My new favorite building

A little over a year ago I was browsing the magazine racks at Borders in Norman when I spotted Architectural Record with the Tokyo Prada on the cover. Intrigued, I looked inside and found the photos accompanying the article to be dazzling. I immediately purchased the magazine and have had it on display in my home ever since.

A few days ago I was browsing the magazine racks of the OKC Borders on NW Expressway and looked through the current issue of ID. Inside was a story about a new office complex in Holland that used a refractive film (from 3M, I believe) for an outer layer, making its exterior an ever-changing rainbow (the effect is subtler than it sounds). The project was designed by UN Studio. To see pics on their site, go to http://www.unstudio.com/html/proj_all.htm and look under Offices. Click on Offices La Defense Almere.

Entrepreneur of the Year

And, by the way, congratulations to Burt for being named "Entrepreneur of the Year" by Inc. Magazine!

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050101/eoty-rutan.html

SPACE SHIP ONE, GOVERNMENT: ZERO!!!!!

Burt Rutan and individualism

Virgin soars towards new frontier

I want to point out a couple of things in this story. Rutan is quoted as saying:

"This experience is going to have very few restrictions on what you can do because these payloads are doing it for fun and every person has a different idea of what fun is."

What he means by "these payloads" is: paying passengers! I think it is absolutely stunning that a person like Burt Rutan is willing to publicly declare that "every person has a different idea of what fun is" in a way that makes it clear that he believes it is something that can be the foundation of a successful business, and that a business based on that idea is worth pursuing! Imagine going to the all the trouble to build, not just a vehicle that can take paying passengers to space, but everything required to put that vehicle in space, because you think that people will pay for it because they think it will be fun! Imagine having the sheer respect for them as individuals to want to provide each individual passenger the opportunity to get just exactly whatever he wants out of the experience, so that the meaning of each experience is specific to the individual!

WOW!!!!

The Aviator

I have just seen The Aviator and I am frankly flabbergasted that a filmaker such as Martin Scorsese would take the side of a private businessman as much as he does in this movie. Howard Hughes is portrayed as being the target of collusion between his competitor and the government. Juan Trippe is portrayed as a person who would stop at nothing to maintain Pan Am's monopoly on international flights, including getting into bed with the government. And the government is potrayed as being on the wrong side for going along with Trippe. It is even made clear that Pan Am's monopoly is only made possible by government intervention - in the form of a bill which would grant exclusive rights to international flights to Pan Am, forbidding entry to TWA, which has just acquired a fleet of planes capable of high-altitude, long range flight.

True, by the end of the film, Hughes is portrayed as being overtaken by madness, but not before he is able to publicly confront a senator with his own motivations for investigating Hughes. I personally don't think this detracts from the significance of the portrayal of a private businessman as the hero and the government - and those who seek unfair advantages from it - as the villains in a major movie such as this. It will be interesting to see what impact it has on our culture.

Note to myself

The key to religion's power lies, of course, in morality. An important part (though not all) of the reason for this is emotion. While it is true that Reason makes it possible for Human Beings to live, it is emotions which make it possible for Human Beings to experience the Joy of living. This is also the key to the power of faith, and it will only be when the relationship between Reason and emotion is made clear - understandable - intelligible to the average person that the power of faith will be broken forever.

Speak for yourselves!

Well, if this is what the Democratic Party has come to, it makes me want to throw up. This morning I posted a snip from TIA Daily about the governor of Illinois' desire to ban violent video games on DemoOkie.com. Rather than seeing the greater danger of granting the government a role in censoring the moral influences on the youth who play these video games, the two who posted replies so far actually stood up for the damn governor!

Of course, these are the same people who have been wailing about Sinclair Broadcasting and demanding that the government should "do something".

These people manifestly do NOT want freedom of speech. It makes me wonder who is scarier: the Religious Right, who want to abolish the separation of church and state so the government can dictate our moral values for us, because the Bible says so - or the liberal left, who want to establish actual socialism in this country and jump at every chance to expand government power until the government is actually dictating our moral values for us, because it's for our own good and the government knows what's good for us better than we do, anyway.

I am appalled that, rather than standing up for freedom, these two are obviously willing to give theirs away. Unfortunately, such people usually want to force everyone else to give up their freedom along with them. To such people I can only say: speak for yourselves!

Antony Flew

I posted this on the Oklahoma Atheists board on December 12th. I've made a couple of changes for posting it here.

A post on the HBList mentions Antony Flew: rather dismissively, due to Flew's being a British modernist philospher - hardly someone who could be expected to really stand up for atheism - or anything else, for that matter. Plus, it seems he wrote an article on Ayn Rand's ethics which supposedly mangled her ideas.

But the post also included commentary on the current states of physics and biology, which I thought some visitors to this board might find interesting. Unfortunately, I'm not at liberty to cut and paste the entire original post here, due to the rules of the list, so I'll have to try my best to summarize it.

Basically, after mentioning Flew, the author describes what he sees as current attempts to import creationism into biology, mainly by watering down the mysticism and attempting to misdirect by misapplying theories outside their proper context. Visitors to this board are familiar with the attempt to establish "intelligent design" as a valid theory in biology, both on the political level and on the academic level.

He then asks whether a similar process occured in the field of physics and basically the answer is yes, only in physics it was Buddhism that was the flavor of mysticism being smuggled in. Unfortunately the attempt seems to have been a success.

None of this would be possible, of course, without the self-destruction of modernist philosphy, which has left a vacuum which the religionists of every flavor are eager to exploit. An earlier posting on this list lays out a disturbing progression: a philosophy of skeptism will always lead to a resurgence of irrationalism, paving the way for mysticism, culminating in nihilism and the destruction made possible by an ethics of sacrifice. If it sounds like I'm saying that it was ultimately philosophers such as David Hume who made it possible for things like the Taliban, that's what I'm saying. This is how the Dark Ages came about: observe the progression from the neo-Platonists to Augustine and Tertullian.

The only thing that can keep this from happening is to uphold Reason. The only philosphers that I see doing that today are the Objectivists.

Equality Through Education

I posted a slightly different version of this on the OKObjectivists list on Dec 5th -

I got another email today from a Gay activist who's depressed by the elections and wants to do something about it. Education is the answer, they say. Well, okay, but education about what? This particular activist says we need more positive portrayals of Gay people. Well, I think that's a start but is it really the key?

What is required to truly secure the right to be Gay? I think this would require an understanding of what it would take implement such a thing in the context of an individual human being's right to his own life. Clearly that has to come first, for what use is the right to be Gay if one does not have a right to one's own life?

And there is the problem. In "Man's Rights" Ayn Rand wrote, "The concept of individual rights is so new that most men have not grasped it fully to this day." Under the influence of altruism, most people don't know that property rights are the means by which individual rights are implemented. (I think there are some altruists who do know this and are actively working to prevent others from knowing it.)

As Rand states, "The concept of a "right" pertains only to action - specifically, to freedom of action." This is because sustaining one's life requires action. Since life requires effort, living is acting. The right to property is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of something. I think it's important to note here that keeping something is not a passive state, it requires work - effort - action. This is how the right to property is at the base of all other rights. The right to act and to choose your actions is the right to be yourself.

Obviously, this is incompatible with altruism, which demands that you deny yourself and make others the object of your actions. This is the crossroads at which America now stands: America is a country built by individualism which pays lip service to altruism. Both the religious right and the liberal left want to push it all the way into altruism and the dictatorship to which it leads.

I have learned from my own first-hand experience that Ayn Rand was correct when she said that politics is an effect, not a cause. This is what Americans need to be educated about. Teach them the truth about altruism and individualism, and the politics will take care of itself.