knowledge of the camp boils down to this: of Yodok's ten villages, four were for redeemables and six were for irredeemables, or political criminals. The latter group lived in a high security zone that was separated from ours by several hills, as well as by rows of barbed wire rolled out along the valley floor.His point about the degrading effects of total isolation, to the point of attacking his identity, is significant for it points to the importance of the integration of knowledge. Without any contact with or connection to the outside world, a prisoner would feel isolated from everything else that he knew about life -- and thus from reality itself. Elsewhere in the book, Kang describes the shocking sight of the dirty, half-starved camp prisoners upon his arrival, then his own gradual physical transformation, and then the shocking appearance of new clean, fat new arrivals to his camp. Just on that basis alone, the camp seemed to exist in a totally different dimension than the world he had known. In fact, the only continuity in this young boy's life was the presence of his family, albeit not his mother or his grandfather. (His mother remained a communist in good standing, while his "criminal" grandfather was sent to a much worse camp.)
The basis of the [state] system [of education and indoctrination] was composed of nurseries followed by compulsory education from kindergarten through tenth grade. Matriculation came when a baby, only a few weeks old, was sent to a nursery at the mother's workplace. The children would stay there from early morning until late evening. The mothers were permitted breaks from their work to feed them. After regular classes, the state kept school-aged youngsters busy with supervised activities. Youngsters might end up spending only an hour or two a day with their parents, if that much. [Yikes! Here it comes!] North Korea had been one of the first Asian countries to extend free public education as far as grade ten, and that in itself was an undeniably impressive accomplishment. As a Westerner, though, I could not help finding a sinister aspect to the system's near monopoly on children's upbringing and the direction in which it guided them.After indoctrination into the mystical worship of the Kims and the altruism and collectivism of communism via the state educational system, young men are sent to the army for ten years. During those years, outside contact -- even with family -- is forbidden.
...
I visited a Pyongyang weekly boarding nursery, whose tiny charges spend only Saturday nights and Sundays with their families. The director said enthusiastically that they "grow faster and learn more than if they were at home." Meanwhile, tots in her nursery competed in a relay race to see which of two teams could be first to complete sentences such as "We are happy" and "We have nothing to envy in the world." Two-year-olds in the showplace nursery were counting apples displayed in a visual aid: "These are four apples and one more makes five." In a room decorated with models of President Kim's birthplace, little ones shows the proper attitude to the Great Leader by reciting stories of his childhood and bowing before his boyhood portrait. By the time the children reached kindergarten age, they would have learned to say, when they received their snacks, "Thank you, Great Fatherly Leader." (166)
I saw just how seriously North Koreans took that struggle for uniformity and against individualism when I went to the Taedongmung Primary School in Pyongyang. Teachers in classrooms I visited were posing questions to classes studying, variously, birds, evaporation and the revolutionary deeds of President Kim. Upon hearing each question, the pupils, sitting perfectly erect and still at their desks, all raised their hands, barked in unison, "Me!" and then instantly fell quiet again. Whenever any pupil was called upon, he or she marched to the front of the room, stood at attention and shouted our the memorized answer in a high-pitched monotone like the one used by West Point plebes to address upperclass cadets. Among the pupils who were not called upon, no one stirred; no one whispered.That was likely a staged performance, but it nonetheless indicates the thoroughly collectivist ideal of North Korea's educational system. Perhaps more amazingly, the North Koreans are proud of such demonstrations, almost totally unaware that people from more-or-less free countries find them creepy, if not repugnant.
So we might as well admit that by foreswearing the use of torture, we will probably be at a disadvantage in obtaining key information and perhaps endanger American lives here at home. (And, ironically, those who now allege that we are too rough will no doubt decry "faulty intelligence" and "incompetence" should there be another terrorist attack on an American city.) Our restraint will not ensure any better treatment for our own captured soldiers. Nor will our allies or the United Nations appreciate American forbearance. The terrorists themselves will probably treat our magnanimity with disdain, as if we were weak rather than good.This is exactly the kind of argument I expected someone from the religious right to come up with. What threw me for a loop here is how brazenly someone would admit the problems inherent in passing such an amendment and yet still support it. I disagree with Victor Davis Hanson that human sacrifice, and specifically of Americans for the sake of the welfare of savages, is one of our nation's ideals. Nor does barbarity (in self-defense) reflect any more negatively upon our nation than taking the lives of our enemies for the same purpose. On what grounds does Hanson condemn the former, but condone the latter?
But all that is precisely the risk we must take in supporting the McCain amendment -- because it is a public reaffirmation of our country's ideals. The United States can win this global war without employing torture. That we will not resort to what comes so naturally to Islamic terrorists also defines the nobility of our cause, reminding us that we need not and will not become anything like our enemies. [All bold added.]
"We consider The Bible to be a very negative force in the history of the world," student Ryan Walker said. He is part of a student group calling itself the "Atheist Agenda."If these students really think the Bible is a "negative force in the history of the world", their actions indicate that they want to help it along. Consider the following. (1) They are targeting Christians whom they can expect will not be receptive to their arguments. (2) Oh, wait, but they offer no arguments. (3) They present these Christians, who regard the Bible as a good thing, with pornography, which they (the Christians) regard as bad.
Club members were on campus asking students to exchange religious materials for pornographic magazines like Black Label and Playboy.