| | In the thread, "How Did You Discover..." I told of my teenage romance with another student of Objectivism. In many ways, it was like something out of Atlas Shrugged. Western Reserve University was Patrick Henry. The Terminal Tower was perfect for the Taggart Terminal: the concourse lacked only a statute of Nat. We had steel mills, of course, and ore boats to feed them. I grew up so close to the steel mills I sometimes found coke on the sidewalk on the way to school, something exhaled from a tremendous process. Deep on the late night in the summer with the windows open, I could hear the yard engines pushing and pulling cars. ... Then, my Mom got on top of most of her life and we moved three times in two years until we made the Gold Coast and life was pretty much OK with me -- and just like something out of Atlas Shrugged.
The Nixon Wage and Price Freeze was definitely right out of Atlas Shrugged.
I am taking a class in Logic right now and the instructor suffers from logical positivism. She is smart, that is obvious, but it only has allowed her to memorize huge volumes of nonsense which she attempts to teach. In fact, last week, in lieu of actually explaining truth tables, she put one on the board and told us to memorize it. A couple weeks before, when I said that I was grappling with this, doing the exercises over and over, she asked if instead of trying to understand it, I could just do the exercises over enough times to memorize them. She also has the psycho-epistemology of a Valley Girl. "We'll use symbols and stuff... Logic is kinda like math ... or whatever... stuff like that ... Before we learn very much stuff..." Last week, her marker gave out but she kept writing on the board anyway, making white tracks in the dust and then reading them to us. And her favorite movie this summer was War of the Worlds. It's like something out of Atlas Shrugged.
The anti-trust action against Microsoft was like something out of Atlas Shrugged, but so was the looting of Drexel-Burnham.
Toward the end of Atlas Shrugged, as things ground down, people noticed that storms which were never more than an inconvenience now left dead bodies in their wakes.
There was the time -- I've told this before on SOLO -- when my wife and I were entertaining Bill and Cathy Bradford. W. R. is the publisher of Liberty magazine today, but back then, he was the owner of Liberty Coins. We were renting a duplex that backed up to a cemetary (quiet neighbors) and there was a picnic table near a fence under a tree. Bill thought he could go from the table to the fence to the tree and pull himself up. I looked away for an instant, and he fell out of the tree. "I know what the problem was," he announced. He pulled a large bar of gold from his pocket. "Here, hold this," he said. I said, "Wow! This is just like something out of Atlas Shrugged!" Bill replied, "Where does a guy fall out of a tree and hand you a gold bar?" I said, "Ragnar appeared out of nowhere, and that's how you looked to me." He murmured that the bar belonged to a customer and I couldn't have it.
... and then there was the time I was sitting in a physics class and in the middle a lecture on static electricity, a door opened in my mind. I could not see what was beyond the door, but I caught of glimpse of something contradicting a basic assumption. It was like something out of Atlas Shrugged.
While in that physics class, I was hanging out with a guy who taught me a lot about hacking. He got into more trouble for it than I did. One day, we were in the lab after school and the new lab aide came in: a bright-eyed bushy tailed guy named John. "Wow," I said, "This is just like something out of Atlas Shrugged." Geoff got it and finished the thought. "... because you are a business major in a physics lab with a guy named John and pirate?"
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