March 6, 2010--Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice in Wonderland books have just been given a 3-D facelift by oddball director Tim Burton. In the
June 19, 2009 -- When I first saw the “Boycott UPS!” group on Facebook, I must admit that I was ready to believe the worst. After being
April 24, 2009 -- As Congress returns from spring recess and gets to work hammering out a health care reform bill, that dreaded statistic
September 5, 2009 -- As if we needed more proof, the ongoing dustup over health care reform in the United States has made it painfully
As the U.S. Senate argues about how best to take over the American health care industry, it is worth taking a look at how government health
April 13, 2010 -- Little more than one hundred years ago, women did not have the right to vote anywhere on Earth. Over the course of the twentieth century, this measure of women’s second class status faded away, and women’s suffrage gradually became all but universal. Today, every frontier is open to women—including the final frontier, as at this very moment, a record four women are circling our planet aboard the International Space Station. Given the advancement of women’s rights, it is hard to understand why any woman living in a free country would voluntarily cover her face in public. Yet some tiny minority of Muslim women living in the West do choose to wear the niqab, a full face veil. A Quebec law proposed late last month, Bill 94, would interfere with that choice. It would entrust top government administrators with the power to forbid public sector employees, as well as those using government services, from covering their faces if “reasons of security, communication or identification warrant it.” The controversial proposal has touched off a fierce debate within and without the Canadian province on what it means to be modern, tolerant, and free.
Ayn Rand and Mises knew each other, and they were on good personal terms, though never close friends. There is reason to think Rand read....
Marxism and Objectivism are similar in very few respects: —They are systems of thought. But Marxism is primarily a political and economic
Objectivism holds that the sole purpose of government is to secure our right to live free from force. This implies property rights and
Magic and illusion are actions that aim to produce effects that appear to be paranormal or impossible by the laws of logic and nature that
Marx often tried to blur the difference between economic and political power, to argue that those who command large fortunes have an
Objectivism has no position on most of the questions you ask, and in many cases the same general answer applies: We'll see when we get there
Early in her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand presents us with a scene aboard a train that is entering Philadelphia. “An office building...
In life, we take risks to achieve and maintain values. Objectivism holds that you should choose a course in life that will be conducive to
Cultures, like people, have a sense of life, which Ayn Rand characterized as an "emotional atmosphere." "This emotional atmosphere," she...
Objectivism's social ethic (which underlies its theory of rights) is based on the recognition of a complex fact about rational beings: that
December 20, 2002 -- "Drop the candy cane, step away from the punch bowl." Is that the order we’ll hear some day from armed food cops trying to prevent us from committing holiday health crimes against ourselves? Before you emit a "Ho ho ho" of derision, take a sip of your eggnog (360 calories per cup) and consider the ghost of Christmas future that might haunt us if we’re not careful. Here’s how the criminalization of Christmas goodies might come about. The first contributing element is the "war on fat." Some groups and agencies claim that 65 percent of Americans are overweight and 30 percent are obese. While many Americans do have serious weight problems, by the questionable standard used to generate these stats, athletes like Barry Bonds and Michael Jordan should go on diets. It’s also alleged that 300,000 die each year from weight-related problems. Never mind that the New England Journal of Medicine stated that "that figure is by no means well established. Not only is it derived from weak or incomplete data, but it is also called into question by the methodological difficulties."
December 19, 2005 -- If art holds a mirror to reality, the original 1933 King Kong, the 1976 remake, and the latest version by Peter Jackson show a culture that swung from romantic optimism to cynicism and now is perhaps returning to a healthier sense of life. The original King Kong very much reflected the values of its maker, Merian C. Cooper. When Cooper was six years old, his uncle gave him a book called Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa that inspired his imagination with tales of the jungle and strange animals, including gorillas. He wanted to be an explorer. He went to the U.S. Naval Academy but got booted out for suggesting that the recently-invented airplane could someday sink battleships. He became a bomber pilot in World War I and was shot down and imprisoned by the Germans. After the war, he flew for the Poles who fought Soviet invaders in 1920. He was shot down again and thrown into a communist slave camp but escaped. Years later, he made movies celebrating American values to counter communist propaganda.
February 7, 2002 -- Call it a tribute to the individuality of human taste. How rarely one person feels a strong attraction to another. The phenomenon is so infrequent that we recall, back to our school days, those that made our heart flutter—the moments in time that stand still, during which we experience cinema-like captivation. One’s life experiences result, understandably, in preferences for a certain type of person. Love is a theme universally trumpeted but, by necessity, individually understood. Wherever a discerning mind ponders romance, a unique image of the ideal will materialize. The discovery of that ideal is exhilaration like no other.
The media makes “urban sprawl” sound like some kind of terrible virus that will infect the forests and other green areas of the world and cause them to disappear forever. Urban sprawl refers to replacing forests and farms (which are pretty, and desirable to those who do not have to pay the taxes on them) by other things that are not so pretty, like factories, homes, highways, shopping malls, and people But factories provide jobs for people to improve their standard of living. Home ownership has defined the American dream. New and better highways make it easier for people to get around. Shopping malls are constructed to fill people's need to buy food, clothing, and other items. And just what is wrong with people moving to areas that were once farms and forests? People have been doing this in this country for over 300 years. Why should they stop now?
March 6, 2010--Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice in Wonderland books have just been given a 3-D facelift by oddball director Tim Burton. In the
June 19, 2009 -- When I first saw the “Boycott UPS!” group on Facebook, I must admit that I was ready to believe the worst. After being
April 24, 2009 -- As Congress returns from spring recess and gets to work hammering out a health care reform bill, that dreaded statistic
September 5, 2009 -- As if we needed more proof, the ongoing dustup over health care reform in the United States has made it painfully
As the U.S. Senate argues about how best to take over the American health care industry, it is worth taking a look at how government health
April 13, 2010 -- Little more than one hundred years ago, women did not have the right to vote anywhere on Earth. Over the course of the twentieth century, this measure of women’s second class status faded away, and women’s suffrage gradually became all but universal. Today, every frontier is open to women—including the final frontier, as at this very moment, a record four women are circling our planet aboard the International Space Station. Given the advancement of women’s rights, it is hard to understand why any woman living in a free country would voluntarily cover her face in public. Yet some tiny minority of Muslim women living in the West do choose to wear the niqab, a full face veil. A Quebec law proposed late last month, Bill 94, would interfere with that choice. It would entrust top government administrators with the power to forbid public sector employees, as well as those using government services, from covering their faces if “reasons of security, communication or identification warrant it.” The controversial proposal has touched off a fierce debate within and without the Canadian province on what it means to be modern, tolerant, and free.
Ayn Rand and Mises knew each other, and they were on good personal terms, though never close friends. There is reason to think Rand read....
Marxism and Objectivism are similar in very few respects: —They are systems of thought. But Marxism is primarily a political and economic
Objectivism holds that the sole purpose of government is to secure our right to live free from force. This implies property rights and
Magic and illusion are actions that aim to produce effects that appear to be paranormal or impossible by the laws of logic and nature that
Marx often tried to blur the difference between economic and political power, to argue that those who command large fortunes have an
Objectivism has no position on most of the questions you ask, and in many cases the same general answer applies: We'll see when we get there
Early in her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand presents us with a scene aboard a train that is entering Philadelphia. “An office building...
In life, we take risks to achieve and maintain values. Objectivism holds that you should choose a course in life that will be conducive to
Cultures, like people, have a sense of life, which Ayn Rand characterized as an "emotional atmosphere." "This emotional atmosphere," she...
Objectivism's social ethic (which underlies its theory of rights) is based on the recognition of a complex fact about rational beings: that
December 20, 2002 -- "Drop the candy cane, step away from the punch bowl." Is that the order we’ll hear some day from armed food cops trying to prevent us from committing holiday health crimes against ourselves? Before you emit a "Ho ho ho" of derision, take a sip of your eggnog (360 calories per cup) and consider the ghost of Christmas future that might haunt us if we’re not careful. Here’s how the criminalization of Christmas goodies might come about. The first contributing element is the "war on fat." Some groups and agencies claim that 65 percent of Americans are overweight and 30 percent are obese. While many Americans do have serious weight problems, by the questionable standard used to generate these stats, athletes like Barry Bonds and Michael Jordan should go on diets. It’s also alleged that 300,000 die each year from weight-related problems. Never mind that the New England Journal of Medicine stated that "that figure is by no means well established. Not only is it derived from weak or incomplete data, but it is also called into question by the methodological difficulties."
December 19, 2005 -- If art holds a mirror to reality, the original 1933 King Kong, the 1976 remake, and the latest version by Peter Jackson show a culture that swung from romantic optimism to cynicism and now is perhaps returning to a healthier sense of life. The original King Kong very much reflected the values of its maker, Merian C. Cooper. When Cooper was six years old, his uncle gave him a book called Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa that inspired his imagination with tales of the jungle and strange animals, including gorillas. He wanted to be an explorer. He went to the U.S. Naval Academy but got booted out for suggesting that the recently-invented airplane could someday sink battleships. He became a bomber pilot in World War I and was shot down and imprisoned by the Germans. After the war, he flew for the Poles who fought Soviet invaders in 1920. He was shot down again and thrown into a communist slave camp but escaped. Years later, he made movies celebrating American values to counter communist propaganda.
February 7, 2002 -- Call it a tribute to the individuality of human taste. How rarely one person feels a strong attraction to another. The phenomenon is so infrequent that we recall, back to our school days, those that made our heart flutter—the moments in time that stand still, during which we experience cinema-like captivation. One’s life experiences result, understandably, in preferences for a certain type of person. Love is a theme universally trumpeted but, by necessity, individually understood. Wherever a discerning mind ponders romance, a unique image of the ideal will materialize. The discovery of that ideal is exhilaration like no other.
The media makes “urban sprawl” sound like some kind of terrible virus that will infect the forests and other green areas of the world and cause them to disappear forever. Urban sprawl refers to replacing forests and farms (which are pretty, and desirable to those who do not have to pay the taxes on them) by other things that are not so pretty, like factories, homes, highways, shopping malls, and people But factories provide jobs for people to improve their standard of living. Home ownership has defined the American dream. New and better highways make it easier for people to get around. Shopping malls are constructed to fill people's need to buy food, clothing, and other items. And just what is wrong with people moving to areas that were once farms and forests? People have been doing this in this country for over 300 years. Why should they stop now?