Ayn Rand Speaks Against the Religious Right in Favor of Conservatism.

[Driven1]

ok...after a little research, it seems that it may only be a strong hollywood rumor that JLC was a hermy...

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/jamieleecurtis/a/jamieleecurtis.htm

[RiversideGator]

River.

Thank you I do not need to be lectured on the history of Conservativism, frankly.  You certainly are entitled to your favorite vintage. 

Frankly, I think you do.  While there are certainly different factions and nuances within the conservative movement, none of them attempt to advance the ideology which you espouse.  And, while maybe there is some odd conservative splinter group out there which is supporting Barack Obama, I have never heard of it.  If nominated, he would be one of the most liberal Democrat nominees ever (if not the most).

Surely there are a number of people who don't think that Kirk's anti semitic comments about the Capitol of America not being Jerusalem reflect all of Conservativism.

Kirk was a devout Christian who was first concerned with the interests of the US.  In this, he was more of a paleo-con isolationist.

In fact your claim is slightly lunatic in its provenance, and mostly made in order to be ornery.  There have been many great thinkers and many contributors to the Movement. 

Lunatic?  I am not the one claiming that Buckley would be supporting Obama.   

We at least share, I hope, a mutual admiration for Buckley.

Indeed we do.  Now, if you would just read some of his magazine, National Review, and take its contents to heart, you could cleanse your mind.   

[RiversideGator]

And Im not really sure about River's ad hominem attacks on a woman he never met.  I guess thats why Midway has been calling him out so frequently.

Are you saying now that she was a nice woman?  Because from what I have read, she was rather disagreeable personally.

I suspect he hasnt read her work either.

I havent read the complete works of Al Franken either but I have read enough of it and about it to know that I do not agree with him (or Rand). 

I guess thats why Midway has been calling him out so frequently.

Despite the attempt to double team me, you and midway have scored nary a point on me.   

[RiversideGator]

I wonder if Stephen will associate himself with this article from the Ayn Rand Institute?  For some reason, I doubt it.  Anyway, here it is:

Investigate Big Congress, Not Big Oil by Alex Epstein

Posted by ARI Media at 11:38 AM

With gasoline prices exceeding $4 a gallon in some states, politicians are responding as usual: Blame Big Oil First. Several prominent senators have once again summoned industry leaders to Capitol Hill, subjecting them to yet another barrage of rhetorical questions, interruptions, accusations, and sermons. The lawmakers' goal, claims Sen. Patrick Leahy, is to identify "causes of the rising price of oil on which Congress can act." But the foregone conclusion is that "price gouging," "collusion," and "market manipulation" by Big Oil, or speculation by financiers, is responsible.

The simple fact that such Congressional investigations are designed to obscure is that the prices of oil and gasoline are determined by supply and demandâ€"which neither private oil companies nor speculators have any power to dictate in their favor. If they had such market mastery, then why didn't they use it in the 1990s, when gasoline was selling at a barely profitable $1 a gallon? To be sure, speculators can bid up pricesâ€"but they only do so when they believe that oil will become even more expensive in the future, and only make money when they are right.

The question Congress should really be asking, then, is: What nonmarket factors are distorting supply and demand? If they sought an honest answer, they would discover that much of the blame lies with Congress itself.

No one disputes that environmentalist laws passed by Congress have cut off some of our most promising and plentiful sources of oil. In the name of safeguarding a tiny portion of caribou habitat in the Alaskan wilderness, drilling is prohibited in the Alaska National Wildlife Refugeâ€"a potential source of 1 million barrels a day, 5 percent of America's daily oil consumption. Also off-limits is 85 percent of America's coastline, which Shell estimates contains some 100 billion recoverable barrelsâ€"13 times America's annual oil consumptionâ€"and the vast majority of oil shale in Colorado, which Shell estimates at 1.5 trillion barrels.

Congress should publicize these facts, prepare an inventory of how many oil-rich areas they have blocked off, and bring in economists to estimate how much all of this raises gas prices.

And how about the effects of Congress's open hostility toward the future of oil? Our politicians damn oil as an "addiction" to be eliminated, and seek to cutâ€"by up to 90 percentâ€"the use of oil and other vital fossil fuels that make our standard of living possible. Congress should ask oil executives how this possible forced cut in demand affects their industry. It should ask whether they feel safe to make the billion dollar investments and decades-long plans that oil production requires when Barack Obama, a leading presidential candidate, can uncontroversially proclaim that "the country that faced down the tyranny of fascism and communism is now called to challenge the tyranny of oil." Is it a coincidence that the much-maligned speculators think oil will become even scarcer in the future, and are acting accordingly?

In addition to investigating its own impact on gasoline prices, Congress should investigate how its economic policy partner, the Federal Reserve, has raised our gas prices by lowering the value of the dollars we buy gasoline with. The Fed, along with the Treasury Department, has for years had an inflationary policy that has caused the value of the dollar to plummet relative to other currencies. Were it not for this devaluation of the dollar, oil prices would likely be 40 percent lowerâ€"as they are for those on the Euro. Why not call a free-market economist to the stand and ask how much more expensive Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Henry Paulson have made our gasoline?

Americans deserve to know the storyâ€"in all its gory detailâ€"of what their government has done and is doing to cause high prices at the pump, and to make gasolineâ€"indeed, all energyâ€"more scarce and more expensive in the future. A congressional investigation of Congress would be a great public service.

Alex Epstein is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, focusing on business issues. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Randâ€"author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Copyright © 2008 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

http://theobjectivestandard.com/blog/2008/05/investigate-big-congress-not-big-oil-by.asp

[RiversideGator]

Interesting screed.  Any proof that she would think these things?

BTW, why is it her intellectual heirs seem to not agree with your position?

[RiversideGator]

Your links do not support your statements.  The fact is the oil companies want to drill but are not being allowed to do so by government.  This is a classic Randian dilemma and the solution to this would be for government to get out of the way and allow the productive members of society to drill oil:

The main conflicts of the book surround the decision of the "individuals of the mind" to go on strike, refusing to contribute their inventions, art, business leadership, scientific research, or new ideas of any kind to the rest of the world. Society, they believe, hampers them by interfering with their work and underpays them by confiscating the profits and dignity they have rightfully earned. The peaceful cohesiveness of the world disintegrates, lacking those individuals whose productive work comes from mental effort. The strikers believe that they are crucial to a society that exploits them, denying them freedom or failing to acknowledge their right to self-interest, and the gradual collapse of civilization is triggered by their strike.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged

[RiversideGator]

exactly.  But it would have to start over from scratch for that to happen, if only because you cannot seperate the non subsidized oil men from the subsidized.

And incidentally, my links DO support my claims, as they are in reference to the characters and plotline of Atlas Shrugged.

This subsidy argument is really garbage when you consider that the oil companies pay more in taxes than the bottom 75% of American taxpayers.  You can stop repeating it now because it doesnt hold water.   

[RiversideGator]

We wouldnt need Saudi oil if we exploited our own resources.

[RiversideGator]

Stephen, I thought we had put the global warming hysteria to bed.  Do we need another lesson on this subject?   

[RiversideGator]

Let me know when the average temperatures start to rise again.   

[RiversideGator]

One more time:

The hottest year on record (which record only goes back decades BTW) was 1998.  No year has been hotter than that since:

The record year for world temperatures was 1998, ahead of 2005, according to WMO data.

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL1171501720080112?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0

Also, the highly variable weather patterns of the past, which occurred without the input of man, tend to indicate that the warming that has occurred is natural:

This figure shows the Antarctic temperature changes during the last several glacial/interglacial cycles of the present ice age and a comparison to changes in global ice volume. The present day is on the left.

The first two curves shows local changes in temperature at two sites in Antarctica as derived from deuterium isotopic measurements (δD) on ice cores (EPICA Community Members 2004, Petit et al. 1999). The final plot shows a reconstruction of global ice volume based on δ18O measurements on benthic foraminifera from a composite of globally distributed sediment cores and is scaled to match the scale of fluctuations in Antarctic temperature (Lisiecki and Raymo 2005). Note that changes in global ice volume and changes in Antarctic temperature are highly correlated, so one is a good estimate of the other, but differences in the sediment record do no necessarily reflect differences in paleotemperature. Horizontal lines indicate modern temperatures and ice volume. Differences in the alignment of various features reflect dating uncertainty and do not indicate different timing at different sites.

The Antarctic temperature records indicate that the present interglacial is relatively cool compared to previous interglacials, at least at these sites. The Liesecki & Raymo (2005) sediment reconstruction does not indicate signifcant differences between modern ice volume and previous interglacials, though some other studies do report slightly lower ice volumes / higher sea levels during the 120 ka and 400 ka interglacials (Karner et al. 2001, Hearty and Kaufman 2000).

It should be noted that temperature changes at the typical equatorial site are believed to have been significantly less than the changes observed at high latitude.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Ice_Age_Temperature.png

[RiversideGator]

You are reading the first chart and the data incorrectly.  And, I didnt say that the temps post-2000 were below the 1880 to 2008 temperature average (which are the only years for which we have actual thermometer readings for temperatures).  I said that the warming has apparently stopped.  Would you like to see the dramatic drop in temps so far for 2008? 

BTW, is the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize incorrect in this statement?

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N. Panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, said he would look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century.

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL1171501720080112?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0

[RiversideGator]

And the output of solar energy alone is not the only non-human factor which could be causing the warming.  Read the following:

Milankovitch cycles are the collective effect of changes in the Earth's movements upon its climate, named after Serbian civil engineer and mathematician Milutin Milanković. The eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth's orbit vary in several patterns, resulting in 100,000-year ice age cycles of the Quaternary glaciation over the last few million years. The Earth's axis completes one full cycle of precession approximately every 26,000 years. At the same time, the elliptical orbit rotates, more slowly, leading to a 21,000-year cycle between the seasons and the orbit. In addition, the angle between Earth's rotational axis and the normal to the plane of its orbit moves from 21.5 degrees to 24.5 degrees and back again on a 41,000-year cycle. Currently, this angle is 23.44 degrees and is decreasing.

The Milankovitch theory[1] of climate change is not perfectly worked out; in particular, the largest observed response is at the 100,000-year timescale, but the forcing is apparently small at this scale, in regard to the ice ages. Various feedbacks (from carbon dioxide, or from ice sheet dynamics) are invoked to explain this discrepancy.

Milankovitch-like theories were advanced by Joseph Adhemar, James Croll and others, but verification was difficult due to the absence of reliably dated evidence and doubts as to exactly which periods were important. Not until the advent of deep-ocean cores and a seminal paper by Hays, Imbrie and Shackleton, "Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages", in Science, 1976,[2] did the theory attain its present state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

And here is a chart:

This figure shows the variations in Earth's orbit, the resulting changes in solar energy flux at high latitude, and the observed glacial cycles.

According to Milankovitch Theory, the precession of the equinoxes, variations in the tilt of the Earth's axis (obliquity) and changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit are responsible for causing the observed 100 kyr cycle in ice ages by varying the amount of sunlight received by the Earth at different times and locations, particularly high northern latitude summer. These changes in the Earth's orbit are the predictable consequence of interactions between the Earth, its moon, and the other planets.

The orbital data shown are from Quinn et al. (1991). Principal frequencies for each of the three kinds of variations are labeled. The solar forcing curve (aka "insolation") is derived from July 1st sunlight at 65 °N latitude according to Jonathan Levine's insolation calculator [1]. The glacial data is from Lisiecki and Raymo (2005) and gray bars indicate interglacial periods, defined here as deviations in the 5 kyr average of at least 0.8 standard deviations above the mean.

[RiversideGator]

Occam's razor, River.

Occam's razor.

I agree.  The most obvious cause of warming would be the sun.  Thanks for bolstering my argument.   

[BridgeTroll]

It literally sickens my stomach to realize how far away the republicans and the neofascists have come from true conservatism.

This is from Ayn Rand's writings.

http://www.youtube.com/v/VHrHMLeWCrA

The video and commentary do not match.  Looks like someone tried unsuccessfully to be clever...