"Nature is right, but man is straight. She erects no beams, she slants no rafters, and yet she builds stronger and truer than he. Everywhere she preaches not abstract but practical truth -- She is no beauty at her toilet, but her cheek is flushed with exercise. The moss grows over her triangles. Unlike the man of science she teaches that skeletons ( Read more... )

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Where's My Bailout?
A rescue plan for the rest of us.

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Yesterday, my sister and Arune drove down from Fresno to visit me in L.A. I had a slew of downtown bars lined up for the evening, all near the 7th Street metro station. So after we dined outdoors on salami-pastrami-melted-pepperjack bagel sandwiches with my departing neighbor, we took to the sewers ( Read more... )

"Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man's utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant feminine ( Read more... )

"When admirers of Ayn Rand seek my services professionally, they often come with the secret hope, rarely acknowledged in words, that with Nathaniel Branden they will at last become the masters of repression needed to fulfill the dream of becoming an ideal Objectivist. When I tell them, usually fairly early in our relationship, that one of their ( Read more... )

Buttman on Reason.tv