There's another Treaty Debate on tonight at Te Papa.

Sparrow comments on the overweening certitude of Ackman. Most of you should know that Niederhoffer named one his daughters Rand and can be read at DailySoeculations.com

Beethoven's sublime Piano Concerto No. 5 (the Emperor) -- a stellar live performance by Krystian Zimerman with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who based the song Somewhere in his West Side Story on the exquisite second movement. The final moments here are beyond electrifying:

Here is a blog commentary on Martin Luther King from The Objective Standard.

We have just had Leonard Peikoff’s essay “Abortion Rights Are Pro-Life” published at HuffingtonPost.com.

Once again I get this from a Conservative site not an Objectivist one.

Morgan has said that cats kill native birds.

On the evidence provided, this appears to a fact.

In response he wants cats controlled, or even better, eradicated.

Obama’s Inauguration: Celebrating Enslavement

By Edward Hudgins

January 21, 2012 – President Barack Obama’s inauguration for his second term was held on Martin Luther King’s birthday with Obama’s hand on King’s and President Lincoln’s Bibles. The event was tinged with grim irony.

1) Should a person with convictions for violence be allowed to purchase a gun?
2) If the convictions were over ten years old, would your view change?

Harry Binswanger is a rare breed of man—he's both a philosopher and an Objectivist!

I thought this is another worthy contribution, also summed up rather magnificently by Dr George Reisman.

I do not agree with David's religion of which brings contradiction upon his virtue of sacrifice to Obama.

Vice crime infantilizes us, and renders us fundamentally incapable of intellectual and moral decisions. We become stupid and evil -- and thus far less healthy and happy.

How great are his signs,
    how mighty his wonders!

His dominion is an eternal dominion;

This is an excellent blog post. I know Beck has been banned here and he unfortunately has embraced anarchism and can be an asshat at times but this is good:

"In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argued that experience was not the only source of knowledge, that in addition our minds have certain built-in a priori concepts. One of his major examples was our intuition that space is described by Euclidean geometry. Of course, we now know that other geometries exist and that Einstein used non-Euclidean geometry to describe space in his general theory of relativity. So much for what Kant called the synthetic a priori."

Brits Escalate Global War on Producers
By Edward Hudgins

January 8, 2013 — British Prime Minister David Cameron is urging the leaders of the major industrialized countries to engage in a concerted global war to penalize producers who try to avoid having their earnings stolen by governments.

I watched the Iron Lady on TV last night and it was a travesty of a film, a confused mess.

http://raritanquarterly.rutger...

Harry Binswanger, a board member at The Ayn Rand Institute, has just had a new op-ed published at Forbes.com: “With Gun Control, Cost Benefit Analysis Is Amoral.”

This is a brief history of the philosophy and culture of liberalism.

Here are thirteen books, six old and seven new, that I'm planning on reading for 2013.

Old(er)

1. Herman Melville. Moby Dick. Like everyone else, I've always wanted to read it.

I've just finished my second read of Yaron Brook's and Don Watkins' Free Market Revolution—How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government.

It's magnificent.

Stanley Fish, the Miltonist, is normally characterized as a postmodern thinker. But in his recent book, Versions of Antihumanism, he sounds suspiously unlike a postmodernist.

A voice of reason in the US senate. As Rand Paul addresses the appropriation of overseas funding, one finds that such discernment to be seriously lacking within the NZ House of Representatives.

"As a child, I saw a glimpse of the pre-World War 1 world, the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history ... The existential atmosphere (which was then being destroyed by Europe's philosophical trends and political systems) still held a benevolence that would be incredible to the men of today, i.e., a smiling, confident good will of man to man and man to life." (Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto).