The reason for the replacement of this facility is mostly a fear of nuclear power.

For a very long time, I could not bring myself to the point of abandoning the greatness of the world. Then the world, including America, became no longer great. And moreover, men refused to see. The number of people who have blanked out who are in power is so many now that "a one person, one vote" system cannot possibly reward people like us going forward.

Amen, Scout!

Who is HE to judge? I find it exceedingly offensive, not so much for me personally, because I know my own failings, but for the thousands of good, God-fearing, Constitutional Conservatives all across this nation who are known intimately at the precinct level by their constituents, who have been duly elected to serve those constituents, and who believe in their hearts that this country is worth fighting for and will commit their blood and treasure to do so. I am extremely offended, and unless you know empirically that he is right, you should be, too.

I hope you guys are just kidding around and not really suggesting that Dagny caved in any way. If she “succumbed” it was not in failure but through determination.

To me, she was and is the symbol of our quest to reshape the world, not quit it. She believed in things, not as an idealist, but as a realist. “The straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.”

Another one of her best lines: "I cannot bring myself to abandon to destruction all the greatness of the world, all that which was mine and yours, which was made by us and is still ours by right – because I cannot believe that men can refuse to see... so long as men desire to live, I cannot lose my battle."

If this be capitulation, than let me make the most of it!

Wow... that's a rather dark assumption, isn't it, based solely on this one Request for Proposal? Could it be that NYPA, which is the single largest state-owned power organization in the United States, might simply be taking an under-performing asset offline? They have a half-billion dollar budget with debt at less than 20% of annual expenditures... I don't think they (or New York State's need for inexpensive energy) are going anywhere anytime soon.

I knew that ;)

I'm not sure what your preferred profession would be, but I envy you... sort of. I'm in the publishing business, and ever since I was a student in junior college, I wanted to be a teacher... probably English or history or literature... it never really got that far, because a philosophy instructor talked me out of it. He explained the one-sided politics of higher education, something that I am aware of now, but I had no inkling at the time. He was discouraged and discouraging, and to the extent that I allowed another's discontent to cause me to fear disappointment, I have regret.

But knowing the reality of the situation today, I probably wouldn't have made it anyway... too much of an outsider... I seem to always want to push the river, if you know what I mean.

Hijack...? I suppose it's my own damned fault for being a wiseguy. :/

How about this for an idea:

Term Limits for Life. Pick a number, 8 maybe 12, whatever, but that's it, for life, on the federal payroll. Get the nation and Congress back to the Founders' vision of the Citizen Legislator... make your contribution to the BETTERMENT of the nation, then go back home, knowing that you'll now have to live among the rest of us under the laws that you just helped to pass.

Two questions:

Do you think that would help to change the elite culture that you described?

Can you list 13 state legislatures that would absolutely block ratification of such an amendment?

Good morning, jbrenner…

I need to apologize for my hit & run style, at least for this week. As I mentioned, I’m still a working grunt, and my work (such as it is) requires me to leave the keyboard for several consecutive days every month and hit the road. This is one of those times. I will always respond, and I will try to do so as cordially and substantively as I can, but I may not always do so quite as punctually as I would were I posting back at home from the studio.

I followed your link and looked for the arguments from UncommonSense that were, in your words, hard to refute. What I found was an OP based on the factually flawed premise that what we (and Mark Levin) are talking about here is a “Con-Con,” or a Constitutional Convention. He obviously hasn’t read Levin, he hasn’t read (or paid any attention to) the remarks that we supporters of an Article V Convention of States (COS) have posted, or he is simply spreading misinformation deliberately in a very Uncommonsenseless way.

I did see, however, several other COMMON sense posts from other members of the conversation, such as…

Peggy, where, in her second post, she immediately corrected the OP’s incorrect use of the term “Con Con”

robertmbeard, where he correctly outlines the safeguards built into the process, answering all the fear-based arguments to the contrary. And in subsequent posts, he further goes on to concisely describe the Article V process, clearing up any possibility of confusion.

airfredd22, where he confirmed Robert’s interpretation of A5, once again sweeping away the haze over the difference between reality and the OP’s imaginary and constitutionally illegal fantasy.

And finally, dcwilcox, where he provided everyone with the actual numbers at play which make a “runaway convention” a logical and mathematical impossibility.

To be certain, all of the comments were not supportive of an Article V Convention of States.

There was rjim pulling manufactured history out of thin air, virtually declaring our current Constitution of the United States of America to be a fraud on its face by trotting out that 40-year old saw that the Convention of 1786 was a “runaway” and therefore invalid… I mean, come on… even the John Birch Society and Andy Schlafley don’t try to pull that one over on anyone anymore. The facts of the matter are that, whether or not each and every delegate to that assembly had an identically specific commission, their INTENT was the same, and the product from that convention clearly met the needs of the 13 states that sent them there, because it was LEGALLY RATIFIED by them all. End of story, end of BS.

Then I saw your post about a wishy-washy what-if hypothetical regarding a fantasy Vermont proposal that has absolutely NO procedural chance of ever becoming a possibility, at least not in a COS called for our stated purposes. Maybe in some Big Government COS being called for by commie-sympathizers somewhere over on the Left Bank, but not at the one we’re discussing here in the Heartland. That’s a totally different conversation going on in a totally different forum, possibly over on http://DemocraticUnderground.com.

And then I finally saw the vaunted defense by Uncommonsense… where he completely ignores all the rebuttal posts, everything that had been said, all the facts, all the details, and all the truth… where he continues to plod along with the absurd (and frankly boring by now) notion that Washington, D.C. “communists / socialists” (federal elected officials, I presume) are going to so muddle the effort, that everyone would just throw up their hands and give up on the whole idea… give up on the whole country… just fuhgeddaboudit and go home with their tail tucked between their legs… defeated… like he is.

I won’t even waste the bandwidth responding to that, and it’s noteworthy to me that no one from that point in the thread supported his hogwash.

Just so you know, jbrenner, those were not unassailable arguments that he offered… that was fear rooted in sheer ignorance of the facts. All you need to do to refute such “arguments” is go and examine the other side of the argument in order to arrive at an OBJECTIVE opinion of your own as to what the truth actually is… and as a member of a faculty at an institution of higher learning, I’m amazed that you should need to have this pointed out.

Please… seriously... do yourself (and your credibility) a favor and start here: http://conventionofstates.com/

Don't you think he raises a good issue about too few people understanding the purpose and nature of rights? An article V convention is possibly needed to fix what's happening to the nation, but sending people who aren't ready for the task could create even bigger problems.

he asks "hoqws that supposed to work"... as if aksing the quewstion means it wont. defaming all American legioslators is offenseive. Hes entitled to his opinion, of course, but opinion based on false assumptions is misguided. sorry for fat thumbs. L8r

He's wrong, of course, and you all knoiw it. His "pablum" is decades old, and pure defeatism, NOT Objectivism. He's a nihilist and wants to drag everyuone and everythinbg down to that level... Liberalism in its ugliest formn. See JBS & Eagle Forumn circa 1908. Im on the road, so cant elaborate. dont need to, reallty, but will ASAP.

No. Particularly as it's functioning and procedures would be controlled by the very mandarin class meant to be controlled or limited or even eliminated. How's that supposed to work? It's more pablum.

I propose that people, particularly Objectivist stay as far away as possible from Article V or any other nonsense fixes of our problems with our government as possible. Levin is a populist entertainer that's making a lot of money off of the Article V issue and offering false hope to people. Until the general populace gains sufficient education and understanding of the worth and value and the morality of individualism, productivity, and non-initiation of force - the country is lost. One of AR's main points was that the individualistic and liberty intellectuals of our culture and society were abdicating their personal responsibilities to themselves in an individualistic society.

Very few of our population, including commenters on this site and Article V proponents, have an understanding of natural rights vs. the pablum they've been fed of 'constitutional rights', as an example. There are no such things as 'constitutional rights'. There are only natural rights and there are a very few listed in the Bill of Rights, to illustrate where government may not trample. In the belief that their rights come from the constitution, the population then thinks it's OK for the government/voters to limit those rights in certain circumstances. The Objectivist needs to offer explanations and illustrations of the differences and the individual gains available from living a life of Objectivism with a government truly limited to only protecting natural rights - all natural rights.

No amount of words written on paper will suffice to rein in the professional political and bureaucratic mandarin class of our society. The only hope to control those individuals and groups is for the population to stand up en masse and say unequivocally, 'Enough'. And they won't do that until they begin to see themselves as individuals with natural rights derived from existence as a human being and the gains available to all from self determination.

Probably... and anyway, the last one I had didn't tell me squat about the future, but it did keep the Orcs at bay!

No, I had to write my own code.

This sounds pretty similar to what I used to do before Excel or even Lotus was invented.

This is a terrible solution to a problem being framed to perpetuate itself.

The problem isn't people you don't like pushing agendas you don't like. The problem isn't that groups can hide who they support, and that those groups oppose your ideals.

The problem is in trying to limit people's options. The proposed solution further limits people's options for effecting change. In other words all it does is change the targets of the suppression.

The freedom of speech doesn't apply to speech you like. By definition it applies to speech you don't like.

Few people seem to be aware of the history of campaign management and finance at the federal level. We have this Pollyanna style belief that candidates have always been the source of the campaign and the ideal place to control spending of it.

Neither are historically accurate.

From the outset, campaigns were not run or financed by the candidates themselves. The notion that CU changed the law is also just as inaccurate.

A constitutional amendment to limit free speech would violate the first amendment's protection of free speech. And yes, spending is speech. Taking about who you do or do not want as an elected official, and attempting to effect that change by means other than force, force-threat, or fraudulent actions is not corrupted by the decision of CU, and would be infringed upon heavily by an amendment to do so.

Let Soros and the Koch brothers spend as much a they want on political ideals.

Objectivism is not simply a place for people who don't lie, the status quo. What this proposal does goes against objectivism in my opinion, not in alignment with it. How so?

The proposal seeks to place limitations through force of law on people precisely because of their success. Consider it thusly, if the Koch brothers were not successful would you really care to mount an effort to limit their ability to succeed? I doubt it.

Part and parcel of this problem is the mounting mindset of "us vs them". The demonization of people you don't agree with is the oath to destruction, not a path to rational and civil society based on freedom and individual responsibility.

Think hard on why you want to limit the free speech of others. It is easy to rationalize it away by saying your opponents or interlocutors are evil or "being bad", but it allows you to minimize the cognitive dissonance of doing something to some one that you would object to having done to you.

The fundamental problem is not that the Koch brothers, or Soros, can fund all manner of political strategies. You can't really stop it anyway (they have money because they have power, not the other way around) and only make it harder for those who lack their resources to have an effect. No, the problem is that politicians and government have too much power, and we refuse to acknowledge as a society that politics follows the same laws of economics, specifically supply and demand.

If the politicians did not have the ability to grant favors or to put limitations on competitors, or compel you to buy things you don't want, the supply of power diminishes, and thus the demand for it diminishes.

The increase costs of campaigns is due to the increased control the would be government elect has. There is prima facia evidence of this easily seen.

How much money is raised in being elected to a school board as opposed to a legislative seat for the same citizenry? Why is that? Simply, and most evidently, because of the difference in power behind the seat.

If government didn't possess, and want allowed to, the authority to force businesses into providing Services or products not in their interest, those who want to force businesses to do that wouldn't be so keen to spend money to convince the PTB to do something they can't do.

Address the wound, not the blood stained clothing.