It seems it just gets busier and busier every week around here. That makes it a bit more difficult to listen to my usual podcasts. Well, not really difficult to listen to them, but to pay attention to them to make some meaningful comments here on the blog.

Podcasts

Don’t Let it Go…Unheard: Let Them Eat Lies –  This week Amy Peikoff and co-host Bosch Fawstin that put a 2015 update on the quote often attributed to Marie Antoinette of “Let them eat cake.” In many ways this was an extension of last week’s podcast on honesty as it dealt with the various way that public figures give us lies and misleading information which we are expected to just swallow. A good part of the show dealt with Hilary Clinton’s e-mail scandal, especially her decision to provide 50,000+ pages of printed e-mails. This reminded me of nothing so much as an episode of a television legal drama where a lawyer subpoenas all the records regarding an issue and gets box upon box upon box of documents that may only be tangentially related to the matter at hand. The goal of course is to make it extremely difficult to find anything relevant.

You can find Amy’s show notes here.

Philosophy in Action – Each week Dr. Diana Hsieh and her co-host Greg Perkins apply rational principles to everyday life by answering questions from actual listeners. This week the main questions were:

• What are the major branches of philosophy? – Short answer is: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politcs. Here she differs a bit from Ayn Rand who includes aesthetics as a major branch as well.
• Is displaying the Confederate flag racist?
• Should tax-payer funded abortions be opposed? – I found this question to be quite interesting and it actually changed my mind a bit. Not in a fundamental way, but more in how I would frame my opposition. For me her key point was that if we want to get government out of medicine, which is my goal, you cannot do so by opposing a single procedure in isolation. So you cannot make a list of procedures – Heart bypass, tonsillectomy, abortion, appendectomy and so forth – and say that the government shouldn’t pay for this or that one with no reference to all the others. Especially where opposing the procedure in question could lead to more serious rights violations than the government paying for it as one among the many others. The idea is that in opposing government-funded abortion the argument should be made on the basis that government shouldn’t be paying for any of them and abortion is just a single example.

Peikoff.com Episode 364 – In this episode of Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s podcast, Dr. Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, answers questions about:

• Should potentially dangerous economic activities, such as nuclear power, be regulated by the government?
• What is his stance on massive piracy of copyrighted material?
• If a revolutionary new treatment for disease were to be discovered, would the FDA deny approval for it? – I thought Yaron’s answer to this was especially interesting. He stated that, assuming the treatment was deemed safe and effective, once it is developed they would likely approve it. Where the problem comes in is that given all the hurdles the FDA imposes on the development of new treatments fewer and fewer of them are likely to appear.
• What is his opinion on the demonstrations following the events such as in Ferguson and New York City when white policemen killed black suspects?

Yaron Brook Show: Examining This Week’s Headlines – The one difficulty I have with Yaron’s shows, some of them at least, is they offer so much information it can be hard to keep track of, especially listening at work. The first half of the show dealt with the situation in Iran and covered, somewhat briefly, the history of the conflict with Iran going back to what many consider the starting point of our problems, the 1953 ousting of the “democratically elected” prime minister who had vowed to nationalize, i.e. steal, the oil that had been discovered and produced by Western companies. (In the chat at this point it was pointed out that there actually was no democratically elected prime minister, but rather an appointee of the Shah who “convinced parliament to grant him emergency powers for six months to “decree any law he felt necessary for obtaining not only financial solvency, but also electoral, judicial, and educational reforms”.” (This puts me in mind of Venezuela in recent years, and knowing how such powers were granted I have little doubt that similar machinations were used in Iran.) At no point was the Shah not the head of state, so the “coup” was more to restore power that had be usurped by the prime minister.) The restoration of the Shah, who promised that existing agreements with Western companies would be honored, was an act of self-defense on the part of American and British governments. Yaron then discussed more recent events including the take over of the US Embassy in 1979, various terrorist attacks funded by Iran in the years since that have brought us to the situation today. He spoke of the connection between the recent murder of Alberto Nisman in his hotel room in Buenos Aires in January and the Iranian nuclear program.

The second half of the program started off with an in-depth discussion of an article posted to HardMoneyJim.com about monetizing the debt and the effects that has. This leads to a discussion of Paul Krugman’s recent editorial in the New York Times, Strength is Weakness, regarding why he, Krugman, feels that a strong dollar is bad for the United States. Also talked about were Uber, self-driving cars and how a version of “trolley dilemna” in ethics might apply, e.g. how should a self-driving car be programmed to deal with a child running into the road in front of it. (This makes me think of a recent episode of “Person of Interest” where they dramatize the machine, an artificial intelligence, working through different scenarios trying to decide which actions to take.)

He ends the episode, as usual, with a positive recommendation: Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey has a whole array of characters who, while often mistaken, are good. He also mentioned liking Justified starring Timothy Olyphant (who I loved in Hitman).

And More

In what little extra time I have had this week, I have continued re-reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I have also been listening to a number of lecture series, mainly Defensor Patriae: The Homeland Defense in History by John David Lewis. Once I clear my current lengthy backlog of books I have and want to read, I will buy the book that developed from the same material, Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History. I am a huge history buff, so I find this material really fascinating and love seeing how these lessons from history apply today.