“ My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.
The Daily Bendiken
Jan 21
Dec 27
5 MB hard-disk drive, 1956
Dec 24
Central Park, New York City
Dec 23
Titan, Dione, and Saturn photographed from Cassini
Dec 15
The Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum in Berlin Mitte
Dec 13
“ A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
— Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: The Objectivist Ethics
“ Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.
— Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: The Objectivist Ethics
Dec 11
Man’s Life in the 1950s
(Source: jmcmichael)
The billion-dollar yacht
Dec 04
Spanish parking meter
“
Hiroe: he was dressed as a big fuckin devil
Hiroe: like, HUGE costume
Hiroe: 8-foot lizard wings, giant horns on the head
Hiroe: at some anime con in california
Hiroe: they were double booked with a southern Baptist group in the same hotel
Hiroe: he’s riding the elevator down to the con space
Hiroe: doors open, little old baptist woman standing there
Hiroe: he just says “Going Down” in his best evil voice
Effective advertising
Dec 03
“
When choice enters into our lives, where formerly we felt there were only absolutes, we feel anxiety, because deep down we know that that choice always existed, but we have been told that it was wrong to think about that choice. […]
If somebody breaks out of prison, you can either try to break out of prison yourself, or you can help the guards get him back into prison. The tipping point of the decision is what you decide to do with your own anxiety. If you decide to deal with your anxiety as an internal state, related to your core beliefs, your history, your false allegiances to false virtues, then you will be catapulted through the entire cavalcade of growth that is the inevitable result of deciding to stop using others to manage your emotions.
It is a sad reality that, for most people, their prison doesn’t feel like a prison until somebody tries to break out of it. The conclusion they leap to is that the person who has broken out of prison is the one who actually turned it into a prison - by the very act of breaking out of it! It’s madness, of course, but all too common.
Heinlein in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
(Source: avalokana)
Nov 30
Atlas Shrugged movie review on Freedomain Radio
