william.scherk

Um, that's not a new building. It's a digitally rendered visual proposal of a facade makeover that an old building is receiving. That bit of knowledge led me to this article, "Managing Modern" -- it looks like the Cleveland building facade/interior upgrade is part of a larger movement. It makes sense, modern-era buildings are getting pretty degraded in some areas (as FF's link to decaying DC Brutalist buildings demonstrated). Here below a picture of a new tower designed for central Vancouver. The downtown peninsula is almost completely saturated with the same old same old Vancouverism, but a few plots remain, so this is one of several overheights among hundreds. One reason why this tower and podia stand out from the cake and cookies walls of blue/green glass is that the architect is not from here. Most of the Vancouverist towers and neighborhoods were designed by local firms. (oddly or not, the Vancouver vernacular is exportable -- see Vancouverism in San Diego) One remarkable part of the design is how it fits with the odd shards of available footprint, as the location is partly under an exit ramp and bridge deck. From the blurbs locally, the architect attempts to mirror the kind of cultural space a short boat ride away at Granville Island, our town's major urban success story (note the crowd at lower left). Granville Island, for those who don't know, is a multiuse former industrial ground turned into public market and arts nexus. A big tourist attraction. Its built form is of course anything but modern, being refurbished sheds and other work-ish blocky metal-sided masses. This video gives a bit of the feel of the place. Americans might be more familiar with the also-successful Seattle market precinct.

You have it almost half right, Jerry. What you consider a drug legal or illegal (alcohol, marijuana, aspirin, penicillin, L-DOPA, digitalis ...) can overlap with what the rest of the world considers a drug in the broadest terms1 : a chemical substance with known biological effects. It almost overlaps with the more precise meaning in pharmacology2 -- "a chemical substance used in the treatment, cure, prevention, or diagnosis of disease or used to otherwise enhance physical or mental well-being." The so-called recreational drugs are also so designated because of psychotropic effects (nicotine, caffeine, alcohol). Now, given your generalization, Jerry -- does it apply in every instance? Does a therapeutic dose of say, aspirin, act as a poison? Similarly, does digitalis 'poison' a person at the dosage recommended for treatment? You will see that your generalization must give way to reality once you try to apply it across the board. Thinking about the effect of dosage will bring your thinking more in line with the essential distinction between a substance being poisonous (to humans/animals) and a substance being an efficacious drug. Moreover, knowing that distinction will lead you to understand that otherwise benign or necessary materials like water, sun, vitamins, food, oxygen can also 'poison' or kill when taken in quantity. One can die from drinking too much water. One can die from inhaling a pure oxygen gas. Consider too some foods and the chemicals/vitamins they contain. Consider just carrots. Consuming too many carrots (or other carotene-containing plants) can lead to liver damage and death. So, Jerry, think of dose. Think of actual measurable chemical action. Don't be pushed into a cul-de-sac of crankery by using such a defective generalization. Any drug? Okay, take L-DOPA. What is the poisonous dosage, and what is killed/poisoned by its ingestion? If your theory of druggery is correct, you should be able to clearly state the relation. Take any other drug, aspirin for example. What is killed/poisoned by a therapeutic dose? How does an overdose of aspirin kill? What about, oh, anti-nausea drugs -- what is their poison? Again, what about anti-cholinergic drugs, or topical anti-infectant agents, or morphias or emetics or anti-fungals ... There are of course more modern drugs and drug-delivery systems that tend to call your theory into question. For example, the antiparasitic drug, Ivermectin. What does this agent poison and how, and how might it poison or kill a human or dog? What is the difference between therapeutic dose and 'poison' in this instance? What does Nalaxone kill? As you plug in examples into your theory, you could likely reinvent the wheel (the importance of dosage) and a drug classification system. I look forward to you meeting objections to your notions with cool, calm, thoughtful and engaged reasoning. Bon Appétit!

Wikiquotes has a slightly differing version of this quote, which makes it more poignant. She had apparently spoken the phrase 'when they love their children' more than once. When peace comes, we will perhaps in time ... When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Press conference in London (1969), as quoted in A Land of Our Own : An Oral Autobiography (1973) edited by Marie Syrkin, p. 242 The same Wikiquotes pages cites a comment of Meir's which speaks to the existence of a group of people calling themselves Palestinians. Also poignant ... there were no such things.There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. As quoted in Sunday Times (15 June 1969), also in The Washington Post (16 June 1969)

Vancouver is Canada's third most rainy city, with over 161 rainy days per year. Snow tends to be quite wet, which, combined with typical winter temperatures rising above and falling below 0 °C (32 °F) throughout the course of the day, can make for icy road conditions. Years or months with snowfall surpassing 100 cm (39.3 in) are not completely exceptional. Vancouver experienced a White Christmas in 2008 after weeks of record breaking cold temperatures and four consecutive snow storms. The Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm of 2006 swept through Greater Vancouver on December 15, 2006 with winds reaching from 70 km/h to 125 km/h. [Wikipedia] All dastardly lies, huh? Kind of pointless to hand a 'bad weather' challenge to a couple of Canadians ... especially while making a larger incorrect point about Erickson's SFU as a particularly wind-scoured hellhole (as if the design resulted in greater winds, as with downtown effects). Is there anything you don't have a swiftly googled-up opinion of, Wolf? Some of what you post lately is sour, reactive, graceless. You would do well to follow Brant, who maintains a grace no matter how pithy or contrary his comments. I'd say you would benefit from cashing in your chips and taking a visit to Vancouver. I would be happy to show you the hideous windswept encrustation atop Burnaby Mountain, and even buy you a cup of bile to top up your tank. [edited for gracelessness]

Those steps are one of the coolest features of the complex at the university, to my eyes**. What you saw as a sculpture, I guessed might be a bronze of Canadian hero Terry Fox (Fox was a one-legged cancer survivor who ran from coast to almost coast until cancer returned to kill him. He rather lives on through annual Terry Fox Runs, major festive fundraising events) ... As it turns out, the Terry Fox sculpture at the university is within the quadrangle, not at the steps leading up from the convocation mall. So what we each saw as sculpture was likely just a hurrying student ... Here's a couple more views of the steps/mall/quadrangle, where the unique space of SFU is almost captured by photography. _________________________ ** -- a link to a Google 3D view of the steps in the overall setting. See also Google Streetview for a virtual walk through the precincts.

It is still standing, and still full of yuppies, 38 years later (in Montreal). I still kind of like it. Moshe Safdie also designed the ugly/cool Vancouver Public Library (which is a wildly popular place to be -- go figger). VPL ... Here's another Brutalist complex I do really like, the Simon Fraser University campus built on Burnaby mountain to the east of Vancouver. The pictures may not do it justice -- I find it just an amazing space to be in and move through. Architect was Arthur Erickson, who went on to do the city's main courts downtown.

You may have come across news of Franklin Change Diaz's VASIMR rocket design: Traveling to Mars is not easy, which may be why no one has ever tried. It would take a good six to nine months to get there with today’s chemical-fueled rockets. Along the way, according to a 2013 study, you’d get dosed with the radiation equivalent of a whole-body CT scan every five to six days, increasing your lifetime cancer risk above the limits set by NASA. Upon reaching the Red Planet, you’d wait up to two years for Earth and Mars to be at their closest before your return trip, which would last another six to nine months. If the cosmic rays didn’t get you, the long layover might. But what if there were a better way — a new kind of rocket that could transport you to Mars in less than six weeks? It would drastically cut both travel time and radiation exposure, and instead of three years, the entire round-trip flight could theoretically last just three months. This isn’t mere sci-fi speculation: In a nondescript warehouse in Webster, Texas, a forward-thinking scientist is developing a prototype rocket engine that could make space travel faster than ever before. Franklin Chang Díaz, an MIT-trained physicist and former NASA astronaut, has spent more than 30 years tinkering with the rocket engine he invented, which he believes can transform interplanetary flight. In 2005, he founded a company, Ad Astra (Latin for “to the stars”), to pursue that goal, and he remains an unabashed advocate of space exploration. “The first person that is going to walk on Mars has already been born,” he says. And he hopes they’ll use his rocket to get there. [...] Even though you’d still need a conventional chemical rocket to reach space from the ground, once there this engine could generate enough thrust to get people to Mars three to four times as fast as a traditional spacecraft — within 39 days, under the most favorable conditions. The idea of the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket — or VASIMR — was thus born.

I've never been to Washington DC, but was aware it held numerous examples of Brutalist architecture. Most university campuses in the West (and the East) have at least one example of the form. I expect that the US federal government chose Brutalism over another ugly genre during the same time that many other governments chose the form (according to the Wikipedia article noted, "Brutalism became popular with governmental and institutional clients, with numerous examples in Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the United States, Canada, Brazil, the Philippines, and Australia"). New Brutalism: this example is of an hotel in Krakow, Poland. This from Canada, Habitat, by Moshe Safdie. It is one of very few standing Brutalist architecture that pleases the (my) eye. -- an interesting aside from the Brutalist page at Wikipedia: Theodore Dalrymple, a British author, physician, and political commentator, has written for City Journal that Brutalist structures represent an artefact of European philosophical totalitarianism, a "spiritual, intellectual, and moral deformity." He called the buildings "cold-hearted", "inhuman", "hideous", and "monstrous". He stated that the reinforced concrete "does not age gracefully but instead crumbles, stains, and decays", which makes alternative building styles superior.

The director is quoted at the production site:

Conquest has been a value and process in the founding of every country on earth. Every single one. Modern civilization arose on top of this. It did not start magically in some utopian past and then history was a progression of violators against it. I saw a striking video today on topic for historical bloodshed in Palestine/Israel. Dang did I love the instrumental version of Exodus back when. This video uses the syrupy Andy Williams version, and the trenchant cartoonship of Nina Paley. A brief history of Israel/Palestine/Canaan/The Levant. Who's-killing-who viewer's guide here: http://blog.ninapaley.com/2012/10/01/this-land-is-mine/ Music: The Exodus Song/This Land is Mine melody by Ernest Gold, lyrics by Pat Boone, sung by Andy Williams. Jazz instrumental (over end credits) by Quincy Jones. This Land Is Mine from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

According to a story in the Jerusalem Post, Israel has returned to the practice, after having stopped the policy circa 2005:

I respect MSK's call, and his 'it's complicated' views on Palestine/Israel. I have zero respect for Hamas. In each case they have lobbed rockets into Israel (even with no deaths) they knew quite well that Israel would use disproportionate force against their positions, leaders, HQs, rocket launching areas, and so on. Right now the death tolls are 180-odd Gazans (including children) and 2 Israelis. So I revile the jihadists who took control of Gaza and established their dictatorship, and I revile their short-sighted tactics and their ugly revision of Islam. Having said that, Gazans have my sympathy. They suffer and their suffering should not be swept away. I think we should occasionally listen to the voices of Israelis who oppose the kind of overwhelming reprisals we see. We should also be alert to a my-country-right-or-wrong settling of our minds. As for Naomi Ludenberg, alexythimic 20-something from Chicago, I wish her well. The internet has a huge scope for argument of every kind and flavour of madness. No doubt Naomi will find a good fit somewhere else. I wonder what it is like to be not quite able to read the emotions of self and others.

I don't see the downside of posting images of art, images that illustrate a point, a definition, an argument. It seems a little odd to foreswear illustrations from the get-go, lay down a Hell No to using powerful means of communication. I think your points, definitions, and arguments would gain strength when supported by actual pieces of art. A visual example adds heft and weight, adds instances of what you are trying to illustrate only by words ... Is it that you think only a minefield awaits you, a spiked pit-trap, a blind alley where you might be cudgeled or otherwise abused? if you posted, say, a canvas from an undeniably Romanticist/Romantic artist, what is the worst thing that could happen? I figure that you have endured the crashing of the waves upon your argument quite well so far, neither devolving into Phil-ism nor DeVoonism. I bet you can easily select and upload a picture that exemplifies your views -- or poses a challenge to your collocutors -- and easily dodge the cudgels that await. How much worse could the figurative beating be, anyway? "One needs examples because one can't see for oneself"? But see what? Find rational value in which thing? Error of what kind, made by whom and how? I just don't see giving examples as a dangerous thing to do, dangerous to reason, to analysis, to discourse. If posting an image is not gonna happen, as a point of principle, well, too bad. I think you have already passed the point of maximum danger with regard to harsh and unpleasant criticism. Posting an example of a rip-roaringly right Romantic canvas that turns your crank might inform the argument and turn it in a good direction. Illustrations can sometimes punch through the verbiage and instantiate the abstract -- performing the 'teachable moment.' I have been reading Jonathan's interactions with Objectivish Arts Eggheads for a few years. He (and since departed OLer Dragonfly) sometimes illustrated the category 'objecti-kitsch.' Here is an example from the Quent Cordair Fine Art gallery, which promises "The Finest in Romantic Realism." The piece is "Yes" by artist Danielle Anjou. It illustrates for me the neck-snapping awfulness to be found in the genre.

This is garble, nonsense, end-times vapours. From Wikipedia's Blood Moon page:

This is fallacious. The sarcasm does not validate the opposite corollary in the set. See what happens when the statements are straightforward positive assertions (without the irony): Art does exist in objective realityArt can be identified (the artist knew what he was doing)Individual concepts derived from art are objectiveRely on (not-authority) to tell the 'facts'Rely on (non-experts) to tell the good art from the bad artMoral judgments of art are cool I agree with 1. It seems obvious that art exists. I agree to a point with 2. Art can be identified (as art) by a variety of criteria. We can guess what an artist thought he was doing in some circumstances. The correctness of our guesses can increase with study of the artwork and the utterances if any of the artist. Sometimes our guesses are not rightly falsifiable. Consider this work of early art: Now with your 3, Tony, you can make guesses about the concepts intended by the artist/s. You can identify and name them, and show how they are derived from the artwork.** With your 4, I can't make it work without reformulating it somehow: we don't yet have criteria on what/whom to rely on to tell the 'facts.' In some senses -- like dating the cave art above, and in comparing it to other survivals -- we can find out more about the culture in which the art was made. We can find facts about the materials and progress of technique over time. Why only two possible states for the very first painter on cave walls? -- it doesn't make sense to reduce to a binary. What if that first painting was a thing to be respected, and its maker imitated? What if much discussion around the time of its making was devoted to practical matters, esthetic appreciation (eg, Trog gets thumbs up for his amazing brushwork from Brog and Dreg and Trag)? I think it would be obvious to Brog and crew that Trog had with his own means done the deed, and so to invoke spirit birth or death is arbitrary, not grounded in any extant 'facts' about Trog ... Well, there you go. It is cool to moralize about "today's society" by calling down 'most present art' as a mirror and incubator of said society's debasement. How you got from Trog to the art world of today is unclear, though I salute your search for a Romanticist/Romantic body of work that will sustain your own Objectivish spirit. It's like you have a longing for willful, uplifting themes and scenes. Nothing wrong with that, I don't think. And I don't think there is anything wrong with you posting an artwork that rings all your bells. Or even an artwork that rings no bells for you at all. In a thread devoted to art, I would expect many more illustrations of what folks are talking about, grounding the concepts. Here's an image from the fantastic series of Romance covers from the Maher Art Gallery, each of which fairly bursts with volition. ________________________ ** I think you (and I and we) need to be careful, meticulous, alert to confirmation bias, when deriving 'Individual concepts' from particular works of art. To claim that the derived concepts are objective is easy, to demonstrate this takes a lot more work deployed.

Yeah. It looks to be a cut-and-paste job of small Binyamin Netanyahu statements mixed in with statements made up of whole cloth. I can't find any current news record of this speech to the Knesset (Yonatan Netanyahu is not in the Knesset). The speech is not quoted anywhere in Israeli English media, though the speech/hoax has already made the rounds on Twitter, with pro-Palestinian voices using it as evidence of the brutality of the Israeli leadership. Here's a link to a page calling hoax: And here is a page with a certain Bob Kolker spreading the story in comments. And here is another purported Bibi speech to the Knesset ... I won't give a link to the source, observing the same protocol as Bob.

Adam, I am pretty sure that you mean our alexithymic Naomi of Berwyn IL via Sarajevo, but I will answer for my own lazy posting habits on anthropogenic global warming. I have begged off privately from posts owed back to Jonathan in that other thread, and otherwise don't note on OL what I have been reading and remarking elsewhere. Here we tend to get het up and categorical and I think hasty when discussing or arguing any aspect of purported climate change. At best we capture each others' attention, and strike off towards discovery and end up knowing more at the end of the argument than we did starting out. Sometimes it's not so educational. The overwhelming consensus at OL is that AGW is some kind of fraud/hoax/scam. It means that me or Naomi (and perhaps other silent OL members) are definitely outliers, and if you get het up about it, means we may be part of the scam. At times we get so het up we call each other beeyotches and death worshippers. So, I am going to claim the newest ad hominem for myself ('and your little dog, too!), since my basic take on the issue is near as a nose to Naomi's -- though I may use a different tone or offer a different angle when I get my lazy ass posting ... Here are your friends, death worrshiper: Ludenberg and Scherk, and their awful evul friends! My country may be said to benefit from continued warming in our Arctic and sub-arctic. On average Canada is heating up at a greater pace than the global average. We apparently get continued northern march of arable land, ice-free Northwest Passage, increased agricultural yields (in some areas), and a extension of the boreal forest into taiga/muskeg lands. The damages assumed by sea level rise will not accrue for another century or so, and other water-based issues (eg, more water for more fracking/oilsands extraction) will play out in a scenario that will not crimp 'business' where the business is energy. A pessimist would here list all the other knock-ons of warming in various provinces and territories (ie, methane, ocean acidification, fisheries, permafrost, forest stress/epidemics, yadda yadda), but won't. I think readers can imagine a scenario where Canada does warm over a couple three centuries, increases its population, shelters tens of millions of immigrants, rebuilds all its waterfront protections or evacuates floodplains and generally 'gets ready' for the wave rather than avoid it or pin Canada's emissions to an unattainable level. OL readers generally may not be aware of how our Conservative federal government is dealing with its own estimations of global warming (yes, Canada is of the frabjous "consensus"). For at least the length of their reign, they will push energy development, growth, infrastructure along a spectrum of adaptation, not mitigation. If anyone is interested in the story of how the scientific consensus on Warming Canada is used by an ostensibly 'right wing' government, wave a white hanky or something, and I will put up a couple of links. Can I talk you through a lowering of your thermostat, Adam? We know that Naomi is by consensus wrong wrong wrong beyond wrong on global warming, but this does not make her half as fascist as me. As far as I can recall she has no UltraGreenFascisti policy prescriptions. Maybe Naomi is a bit like me, alarmed a bit and a lot at a lot of things, but with a sardonic appreciation of fate. Maybe she is a bit Stephen Harper, intent on wringing every economic benefit from warming that can be wrung. I can't remember Naomi the dethwrshippr even musing about the World To Come ... Here in BC, over the centuries, some places may be ocean-swamped. We will either dike them out like the Ninth Ward or rebuild on sea-footings, and devise solutions elsewhere. Some habitats, species will suffer, some will not. I think of the times we live in as waiting times, waiting for more results of the human experiment --- increasing atmospheric contributions of 'greenhouse gases' -- with some intent on waiting a lot longer before accepting that climatologists are probably generally right about warming ... How this experiment will continue to play out is what I imagine concerns OLers of a skeptical nature, regardless of our commitment to one side or other. Our very young children/grandchildren will see farther than we can, we here likely all dead by mid-century, but with what we can see so far, many require more time before accepting the very idea that humankind has appreciably altered climate. Somehow my sunny, placid nature leaves me relatively unalarmed, whilst I am convinced that the experiment has given clear results already. Did I mention it was lovely and Hot here in Vancouver? This is what the poor socialist starvelings are reduced to in the northern collectivist hellhole ...

Ward Churchill lost his tenure and his professorship because of plagiarism1 and research misconduct. Ali Al-Timini was not a professor in Virginia but a self-styled lecturer on Islam -- he was convicted of, essentially, terror charges, eliciting members of a Jihad network to make war against the USA overseas in Afghanistan. Treason? It seems so, as "on Sept. 16, 2001[... ]Timimi told his followers that 'the time had come for them to go abroad and join the mujaheddin engaged in violent jihad in Afghanistan'"2 This seems to be larded with a bit of fiction. Edison was a prolific inventor (and holder of valuable patents). Tesla worked for Edison (and quarrelled, and died broke and miserable by all accounts). Westinghouse favoured AC over DC current (and of course AC mostly won). Edison had two wives, with three children by each. He may not have married and fathered as much as Wolf, or participated in child-rearing to a greater degree than any of us here, but -- If Edison is being used as an example of a 'cruel lifestyle,' the example does not do its job. I have no idea where to find information on his six bankruptcies ... (these may be picayune corrections. Wolf is a good writer, punchy and engaging, so he may be using examples on the fly, from remembered details rather than from on-the-desk research. I really enjoyed the story from Constitution of Government in Galt's Gulch, "Walking to Ayrshire." When he writes the unvarnished biography, his prose is rich and compelling, full of complex emotions. He is not afraid to expose his heart) __________________ 1. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0002.004/--ward-churchills-twelve-excuses-for-plagiarism?rgn=main;view=fulltext 2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071302169.html

The mention of Newberry reminded me of something, so I had to go look. He published his "guidelines for detecting metaphysical value-judgments in painting" in 2002. In the article are thirteen paintings, including the thread-perennial Maid with Milk by Vermeer. It is part fun, part sad to read. This Newberry painting is one of the thirteen, one that I call "While Orgasming, We Knocked Over The Lamp." And a bright lamp it was. What would properly describe their body language? Would 'contorted' or 'posed' be right? Here are some more guidelines from the same Newberry lecture: -- and a radiant universe within one contortionist, his lovely if back-snapping, neck-tearing "Ascension" ...

I know some things about First Nations in my corner of the world, British Columbia. I don't always see Rand's 'savages' in these peoples. Culturally, the Haida and the other northernmost peoples reached some heights -- part of their economy is sustained by creating art works for the market. They were in a few senses, nations, rather than tribes, with language and culture being the distinction between adjoining peoples. Each one of them occupied and traversed traditional terrorities under their rule, warred against neighbours at times, captured slaves, did all the awful things that humans do. Some of their traditions were staggering, and interesting/repulsive from an Objectivist standpoint, ie, secret spirit lodges, fraternities, wool-dogs, steamed wooden boxes, and the truly 'monstrous' altruistic Potlach. This week there was big news on this front in Canada. A small 'nation' in BC, the Chilcotin, had their right to aboriginal title affirmed by our Supreme Court. This means many things in BC context, especially resource extraction and the environment, but it surely would mean something bad to an Objectivist like Ayn Rand! But I tend to think of these matters with an anthropological bent, and think of natives/aboriginals/first peoples as organized into cultures, and not as savage tribes needing complete subjugation to the European ideal. Ayn Rand seemed to say that all the cultures in BC too were deserving of whatever that white folks had in mind for their subjects ... I just can't go that far, knowing what harm was done to these very people by an earlier state. As with Wolf's pastiche, I could dig up signs of vicious native antipathy to whites**, brutal massacres and so on. But however I might borrow from Wikipedia and elsewhere, I couldn't come up with the same tolls of savage wickedness on the BC frontier. I think we have to remember not to overgeneralize from one savage tribe to all the others. Here's a rough ethnocultural map of 'indians' in BC as represented by the provincial education department (that same government now forced by law to gain 'consent' from first nations for major projects on their lands, rather than the earlier standard of 'consultation'). See this cool interactive to zoom in on language, culture, nation in BC. I think there are scary times ahead for Randians in the final shakedown of Canadian/First Nations treaties and legal frameworks. It's the cultchah! ___________________________ ** Wikipedia's Chilcotin War article sez (Hi Wolf!): April 29, 1864 a ferryman, Timothy Smith, stationed 30 miles up the river was killed after refusing a demand from Klattasine, Tellot and other natives for food. Smith was shot and his body thrown into the river. The food stores and supplies were looted. A half ton of provisions were taken. The following day the natives attacked the workers camp at daylight. Three men, Peterson Dane, Edwin Moseley and a man named Buckley, though injured, escaped and fled down the river. The remaining crew were killed and their bodies thrown into the river. Four miles further up the trail, the band came upon the foreman, William Brewster, and three of his men blazing trail. All were killed. Brewster's body was mutilated and left. The others' bodies were thrown into the river. The band also killed William Manning, a settler at Puntzi Lake. A pack train led by Alexander McDonald, though warned, continued into the area and three of the drivers were killed in the ensuing ambush. In all, nineteen men were killed.

In the following, I have inserted links to verbatim passages at other websites. I wish folks would not be this sloppy about attributions. If you are copying and pasting from other sources, it is a basic courtesy to let the readers know they are word-for-word borrowings. Please don't be lazy and forget to note when you lean heavily on other sources. If you have actually taken quotes, please mark them off ...

Let us assume that the quote is substantially correct. There are problems with the quotes. In some versions, Rand's spoken words are accurately transcribed as "white people" ... but in other versions, "white people" is replaced with "Europeans." See Robert Campbell's yeoman efforts to reality-check Mayhew's transcription/editing of this particular Q&A from the West Point speech in 1974. See also Robert's vetting of the Q&A from the 1976 Ford Hall Forum. This link contains the entire 1974 question and answer period (link from your wikiquotes talk page reference): https://ari-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/ar_library/ar_pwni/ar_pwni_qa.mp3

I wonder if anything does. Lack of falsifiability is one symptom of a pseudo-science. "Climate change" (which used to be global warming), confirmed by any weather pattern and contradicted by none, is the classic example. You do well to be cynical, on the whole -- if thinking of diagnostic constructs that seem knitted out of air rather than strict criteria. Even strict criteria can describe a 'syndrome' that is otherwise entirely normal and healthy or at least within human variance. Mind you, you might be suffering from Oppositional Defiant Syndrome ... I think what I keep in mind is suffering. Do folks with Autistic Spectrum disorder suffer in ways that so-called typical or normal kids do not? I think they do. I also think the main point of having this Dx fixed is that it answers parents' calls: "how can I help my child?" This allows remediation, effective support, therapy designed to increase social abilities, understanding unique challenges in education. Knowing more about what happens in the life course so that someone becomes labeled Autistic -- all the different ways that one can be autistic -- this destigmatizes the disorder, makes it comprehensible, and allows an informed opinion. For those who are doubtful that such a thing exists, I recommend the individual narratives at Autism Speaks, and the guides to symptoms, early signs, and so on. I think we have to listen to kids, parents and adults affected by or diagnosed along the spectrum. Reidy, I'd be happy to read your further thoughts. It's true that psychiatric disorders have proliferated madly in the last century (as exemplified by the DSM itself), It's also true that many purported psychiatric disorders seem only to describe an extreme of personality or trait or behaviour. But I would not throw out the baby with the bathwater, nor reject the reality that is autistic people who vary along the presumed spectrum. Present labels may be only heuristics, and in future times different names will be applied to folks like Bob, yet there they are, the folks and lives behind the labels. You don't agree with me, in that you seem to believe that no contra-indications to a Dx of Asperger Syndrome exist. For example, you might take the simple survey by Baron-Cohen, and see if it indicates you are 'on the spectrum.' That criteria for AS can discriminate from 'neurotypical' means to me that the construct 'syndrome' can indeed be falsified. I don't think you have done any work to challenge your conclusions. I note you are on earlier record against the utility of the construct entirely, considering it close to fraud. As far as I know from reading your posts on the subject -- at OL and at RoR -- you have not supplied any warrants for your beliefs, no evidence that supports your reading of Asperger and his career. I challenge you to provide warrants for these specific claims, which you have repeated in differing forms for a few years now: Asperger Syndrome is baloney Asperger's Syndrome is pseudo-science, just quakery dressed up in the language of science Asperger Syndrome is nothing but a paycheck for psychologists who specialize in Asperger's Syndrome. Honestly, Hans Asperger was a nazi. Asperger was a Nazi in the fundamental sense He adhered to their paradigms for social behavior His career did well as the Nazis rose. After the Anschluss he moved to Germany. Hans Asperger was a nazi who studied boys who did not "get along well" with others. He took his "little professors" marching into the hills, German-style, singing songs while following a flag. Asperger served in the army in the German occupation of Croatia, a Nazi client state. After the war, he was interviewed by US Army "intelligence". He explained his theories and methods to US intelligence and it sounded harmless to them, just like the Boy Scouting they knew and loved The truth is that Dr. Hans Asperger was an Austrian nazi whose work was approved by the US military occupation of Germany because the Army intelligence interrogators thought that it was appropriate to socialize “little professors” by marching them through the woods singing songs just like the Boy Scouts they all were. He found that mild regimentation -- youth groups, hiking clubs -- worked wonders for them, made then fit right in! After the War, the Allied military -- themselves a bunch of Boy Scouts -- found nothing dangerous in his ideas and they let him go. Well, that is fine. A 'personality type' is a nice fuzzy meme with no boundaries. But you cannot use such a generalized term to apply to severe disorders in addition, not with such fuzz, I don't think. Which makes me wonder if you consider attending to severity while 'typing' as particularly meaningful, ie, Autism itself as a personality type, rather than descriptive of a distressing condition. If in your constellation of personality typing we have Asperger-ish, Sociopathic-ish, Obsessive-ish, Paranoiac-ish, Autism-ish, Rett Syndrome-ish and a thousand other normed afflictions ... then I have to wonder if you are just having a walk in the garden, rather than distinguishing the concepts along a metric of observed severity, of suffering, of social impediment, of problem. What I am missing from your pronouncements is any reflection that AS kids (like Bob) have suffered. In other words, what by your lights is mere personality difference was reliably detected by others, made a target of bullying, identified as obstacle to learning, work and independent living. I haven't seen you empathize with the 'type' or note a person's challenges. I know you have a heart. Consider Asperger and his patients. Many of these were institutionalized, at risk of eradication via Nazi eugenics. Consider that identifying a particular constellation of behaviours/symptoms allows educating (and self-educating as with Bob) and a sort of reparation to occur. The understanding of Asperger Syndrome shown by Bob is I think of greater value than yours. His stories of 'adjusting' to his aspie-type personality and actively learning/decoding the social world are useful. Myers-Briggs is a whole other ball of wax. It wants to reliably separate out humans into distinct useful personality preferences. If It fails to detect the kind of 'personality type' you assume is Asperger Syndrome it's a bit thin, if it does detect it, it speaks to the validity of AS. If you have read case histories, or case studies, or even the work of Asperger himself, or read what Bob Kolker has written about his struggles to be/appear a neuro-Norm, I think you would be less categorical. If you were familiar with the life-course of those who live with what they call AS, then I think you would sharpen your curiosity and add to your conceptual understanding. In lieu of study, you seem to be sweeping away what does not fit your preconceived ideas. Why use an analogy that is so strained? This is logically fallacious. No doctor or psychiatrist or psychologist is going to offer a "cure" for Asperger Syndrome, let alone Autism. There is no drug for AS or Autism. There are, of course, many pedagogical interventions, and behavioural therapies, which address particular social and behavioural deficits. I don't think your analogy holds for the situation you want to address. I think you are pretty ignorant of the lived reality that 'aspies' (in particular) represent. I suggest you push back the darkness on this issue. Where do you get such categorical summaries? Is there some clear evidence that what you claim is true? Have you a quote from the producers, writers, and Parsons? Frankly, the more I read the repetition of the Asperger Was A Nazi trope, the less I believed it. You would think that after a few years of such claims, you would have managed to put forward some objective evidence.

Michael -- Is Asperger's Syndrome a real thing or just trendy psycho-babble? If you've done little research yet (on the subject of Autism/Asperger Syndrome/Autism spectrum disorder), Asperger Syndrome can seem to be an item of psycho-babble, I suppose. If you can hold in mind the constellation of symptoms of Autism, and understand things like when the first indications of 'difference' make themselves known in a given individual, it makes more sense to think of a disorder which varies along a scale, with severe, profound, ineradicable deficits at one pole and near 'normal' at the other end. If by "real thing" you mean a real 'difference' or 'mental disability' or real 'deficits,' then yes, it is a real enough thing, a real enough condition with understandable criteria. However, if you believe that many, most or all so-called mental disorders are merely a subset of a large continuum of thoroughly normal behaviour, then you might think Asperger Disorder is an artifact -- an artifact of an over-the-top psychiatric profession, a profession whose raison d'etre is to medicalize or pathologize ordinary human variation. Here's how the Autism Speaks website introduces Asperger Syndrome: Do read on at the link, Kyrel. It will probably orient you fairly well to what makes Bob call himself an 'aspie' ... Bob self-identifies as 'aspie' (the short-hand assumed by those with AS), and has had a lifetime of learning to understand behaviour and communication of non-AS folks. Here's one of his posts wherein he discusses his own case. It is among many. Kyrel, you may have been on to something in general terms -- slinging about psychiatric diagnoses is not a job for amateurs, as the amateurs may incorrectly sweep individuals into a given diagnostic pile: As a diagnostic criteria, it is not so loose, really, and no insult is implied in either the term Asperger Syndrome nor in the self-applied insider badge of 'aspie.' That's not the way it works. I mean, you or I cannot credibly diagnose Rand, Branden, Kelley or Peikoff with AS. We can't, moreover, make a stab at accurate diagnosis unless we are able 'tick off all the boxes'. As far as I can tell, as a sanity check, none of those folks ever reported the same kinds of issues Bob Kolker has here. The specificity of the diagnostic criteria would tend to rule out AS as a 'diagnosis' of Rand, Branden, Kelley and Peikoff. MSK was, I think, being playful when he suggested "I'm almost as aspie as you [Kyrel] are." He, I think, was playing on a degree of 'puzzlement' at normal, neurotypical human behaviour. In other words, he shares some of Bob's puzzlement, and so do you. I don't think he had a diagnostic hat on beyond the quip. This does not compute, Brant. Your own musings do not correspond to the suite of developmental problems that attend the infancy and childhood of folks diagnosed with AS, nor the common 'deficits' of the high-functioning autistic folks. You've cited some of the criteria for the Autism Spectrum, you will no doubt adjust your conclusions upon further thought. I find Bob to be straightforward about his own situation; I bet that if another person related the same development deficits as Bob's you would probably accept a self-designation as 'aspie' from that guy too. (fluent, confident talk does not contradict a Dx of Asperger Syndrome/High-functioning Autism. I think one can be a tremendous talker -- and teacher -- like the wonderful Temple Grandin) and still remain profoundly autistic. We need also to bear in mind that AS folks like Grandin may have needed exceptional teaching tailored to their communicative deficits to allow them to achieve superior language fluency) For added vexing details, note that the criteria for a diagnosis of autism have been updated in the newest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the DSM-V). Asperger's Syndrome has been removed as a separate disorder. The entire current DSM criteria are excerpted at the Canadian Autism site. The meaty part: -- I see MSK has typed out the word fucking for the first time in a week, so perhaps nothing more needs be said on 'aspies' and their possibly bogus syndrome ...

Perhaps I am, but I found the scandalous 'scoop' in the Telegraph -- and the continuing playout of the Goddard claims -- to be interesting, telling, worthy of attention. I was interested enough in the topic to read discussion involving Goddard and his critics on the 'other side' and to understand where Goddard had made his mistakes. I posted some of what I researched above in this thread. (more discussion has continued to play out at Watts' blog, at Goddard's, and elsewhere**). It looks like Goddard was wrong, and not for the first time. If attempts to understand and explicate a contentious issue makes one a scoundrel, then scoundrel I am, and scoundrel I will continue to be, my dear Wolf -- along with the scoundrels Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre (whom you might have noticed, disassemble Goddard's methodology). Slightly off-topic, some scandalous numbers from the Wall Street Journal __________________ ** From Goddard's blog (emphasis added) NikFromNYC says:June 25, 2014 at 10:47 am Goddard willfully sponsors a hostile and utterly reason averse and pure tribal culture on his very high traffic skeptical blog where about a dozen political fanatics are cheered on by a half dozen tag along crackpots who all pile on anybody who offers constructive criticism. His blog alone is responsible for the continuing and very successful negative stereotyping of mainstream skepticism by a highly funded alarmist PR machine. His overpoliticization of climate model skepticism results in a great inertia by harshly alienating mostly liberal academic scientists and big city professionals who also lean left but who might otherwise be open to reason. I live two blocks from NASA GISS above Tom’s Diner, just above the extremely liberal Upper West Side and my main hassle in stating facts and showing official data plots is online extremism being pointed out by Al Gore’s activist crowd along with John Cook’s more sophisticated obfuscation crowd. Goddard’s regular conspiracy theory about CIA drug use to brainwash school kids into shooting incidents in order to disarm conservatives in preparation for concentration camps for conservatives is something skeptics should stop ignoring and start actively shunning. His blog is the crack house of skepticism.