Mark

Though the Boston Marathon attracts foreign runners it’s still a very local affair. There are no big company sponsors, no prize money. The winner gets a bowl of hot beans, at least he used to. Broadly speaking there are four possibilities for who was responsible for this atrocity: (1) A nutcase like Eric Robert Rudolph of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, (2) elements within the government as with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, (3) another group either Israeli or sympathetic to Israel that wants to keep the U.S. at war with the Middle East, (4) Muslims who hate Americans for supporting a government at war with them. One of these is the butcher. Keep that in mind because you can be sure the government is itching to make it number 4, and they will omit the context and trash anyone who brings it up. On the Internet you can view as many photos of Mideast children turned into a bloody mess by U.S. bombs for as long as you can stand, mass butchery for absolutely nothing, but the Neocons – and the Ayn Rand Institute – will be screaming at the top of their lungs "they hate us ’cuz we’re free." In cases 2 through 4 it will be the U.S. government that is hateful.

That would be Richard Jewell, only he died of natural causes and not depression.

The article doesn't say how the man (Ali Stevenson, a college running coach) knew. Perhaps he drew a conclusion: he saw police officers leading dogs that were sniffing around and asked himself what the dogs were for. Maybe they needed a walk, maybe they were bomb sniffing dogs, ... The "former agent" interviewed on FOX probably knows less about this than the man who was there. And I would trust the man before I trusted a random former federal agent. Note the more important point. The man (Stevenson) said: "They kept making announcements to the participants do not worry, it's just a training exercise." (It's not clear if this refers to the dogs or to the policemen on the building roofs.)

Mr. Kolker doesn't state his point openly, he only insinuates. Stated openly he would be seen as ridiculous. We will never be able to fight for liberty effectively without knowing the corruption of current government, corruption as in gangsters. They are easily capable of murdering and maiming to further an agenda. Some links about this in a post of another thread.

www.local15tv.com/mostpopular/story/UM-Coach-Bomb-Sniffing-Dogs-Spotters-on-Roofs/BrirjAzFPUKKN8z6eSDJEA.cspx

It would be rash to speculate at this point, so I’ll be rash. Five bombs in separate locations suggests a group was responsible rather than a lone nut. That in turn suggests, though doesn’t necessarily imply, sophistication and competence. Yet three of the five bombs were duds. [ADDED: An updated story is being put out that there were two bombs and no duds. No reason is given for the error regarding the alleged duds. I don't know which story is true. (As with OKC, the initial story might contain more truth.)] One possibility is that they were duds intentionally. The duds’ existence increased the terror, yet minimized the casualties. If the duds were intentional this means the act almost surely was "homegrown" – in the sense of perpetrated by the U.S. government or some other gang wanting to increase government power or keep the "War on Terrorism" going. It’s good to see people here who understand this motivation. Regarding Muslim terrorism, which is certainly a possibility, it’s the price of the U.S. having entered Israel’s wars in the Middle East. If you enter a war, expect to be treated as a combatant. Was it worth it, is a question.

To appreciate music not only must you remember what came before, it helps to have whatever the aural analogue to an eidetic memory is. By that I mean that sounds sort of hang in the air, you can hear them over for a time. The advantages of an aural memory should be obvious: hearing repeated motifs, suspense, relations from one phrase and section to another. The advantage is more than that too but I haven't analyzed it. Anyway, one note isolated from another would be just a series of tinkles without meaning.

Nice catch. From what's become known as the Money Speech in Atlas Shrugged. (Hypebole, by the way, exaggeration to make a point.) Inserting, "in a word, crony capitalism" would not have been her style, but it fits perfectly.

Administrator: Please remove and ban "jts" from this thread.

The Internet is Being Slaughtered in the Back Room - the police state’s granular Internet tap - by Paul Rosenberg (abridged and copy edited) A group called the Secure Inter-Domain Routing Working Group is working on a technology called Secure Border Gateway Protocol, or BGPSEC. BGP (without the SEC) is how autonomous networks tell each other which IP addresses are available behind them, and it is necessary for the Internet to work. No BGP would mean no Internet. Routing information exchanged over BGP is currently not verifiable. That can be a problem, especially because of a spying scheme called hijacking. The fix for this involves the verification of unique resources (like IP addresses). BGPSEC is one possible solution, among several. Under BGPSEC (and using a protocol called Resource Public Key Infrastructure or RPKI) a permanent hierarchy is created: rigid, centralized and mandatory. It is a solution to highjacking, at the cost of complete dominance. Another solution would be to give out resources without hierarchy, like Bitcoin does for currency, but the people pushing BGPSEC ignore all such possibilities. While BGPSEC guarantees that no one can hijack the top layers of its hierarchy, it allows its top layers to hijack anyone, at any time. In other words, it centralizes absolute power – precisely what the Internet once freed us from. The group that will distribute resources (such as IP addresses) is called IANA, and it is more or less controlled by the State Department of the U.S. government. Worse, RPKI can use another protocol (called Neighborhood Discovery) to take over any IP address they want – even a single IP address. So, the people at the top of the BGPSEC pyramid will be able to shut down a whole country or a single troublemaker. They will also be able to spy on anyone they wish to, while preventing anyone from spying on them. There are technical difficulties with BGPSEC. The required cryptography, for example, is complicated and it may slow down route changes. But another core protocol called DNSSEC had similar issues, and it became a standard anyway. People threw resources at the problem and got used to it. The average user never knew. The same thing will happen with BGPSEC. The bosses will compromise at some level, slide it into the arena, and before many years it will become mandatory. There will be fewer highjacking attacks, but the Internet will be fully enslaved and the U.S. will be a super-empowered spymaster. The technical discussions for this are going on right now, and the free Internet is being destroyed as we speak. The military-industrial-intel-control-fetish complex wants this. US government-funded contractors and US government agencies (like the National Institute of Standards & Technology) are the big pushers. The process works, more or less, like this: A real routing problem is identified by researchers. A clever contractor proposes a control-friendly solution. An agency hires them. The funding cycle ends. The contractor writes an even more appealing proposal. The agency continues funding. Continue.Many people who actually run things are complaining about BGPSEC. These complaints will either be ignored, or will be used to write still more proposals, with more contractors being hired to address the problems. At the base of it all, however, are engineers – smart guys – who are willing to do whatever they are asked, so long as they get a paycheck. They are forging electronic chains for humanity, and passing it all off as "a harmless piece of software," or, "a systems design." More at The State Versus the Internet.

Ellen, Yes. (And aren't you a tactful little thing for asking me instead of telling me, LOL.) The "rabble-rousers" are not the evolutionists but those who oppose evolution. She is saying that those who oppose evolution – some of them at least – do so because they are anti-reason. If she had emphasized some opponents of the evolution theory that would be true. But it's easy to infer that she meant all, and if so she's wrong. Some people mistake a perversion of evolution, what Raymond Tallis calls Darwinitis, for evolution and consequently try to defend the dignity of man by opposing evolution. At least their motivation ought to be respected. I like to think that Rand meant "some" in her all too brief comment on evolution. In any case she should have written more clearly.

What is Rand's evidence for the "psychologizing" (by her own definition) claim in the last sentence? How would she know that the reasons given by people who want creationist accounts of species origins to be included in school curricula aren't sincere reasons? She provides no indication. The man-hatred of some evolutionists is so stark it hardly requires analysis but there’s a recently published book that does analyzes it in detail: Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity by Raymond Tallis – a British neurologist and retired physician. I read the book cover to cover. He gave a talk on the subject, videotaped here:

I don't know what BaalChatzaf meant by the term but these days "crony capitalism" can mean the collusion of business and government. That's how Ron Paul uses the term. In the case of Moelis et al the governments are foreign dictatorships.

Read the letters of Mozart, Beethoven (what few there are), and Chopin. Their composing was very much a commercial enterprise (Mozart is sort of a mixed case because he began as a court musician.) Getting back to making a list, some of the composers of Broadway musicals approach classical class. Meredith Willson (1902 – 1984) composed two symphonies as well as the music and lyrics for The Music Man, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and several independent songs. I haven't heard his symphonic works but the musicals are good enough to put him in this list. (Unfortunately according to Wikipedia one of his works is "Ask Not" that puts Kennedy’s infamous line to music.) The reason I mentioned movie music first is that "popular music," as in what you hear turning on the radio at random, is dead. Now only movie scores feature intelligent music, sometimes, and if you can stand the movie.

Leroy Anderson (1908 – 1975). He composed what you might call miniature symphonies: Bugler's Holiday Trumpeter's Lullaby Blue Tango He wrote one full scale work, a piano concerto, then withdrew it after one public performance (1953). His heirs released it and you can find performances on YouTube: Mark www.ARIwatch.com

Ninth, Read the quoted article with attention to Kuwait and KIPCO. (The raghead joke was inspired by some of the photos on KIPCO’s website.) As you know I’m behind ARI Watch. That website documents the anti-Objectivist and anti-America material coming out of the so-called Ayn Rand Institute. For what it’s worth generally speaking I don’t like Muslims (the only exceptions would be among the "happy hypocrites," that is, those who don’t take their religion seriously). Leonard Peikoff once insinuated that the New York City mosque should be bombed, which is sick. I don't think the people who built it should have been allowed to immigrate here in the first place. 　

Advertised on ARI’s website: Kenneth Moelis is a global "capitalist" who apparently has no problem helping prop up the Kuwait monarchy, a regime as brutal as Sadaam’s Iraq ever was. Here's something for him and Yaron Brook to talk about over the food: www.thenational.ae/business/banking/moelis-company-joins-dubai-finance-hub So we have the "Arab Spring of savages" on one hand and nimble athletes like Mr. Moelis on the other.

Some "classical" music writers of this century and the last who wrote for the movies: John Williams (b. 1932), e.g. first Star Wars movie Bruce Broughton (b. 1945), e.g. Baby's Day Out Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), e.g. North by Northwest Elmer Bernstein (1922-2004), e.g. The Hallelujah Trail

Gulch8, I can’t join in your good wishes to Young American’s for Liberty because they promote unrestricted immigration. Most recently they endorsed Rand Paul’s idea of immigration reform which is the beginning of a mass amnesty à la Reagan. (Note: the link in Gulch8’s post to “Ski for Light” was added by the OL advertising system.)

Ted Turner. Early in his career he advertised Atlas Shrugged on a couple hundred billboards ("Who is ..."). And let's not forget Ron Paul:

Please leave out Paul Ryan, Alan Greenspan, and John MacKey. The last is in part getting rich on food stamps, and he puts it in your face: www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blog/food-stamped-do-something-reel-film-festival -- an insult to everyone living on a budget. Not only does Whole Foods get the increased revenue from selling to food stamp people, the government reimburses Whole Foods more than the list price of the food. In other words, they make more money selling to food stamp people. People not on food stamps are forced to pay for the food stamps of those who are. That would be bad enough, but food stamps also drive up the price of food, so food costs you more than it would otherwise. In so far as people can hold a low paying job and receive food stamps at the same time, food stamps enable employers to pay lower wages. Food stamps drive down wages for all low income people, even the ones not on food stamps. The Corpos are taking over, and they know the lynchpins. It doesn't get any more basic than food. And don’t say MacKey is just competing with other grocers who do the same thing. He could make a real statement, one that would make the national news, by refusing SNAP or whatever food stamps are called these days, and advertising that instead of the demoralizing spectacle under the link above. Whole Foods would remain profitable, if not quite so profitable, and people would believe MacKey was sincere in his book.

I could care less.

This flocking of birds is tomorrow, Thursday, at 7:00 pm PST in Giedt 1001. It will be the 12th time an ARI writer and Daniel Pipes have appeared together. Mark www.ARIwatch.com/BirdsOfAFeather.htm

The assassination of a U.S. president is no joking manner. As has been pointed out by others, “conspiracy theory” is, in Objectivist parlance, an anti-concept. It’s a package deal designed to obliterate the legitimate distinction between rational and irrational analysis of a crime. Besides being called a “conspiracy theorist” usually anyone who doubts an official story is accused of being “crazy” to boot, which again in Objectivist parlance is the fallacy of Argument from Intimidation. Ayn Rand herself recognized at least two crimes that the powers that be label “conspiracy theory”: (1) F. D. Roosevelt’s deliberately leaving the Pacific Fleet vulnerable so that something like Pearl Harbor was inevitable and he could use it as an excuse to convince a peace-loving people to enter Europe’s war. (2) Private industrialists’ financing and construction of Soviet Russia’s industrial base. You’ll find more government corruption -- as in gangsters -- than you could read about in a month at: Government Corruption Kurt Haskell and the Underwear Bomber Rodney Stich, former federal agent Mark www.ARIwatch.com

That's the title of a panel discussion scheduled for Thursday April 11, 2013 at the University of California, Davis, featuring: Daniel Pipes – Middle East Forum, Clarion Fund.Elan Journo – Ayn Rand Institute.Larry Greenfield – American Freedom Alliance, Claremont Institute, Reagan Legacy Foundation, Wexner Foundation.From the Ayn Rand Institute's blurb: “Where are things heading in the Israel-Palestinian conflict? What should America’s policy be toward the region, and toward Israel in particular?” Mr. Pipes is a self-proclaimed neoconservative. Mr. Greenfield is the author of “Liberal Jews and the Legacy of Neoconservatism” (American Thinker September 27, 2009) where he writes: “... neoconservatism should be analyzed and respected on its own merits as a rich and deep contribution to modern conservatism. The case study of neoconservative patriarchs Kristol and Podhoretz inspires celebration and contemplation.”and goes down from there.