There is an excellent video available of Craig Biddle's recent talk, "McBama vs. America," available on the front page at:

http://www.aynrand.org

What action should the West take to stop Russia's occupation in Georgia?

Here's a recent interview with Georgian President Saakashvili:

This is Norah Jones singing a song written by Gene Scheer called American Anthem. The first is a shortened version of the song with more powerful video. I thought some here might appreciate it.

I watched this movie for the third time last night. The conflicts and resolutions are worked out brilliantly by director Frank Capra. Mary Hatch (Donna Reed) is a total babe. Last Christmas I watched it and was a little conflicted about it all. This time I loved every minute of the film and after thinking about it for half an hour I began to feel that I'd been tricked.

There seems to be something wonderful about the movie but I'm conflicted as hell about it. On the one hand the theme is "Be satisfied and even happy with what you have," and that's a good thing. On the other hand that same theme, "Be satisfied with what you have," pisses me off because it suggests that one ought to resign himself to a lesser existence.

This excerpt is from Ayn Rand's working notes on Atlas Shrugged. The rest can be found in Leonard Peikoff's intro the 35th anniversary edition.

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...Dagny is committing an important (but excusable and understandable) error in thinking, the kind of error individualists and creators often make. It is an error proceeding from the best in their nature and from a proper principle, but this principle is misapplied...

The error is this: it is proper for a creator to be optimistic, in the deepest, most basic sense, since the creator believes in a benevolent universe and functions on that premise. But it is an error to extend that optimism to other specific men. First, it's not necessary, the creator's life and the nature of the universe do not require it, his life does not depend on others. Second, man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only to him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be. The decision will affect only him; it is not (and cannot and should not be) the primary concern of any other human being.

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Objectivism places us at an incredible advantage over the general population because we have better life-serving tools (Sanction of the Victim, A is A, Either-Or, Capitalism is good, Romantic Art gives us goose-bumps) than they do. There is a significant challenge in dealing with the population-at-large because we generally have to gear down to deal with them at all. In business I haven't found this to be a problem probably because we are there primarily to conduct business and that's it. But with family, friends, and new people I have to bite my toungue or, when I don't, their body language displays their discomfort and I become the bad guy for ruining Thanksgiving and making an in-law cry. So the gearing down becomes a habit because day after day we check our toungues at the door because we simply can't go around pointing out every atrocity we encounter.

Name that novel:

Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"

The high-minded and magnificent Lindsay Perigo gave me permission to post this even though it's in competition with his own Free Radical. Thanks Linz!

From their Statement of Purpose:

The Objective Standard is a quarterly journal of culture and politics based on the idea that for every human concern—from personal matters to foreign policy, from the sciences to the arts, from education to legislation—there are demonstrably objective standards by reference to which we can assess what is true or false, good or bad, right or wrong. The purpose of the journal is to analyze and evaluate ideas, trends, events, and policies accordingly.