caroljane

Er, excuse me , I happen to be an alto and he happened to be an eagle. Did the term "screaming eagle" fall unabetted from the sky?

Go ahead, take his side. Just what he used to say, he would die if he had to listen to me any longer...

Cats are basically coldhearted murderers except the stupid ones, like ours. I love cats. Is that a kind of Randianism in me which I am repressing? I don't like human murderers at all, that I know of.

And he made fun of my Eaglish all the time, even though that stupid language only has 78 words. And he only knew 62 of them.

It is good to know that a rational woman is in charge of you Mikee. She has my deepest empathies!

Your Smokey reminds me of my dearly missed Satan, resentful great-great-grandmother of many, who was adopted to kill mice but turned out to be more terrified of them than we were. If she had ever seen a rat she would probably not have lived to reproduce.

I only wish. He was so possessive and controlling, but anytime I tried to open honest communication he would see another squirrel, and make excuses to break off dialogue, and he would never even let me cook them and he KNEW I hated squirrel anyway. Would it have killed him to predate on a nice rabbit sometime?...Don't get me started.

Sticks and stones may break my bones Mikee, but your avatar is so great that you can never hurt me. (Please don't change it just to torment - think of the others who would be deprived! Other individualists that you like, I mean. Totally your right to not think of them.

Yeahwell, I've had plenty awkward dates. As I mentioned to Frediano I dated an eagle once and that was no flight in the park. Well, actually it was... still shudder to think about it.

Adam! Good heavens, what a misconstruction. I will have you know I usually thank a gentleman at the end, not the beginning.

Thanks Brant. \Please drive safe as you navigate your rig across the bridge I live under

This excellent post confirms what I do instinctively feel when I hear, and especially read, such reports, not that I understand the math, but I do understand "lies, damn lies and statistics.". The leader of our government is a free-market economist (you may have heard he does not get on that well with Obama). I did not vote for him of course, but I am a fatalist and in a long life found things to adjust to change, mostly by unintended consequences, in ways I could not predict. Even my dice throws were more accurate than those of the economists. Minor correction, as you are probably aware we do not vote for a federal leader, only our local representatives. I meant that I did not vote for the Conservative candidate in my riding. The government leader of course is the head of the party that wins the most seats.

Just wondering.

A collectivist position is what he is seeking: a large collection of people and groups influential enough to help implement his agenda of hatred. He is about as individualist as bin Laden was.

Correct. Well, I must respect your principles. But it is poor Neil who must now, without expert guidance, seek for someone to call him names and abuse his character.

How well I know that. My just-mentioned hero Paul the Octopus was even more unpalatable than me, lucky for him. In a suspenseful moment of his life, he was guaranteed to be on display and not on the menu, -- well, you really have to be a Paul fan to understand. Whoever wrote that Wiki entry is a genius.

You will get your cut like always. Have I ever let you down? Mikee mistakes my stream of consciousness style of posting for a deliberate attack on his values. He doesn't know me but sees me as part of a collective. Fair enough.

You are talking about context I think Michael. Presidents who write things are presidents who write things, objectively, and interpreting the writings is the work of scholars and legal experts== am I wrong?

This previous post was In Memoriam for Paul the Octupus, sadly deceased. We shall not fish for your like again.

This excellent post confirms what I do instinctively feel when I hear, and especially read, such reports, not that I understand the math, but I do understand "lies, damn lies and statistics.". The leader of our government is a free-market economist (you may have heard he does not get on that well with Obama). I did not vote for him of course, but I am a fatalist and in a long life found things to adjust to change, mostly by unintended consequences, in ways I could not predict. Even my dice throws were more accurate than those of the economists.

I guess I win the essay contest.

Not even if you can dress up in the robes and weild the gavel?

Rand's view of ordinary people, as demonstrated in your use of the term, comprised a very small part of civil society; she depicted the potential of ordinary in Eddie Willers, and frequently said that every individual is capable of becoming rational and more intelligent. However I do not think she had much hope that every individual would do this. Her ordinary people all seemed to be western Europeans and Americans anyway. ||Aboriginal Americans, in their millions, she dismissed as uncivilized, and of the rest of the planet she seldom commented upon. Only the best and the brightest belong in Galt's Gulch, or deserve their lives at all, if they would just think about it.

Cripes! Is this your example of a bright wellread person with good ideas? If receiving such missives is your idea of fun, I suggest you consult with Adam.

Ayn Rand, I think, perceived the population of a civil society as very small, maybe somewhat the population of Aristotle's Athens, or St Petersburg's middle class, or Galt's Gulch The millions of individuals outside were to her , mindless barbarians who wished to destroy civil society for the sake of destruction, because of their animal envy. She has acknowledged many times, that any individual amongst those millions if showing merit should be raised to admission to civil society, and that every individual has the potential to become civilized and intelligent. But I don't think she was optimistic that most of them would.