Breaking News
Edited by | Last Update: June 4th, 2001
31 May 2001
The American Dream: Why Environmentalists Attack the SUV
Editorial By John Bragg, Policy analyst for the
Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism
[OBJECTIVISM TODAY.COM] The SUV is under attack. Greens say
they use too much gas, threaten air quality and contribute
pell-mell to the desecration of the environment. So why
would anyone build these horrible engines of death? They
build them because SUVs have advantages in safety, cargo
space and power that Americans demand.
The large cars from Detroit’s heyday have been
abolished by environmental regulations of the 1970s. In
1975, Federal fuel efficiency mandates forced car
manufacturers to smaller and lighter designs until 1983,
when Chrysler adapted the first minivan. Unlike the once
popular station wagon, the minivan fell under the lower
“light truck and van” fuel efficiency regulations, a
loophole which allowed companies to build larger, heavier,
safer vehicles without falling under the “gas-guzzler”
tax. The SUV, which became popular in the late 80’s
enjoyed a similar exemption. The minivan and the SUV gave
America the powerful, spacious vehicles that they had
demanded before the regulations—they were our reply to
Washington’s attempts to force everyone into smaller
cars.
Yet today there is no symbol of consumption hated more
than the SUV. There is a history behind this hatred: The
people attacking SUVs are the same people who have spent
the past thirty years attacking cars and hailing Al
Gore’s call ten years ago to abolish the
internal-combustion engine. SUVs are attacked because they
are today’s foremost examples of what a car is. [Click here to read the complete
article.]
28 May 2001
Nations United Against Rights
By Robert Tracinski
Consider the meaning of the rights
commission vote. The UN voted not to reappoint the United
States to its seat on the commission ... but in the same
vote, it gave a seat to Sudan, a country that tolerates the
practice of slavery. Read the article at Capitalism
Magazine.
21 May
2001
A
toast to Bryan Larsen
At a reception held for Bryan Larsen, Quent Cordair
delivered an inspiring toast to him and to his recent painting,
"Heroes":
 "As a young boy growing up
in Florida, I had the good fortune, on several nights, of looking to
the horizon to watch a bright white light turn night into day and
rise in a line toward the stars.
A few years later, I would watch my
first model rocket fly straight up into the sky and out of sight --
never to reappear. My father would take us to airports and air
shows, where we marveled at the wondrous machines, the men who built
them, and those who flew them with such confidence, courage and
daring.
To this day I thrill at standing near enough to a jet engine
to feel its vibrations through the core of my body, and at watching
tons of metal lift off of the earth and travel gracefully
skyward."
Read
the rest of this toast at www.cordair.com 13 May
2001
ARI
in LA Times -- Power Crisis
Nonprofit Shrugs at Pleas to Conserve
By BOB POOL, Times Staff Writer
Their other electricity customers may be
following the Southern California Edison Co.'s plea to conserve
electricity during the current energy crisis.
But don't expect anyone to be going
room-to-room flipping off lights and turning down air conditioning
in a fourth-floor suite at one Marina del Rey office building.
That kind of conservation is
"immoral" and "un-American," say those working
at the Ayn Rand Institute international headquarters on Admiralty
Way.
The 15-year-old nonprofit group is run
by devotees of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, who died in 1982.
It is a clearinghouse and educational center for those who embrace
Rand's theories of individualism and laissez-faire capitalism. Click
to read the whole article.
13
May 2001
The Works of Ayn Rand Are Now Available on
CDROM!
Phil Oliver is happy to announce that The Objectivism Research CDROM is now available, containing most of the published works of Ayn Rand. The works can be browsed individually, or a fulltext search engine permits you to find all
occurrences of any word or phrase almost instantly.
The CDROM includes the following works Ayn Rand: Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, Blind Chaos, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, For The New Intellectual, Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology, Journals
Of Ayn Rand, Letters Of Ayn Rand, Only Path To Tomorrow, The Art of Fiction / The Art of Nonfiction, The Ayn Rand Column (LA Times), The Ayn Rand Letter, The Fountainhead, The Man-Haters, The New Left, The Objectivist, The Objectivist Newsletter, The Romantic Manifesto, The Virtue Of Selfishness, The Voice Of Reason, and We The Living. The CDROM also includes the following works by Leonard Peikoff: The Ominous Parallels, Objectivism: The Philosophy Of Ayn Rand, plus other writings interspersed in the first list.
The CDROM is available for IBM PC compatible computers and the price is $149.95 ($99.95 for fulltime students 21 or younger.) Orders can be placed at www.Objectivism.net
2 May 2001
Two new articles at ObjectiveScience.com,
Lewis Little's TEW
"Quantum Mechanics and Dissidents" By Eric Dennis
Conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics seem to deny the existence of entities with definite properties determining how they act, independently of human consciousness. Lewis Little offers an alternative to this in his "theory of elementary waves" (TEW).
The advocates of TEW believe that its lack of recognition among physicists stems from their faulty philosophic premises. In fact, it stems from TEW's failure to account for a range of key experimental results and of a clear, well known, unanswered argument that shows why a large class of theories (including TEW) could never account for certain of these results.
But realism need not despair, for a genuine alternative to the standard version of quantum mechanics does exist, one becoming increasingly visible and attractive to physicists...
ALSO:
Letter to the Editor:
"TEW Still Fails"
By Travis Norsen
A response to Lewis Little's "TEW's local explanation of the
Innsbruck Experiment".
2 May 2001
Alan Greenspan's Original Solution to Market Volatility: The Gold
Standard Capitalism Magazine (April 26, 2001)
There's only one surefire way for the Fed to match the supply of money with the demand for it: target the price of gold.
Read
the article here
2 May 2001
Rehab Not Jail: Set Downey Free to Solve His Problems By Amy Peikoff (LA Times)
Award-winning actor Robert Downey Jr. is in trouble again, having been arrested Tuesday in Culver City on drug offenses. This arrest comes less than a week before Downey's scheduled court hearing from his arrest last November in Palm Springs on charges of possessing small amounts of cocaine and diazepam and for being under their influence.
"Rehab Not Jail" is the motto of a nationwide movement that has adopted Downey as its de facto poster-boy. It favors court-ordered rehabilitation instead of prison for nonviolent drug users.
California's Proposition 36, which implements this viewpoint and which may allow Downey himself to avoid prison, is counted among the movement's successes. It is, however, no solution.
Morally, it fails to respect the rights of nonviolent drug users. Practically, it is a disaster because of the false premise underlying most state-certified rehab programs.
The pro-rehab movement correctly argues that it is wrong to imprison nonviolent drug users like Downey: They have violated no one's rights. Only people who commit real crimes--burglary, manslaughter, rape, etc.--deserve criminal punishment of any kind, let alone multiyear incarceration.
Click here for the whole article:
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items click here
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month we present one CyberNet item from Betsy
Speicher's CyberNet
which features hundreds of news items delivered to your email
box. Click
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Objectivism In The Media
--DAVID ELMORE is now Editor of the Marietta (GA) Daily Journal (MDJ) and that gave him the opportunity to quote ARI Executive Director YARON BROOK at length. In an article about a renowned local economist which appeared in the business section on May 11, 2001, Dr. Brook gave a dissenting opinion on the effects of recent Federal Reserve policy. The MDJ has a circulation of 45,000, many of them top executives in the Atlanta area, who have moved to the upscale suburb. "I plan to use ARI as much as possible as an analyst and commentator," David writes, so we will be watching for future mentions.
Click
to see the article
--In an opinion piece in Aviation Week's Aviation Now, titled "Atlas Shrugged And The Mice Roared," writer William B. Scott asked what would happen if the government asked for bids on a new multi-billion dollar aerospace project and nobody submitted one.
[I]t's the subtle, "stealthy" shifts in government contracting that could someday prompt a headline reading "Atlas Shrugged," to borrow a term from Ayn Rand's book of the same name. "Atlas" in the 1930s [sic] classic referred to industry leaders who disappeared rather than continue fighting government and other interference with railroad, steel and similar companies that were the heart of an Industrial Age economy. In today's case, "Atlas" would be aerospace/defense industry captains that finally just say, "No."
Click
to see the article
--There is an unconfirmed report that at 8:30PM EDT on May 14, 2001, C-SPAN2 carried a program on which Fred Smith of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute defended energy production against calls for conservation. He occasionally referred to morality and, in true conservative fashion, praised sacrifice but at least twice he quoted from _Atlas Shrugged_.
WORTH MENTIONING ...
--In the February 2001 "Word Fugitives" column in The Atlantic Monthly, a reader wrote:
I am interested in either learning or coining a word that emphasizes the positive aspects of selfishness. Selfishness has such negative connotations, yet looking out for one's health and well-being first and foremost is considered emotionally and physically sound. Why should that have negative connotations? I hear a lot of people apologize for this enlightened view, because they have to use the nasty word selfish to describe themselves.
Atlantic readers responded, and in the April 2001 column it was reported that
[A] number of people seem to have stayed up late writing responses to it, including treatises that quoted or paraphrased such thinkers as Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Abraham Maslow, S. I. Hayakawa, and, most often, Ayn Rand.
Click
to see the article
--Columnist Paul Carpenter, writing in the Allentown Morning Call (5/15/01), questioned whether Martin Luther King deserved a holiday.
King was a great man, but [...] do his contributions outweigh the combined contributions of Washington, Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin? [...] How about Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Sacajawea? Where would we be without them? How about H.L. Mencken, Ayn Rand, Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison?
All those people had as much to do with the quality of our lives and freedom today as did King.
Click
to see the article
--JACK CRAWFORD tells us that there was a mention of Ayn Rand in the Sunday Washington Post [5/6/01, Book World, Page 4]. In a review of a book about Friedrich Hayek it states that Hayek's libertarianism didn't come from the idea that "humankind was too grand to live in chains" and associates this idea with Ayn Rand instead.
--The "Sunday Datebook" column in the Arts and Entertainment section of the April 22, 2001 San Francisco Chronicle began, "Blame it on Ayn Rand and Frank Lloyd Wright if the popular perception of a famous architect is some Promethean character who strides across the earth giving us mere mortals the buildings that we live and work in, whether we like them or not."
--The cover of the May/June 2001 issue of Foreign Policy caught GERRY GLYNN's eye. It contains an interview on globalization with the CEO of McDonalds and, although it never mentions Ayn Rand, the article is titled "McAtlas Shrugged."
Click
to see the article
HAVE YOU SEEN OBJECTIVISM IN THE MEDIA?
When you see a column by a known Objectivist or a mention of Ayn Rand in the media, please tell SCOTT McCONNELL
()
at ARI and send him a copy of the article by mail or fax (310-306-4925). If you Cc:
cybernet we will mention your name in the CyberNet, too (unless you ask us to withhold it). We also would appreciate
specific_details like the publication, date, time and station call letters and dial position (for broadcasts), columnist or author, exact title, page numbers, web site URL, etc.
|
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Already a classic. Read this book and "sit in Ayn Rand's living
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Order other Ayn Rand titles from our Ayn
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