I saw that this AM, too. Thanks.

Thought this might be of interest to you, jb:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/high-he...

I'm commenting on this post a little late, sorry! If the members of this forum were younger maybe a Gulch would be possible. In reality, for many of us, it isn't possible. Being self-sufficient or having the means to keep a roof over our heads, and enough supplies to weather changes that are happening to this country. I have gotten to the point that I don't want to watch cable news anymore it was making me very depressed. That's not how to enjoy life.

To address a couple of points raised in the lead post:

The despondency among Gulchers and non-collectivists of every stripe is a natural reaction to watching unfold before us the fruits of intellectual mass-poisoning of at least a generation of American (and European) kids via "educators." If we were all skipping around in a Pollyanna-ish frenzy I'd really start to worry. But no, Western Civ being in a death-grip by neo-Medievalist misanthropes needn't be an excuse to mope around dejectedly either. We have to break the death-grip and drive these humanity-hating scum back into the holes from which they slithered.

Our starting point for that counter-offensive is - always has been and always will be - morality. As Peikoff once pointed out (presumably Rand too, but memory is hazy,) an idea presented as moral will ultimately prevail over an idea presented as "This works better" or any such pragmatic drool. Our philosophy is morally good - also factually true, efficacious and benevolent in practice - demonstrably; their philosophy is raw moral evil - capable of producing mountains of murdered human corpses and nothing more - demonstrably.

We are seeing the abject fecklessness of Republican (and Libertarian) "leaders," Trump emphatically included, because with few exceptions they have utterly, infuriatingly defaulted on making the moral case for individualism, for human rights, for capitalism, for liberty. [A great single-issue example is the racial collectivism the Democrat Left unleashed in summer of 2020: Republican "leaders" couldn't locate racism's antidote - that single, simple word: individualism - with both hands and a GPS-synced road map. I don't remember the word being so much as uttered by a single worthless one of them, and I don't expect to. There are dozens of other examples of this default - pick an issue, any issue.]

Rand's signature line "Who is John Galt?" is not an instruction to adopt a "Why bother" attitude, it's another of the brilliant tools she used - in this case irony - to drive home her theme. To the random man-on-the-street, the phrase is indeed an expression... not necessarily of "Why bother" but of "Who knows?" The brilliant irony - and economy - lies in the fact that that simple question and its answer are an extreme distillation of Atlas' theme: Knowledge - therefore freedom, production, abundance - is not automatic, and John Galt is the embodiment of the philosophy which answers all questions pertaining thereto.

So I think Rand meant "Who is John Galt?" as a question that has two aspects, like sides of a coin. The crude, surface-level public meaning expresses the "Shrug" and the full philosophic-level core on the flipside expresses the "Atlas."
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Your decision is being made for you.
The rest of the world is being bull-whipped to get in line, unfortunately too many are knuckling under. America may very well be the last to face the fire, but don't kid yourselves, the Davos crowd (NWO) is running the global financial market. The Great Reset is coming. What America dose (you or I) will determine the fate of the planet. Our very freedom and sovereignty is at hand. The Tree of Liberty. The Blood of Tyrants. Some assembly required.

I agree. Anarchy reminds me of the walking dead, while socialism reminds me of dead, period. You can't fight the dead, but you can fight the zombies. Just keep your powder dry and plentiful, and your supplies intact. My supplies include a lot of books in all different categories, non-electric hand tools, heirloom seeds and other important odds and ends.

Well, actually, we have both anarchy and the statist/collectivist/communist movement simultaneously, and often the anarchy immediately precedes the statism.

You mentioned anarchy, katrinam41... I think I would prefer anarchy to the statist collectivism/communism movement of the "great reset." At least with anarchy I am in control of myself and the welfare of those in my care/family. The opposite of that scares the daylights out of me!

Yet the sky, the Earth and the plants are the same, just perspective of how you view them. There must be something worth living for in bad situations.If you do not fight for the individualism we already know, you have to live for the possibility of taking out the ones denying that individualism. I once had a Jewish psy. professor (former Israli Army) ask me what I would have done during the Holocaust, gone to the chambers or cooperate. I said i would have lived, with the hope of one day bringing the oppressors down. He also tried to hypnotize the class one day, and I was one of two who he could not go under. He asked if I did not trust him, and I told him I did not know him well enough to know, and trust is earned. I really did like him and we got on great.

Original publication "Viruses"2021, Nov.

https://www.naturalnews.com/files/vir...
13-02056-v2.pdf

With a journalism degree, I started out as a general reporter for a weekly and wrote a lot of police stories. You could say I became the county crime photographer. Police wanted my photos and I wanted their stories.
Thought I was coming up in the world when the managing editor of The Montgomery Advertiser in Bama's state capital used the word "guarantee" that I'd be the police beat reporter at the end of a hiring freeze. Two months later he hired someone straight out of college for a lot less money promised me. That was my "seeing the writing on the wall" moment. Nevertheless, I bagged a job in Mississippi with slightly better crappy money than at the weekly and was shocked when they wanted me to write crap about Ronald Reagan. And up until then I thought Mississippi was supposed to be even more conservative than Alabama. I resigned and found out I could make more money painting walls for a construction company. Now ain't that pathetic?
Later I saw an ad about the Alabama Department of Corrections needing officers for two prisons being built and very long story short I now have a pension.
I've had close calls too. If I had been sleeping, I would have burned up in a rented trailer due to an electrical malfunction directly under my bed, but I was away attending a college class working on my wonderful journalism degree that's now called "communications," which may explain a few things. I fell into rapids at Yosemite, stepped in quicksand beside the Cahaba River (promoted as the last wild river in Alabama) and even fell off a cliff, grabbing a bush like the Lone Ranger on TV. I climbed up a 60 degree (like on my protractor) incline by grabbing one bush after another. For grabbing that first bush, my right shoulder was sore for days.
Two guys tried to kill me over a police story I wrote, but when one them chickened out so did the other. That's when I began to conceal carry for some funny reason.
Today I bumped into a corrections coworker in a grocery story. She was surprised when I told her about a retired coworker who died that was about my age. I was surprised when she told me about another coworker way younger than both of us who died.

A very apt description of both of these two. I have stayed in private practice in part so I do not have to go along with anyone's ideology that does not fit my own. A fascinating discussion.

Love the episodes with Q! They expose what a paradox it would be - as pointed out by Plato in Republic to have a quixotic being with the power of a god.

Life is worth living. There's no doubt. For those without "faith" what else is there beyond life?

"Growing despondency"...Reminds me of something my wife and I watched this morning. There is a plethora of violence at airports and on jet liners lately...all to be enjoyed on youtube from people's smartphone videos. I am blown away at what appears to be a huge increase in unstable behavior in the general public. That said...One can't help but see a vast majority of the violent offenders in airport terminals are African American people. What's gotten into all these people? Am I watching a society just completely unraveling?

Is life worth living?...Reminds me that I want to read "We the Living" before the movie is released (if it ever is).

We are the same age, I will be 75 in Jan.! I have faced death, pneumonia and treatment put me in a coma at 7, I had the out of body thing. I had a different idea about death after that. My mom died when I was 15, too much booze and drugs, her. Never blamed her, but did not respect her choices either. My dad was a businessman with a great sense of humor, I respected him. Funny you alos mention the law enforcement system. I was the law enforcement reporter for several years, along with business and schools! I spent part of each day in the sheriff's offic/jail and police Dept. office, getting reports. On parole meeting day, I shared a room with the parole officer, who knew I was haring how he handled the guys checking in. Some would laugh wen he told them they failed the drug test, even though the had a wife and kids. I asked him how he did it, and he said they are like liittle kids, it had to be stressful. Somethimes they tried to draw me into the conversation, and i wanted to say, been there with an addict, you hare not being responsible, but I left it to the parole officer, telling thee, who was likely headed back inside, tht he should listen to that guy, he knew.I did feel for their children. It seems your humor may have spared you the early demise of some in that profession.

Yes, and even if you don't believe it, it is still true. End of my foray back into the world of null-Rand. Espousing Rand, but condemning individual thought. Using Rand as an appeal to authority is not independent thinking, and that, my friends, or rather, non-friends, is never what Rand wanted.

Life is worth living in direct proportion to the degree it can be lived free. Itis never zero because in the recesses of individual's mind there can be fragments of freedom. Only in America have men devised a plan for organizing a society that can optimize freedom and we are falling into despair because we have allowed the most slothful among us to bend the system to reward those that contribute nothing by enslaving those that produce value. John Gault is the man rumored to know the secret for the producers to prevail but that seems so far fetched that we doubt he will ever show up. As an Objectivist, I know I only have this existence and I must be free to live it. If the only way is by staying out of sight, I will. If discovered, I will resist. I cannot secure freedom for others but I can optimize my own. I will contribute or not at my pleasure or at the point of a gun but I will not sanction the actions of tyrants.

See the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Q becomes Human and remarks that to stop a moon from falling all you have to do is change the gravitational constant of the universe.

With respect, noone, ie. no individual determines Reality. They may attempt to shape another's perception of Reality, but they can not change Reality. Reality is an axiom. It is. That is why Galileo could assert the truth that the Earth revolved around the Sun and eventually be proven true despite the attempts of the "authorities" to shape the perceptions of others around him through persecution and incarceration. Do not make the cardinal error (pun intended) of attributing to man the power to alter the fabric of Reality. Unless you really can alter the gravitational constant or the speed of light... In which case, please share. ;)

Blarman, look around you. Authorities of every stripe, every day, are determining your reality for you.
You need to read the classic "Obedience to Authority", a famous study by Stanley Milgram.

A What-if scenario can be played out any number of ways. I believe Rand posited one such in Atlas Shrugged (unless I totally misread the book).

But can someone else really determine what Reality is for someone else? I don't think so. Reality determines itself and our perception of that Reality is incomplete and faulty due to our own limited knowledge and understanding. Just so with Galileo. He was persecuted for affirming Truth, just as many others before and since. Did that mean that somehow Truth was subject to the whim of the tyrant who called himself Pope? Not so. We may be inconvenienced, belittled, even put to death like the martyrs before us, but Reality will go on independently and without respect for such tyranny. Eventually, Truth will win out.

As to the Great Man Hypothesis, I believe that we are all born with the possibilities of greatness, but that few posit the existence of that greatness and even fewer act to realize it. Ignorance and apathy are bane to self-actualization.

I think I saw my DVD on that one last night, maybe. Hardly remember reading We the Living, but I know I did, it's on my bookshelf. Memory issues starting to come into play, can't remember contents of books or videos unless they are simple and dumb singular themes.

I have a lot of feeling about this, but better not get into it. Especially around Christmas has always been a hard time for me. And now with the outright tyranny from our leaders, with little or no repercussions at all in this country, make it that much worse.

Wow, 58 comments in under an hour on this issue.

I agree with you, blarman. Once the risk, the challenge is removed from one's life, especially that of European white men, who thrive on challenges and risk, they become apathetic.
Science, and the zeal for knowledge, replaced battle in the life of the Europeans, as a means of combatting problems. (Notice the use of the word "combat", here).

Cervantes showed us in "Don Quixote" the lengths a man will go to, to accept a challenge.
From the Quest for the Holy Grail, to tilting at windmills.

And what if we are "forced" to give up on them? At least forced to give up on our own independent, individual ways of attacking, or solving, those problems. What if the collective "forces" the "Great Men" to do it the way the collective wants them to do it, and not as the Great Man himself wants?

Will Galileo's struggle with Urban VIII have been in vain?

Will mankind, or has he already, gone back to a time centuries before Galileo, when someone in authority is to determine your reality for you?

(Blarman, what do you think of Carlyle's Great Man hypothesis, in the light of Rand's Objectivism?)