Daily Archives: November 5, 2021

Visiting fellow Daniel Schwartz, PhD, will offer a course on the seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Francis Bacon.

One of the few philosophers Ayn Rand quoted approvingly was Francis Bacon, a seventeenth-century English philosopher known for developing methods of scientific induction. In a discussion of mans creative powers in The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made, Rand describes Bacons aphorism (Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed) as the best and briefest identification of mans power in regard to nature.

As part of ARIs expanded educational offerings in the 2021-2022 academic year, the Ayn Rand University is offering several classes in the history of philosophy, the first of which is on the philosophy of Francis Bacon. Guiding students through this material is Dan Schwartz, PhD, a visiting fellow at ARI. Schwartz completed his dissertation on Bacons philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, in 2014 and has published papers on Bacons thought. He also lectured on Bacon at the 2013 Objectivist Summer Conference.

The course will cover Bacons epistemology and philosophy of science through a close and critical reading of his most important work, the New Organon. Says Schwartz: Francis Bacon was a source of intellectual and spiritual inspiration for many of the scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he can still serve as a source of inspiration for us today. Of special interest to ARU students is Bacons this-worldly approach to questions of scientific method, an approach which is evinced by the aphorism Rand quoted. Anyone interested in how to think about science, says Schwartz, can learn a great deal by studying Bacon.

Francis Bacon is being offered to second-year Objectivist Academic Center students and advanced students as part of the relaunched Objectivist Graduate Center of the Ayn Rand University. The course remains open to auditors. To register as an auditor, visit the ARU course catalog.

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New from Ayn Rand University: Bacon's Philosophy of Science - New Ideal

Popularity does not mean the idea is politically feasible, as Mr. Manchins opposition demonstrated. And Mr. Wydens plan also prompted discussion of a constitutional challenge.

This would be the first real attempt to tax unrealized gains, which would be a significant shift in how we view income, said Joe Bishop-Henchman, vice president of tax policy and litigation at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Theres a big suspicion of direct taxes, of giving the central government this power.

Recently, as officials in Hong Kong signaled new regulations for cryptocurrency exchanges, Mr. Bankman-Fried set up shop in the Bahamas, where there is a legal framework that he says meets his businesss needs. Still, he is active in the United States. FTX has a U.S. exchange and has sponsorship deals with American sports leagues and players to promote its brand. Its founder donated about $5 million to a group supporting Joe Bidens presidential campaign last year.

In comments denouncing the proposed billionaire tax, Mr. Manchin described the ultrawealthy as people who create a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits.

That was an implicit endorsement of the idea, often repeated in discussions around high-net worth giving, that regular people pay taxes while rich people pursue philanthropy, giving not to the Treasury but to their preferred causes. My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness, Mr. Musk said in a subsequent tweet in response to the tax proposal.

That idea that its my money and I should decide what to do with it is very dominant, and it goes along with the culture of individualism that allows people to feel that theyve done this on their own and havent benefited from social goods like roads and education and laws, Professor Sherman said.

Ms. Disney, who is an active member of the Patriotic Millionaires, said she sees that thinking as a primary obstacle to raising taxes on the richest Americans. Billionaires may be brilliant and I dont doubt Elon Musks I.Q. but they dont do anything on their own, she said. She also questioned the prevailing wisdom among the countrys wealthiest that they know best and the government shouldnt be trusted with their money.

The last time I was in the Bay Area, I went walking in the marina and saw seven consecutive boats named after characters from Ayn Rand, Ms. Disney said. They need to come to their senses.

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Who Are Americas Billionaires, Anyway? - The New York Times

We should be freaking out more about Russell Westbrook. By we I mean you. I am already freaking out about Russell Westbrook quite a bit. For some of us, its a way of life. Freaking out about Russell Westbrook is to me what horse whispering is to a horse whisperer. Its the thread that connects me to the universal essence. Robert Redford will (possibly) never play me in a movie, but if he does, he will be wearing a cowboy hat and staring at the severe beauty of the pale Montana sky while he murmurs, 26 points 11 assists 12 rebounds on 37 percent shooting my God, creation is marvelous.

The rest of you, though? I dont know. I feel like we could bump the national freakout up a notch. Im not saying theres no freaking out happening. Its just been mild. Its as ifto keep our metaphors corralled within the larger Horse Whisperer universeyoure all concentrating on the whispering part and Im going, What if we went outside on the ranch and yelled at the top of our lungs? Russell Westbrook, arguably the most divisive star in modern NBA history, is playing in a situation perfectly calibrated to bring all his maddening, beautiful, self-defeating, and transcendent qualities to a crisis point. Hes embarking on a kind of third-act trial by fire of radical basketball iconoclasm, one that will either validate his whole career or convince his doubters they were always right. Exciting and confusing deeds are being accomplished by and near him. Please join me now in the sage grass, where we will shriek at some chickens.

Consider: Like all former MVPs who hit 30 without winning a championship, Russ has spent his later career dogged by the suspicion that hell never land the big one, that some inherent flaw in his game or his personality makes him unfit to contribute to a title team. In Russs case, these suspicions have accrued an added intensity due to the high probability that they are correct. His game is wildly inefficient; as capable as he is of moments of astounding brilliance, he also stands furiously ready to, say, fire off a 30-foot air ball with 19 seconds left in a game in which his team trails by one. There are so many ways an NBA player can make you clutch your head; he might be the career leader in all of them. Is he a genius? Undeniably; but its also easy to see him as perverse, willful, a star for whom every midrange bucket is a Pyrrhic victory, a player eternally on the wrong side of an It he simply does not get. For thy sake, Tobacco, I / Would do anything but die, Charles Lamb wrote in 1805. I sometimes meditate on the ironies of that sentence while I watch NBA franchises take deep puffs of Russ in the fourth quarter.

And yet! This player, this wacko-jacko firebrand of system-killing mood-ball, this living embodiment of the question what if Ayn Rand went to Studio 54 and the whole dance floor got drafted by the SuperSonics?this dude, who once recorded 42 triple-doubles in a single season, who has the worst 3-point shooting percentage in the history of human beings with more than 2,500 NBA-level attempts, this dude has been hand-selected by LeBron James as an essential cog in the machine hes building to return the title to Los Angeles.

Im sorry, what?

Picture me in a Robert Redford shearling-lined trucker jacket, gazing stoically upon the majesty of the West as my face starts doing Beetlejuice-style tentacle-squiggles.

I mean, its perfect. Terrifying but perfect. Rarely does life set you up with such a clear set of stakes. Option A: Russ thrives under the wing of the first leader hes ever played with whos capable of compelling his full obedience (Kevin Durant and James Harden being at best problematic quasi-alphas, not fully licensed by the Michael Jordan Despotism Academy), buys in, plays smart, meshes with Anthony Davis and Carmelo Anthony, helps the Lakers win the championship, and proves he had it in him all along. Option B: Hotter heads prevail, Russ plays like hes on a completely different team, L.A. loses in the second round, and he confirms himself as an influence so toxic to ultimate victory that not even LeBron, the winner among winners, is immune to him.

Is there a middle ground between these two options? Yes, in the sense that a giant asteroid hurtling toward Earth could technically destroy half, rather than all, of the planet. No, in the sense that the asteroid either hits us or doesnt.

Why arent more people extremely excited about this story? There might be (he said icily) a bit of Westbrook fatigue in the NBA communitya player who demands so much attention, with so little perceived return, will eventually start to seem frustrating to your less quixotic sort of fan. But Id guess the main reason is LeBron himself. LeBron is such an outsize presence in the NBA that everyone who plays with him ends up being enclosed in the Matryoshka doll of his own narrative. Theres no room for another protagonist. The question is never what will Russell Westbrook do in L.A.?; its always has LeBron Jamesmedia mogul, star player and de facto GM of the Lakersbuilt a product that can deliver his sixth championship (we are all witnesses)? Whatever Russ does, LeBron is seen as the prime mover. Thats silly, but only in the way that all of this is silly. Sports narratives are generally silly. They work the way they work.

The soul-deep second-tier status that goes along with being LeBrons teammate has made it hard, in the past, for other offbeat megalomaniacs to play with him. Kyrie Irving, for instance, could not stand to dwell in the shadow; Kyrie wants the brightest possible spotlight, the biggest possible podium from which to explain to the world what he read on Wikipedia last night. In a weird way, though, I can see it working for Russ. Hes always played at a remove from mainstream NBA logic. So why not outsource the mainstream-NBA-logic stuff to LeBron and stop having to worry about it? It can be freeing, cant it, not to be the frontman? Let the singer write the chart hits; concentrate on your own mind-melting guitar solos.

Its too early to say whether its working, of course. I have my doubts, but I have doubts about my doubts. People say hes settling in. The Lakers are a work in progress, with a lot of new parts to assimilate, and LeBron has missed some games with an ankle injury. The team currently has a negative point differential with Russ on the court; hes shooting very, very badly from 322 percent!even by his standards. On the other hand, hes shooting well from 2-point range, and hes taking fewer 15-footers. LeBron is saying nice things about him, encouraging him to fit out rather than fit in, which is an extremely smart way to work the word fit into a non-fashion-related sentence about Russell Westbrook. L.A. is 5-3, 1.5 games out of first place in the West. Carmelo Anthony has looked great off the bench. Its a long season.

Theres already been time, however, for some surreal moments. Last week, Russ managed to get ejected from a game against his former team, the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Lakers, playing without LeBron, had choked away a 26-point first-half lead against their then-winless opponents. With 1.5 seconds left and the Thunder leading, OKCs Darius Bazley elected to throw down a breakaway dunk rather than dribbling out the clock. Russ, stung by this violation of the protocols of good sportsmanshipnot a code I had ever strongly associated with him, but the heart knows its own sense of honorwent after him, got his second technical, and was tossed. The whole thing felt bizarre. A few times in every NBA season theres a game that makes you think, Is this League Pass or am I dreaming? I remember 1,377 missed 3-pointers. Afterward, Russ described himself as old school, and the amazing thing is hes not even wrong; for all that I tend to view him as an avant-garde art project, there is a very specific sense in which pride, grit, and comprehensive indifference to advanced statistics do make him something of a throwback player. Dennis Rodman was old-school, too, in his way.

And so here we are: Weve been thinking about Russell Westbrook for nine minutes, and Ive already put The Horse Whisperer on my Apple TV watchlist and reversed my understanding of what several words mean. Basketball remains the best. The Lakers play the Thunder again tonight. Anything could happen. But among all the stories unfolding over this young season, dont sleep on the new Russ arc. It could be the defining moment for the most electrically non-defining player of his generation. I wont say Im ready for it, because how could you be ready? But I cant wait.

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Its Time to Talk About Russell Westbrook (Again) - The Ringer

My fathers Republican Party is now the modern-day Confederacy, and Republicans defense of Steve Bannon defying subpoenas this week pretty much proves it. If it keeps moving in the same direction, our American republic may soon be fully transformed into a racist, strongman oligarchy.

The racist and big-money poisons began to take over the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s after the Supreme Court ordered an end to school segregation with Brown v Board, and LBJ and the Democrats embraced the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Medicare Acts.

In aggregate, Johnsons Great Society offended both the nations billionaire oligarchs, who saw Medicare and other programs as socialism, and the White racists who were horrified that theyd now have to share schools, hospitals and polling places with African Americans and other minorities.

Those White racists, particularly in the South where the majority of Americas Black people lived, fled the Democratic Party and flocked instead to the GOP. Richard Nixon saw this as the key to his presidential victory in 1968, openly inviting racists in with his Southern Strategy.

Thus began the transformation of the party founded by Abraham Lincoln.

At the same time, the Libertarian and Objectivist movements found common cause with the anti-communist movement led by the John Birch Society that saw every effort to help working class or poor Americas as a step towards full-blown Soviet-style socialism. They all marched into the GOP.

The mob, as Ayn Rand used to call us American voters, couldnot be trusted any longer to determine who held power in America, these early leaders of the GOP determined, so they worked out ways to get around a multiracial and politically active populace.

The leading conservative light of the era, William F. Buckley, wrote for his National Review magazine an article titled Why The South Must Prevail:

The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote, Buckley wrote. In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.

His article was grounded in a discussion of the jury system, but he couldnt help veering off-course (or on-course):

The central question that emerges is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?

The sobering answer is Yes the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

Itis exactly the philosophy that today animates the new voting laws put into place over the past six months in Florida, Georgia, Texas and multiple other states. Racists and big money seized the GOP, and the GOP then drained 40 years of wealth from the Middle Class.

The merger of racism and big money reached its first peak in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, who openly ran on states rights and the argument that government was the cause, not the solution, to the nations problems. Just leave everything to the morbidly rich and their magical free market and America, Saint Ronnie promised us, would become a paradise. At least for White people.

But it didnt work out that way for White people or anybody else; instead, the top 1 percent of Americans succeeded in grabbing well over $10 trillion from the middle class over the next forty years and have now largely ringfenced their wealth with bought-off Republicans declaring theyll never, ever vote to raise taxes on the morbidly rich.

And the billionaires and racists who seized the GOP are now turning it into something not seen in a major American political party since the Civil War. Its become an anti-American insurgency, along the lines of the Confederacy.

Many of the same wealthy individuals and corporations that brought Reagan to power continue to pour billions into the GOP, an effort that in 2016 brought authoritarian Donald Trump to the White House and threatens to do so again in 3 years.

But this isnot even the GOP of Reagans time: todays GOP has now transformed itself into a full-blown anti-democratic neofascist party.

Itis no longer the business-loving White-middle-class GOP of the 20th century: its now the party of Nazis and the Klan, although theyve turned in their cartoonish swastikas and white robes for red caps and camo.

Which is presenting the funder class in the GOP with a stark decision. Are their tax cuts and deregulation of pollution so important to them that theyll continue to fund a neofascist party in order to keep them? Early signs are not good.

Billionaire-owned rightwing radio and TV are rewriting the history of January 6th and continue spreading Trumps Big Lie about the 2020 election. Rightwing think tanks and billionaire-founded and -funded Astroturf activist groups continue their mischaracterizations and outright lies about President Bidens agenda.

Social media sites continue to use algorithms that drive increasingly extremist views and have become organizing platforms for lies, racism and political actions like intimidating school boards and election officials.

They have been so successful that the majority of Republican voters no longer trust our electoral system and are willing to have Republican-controlled legislatures decide how elections came out rather than voters.

While a small but vocal and credible group of former Republicans from politicians like Jeff Flake and George W. Bush, to GOP operatives like Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, to media figures like Jennifer Rubin and Joe Scarborough are speaking out and doing so in terms often far more blunt than even Democratic politicians, the oligarchs who own the Party are not listening.

The Republican base, meanwhile, is completely in thrall to Trump and he is showing every sign of running and possibly taking over the country using the 12th Amendment trick I was warning of more than a year ago, this time running John Eastmans scheme in 2024.

And if not Trump, there is no shortage of ambitious fascist-leaning Republican politicians in the mold of Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott who are more than willing to stand-in for him with the same strategy.

The stage is thus set now for the final, irrevocable transformation of Eisenhowers Party and American democracy. The turning point will be the 2022 election if Republicans can retake the House and Senate.

Nineteen states have already changed thirty-three voting laws to accommodate Trumps and John Eastmans 6-point-plan to ignore the popular vote and throw the electoral college vote into the House of Representatives to put a Republican loser of the 2024 election into the White House.

This will work if Justice Sam Alito and his rightwing extremist friends on the Supreme Court give the scheme their stamp of approval; Trump lawyer Sydney Powell said this week Alito was prepared to do just that. It is decision time.

Numerous corporations said that theyd stop funding the so-called treason caucus of 140+ Republicans who voted to decertify the 2020 election after the January 6th attempted assassination of the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.

Almost all of those corporations, as Judd Legum and David Sirota regularly document at popular.info and DailyPoster.com, have gone back on that pledge.

Eisenhowers GOP no longer exists: it has been replaced by an authoritarian shell that is home to open racists and billionaire oligarchs who dont want their businesses regulated or taxed. They are willing to end democracy in America to get what they want.

German industrialist Fritz Thyssen famously backed Hitler and lived to regret it, penning an awkward but portentous autobiography titled I Paid Hitler.

Will todays rightwing billionaires and the CEOs of our largest corporations one day be writing similar books? Or, if Trump prevails, will American democracy be so totally wiped out that no future publisher would dare sell such a book?

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How racists and big money transformed the party of Abraham Lincoln into a modern-day Confederacy - Milwaukee Independent