I am editing this post to add an important preface.
Damning indictment of black Berkey Filters from a supplier
The above link is an audio YouTube session. Move the slider to about 1 hour 23 min into the session to hear twenty minutes of carefully worded comments about New Millennium and how the highly promoted black Berkey filter is nothing more than a cheap $3 carbon block filter, that because of the design of the holder is destined to fail.
If these claims are true, New Millennium has been INTENTIONALLY selling a defective product, the highly touted black Berkey filter, using completely unsubstantiated claims of effectiveness, and when used to filter non-potable water, failures of this filter COULD KILL YOU.
Where before, I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt, my strong personal opinion has changed to "DO NOT BUY A BLACK BERKEY FILTER, and destroy and throw out any ones you may have to prevent their use."
Read through the rest of this post if you need more convincing or want to know the full story of my research.
Reports of black Berkey filters breaking or becoming unglued at the base keep coming in across the net. This is an acknowledged defect by the manufacturer. Many people are totally confused by the marketing of these "candle" type filters and do not understand who is responsible. There are, as far as I know, about three or four main makers of such candle type filters.
The primary maker, with a long history and excellent reputation, has been British Berkfeld, which has gone through changes and become a part of Fairey Ceramics of England. This company also makes the "Doulton" brand filters.
In the United States, there is a company called New Millennium Concepts, Ltd., which claims to make the "Berkey" filters within the U.S.. These are the filters that are having problems. They are black in color.
Korea has a company called Korea Ceramics, which makes a white filter similar to the Doulton filters.
China has a manufacturer called Paijing China, which makes filters that are like the Doulton, as well as another that appears to be like the black Berkey, although there seems to be no ready documentation about it on the net.
The concept of filtration through micropores is very old. I have run across old photos of filter furniture in Caribbean homes where a vertical box contained a top water container, a block of porous limestone or coral, and a catchment. Candle filters use a fused diatomatious earth in what looks like a porcelain 10" tall cylinder with a domed top. The material has a relatively consistence porous nature that has small enough holes that most dangerous bacteria and organisms cannot penetrate it.
The purpose of this post is to provide links so that people can understand which company is doing what, and the correct operation of these filters. I have no connection with any of these companies other than having purchased a Big Berkey from James Filters, and specifically requesting the Doulton brand of filters, due to their long reputation and use in third world countries. Doulton has a current NSF certification. The NSF website shows no other certified filters. I make NO claims other than that I am satisfied with the operation of the Doulton filters I purchased. Readers may click on the links, read, and make their own conclusions.
http://www.survivalunlimited.com/wat...waterintro.htm
http://doultonusa.com/HTML%20pages/history.htm
http://www.jamesfilter.com/faireyceramics.aspx
http://www.faireyceramics.com/freque...questions.html
Q26) Does FICL manufacture the Berkey filter range including the Black Berkey filter element?
A26) British Berkefeld is an FICL trademark. Berkey is not an FICL trademark. FICL manufactures all British Berkefeld branded filter products. FICL manufactures some British Berkefeld branded Super Sterasyl grade ceramic filter candles which are used inside certain Berkey filter systems. FICL is not involved in the manufacture of Black Berkey filter elements or any other Berkey branded filter products.
http://www.britishberkefeld.com/faq.html
10) Does New Millennium Concepts, Ltd. (NMCL) manufacture the British Berkefeld® range of Super Sterasyl ceramic filtration candles, including the British Berkefeld® water filtration system?
Berkey®, Big Berkey® and Black Berkey® are trademarks registered to New Millennium Concepts, Ltd. British Berkefeld® is not an NMCL trademark. NMCL manufaturers all water purification systems and elements bearing the Berkey® trademark. NMCL manufacturers some Big Berkey® systems using British Berkefeld® branded ceramic filter elements. NMCL is not involved in the manufacturer of these ceramic filter elements or any other British Berkefeld® branded filter product. Since 1998 New Millennium Concepts, Ltd. has been the
North American Master Distributor for British Berkefeld® stainless steel gravity filters and replacement ceramic filter candles. British Berkefeld® is a registered trademark of Fairey Industrial Ceramics Limited, UK.
Since Fairey denies manufacture, obviously there is some other plant somewhere making the elements.
The following link shows that NMCL is actually located at a house in a residential neighborhood. This is not the expected place for a ceramics factory.
http://www.list-corp.com/b2b_directo...cepts_LTD.html
This link gets interesting when you search the word "millennium" within it:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=541335
This is also interesting:
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=201621.0
What I find ultimately troubling is that no matter how hard I search, I don't seem to be able to locate any actual ceramic filter manufacturing facilities, which are supposedly in the United States. I did however, find this:
http://paijingchina.en.alibaba.com/p...Cartridge.html
Go to the bottom of the page where the images are and mouse hover over the second one. Look familiar? Other than black Berkey filters, this is the only image of a black candle filter I have been able to find.
I can draw some inferences and tentative conclusions, but those who have read all the links I have provided can become better educated by doing that on their own.
As noted above, British Berkefeld is an FICL trademark. Berkey®, Big Berkey® and Black Berkey® are trademarks registered to New Millennium Concepts, Ltd.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Make your own DVDs
I have watched over the years as television evolved and blossomed into some good educational programs, then started to become less and less accurate, more filled with commercials and those annoying little pop-ups at the bottom of the screen, to the point that commercial and cable/satellite television is now largely unwatchable.
We have Netflix and Blockbuster by mail, and those serve for entertainment, but when the local public tv station is showing an Antiques Roadshow from 2007 in prime time, it is obvious that the potential has "left the building."
We are on Hughesnet satellite service, which severely limits our streaming options, but that has pushed me into learning how to download some of the streaming content and convert it into DVD format for viewing (and REviewing) at our leisure.
How is it done? I'll walk you through the steps.
First you need a relatively decent computer and a DVD burner. I got a liteon USB burner from Buy.com that has lightscribe capabilities. It also can burn on both DVD-R and DVD+R disks. (DVD+R is a little better)
Next, you'll need some DVD disks. At first, just get some inexpensive disks from someplace local like Big Lots or Walmart. Plan on making a few coasters.
Next, you will want to download two programs. Sothink Movie DVD Maker, and DVD Styler. Both are free. Why two programs? Sothink has great video format conversion software but a junky and limited output that has an annoying lead-in to every program. DVD Styler doesn't convert well, but allows you to make a much better looking set of menus. Install both before going further.
Where to get interesting material? TED talks has free downloadable short lectures on various subjects. Just go here: Ted Talks and chose a couple and download according to instructions. Make TV has some free downloadable 25 minute programs as well. You can search elsewhere, Yale and Oxford have lectures available online.
For your first DVD, open up Sothink, click on the add button and add two of the Ted videos * without a blank DVD in your DVD recorder* When you click on the burn DVD button, a warning will pop up. Select Ignore on the warning. DO NOT DO ANYTHING IN SOTHINK AFTER THIS.
When Sothink tells you the files have been created, open your Windows Temporary folder, which is usually:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temp
(You can either browse to that location on your computer or just copy the line, press the Windows Start button, find the "Run" line, and paste it there and press enter.) You will find two big honkin video files in that folder. Highlight them, select edit/copy or press Ctrl C, then open a "My Computer" window and find a folder you can stash these files in, and press Edit Paste or Ctrl V to paste them in place in that other folder.
Once the files are safely copied, close the Sothink program and open the DVD Styler program. Using that program, find the files you just stashed and move them into the program, make a menu (you can use your own pictures for a background), place a blank disk in the DVD drive, and burn your DVD.
There you have it. Toss the disk in your DVD player or send it to a friend.
Try to use a sharpie to label your DVD or buy lightscribe disks and burn the labels on with the lightscribe software. Using stick-on labels can unbalance the disk (which rotates at high speed) or gum up the works if the label starts to come loose.
We have Netflix and Blockbuster by mail, and those serve for entertainment, but when the local public tv station is showing an Antiques Roadshow from 2007 in prime time, it is obvious that the potential has "left the building."
We are on Hughesnet satellite service, which severely limits our streaming options, but that has pushed me into learning how to download some of the streaming content and convert it into DVD format for viewing (and REviewing) at our leisure.
How is it done? I'll walk you through the steps.
First you need a relatively decent computer and a DVD burner. I got a liteon USB burner from Buy.com that has lightscribe capabilities. It also can burn on both DVD-R and DVD+R disks. (DVD+R is a little better)
Next, you'll need some DVD disks. At first, just get some inexpensive disks from someplace local like Big Lots or Walmart. Plan on making a few coasters.
Next, you will want to download two programs. Sothink Movie DVD Maker, and DVD Styler. Both are free. Why two programs? Sothink has great video format conversion software but a junky and limited output that has an annoying lead-in to every program. DVD Styler doesn't convert well, but allows you to make a much better looking set of menus. Install both before going further.
Where to get interesting material? TED talks has free downloadable short lectures on various subjects. Just go here: Ted Talks and chose a couple and download according to instructions. Make TV has some free downloadable 25 minute programs as well. You can search elsewhere, Yale and Oxford have lectures available online.
For your first DVD, open up Sothink, click on the add button and add two of the Ted videos * without a blank DVD in your DVD recorder* When you click on the burn DVD button, a warning will pop up. Select Ignore on the warning. DO NOT DO ANYTHING IN SOTHINK AFTER THIS.
When Sothink tells you the files have been created, open your Windows Temporary folder, which is usually:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temp
(You can either browse to that location on your computer or just copy the line, press the Windows Start button, find the "Run" line, and paste it there and press enter.) You will find two big honkin video files in that folder. Highlight them, select edit/copy or press Ctrl C, then open a "My Computer" window and find a folder you can stash these files in, and press Edit Paste or Ctrl V to paste them in place in that other folder.
Once the files are safely copied, close the Sothink program and open the DVD Styler program. Using that program, find the files you just stashed and move them into the program, make a menu (you can use your own pictures for a background), place a blank disk in the DVD drive, and burn your DVD.
There you have it. Toss the disk in your DVD player or send it to a friend.
Try to use a sharpie to label your DVD or buy lightscribe disks and burn the labels on with the lightscribe software. Using stick-on labels can unbalance the disk (which rotates at high speed) or gum up the works if the label starts to come loose.
Friday, July 15, 2011
The old pear tree
I haven't posted anything in a while, so I just decided it is time to post a free verse poem / teaching story of mine. Like most decent teaching stories, the best fruit isn't a pear ant:
An old pear tree stands on the brow of the hill, the road to Pulaski in front of it, the garden of vegetables behind it.
The summer sun raises high. The sweating politician walks up the hill to the tree, wipes his forehead, and practices his speech before knocking at the next farmhouse:
“Greetings neighbor! You must be concerned about the state of affairs in our fine area. Why the Republicans in this town have denied the widows and the children a decent living, against the Word, while fattening their own wallets! May I count on your support?”
He plucks a pear, eats it, and with a satisfied smile continues on his way refreshed.
The pear tree stands mute, having absorbed the vibrations of the words, waiting, as pear trees will, for a gentle rain.
The brow of the hill is a convenient stop for all those who pass by. The next day, another politician climbs the hill and stops in the shade of the tree, and as politicians are wont to do, is motivated to orate his stump speech.
“Hello fine friend. How are you feeling today? Good, good. I’m doin’ fine myself. may I ask for your vote in the next election? Those Democrats that want to take over our fine area would make us pay more taxes, to the point that we could no longer afford to live here.”
He plucks a pear to eat, eyes it like a magpie, considers that it is a fine pear, and picks a second one to put in his pocket, so that he may enjoy it later. Smiling at his own intelligence, he continues on his route.
The pear tree stands mute, having absorbed the vibrations of the words, waiting, as pear trees will, for a gentle rain.
The following day the traveling preacher on his mule climbs the hill. This being another hot day, he too stops in the shade of the pear tree.
He picks a pear, dutifully thanks the Lord for the blessing of providing fruit so that he may continue to practice the Lord’s work, and after consecrating the fruit, partakes of its sweetness. He muses how that only the chosen can be drawn up to Heaven to sit on the right side of God, and that even this fine pear tree, another of God’s creations will be denied that glory. Inspired, he practices a line of his sermon.
“Yes, you too, brother must see the wickedness of your ways. It is only through Jesus that you can be saved, and it is only through the proper teaching of His Word that only I can provide, that you will reach Jesus!”
Knowing that he sermon of fire and brimstone will require a lot of energy and work, he plucks a half dozen pears to take with him and share with the believers.
The pear tree stands mute, having absorbed the vibrations of the words, waiting, as pear trees will, for a gentle rain.
The wife of the old couple comes out with a dishpan full of dirty dishwater. She takes it to the garden, where the plants are wilting from the heat and lack of rain, and spreads the water around the most needy of the plants. She then comes to the pear tree, and notices the missing pears. She takes the last of the low hanging pears and looks up, thankful that the juiciest and largest pears are up out of easy reach, where they can be plucked later, to be stored and canned for the winter.
The pear tree stands mute, waiting, as pear trees will, for a gentle rain.
That night, the communion of the rain comes. The next morning, the sun begins by filtering through the taller trees to the southeast, touching its branches in a late morning wake-up call.
The old pear tree stands on the brow of the hill, the road to Pulaski in front of it, the garden of vegetables behind it.
An old pear tree stands on the brow of the hill, the road to Pulaski in front of it, the garden of vegetables behind it.
The summer sun raises high. The sweating politician walks up the hill to the tree, wipes his forehead, and practices his speech before knocking at the next farmhouse:
“Greetings neighbor! You must be concerned about the state of affairs in our fine area. Why the Republicans in this town have denied the widows and the children a decent living, against the Word, while fattening their own wallets! May I count on your support?”
He plucks a pear, eats it, and with a satisfied smile continues on his way refreshed.
The pear tree stands mute, having absorbed the vibrations of the words, waiting, as pear trees will, for a gentle rain.
The brow of the hill is a convenient stop for all those who pass by. The next day, another politician climbs the hill and stops in the shade of the tree, and as politicians are wont to do, is motivated to orate his stump speech.
“Hello fine friend. How are you feeling today? Good, good. I’m doin’ fine myself. may I ask for your vote in the next election? Those Democrats that want to take over our fine area would make us pay more taxes, to the point that we could no longer afford to live here.”
He plucks a pear to eat, eyes it like a magpie, considers that it is a fine pear, and picks a second one to put in his pocket, so that he may enjoy it later. Smiling at his own intelligence, he continues on his route.
The pear tree stands mute, having absorbed the vibrations of the words, waiting, as pear trees will, for a gentle rain.
The following day the traveling preacher on his mule climbs the hill. This being another hot day, he too stops in the shade of the pear tree.
He picks a pear, dutifully thanks the Lord for the blessing of providing fruit so that he may continue to practice the Lord’s work, and after consecrating the fruit, partakes of its sweetness. He muses how that only the chosen can be drawn up to Heaven to sit on the right side of God, and that even this fine pear tree, another of God’s creations will be denied that glory. Inspired, he practices a line of his sermon.
“Yes, you too, brother must see the wickedness of your ways. It is only through Jesus that you can be saved, and it is only through the proper teaching of His Word that only I can provide, that you will reach Jesus!”
Knowing that he sermon of fire and brimstone will require a lot of energy and work, he plucks a half dozen pears to take with him and share with the believers.
The pear tree stands mute, having absorbed the vibrations of the words, waiting, as pear trees will, for a gentle rain.
The wife of the old couple comes out with a dishpan full of dirty dishwater. She takes it to the garden, where the plants are wilting from the heat and lack of rain, and spreads the water around the most needy of the plants. She then comes to the pear tree, and notices the missing pears. She takes the last of the low hanging pears and looks up, thankful that the juiciest and largest pears are up out of easy reach, where they can be plucked later, to be stored and canned for the winter.
The pear tree stands mute, waiting, as pear trees will, for a gentle rain.
That night, the communion of the rain comes. The next morning, the sun begins by filtering through the taller trees to the southeast, touching its branches in a late morning wake-up call.
The old pear tree stands on the brow of the hill, the road to Pulaski in front of it, the garden of vegetables behind it.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
High speed passenger rail
I think I can convince you that there is a great alternative to high speed rail. I've been plugging away trying to get the idea out there for years, but the entrenched money is in the status quo, so it falls on deaf ears. Here is my pitch.
High speed passenger rail is an outdated concept. Few people understand how labor intensive and insecure rail transport was and is. I can cite case after case of disgruntled rail employees and union sympathizers in the 1800s and early 1900s who wrecked trains and rail routes. In the sky, there is no easy access to a flying plane, and the average terrorist has to at least buy a ticket on his way to his heaven. On the ground, every inch of track is a potential weak point to terrorist threat.
Further, make no mistake, the claims of the high-speed rail folks are NOT aimed towards helping the average commuter. If you examine the various plans, they promote high speed transport along tourist corridors. The promoters have all the skills of lampreys homing in on their big fish, the over-funded government agencies and more gullible greenies, so that they can suck the money out of them. That is the real driving force of the high speed rail movement. Please don't fall for the hype of the promoters.
Passenger rail failed in the U.S. There were a number of factors involved in the demise, but the biggest was the effect of better roads and rubber tires. A lot of folks don't know that during the heyday of passenger rail, in many areas of the U.S. the roads were closed for the winter and spring mud seasons, and other passable roads were expensive turnpikes.
In the 1800s, people were literally hostage to the railroad timetables. If an area had two trains a day, a trip to the nearest city could often be a two or three day trip. That was a bad idea back then, and is totally impractical today.
During those Halcyon days of rail travel, many competing railroads actually scheduled trains to AVOID good interconnections. In one case in Essex Junction Vermont, an engineer was seen actively backing his train away from the station because he had mistakenly arrived in time for people to make connections with the competing line. I have cites if needed.
When good concrete was rediscovered in England, and Macadam figured out how to use a little bit of asphaltum to create a tarred road, the surface roads got a technological boost that made them a superior to the railroads for transporting people and goods.
Why did cities look at paved roads, rubber tires and autos with such favor? Automobiles and bicycles didn't coat towns with cinders like steam trains. Cleaning horse doo was costly, leaving it on the streets was not possible, since it was a health hazard, and the metal tires and horseshoes ground gravel and pebbles and paving stones into dust, which went everywhere. From 1900 to 1910, there was a revolution in transportation that was every bit a game changer as much as the introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s and subsequent interconnected communication of those computers. Both passenger rail and street sweepers became rarities, just as the typewriter and adding machines fell to the computer.
The railroad company executives were not stupid. A lot of folks who love rail don't know that when air travel was first commercialized, rail companies bought and owned passenger planes and were themselves moving their passengers to planes whenever practical. However, the government stepped in and declared it unfair competition, so any integrated rail/air system was squashed in the bud.
In short, railroads couldn't effectively compete for passengers against the superior systems of paved roads and airplanes, especially after WWII and the improved planes and beginnings of the interstate highway system. Given the changing technologies, most of the rail operators realized that their niche market and money was in freight anyway.
Those were the real days of the "great" railroading in the U.S. that people romanticize, primarily based on fantasy and reports from the few crack (and very expensive) trains like the 20th Century Limited.
It is true that rail passenger service worked in England, even while it was failing here. That is because, let's face it, England is densely populated and only about twice the size of Texas, with much of the population concentrated in the south of England. A compliant population, historically narrow roads unsuited for automobiles, and bad flying weather made railroads the preferred mode of transport there for many years.
Returning to the present day, another problem with rail, especially new rail lines, is that they form a barrier in both a physical and legal sense. Such barriers are not well tolerated by communities anymore, making any new construction for a comprehensive system expensive and problematic.
LA Times article on one high speed rail proposal
This is what high speed rail looks like:
Note the overhead wiring and required poles. Note the swath of protected embankment and trackage and imagine the cost of acquiring the property and disruption of any existing buildings and infrastructure along the right-of-way. Even "light" rail requires moving tons of equipment, whether one passenger is aboard or one hundred. Federal regulations developed over the years require strong frames to keep accidents from "telescoping" cars from the major impact forces involved in a wreck.
If you think the current highway situation is becoming intolerable, I agree with you. However, for passenger transportation, there are less expensive and better options than rail or even trolleys and busses.
The whole skyway concept was more or less abandoned when the various elevated railways went out of favor, due to noise, blocking of light from city streets, and materials cost. There is a whole new generation of technologies that make skyways technically FAR superior to rail for passengers, if only the high-speed-rail government teat-suckers can be pushed out of the way so that attention can be focused on these newer ideas.
Next, take a serious look at the skytran idea about 1/6th of the way down the page here:
http://www.news-world.us/pics/2010/04/14/urban-transportation-by-monorail/
(Don't get caught up in the maglev hooie and hype. Cost per mile of Maglev makes it a non-starter except in unique situations.)
Notice particularly how the Skytran system does NOT create a barrier or hazard to pedestrians and animals, is safe from most tampering, is not affected by snow or rain, can be made to be extremely quiet (enclosed wheels and propulsion, compared to the wheel noise of both roads and railroads) and, with modification, has some inherent flexibility. The changes I propose have been missing from ALL new transportation proposals...
1. allow people to own their own passenger capsules, and have them semi-permanently attach to company owned standardized tractive units. That eliminates the whole "Gross! Who used this car and what diseases did they have?" routine, as well as allowing customization of cargo and passenger carrying capabilities.
Retaining standardized tractive units owned by the guideway system operators allows for guideway instrumentation that would not allow defective units to even enter the guideway, removing 99.9% of delays from disabled vehicles or accidents. Anyone can put a clunker on a public road. On a guideway as I propose, high speed travel is SAFE and consistently high speed.
2. allow the capsules to contain batteries and have 12" wheels on the bottom, so that the capsules can be driven from the home to the overhead, attach to the overhead guideway then disengage at the destination for parking and short distance slow speed ground trips. That one change of design would make many people abandon their cars in favor of such a systematic approach to transportation.
As one example of how the modified personal pod might look for a commuter system examine the vehicle here: clever green vehicle
Now imagine this basic design, with a small skyhook to attach to the overhead monorail.
Again, the pod itself would be owned by the individual, along with the drive system for the ground. The skyhook and electrical motor and components would be owned by the skyway company and leased to the pod owners, so that all repair and maintenence would be within the complete control of the skyway company.
For people who could not afford a pod, basic rental units would be available, dispatched by an automated system.
On a rainy day, it is a lot more civilized to get into a vehicle at home in a garage, sit down, then get to the destination in the same chair, and walk out into a covered parking area. Driving, walking or biking to a train station, dealing with any baggage, having to stand and wait, then walk from the train car to a taxi or bike stand or rental place is both inefficient and a hassle, especially for people with disabilities.
In contrast, the overhead guideway system avoids your having to guide the car for most of a journey, eliminates any drunk driver crossing into your guideway and crashing into you, eliminates slowpoke drivers, and gives a nice view as a bonus.
To repeat, I love rail. I think it is even better than sliced bread for most freight operations. However, use of it for passengers is hopelessly outdated, and the tribulations endured by rail passengers border on embarrassing. Resurrecting passenger rail lines for an encore performance is an idea that is wasteful, silly, and doomed to failure. Even a cursory glance at the balance sheets of past passenger rail operations will show that it simply does not work in the U.S..
High speed passenger rail is an outdated concept. Few people understand how labor intensive and insecure rail transport was and is. I can cite case after case of disgruntled rail employees and union sympathizers in the 1800s and early 1900s who wrecked trains and rail routes. In the sky, there is no easy access to a flying plane, and the average terrorist has to at least buy a ticket on his way to his heaven. On the ground, every inch of track is a potential weak point to terrorist threat.
Further, make no mistake, the claims of the high-speed rail folks are NOT aimed towards helping the average commuter. If you examine the various plans, they promote high speed transport along tourist corridors. The promoters have all the skills of lampreys homing in on their big fish, the over-funded government agencies and more gullible greenies, so that they can suck the money out of them. That is the real driving force of the high speed rail movement. Please don't fall for the hype of the promoters.
Passenger rail failed in the U.S. There were a number of factors involved in the demise, but the biggest was the effect of better roads and rubber tires. A lot of folks don't know that during the heyday of passenger rail, in many areas of the U.S. the roads were closed for the winter and spring mud seasons, and other passable roads were expensive turnpikes.
In the 1800s, people were literally hostage to the railroad timetables. If an area had two trains a day, a trip to the nearest city could often be a two or three day trip. That was a bad idea back then, and is totally impractical today.
During those Halcyon days of rail travel, many competing railroads actually scheduled trains to AVOID good interconnections. In one case in Essex Junction Vermont, an engineer was seen actively backing his train away from the station because he had mistakenly arrived in time for people to make connections with the competing line. I have cites if needed.
When good concrete was rediscovered in England, and Macadam figured out how to use a little bit of asphaltum to create a tarred road, the surface roads got a technological boost that made them a superior to the railroads for transporting people and goods.
Why did cities look at paved roads, rubber tires and autos with such favor? Automobiles and bicycles didn't coat towns with cinders like steam trains. Cleaning horse doo was costly, leaving it on the streets was not possible, since it was a health hazard, and the metal tires and horseshoes ground gravel and pebbles and paving stones into dust, which went everywhere. From 1900 to 1910, there was a revolution in transportation that was every bit a game changer as much as the introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s and subsequent interconnected communication of those computers. Both passenger rail and street sweepers became rarities, just as the typewriter and adding machines fell to the computer.
The railroad company executives were not stupid. A lot of folks who love rail don't know that when air travel was first commercialized, rail companies bought and owned passenger planes and were themselves moving their passengers to planes whenever practical. However, the government stepped in and declared it unfair competition, so any integrated rail/air system was squashed in the bud.
In short, railroads couldn't effectively compete for passengers against the superior systems of paved roads and airplanes, especially after WWII and the improved planes and beginnings of the interstate highway system. Given the changing technologies, most of the rail operators realized that their niche market and money was in freight anyway.
Those were the real days of the "great" railroading in the U.S. that people romanticize, primarily based on fantasy and reports from the few crack (and very expensive) trains like the 20th Century Limited.
It is true that rail passenger service worked in England, even while it was failing here. That is because, let's face it, England is densely populated and only about twice the size of Texas, with much of the population concentrated in the south of England. A compliant population, historically narrow roads unsuited for automobiles, and bad flying weather made railroads the preferred mode of transport there for many years.
Returning to the present day, another problem with rail, especially new rail lines, is that they form a barrier in both a physical and legal sense. Such barriers are not well tolerated by communities anymore, making any new construction for a comprehensive system expensive and problematic.
LA Times article on one high speed rail proposal
This is what high speed rail looks like:
Note the overhead wiring and required poles. Note the swath of protected embankment and trackage and imagine the cost of acquiring the property and disruption of any existing buildings and infrastructure along the right-of-way. Even "light" rail requires moving tons of equipment, whether one passenger is aboard or one hundred. Federal regulations developed over the years require strong frames to keep accidents from "telescoping" cars from the major impact forces involved in a wreck.
If you think the current highway situation is becoming intolerable, I agree with you. However, for passenger transportation, there are less expensive and better options than rail or even trolleys and busses.
The whole skyway concept was more or less abandoned when the various elevated railways went out of favor, due to noise, blocking of light from city streets, and materials cost. There is a whole new generation of technologies that make skyways technically FAR superior to rail for passengers, if only the high-speed-rail government teat-suckers can be pushed out of the way so that attention can be focused on these newer ideas.
What am I talking about? First, go to www.Shweeb.com and watch the video to see what one private company has been able to do with an elevated trackway and pedal power. Pretty neat stuff, and it looks like it might be fun, but it is obviously not for those in wheelchairs or a major transportation system.
Next, take a serious look at the skytran idea about 1/6th of the way down the page here:
http://www.news-world.us/pics/2010/04/14/urban-transportation-by-monorail/
(Don't get caught up in the maglev hooie and hype. Cost per mile of Maglev makes it a non-starter except in unique situations.)
Notice particularly how the Skytran system does NOT create a barrier or hazard to pedestrians and animals, is safe from most tampering, is not affected by snow or rain, can be made to be extremely quiet (enclosed wheels and propulsion, compared to the wheel noise of both roads and railroads) and, with modification, has some inherent flexibility. The changes I propose have been missing from ALL new transportation proposals...
1. allow people to own their own passenger capsules, and have them semi-permanently attach to company owned standardized tractive units. That eliminates the whole "Gross! Who used this car and what diseases did they have?" routine, as well as allowing customization of cargo and passenger carrying capabilities.
Retaining standardized tractive units owned by the guideway system operators allows for guideway instrumentation that would not allow defective units to even enter the guideway, removing 99.9% of delays from disabled vehicles or accidents. Anyone can put a clunker on a public road. On a guideway as I propose, high speed travel is SAFE and consistently high speed.
2. allow the capsules to contain batteries and have 12" wheels on the bottom, so that the capsules can be driven from the home to the overhead, attach to the overhead guideway then disengage at the destination for parking and short distance slow speed ground trips. That one change of design would make many people abandon their cars in favor of such a systematic approach to transportation.
As one example of how the modified personal pod might look for a commuter system examine the vehicle here: clever green vehicle
Now imagine this basic design, with a small skyhook to attach to the overhead monorail.
Again, the pod itself would be owned by the individual, along with the drive system for the ground. The skyhook and electrical motor and components would be owned by the skyway company and leased to the pod owners, so that all repair and maintenence would be within the complete control of the skyway company.
For people who could not afford a pod, basic rental units would be available, dispatched by an automated system.
On a rainy day, it is a lot more civilized to get into a vehicle at home in a garage, sit down, then get to the destination in the same chair, and walk out into a covered parking area. Driving, walking or biking to a train station, dealing with any baggage, having to stand and wait, then walk from the train car to a taxi or bike stand or rental place is both inefficient and a hassle, especially for people with disabilities.
In contrast, the overhead guideway system avoids your having to guide the car for most of a journey, eliminates any drunk driver crossing into your guideway and crashing into you, eliminates slowpoke drivers, and gives a nice view as a bonus.
To repeat, I love rail. I think it is even better than sliced bread for most freight operations. However, use of it for passengers is hopelessly outdated, and the tribulations endured by rail passengers border on embarrassing. Resurrecting passenger rail lines for an encore performance is an idea that is wasteful, silly, and doomed to failure. Even a cursory glance at the balance sheets of past passenger rail operations will show that it simply does not work in the U.S..
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Philosophy
The movie version of the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is scheduled to be released April 15th of 2011. With it, there will likely be another surge of people en-tranced by Rand's philosophy, which she called "Objectivism," and eager to read more of her works.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s I was young and impressionable, and I was "into" Objectivism. Then, as now, there were ample reasons to hope that the really creative minds would not support the continuation of the flaws of the country and government. I have since had over forty years to reflect upon Rand, her work, and beliefs. You will find numerous people ready to comment on the author, with the extreme right heaping praises upon her, the extreme left vilifying her. I went from writing a college term paper in support of her to being horrified that my critical thinking had not seen the major flaws in her viewpoints.
Am I an expert on Rand? I am much more of an expert than most of those who claim to be experts, but the reality is that no single person could ever be at the meta-level required to become a completely objective outside expert on her and her works. What I present here are some of my observations and views, in the hopes that you will quickly gain a perspective that it took years for me to develop. I have a selfish purpose in this as well, because numbers of people make uneducated reference to Rand. My having a single place to guide them for the basics will save me many hours of writing.
There are three topics that must intertwine in this post - the book Atlas Shrugged, Rand's life and life experience, and her thoughts and "philosophy." I quite literally could go on for longer than Atlas Shrugged itself in dissecting the three topics, but will instead cover only a few major points and provide references for further reading.
We next come to a strong speculation on my part. In 1933 Queen Christina, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, starring Swedish-born actress Greta Garbo, hit the big screen. Although I can find no overt links between Rand, the film, or the authors of the story, Salka Viertel and Margaret Levino, the film marks a change point in Rand's life. The Night of January 16th was published the next year, followed by We The Living in 1936. I suspect that Rand stole some of her persona from Garbo's portrayal of Queen Christiana. The romantic nature of her later works is probably partly based on the film.
Rand, as a character and personality, now begins to truly emerge. There is no question about her being a product of her time and experiences. Her writing - Russian influence. Her lack of religion - Soviet and Jewish influence. Her philosophical leanings - strong negative Soviet influence. Her romances - Garbo and early film influences. Her increasingly strong voice - again, influences stemming perhaps from absorbing Queen Christiana's character into her own, especially so without familial feedback and resistance to her changes.
In any valid attempt to understand Rand, the strengths of these influences cannot be underestimated. Her range of thinking was as crippled by her life experiences as certainly as a woman raped by Cossacks. Instead of growing beyond her early experience, she ruminated and regurgitated, attempting to attack in turn those who had hurt her, and glorifying those who had delivered her from her personal hell.
The writings of anyone who has been through such strong experiences are bound to be emotional and strong. Rand's writings were even more so because of her training in pedagogy at Petrograd, and ability to include her study of Aristotle and other philosophers, to lend weight and credence to her views.
Anyone who reads Atlas Shrugged would do well to then immediately read the historical book Empire Express, Building the First Transcontinental Railroad by David Haward Bain. That book of over 700 densely written pages is almost overwhelmed by footnotes and bibliography providing factual historical documentation of what the real railroad operators and industrial giants were like. It isn't a pretty picture.
Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 and was Rand's last major literary work, although she continued to write "non-fiction" books expounding her philosophic and political points. Rand's life began to unravel after Atlas Shrugged. There are reports that she used amphetamines to plow through the intense writing the novel required, and that she suffered depression after it. During her writing and lectures, she had picked up a couple of side-kicks, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. Rand made a cuckold of her husband by having an affair with Nathaniel. The breakup occurred in 1968, with letters going out to subscribers of The Objectivist newsletter, informing them that Branden no longer represented the Objectivist philosophy and castigating him. Branden began his own groups and practice, much to the confusion of readers. In October of 1971, The Objectivist had become thin enough in material that it became the Ayn Rand Letter, Inc.
In the summer previous to this, I decided on a whim to visit the offices of the newsletter in New York City. Followers of Rand will remember her earlier proud pronouncement of offices in the Empire State Building. After that buildup, the later address was a little startling. I present some of my snapshots from June of 1971, taken with permission:
Rand died in 1982. Many notables have been influenced by her thought and writing, including Alan Greenspan, Gene Roddenberry, Robert Heinlein, Martin Anderson, and Ron Paul. Two rather tedious movies have been done about her life: The Passion of Ayn Rand, and Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, the latter based on the book by Barbara Branden, which may be the best biography of Rand.
I have dissected Objectivism a number of times before, often with variation. The apparent simplicity of it may first appear to be a strong point, but is in fact one of its failures. Professionals and professors will undoubtedly find flaws in my work, but to borrow a line from Sam Clemens, "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all." I try to seek a balance and broad view for myself, so if I do that, I don't worry to much about dots and tittles. The comments below should be sufficient to blow any veracity that Objectivism has as a legitimate and workable philosophy out of the water.
Metaphysics - literally "after physics." What do we do with the knowledge from physics? Rand's version is closer to that of Zeno (who posited a fixed reality) than her hero Aristotle ( who broadened it to matter with change and form). On a meta-scale, the reality of physics in the nano-seconds after the big bang was markedly different than the reality we experience today (so much for the fixed reality idea). On a micro-scale, the EXPERIENCE of reality occurs only within the mind of the individual, through the filters of the senses, and within the framework of whatever intelligence is present. The perceived reality is the only functional reality of the individual. The collective reality of one individual or group of individuals might also be entirely different than others.
To put it in the conceptual framework Rand intended - If a safe drops on you from the fifth floor of a building, your concept of reality will be irrelevant to your squashed body. Her metaphysical world depends upon Newtonian physics and every action having an equal and opposite reaction.
Copenhagen and certain forms of Calvinism explored that, with the general division running along two lines of thought. The first went something like, "Yep, that is right, so if every single action has an equal and opposite reaction, we can take that to a molecular or atomic level and work the fixed relationships back to the beginning of time and forward to the end of time. In other words, we have no free will and are on a fixed course of length, width, breadth, and time, through this reality. What Rand believed was determined at the beginning of time, and any talk about it is merely fulfilling another aspect of the fixed path. If you don't believe it, that was predetermined also, and your brain is constructed to make you think you have choices." So, to summarize, if Rand WAS right... WHO CARES? It doesn't make any difference and the "philosophy" has no greater meaning than a bunch of words strung together.
The second division suspects that there are random quantum effects or effects that transcend the limitations of the four common dimensions. It would only be within such constructs that Rand's "philosophy" would matter, but then, by definition, it would be wrong. That, my friends, is a logical double-bind. finis.
Epistemology: - The study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity. Rand would limit any integration of "the" correct model of nature to that gained through pure logic. Even a momentary rumination on this will find the idea simplistic and nonsensical. The only way for this to be true would be to already have complete and pure knowledge.
For example: Joe is color blind and does not know it. He drives through a traffic light and gets a ticket. He argues to the judge that in his reality, the light was NOT red. The judge says "Doesn't matter. The ticket stands." Joe had an unintentional limitation in his ability to completely understand reality. You say, "Yeah, but we have a much better understanding of reality than that. That is not a valid example." Now, the $64 question - as a completely logical Objectivist who considers his view of reality superior to those of the Goy, please detail the full workings of Einstein's special theory of relativity and how that relates to the size of Madonna's bra cups. Anyone with a COMPLETE understanding of the universe should be easily able to accomplish that. As I see it... We ALL have limited views of reality and our internal constructs or models of the external reality will be flawed, and those models will be further flawed by the limitations of our mental processes, physical brains, transient chemical reactions, interfering radiation, and a host of other influences. Bucky Fuller once said; "I seem to be a verb." Perhaps more accurately he could have stated; "I seem to be a verb with a bunch of modifiers attacking me."
Ethics:
Ethics are a code or set of principles that guide everyday action. The common error of those attempting to follow Rand's stated ethics (which she obviously didn't follow too well in real life) is to equate them with an Epicurian ethical hedonism. Pleasure and self-interest are not synonyms. Getting dead-drunk might produce pleasure, but it is not usually in one's self-interest. Getting filthy rich might seem to be in a person's self-interest, but if the cost is the relationships that support other needs of the person, it is limited thinking and not self-interest. We rarely know what is in our ultimate best interest. If we did, we wouldn't have much of a need for philosophy anyway, would we?
Politics:
Knowledge: With the insertion of "intellectual property rights" and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, knowledge is no longer a free agent, to be used for the greater edification of all those in our society, but a commodity to be rented, leased, sold, but only rarely given. 99% of the extreme right wing politicians see no problem with this idea, and since that is the base group of the so-called "Objectivists", the construct has failed.
Trade: Lassie goes to the faire Capitalism. That simply does not exist in the U.S. on any scale. The politics and trade of a flea market may have a certain amount of free market trade. That does not exist in a managed economy. What is a managed economy? If you are asking that, you have no reasonable right to espousing the value of an economic "philosophy" as interpreted by Rand or anyone else. If you can get insurance or medicare to pay for cocaine and a voodoo doll to cure your cold, you don't live in a managed economy. If you can spread gasoline and DDT at will on your fields to grow poppies, you don't live in a managed economy. Every economy is managed to some extent, either by stated law or convention.
Government: See my earlier post on the problems in limiting the control of government, even if you take it to only have the purpose of protection.
In summation:
Rand was an interesting and flawed person, who allowed us to explore some of the extremes of behavior. Her work has special merit for those who are working through issues of low self-esteem. Her personal life was a mess. She wrote some interesting novels that can bring new topics of conversation to many tables. She was not a guru, and even back in 1968 stated that her followers were not a movement, but that it was the ideas she had expressed that she wanted to see continue forward.
Any cult of Rand is exactly that, a cult, with all of the flaws of any religious cult. The truly free and creative thinker has no need for such crutches.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s I was young and impressionable, and I was "into" Objectivism. Then, as now, there were ample reasons to hope that the really creative minds would not support the continuation of the flaws of the country and government. I have since had over forty years to reflect upon Rand, her work, and beliefs. You will find numerous people ready to comment on the author, with the extreme right heaping praises upon her, the extreme left vilifying her. I went from writing a college term paper in support of her to being horrified that my critical thinking had not seen the major flaws in her viewpoints.
Am I an expert on Rand? I am much more of an expert than most of those who claim to be experts, but the reality is that no single person could ever be at the meta-level required to become a completely objective outside expert on her and her works. What I present here are some of my observations and views, in the hopes that you will quickly gain a perspective that it took years for me to develop. I have a selfish purpose in this as well, because numbers of people make uneducated reference to Rand. My having a single place to guide them for the basics will save me many hours of writing.
There are three topics that must intertwine in this post - the book Atlas Shrugged, Rand's life and life experience, and her thoughts and "philosophy." I quite literally could go on for longer than Atlas Shrugged itself in dissecting the three topics, but will instead cover only a few major points and provide references for further reading.
Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in 1905 in Russia, daughter of a Jewish pharmacist. The Russian revolution occurred in 1917 when she was twelve, old enough to experience and remember it viscerally, but not old enough or worldly enough to truly comprehend all of the factors and implications of the event. In reading her works, the impression can form that she escaped Russia to the United States soon after the start of the revolution. In fact, she and her family returned to St. Petersburg where she enrolled at Petrograd State University. While there, she studied history and read the works of a few philosophers. She graduated in 1924, obtained a visa to visit relatives in the U.S. in 1925, and never returned. Her parents and sisters remained in the Soviet Union until their deaths.
Once in the U.S., Rand, without family, was drawn to the movie industry even more than she had been in the Soviet Union. She became, at one point, costume department head for RKO. She married Frank O'Conner in 1929 and became a U.S. citizen in 1931. Rand immediately set to writing anti-communist stories, plays, and screenplays, but anti-communism was not yet popular with the public.
Breaking from the time line for a moment, the sources for many of the underlying themes of Rand's life and thought now become apparent.
Her Jewish heritage and the influence of the atheistic communists led her to have no love for the organized Christian religion of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and with her parents not being active in Judaism, she felt free to declare herself an atheist at around the time of the revolution. Her later studies in a communist supported university would reinforce such views and provide her ample examples of the excesses of organized religion.
The cultural shift that destroyed her life as a bourgeois young lady of means and comfort engendered no love in her for communism, and the subsequent refusal of the Soviets to allow the emigration of her parents and sisters undoubtedly fed that hate.
Study at Petrograd influenced her writing style towards the Russian classics, and her budding interest in film and writing began with her writing a booklet on a Russian film star, thus beginning to channel her energies.
We next come to a strong speculation on my part. In 1933 Queen Christina, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, starring Swedish-born actress Greta Garbo, hit the big screen. Although I can find no overt links between Rand, the film, or the authors of the story, Salka Viertel and Margaret Levino, the film marks a change point in Rand's life. The Night of January 16th was published the next year, followed by We The Living in 1936. I suspect that Rand stole some of her persona from Garbo's portrayal of Queen Christiana. The romantic nature of her later works is probably partly based on the film.
Rand, as a character and personality, now begins to truly emerge. There is no question about her being a product of her time and experiences. Her writing - Russian influence. Her lack of religion - Soviet and Jewish influence. Her philosophical leanings - strong negative Soviet influence. Her romances - Garbo and early film influences. Her increasingly strong voice - again, influences stemming perhaps from absorbing Queen Christiana's character into her own, especially so without familial feedback and resistance to her changes.
In any valid attempt to understand Rand, the strengths of these influences cannot be underestimated. Her range of thinking was as crippled by her life experiences as certainly as a woman raped by Cossacks. Instead of growing beyond her early experience, she ruminated and regurgitated, attempting to attack in turn those who had hurt her, and glorifying those who had delivered her from her personal hell.
The writings of anyone who has been through such strong experiences are bound to be emotional and strong. Rand's writings were even more so because of her training in pedagogy at Petrograd, and ability to include her study of Aristotle and other philosophers, to lend weight and credence to her views.
If there is one single point that I would like the reader to take away from the knowledge I have presented so far in this post, it is that Ayn Rand was a ROMANTIC FICTION writer trained in pedagogy and warped in her life views by early experience.
The book: Atlas Shrugged. Any book is a construction. Without deeply going into the craft of writing and spending pages dissecting the book, I'll expose some of the bones of this one. The plot line in summary:
- Dagney Taggert tries to fix her transcontinental railroad, which services mines as well as passenger traffic.
- Dagney's old lover d'Anconia has copper mines serviced by the RR but he has turned into a playboy.
- Hank Rearden creates a new stronger steel. He gets in trouble with politicians and his wife. Dagney finds him hot and wants his strong steel rail.
- All the major industrialists go on strike because of the parasitic and repressive laws, sending the country into chaos.
- John Galt tells in a massive speech why he organized the industrialists to go on strike.
- The repressive and parasitic government falls and the industrialists prepare to return to make a better world.
Rand plays with various truisms in the book. Here are a few of them:
- Very few people LIKE taxes. Many people suspect taxes are parasitic and repressive, and that they thwart the growth of companies that create jobs and the wealth of new products.
- Politicians by definition have to balance the needs of a society and economy. They often fail to satisfy constituents and industry leaders, making politicians easy targets in a story.
- Engineers work with physical materials and concepts. If an engineering concept works, it is good. If it doesn't, the failure is soon apparent. By making engineers heroic in the story, Rand reinforces the idea of black and white thinking - a concept is either good or bad, with little space for a gray area.
- By making politicians seem to work only in a gray area, they are more easily portrayed as evil.
- The people who bring ideas to the marketplace are seen as heroic.
- Complex systems, when confronted with the loss of a major component, will fail.
- Apocalyptic stories have an inherent audience. Science fiction stories have an inherent audience. Romance novels have an inherent audience.
- Anti-communist and anti-socialist novels have an inherent audience.
- Railroads have a romance attached to them.
- There is an aspect of Rand's novels that is similar to "Symphonie Fantastique" The theme just keeps droning on and on until it gets into the subconscious. Repetition can eventually overwhelm critical reasoning.
The idea of this book plot existing in real life is simply not possible, for any number of reasons. Perhaps the easiest one to understand is that Rand has stereotyped almost all the characters within classes and assigned them their morality as a group. ALL major engineers in it are inherently good. ALL politicians are inherently evil. ALL women except the lead are flawed, insipid, or worthless. Writing using such stereotyping allows readers to more easily follow what appears to be a complex plot and empathize with the protagonists. In truth, such a style of writing is usually consigned to books aimed at juvenile audiences. Adding pseudo-philosophical aspects to the plot and turning it into a morality play promotes the impression of the novel being a deep work, especially to those who are not used to deep writing or long books.
In the world of Atlas Shrugged, the railroads are led by noble capitalists, and everyone with money and brains (which seem to magically go together in the book) goes on vacation in Colorado in a strike of creative genius, making the world fall apart. Never mind that creative genius is often a guy in a garage like WOZ, or the fellow who wrote a freeware CPM and sold the rights to it for peanuts to Bill Gates, who then renamed it MS-DOS and added a feature or two and built a reputation and empire on it. Never mind that Einstein was a geek librarian. REAL creative people do not "go on strike." Their creativity is part of their souls and cannot be turned off and on like a light. Many creative people simply do not care what others do or think and have been ostracized for years from the mainstream of society.
Rand does use actual locations and a loose sense of history in Atlas Shrugged. There is an actual resort on a branch line railroad in Colorado that fits as the location in her novel. What she conveniently leaves out of her story is that the real-life railroad barons were far from noble. How many reading this know that the U.S. government GAVE huge tracts of land along the routes of proposed railroads to the rail companies in order to "promote" rail growth and the transcontinental railroad? How many know that the votes for those give-aways were BOUGHT in Congress? How many have any knowledge of Jay Gould or the Credit Mobilier? Reality and romantic fiction are tremendously different animals. The Wizard of Oz was a story. Atlas Shrugged is a story. It is not profitable to confuse them with reality.Anyone who reads Atlas Shrugged would do well to then immediately read the historical book Empire Express, Building the First Transcontinental Railroad by David Haward Bain. That book of over 700 densely written pages is almost overwhelmed by footnotes and bibliography providing factual historical documentation of what the real railroad operators and industrial giants were like. It isn't a pretty picture.
Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 and was Rand's last major literary work, although she continued to write "non-fiction" books expounding her philosophic and political points. Rand's life began to unravel after Atlas Shrugged. There are reports that she used amphetamines to plow through the intense writing the novel required, and that she suffered depression after it. During her writing and lectures, she had picked up a couple of side-kicks, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. Rand made a cuckold of her husband by having an affair with Nathaniel. The breakup occurred in 1968, with letters going out to subscribers of The Objectivist newsletter, informing them that Branden no longer represented the Objectivist philosophy and castigating him. Branden began his own groups and practice, much to the confusion of readers. In October of 1971, The Objectivist had become thin enough in material that it became the Ayn Rand Letter, Inc.
In the summer previous to this, I decided on a whim to visit the offices of the newsletter in New York City. Followers of Rand will remember her earlier proud pronouncement of offices in the Empire State Building. After that buildup, the later address was a little startling. I present some of my snapshots from June of 1971, taken with permission:
 |
| The racks of books in the front reception area |
 |
| Door to the offices - note the cheap angle reinforcements |
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| Directory of the building - classy, huh? |
 |
| The reception desk in the tiny front room |
Rand died in 1982. Many notables have been influenced by her thought and writing, including Alan Greenspan, Gene Roddenberry, Robert Heinlein, Martin Anderson, and Ron Paul. Two rather tedious movies have been done about her life: The Passion of Ayn Rand, and Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, the latter based on the book by Barbara Branden, which may be the best biography of Rand.
Part 3
The philosophy in summary - Objectivism.
Metaphysics:
There is only one reality. The principles of it are fixed, and man must live within it. Other realities are irrelevant.
Epistemology:
Reason is based on logic. Only pure logic is a valid tool to perceive, identify and integrate material provided by the senses.
Ethics:
"Every man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others." The pursuit of his own rational self-interest is the highest moral purpose in his life. This statement implies that pursuit of self-interest is without expense (damage) to anyone else.
Politics (which Rand posited as the ethics of a society) Knowledge, trade, and protection are the functions of a society:
Knowledge is endemic and to be freely exchanged.
Free market Capitalism is the preferred method of trade.
The sole purpose of government is protection. I have dissected Objectivism a number of times before, often with variation. The apparent simplicity of it may first appear to be a strong point, but is in fact one of its failures. Professionals and professors will undoubtedly find flaws in my work, but to borrow a line from Sam Clemens, "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all." I try to seek a balance and broad view for myself, so if I do that, I don't worry to much about dots and tittles. The comments below should be sufficient to blow any veracity that Objectivism has as a legitimate and workable philosophy out of the water.
Metaphysics - literally "after physics." What do we do with the knowledge from physics? Rand's version is closer to that of Zeno (who posited a fixed reality) than her hero Aristotle ( who broadened it to matter with change and form). On a meta-scale, the reality of physics in the nano-seconds after the big bang was markedly different than the reality we experience today (so much for the fixed reality idea). On a micro-scale, the EXPERIENCE of reality occurs only within the mind of the individual, through the filters of the senses, and within the framework of whatever intelligence is present. The perceived reality is the only functional reality of the individual. The collective reality of one individual or group of individuals might also be entirely different than others.
To put it in the conceptual framework Rand intended - If a safe drops on you from the fifth floor of a building, your concept of reality will be irrelevant to your squashed body. Her metaphysical world depends upon Newtonian physics and every action having an equal and opposite reaction.
Copenhagen and certain forms of Calvinism explored that, with the general division running along two lines of thought. The first went something like, "Yep, that is right, so if every single action has an equal and opposite reaction, we can take that to a molecular or atomic level and work the fixed relationships back to the beginning of time and forward to the end of time. In other words, we have no free will and are on a fixed course of length, width, breadth, and time, through this reality. What Rand believed was determined at the beginning of time, and any talk about it is merely fulfilling another aspect of the fixed path. If you don't believe it, that was predetermined also, and your brain is constructed to make you think you have choices." So, to summarize, if Rand WAS right... WHO CARES? It doesn't make any difference and the "philosophy" has no greater meaning than a bunch of words strung together.
The second division suspects that there are random quantum effects or effects that transcend the limitations of the four common dimensions. It would only be within such constructs that Rand's "philosophy" would matter, but then, by definition, it would be wrong. That, my friends, is a logical double-bind. finis.
Epistemology: - The study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity. Rand would limit any integration of "the" correct model of nature to that gained through pure logic. Even a momentary rumination on this will find the idea simplistic and nonsensical. The only way for this to be true would be to already have complete and pure knowledge.
For example: Joe is color blind and does not know it. He drives through a traffic light and gets a ticket. He argues to the judge that in his reality, the light was NOT red. The judge says "Doesn't matter. The ticket stands." Joe had an unintentional limitation in his ability to completely understand reality. You say, "Yeah, but we have a much better understanding of reality than that. That is not a valid example." Now, the $64 question - as a completely logical Objectivist who considers his view of reality superior to those of the Goy, please detail the full workings of Einstein's special theory of relativity and how that relates to the size of Madonna's bra cups. Anyone with a COMPLETE understanding of the universe should be easily able to accomplish that. As I see it... We ALL have limited views of reality and our internal constructs or models of the external reality will be flawed, and those models will be further flawed by the limitations of our mental processes, physical brains, transient chemical reactions, interfering radiation, and a host of other influences. Bucky Fuller once said; "I seem to be a verb." Perhaps more accurately he could have stated; "I seem to be a verb with a bunch of modifiers attacking me."
Ethics:
Ethics are a code or set of principles that guide everyday action. The common error of those attempting to follow Rand's stated ethics (which she obviously didn't follow too well in real life) is to equate them with an Epicurian ethical hedonism. Pleasure and self-interest are not synonyms. Getting dead-drunk might produce pleasure, but it is not usually in one's self-interest. Getting filthy rich might seem to be in a person's self-interest, but if the cost is the relationships that support other needs of the person, it is limited thinking and not self-interest. We rarely know what is in our ultimate best interest. If we did, we wouldn't have much of a need for philosophy anyway, would we?
Politics:
Knowledge: With the insertion of "intellectual property rights" and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, knowledge is no longer a free agent, to be used for the greater edification of all those in our society, but a commodity to be rented, leased, sold, but only rarely given. 99% of the extreme right wing politicians see no problem with this idea, and since that is the base group of the so-called "Objectivists", the construct has failed.
Trade: Lassie goes to the faire Capitalism. That simply does not exist in the U.S. on any scale. The politics and trade of a flea market may have a certain amount of free market trade. That does not exist in a managed economy. What is a managed economy? If you are asking that, you have no reasonable right to espousing the value of an economic "philosophy" as interpreted by Rand or anyone else. If you can get insurance or medicare to pay for cocaine and a voodoo doll to cure your cold, you don't live in a managed economy. If you can spread gasoline and DDT at will on your fields to grow poppies, you don't live in a managed economy. Every economy is managed to some extent, either by stated law or convention.
Government: See my earlier post on the problems in limiting the control of government, even if you take it to only have the purpose of protection.
In summation:
Rand was an interesting and flawed person, who allowed us to explore some of the extremes of behavior. Her work has special merit for those who are working through issues of low self-esteem. Her personal life was a mess. She wrote some interesting novels that can bring new topics of conversation to many tables. She was not a guru, and even back in 1968 stated that her followers were not a movement, but that it was the ideas she had expressed that she wanted to see continue forward.
Any cult of Rand is exactly that, a cult, with all of the flaws of any religious cult. The truly free and creative thinker has no need for such crutches.
Monday, March 14, 2011
The 9 billion facets of God
Back in 1953, Arthur C. Clarke published a science fiction story; "The Nine Billion Names of God". In it, monks in an obscure monastery work for centuries hand-writing all of the names of God, in the belief that this is the purpose of humanity. When they purchase a computer that completes the job for them in record time, all of the stars begin winking out, one by one.
This humorous and bizarre little tale can be a jumping off point for a number of discussions and explorations. The concept of language is based upon symbols, and a name is a symbol or collection of symbols meant to describe and show a facet of something, be it a person, an object, an action, or something else. Symbols are inherently imperfect, as they comprise less than the whole. By being imperfect, they can emphasize one aspect and minimize others.
Relating that back to Clarke's story, each "name" of God represents an aspect, and the sum total of the names, according to the story, ultimately describes all aspects of God and completes the work of humankind.
Setting that story aside temporarily, there is another story that is needed for further examination. You likely have read or heard it before. In various versions of the ancient teaching story of the elephant, a group of blind men touch an elephant. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, then they then each describe what the elephant is.
One version goes roughly that the blind man who felt a leg claimed the elephant is a big tree; the one who felt the tail said the elephant is a rope; the one who felt the trunk said the elephant is a big snake; the one who felt the ear said the elephant is a giant leaf or fan; the one who felt the side of the belly said the elephant is a wall; and the one who felt the tusk says the elephant is a giant spear. The men argue heatedly for some time, and then a sighted sage explains to them that each one is correct, but that none of them sees the whole.
The symbols here are the elephant as God, the blind men as the various conflicting religions, and the sage as the enlightened man. The story served a number of purposes, not the least of which was minimizing conflict between different religious beliefs.
In both the stories, the possibility of errors was ignored. A word written as the name of God could have been a nonsense word or a word meaning something much less than God. One of the blind men could have wandered off and been feeling a real wall.
It is axiomatic that a part of a whole can never have sufficient information to comprehend the entire whole. The very act of comprehension adds another layer of complexity. Simply stated, we can never understand all of the universe, either as individuals or as a group.
Is it possible then that in the very attempt to understand God that humankind actually is understanding less fully and turning small aspects of a greater whole into fetish objects? Is the phrase "I am that I am" perhaps as complete a description as can be had?
A study of various religions certainly provides ample examples of conflicting beliefs. Is real enlightenment the sweating Zen monk who thinks of nothing but tending a garden and experiencing the fullness of hunger and labor? Or is enlightenment the study of all and realization that it is nothing? Or is enlightenment the goal that is always just out of reach, the fate of Tantalus in Tartarus? Will the last human mulling this conundrum please put out the light?
This humorous and bizarre little tale can be a jumping off point for a number of discussions and explorations. The concept of language is based upon symbols, and a name is a symbol or collection of symbols meant to describe and show a facet of something, be it a person, an object, an action, or something else. Symbols are inherently imperfect, as they comprise less than the whole. By being imperfect, they can emphasize one aspect and minimize others.
Relating that back to Clarke's story, each "name" of God represents an aspect, and the sum total of the names, according to the story, ultimately describes all aspects of God and completes the work of humankind.
Setting that story aside temporarily, there is another story that is needed for further examination. You likely have read or heard it before. In various versions of the ancient teaching story of the elephant, a group of blind men touch an elephant. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, then they then each describe what the elephant is.
One version goes roughly that the blind man who felt a leg claimed the elephant is a big tree; the one who felt the tail said the elephant is a rope; the one who felt the trunk said the elephant is a big snake; the one who felt the ear said the elephant is a giant leaf or fan; the one who felt the side of the belly said the elephant is a wall; and the one who felt the tusk says the elephant is a giant spear. The men argue heatedly for some time, and then a sighted sage explains to them that each one is correct, but that none of them sees the whole.
The symbols here are the elephant as God, the blind men as the various conflicting religions, and the sage as the enlightened man. The story served a number of purposes, not the least of which was minimizing conflict between different religious beliefs.
In both the stories, the possibility of errors was ignored. A word written as the name of God could have been a nonsense word or a word meaning something much less than God. One of the blind men could have wandered off and been feeling a real wall.
Error possibilities aside, we can examine the core concept; that if you gather sufficient descriptions of something, you can know the whole. That too is demonstrably false. The enlightened man never saw inside the elephant, nor did he experience its consciousness. The written names of God were only a limited subset of any real God.
It is axiomatic that a part of a whole can never have sufficient information to comprehend the entire whole. The very act of comprehension adds another layer of complexity. Simply stated, we can never understand all of the universe, either as individuals or as a group.
Is it possible then that in the very attempt to understand God that humankind actually is understanding less fully and turning small aspects of a greater whole into fetish objects? Is the phrase "I am that I am" perhaps as complete a description as can be had?
A study of various religions certainly provides ample examples of conflicting beliefs. Is real enlightenment the sweating Zen monk who thinks of nothing but tending a garden and experiencing the fullness of hunger and labor? Or is enlightenment the study of all and realization that it is nothing? Or is enlightenment the goal that is always just out of reach, the fate of Tantalus in Tartarus? Will the last human mulling this conundrum please put out the light?
Saturday, March 12, 2011
The difficulty in determining the role of government
Recently, in one of the forums that I frequent, the question was posed: "...the government and its actions surely have a big impact on all of our lives, so what role or responsibility do you feel the government should have?" Such a discussion can quickly devolve into partisan politics and very superficial viewpoints, while the underlying concepts are ignored. With that in mind, this was my response:
That is a tall order, and can get complex pretty rapidly.
Roughly -
The preamble to the Declaration of Independence sums up intent beautifully:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Couldn't have said it better myself...
Parsing, that means government has the obligation to provide, as much as possible, "life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for all of those governed. All else flows from that.
"Life" means the government has to protect the lives of the governed through defense against outsiders and insiders. Outsiders is the easiest. A strong defense, and all that entails is a duty. Protection from insiders is more difficult. Ethnic group violence, like the Black Hand, and anarchists, and the neo-nazis and lynch mobs of the past were pretty simple to target. Subtler forms of depriving citizens of their lives start to impinge on perceived "freedoms". Did the Dukes (surname, not title) have the right to run coal mines in a way that killed thousands of miners working for them, even though safety could be implemented at low cost? Ultimately, it was decided that the lives of the employees trumped the rights of the employer to run roughshod.
The employer/employee relationship is a great example of the difficulties involved and the problems in attempting to run a class-less society and still maintain the perks that people of the upper crust demand. The prudent and practical method of intervention was to establish a bureau of mines and oversight of the mining practices. In a minimalist government, that would have been handled in a civil court. However, for that minimal government class-less society to work, the value of a human life would have to be determined and fixed at a single price by law. Joe Miner would have a value of $1,000,000 and Commodore Vanderbilt would have a value of $1,000,000. A mine accident where Joe was killed would be sufficiently damaging to the Dukes that stringent safety measures would be imposed by them voluntarily. However... the value of Joe Miner to society is clearly not as much as that of Commodore Vanderbilt, who promoted railroad and ship development that benefited all, instead of picking away at black rocks. A society that claims equal treatment under the law CANNOT say overtly that Joe is worth $1,000 and the Commodore is worth $1,000,000,000,000.
What government was then forced to do was balance two totally conflicting concepts - one of equal rights and one of value relative to the benefit to society, which can loosely be translated to a person's station in life.
Depending on personal beliefs, each individual will perceive government as too restrictive or too lenient. The key concept to understand is that NEITHER extreme works, and only a balance can form a least offensive governmental intervention in life. If you remove the cults of personality, this is the root source of 99% of the debate on government.
Hegel (German philosopher) and Jung (psychoanalyst) studied the master/slave employer/employee relationships and determined that for wholeness, the two extremes had to integrate, and that from that integration a greater consciousness would be formed. That is great in theory, but with our educational system being what it is, most people are not developed enough in their thought to get beyond "I'm paying you, your bases are mine" or "the Masta is workin' me too hard."
Pure communism or socialism is so insane that the countries attempting to practice it quickly devolved into dictatorships and a society with a very small group of upper crust demigods. Then those societies failed out of lack of innovation and the ossification of the structure of goods distribution and internal development.
Interestingly, the past few decades have presented a similar problem in the U.S., where the laws are ossifying, and stultifying innovation and growth, and the upper class is becoming more rarefied and the middle class being stripped of value.
I'd go on to discuss liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but the post is already too long.
__________________
Roughly -
The preamble to the Declaration of Independence sums up intent beautifully:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Couldn't have said it better myself...
Parsing, that means government has the obligation to provide, as much as possible, "life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for all of those governed. All else flows from that.
"Life" means the government has to protect the lives of the governed through defense against outsiders and insiders. Outsiders is the easiest. A strong defense, and all that entails is a duty. Protection from insiders is more difficult. Ethnic group violence, like the Black Hand, and anarchists, and the neo-nazis and lynch mobs of the past were pretty simple to target. Subtler forms of depriving citizens of their lives start to impinge on perceived "freedoms". Did the Dukes (surname, not title) have the right to run coal mines in a way that killed thousands of miners working for them, even though safety could be implemented at low cost? Ultimately, it was decided that the lives of the employees trumped the rights of the employer to run roughshod.
The employer/employee relationship is a great example of the difficulties involved and the problems in attempting to run a class-less society and still maintain the perks that people of the upper crust demand. The prudent and practical method of intervention was to establish a bureau of mines and oversight of the mining practices. In a minimalist government, that would have been handled in a civil court. However, for that minimal government class-less society to work, the value of a human life would have to be determined and fixed at a single price by law. Joe Miner would have a value of $1,000,000 and Commodore Vanderbilt would have a value of $1,000,000. A mine accident where Joe was killed would be sufficiently damaging to the Dukes that stringent safety measures would be imposed by them voluntarily. However... the value of Joe Miner to society is clearly not as much as that of Commodore Vanderbilt, who promoted railroad and ship development that benefited all, instead of picking away at black rocks. A society that claims equal treatment under the law CANNOT say overtly that Joe is worth $1,000 and the Commodore is worth $1,000,000,000,000.
What government was then forced to do was balance two totally conflicting concepts - one of equal rights and one of value relative to the benefit to society, which can loosely be translated to a person's station in life.
Depending on personal beliefs, each individual will perceive government as too restrictive or too lenient. The key concept to understand is that NEITHER extreme works, and only a balance can form a least offensive governmental intervention in life. If you remove the cults of personality, this is the root source of 99% of the debate on government.
Hegel (German philosopher) and Jung (psychoanalyst) studied the master/slave employer/employee relationships and determined that for wholeness, the two extremes had to integrate, and that from that integration a greater consciousness would be formed. That is great in theory, but with our educational system being what it is, most people are not developed enough in their thought to get beyond "I'm paying you, your bases are mine" or "the Masta is workin' me too hard."
Pure communism or socialism is so insane that the countries attempting to practice it quickly devolved into dictatorships and a society with a very small group of upper crust demigods. Then those societies failed out of lack of innovation and the ossification of the structure of goods distribution and internal development.
Interestingly, the past few decades have presented a similar problem in the U.S., where the laws are ossifying, and stultifying innovation and growth, and the upper class is becoming more rarefied and the middle class being stripped of value.
I'd go on to discuss liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but the post is already too long.
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