First: Happy Birthday Miss Rand!

The first celebratory piece I've read today was from The Objectivist Center and I like it. Here's a couple paras:

Rand developed an ethos of rational self-interest, but this "virtue of selfishness" was not an anti-social creed for predators. Instead, it led Rand to her great insight that there is no conflict of interest between honest, rational individuals. Since individuals are ends in themselves, no one in society should initiate the use of force or fraud against others. All relationships should be based on mutual consent. This became the credo of the modern libertarian movement, found today in think tanks, publications and public policy proposals.

True individualists would not debase themselves by living the life of a thief, whether robbing a store with a gun or their fellow citizens with a government mandate or wealth-redistribution scheme. Rather, they would take pride in taking responsibility for their own lives, actions and moral character. Rand wrote, "As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul."

The last line is what you call a "hard saying" that took me a while to get, steeped as I was in altruistic teachings, but if you find the rest to be common sense, good for you. You're on my side.

And in other news, Punxutawney Phil saw his shadow today, so six more weeks of winter. I'd like to know where that's not the case.

I got my first "Amber Alert: Penny Brown" email today. It didn't look right, so I googled her. No official looking websites, but a bunch blasting the email as a hoax. I didn't see Snopes on the first page, and that made me think that maybe the perv who took her was setting up websites saying that as fast as he could. But then I went to Snopes directly.

Oldest missing persons hoax they've got. I sent that news up the back-trail.

Snopes said, "the e-mail itself provided few of the details that generally appear in legitimate pleas to help locate missing children. Not even the city or country the child went missing from was mentioned, and other than the pointless "has been missing for now two weeks," no date was given for the disappearance. ("For now two weeks" statements are entirely useless in a medium wherein undated text is circulated — the "two weeks" ago of an e-mail can and often has referred to events years in the past.)" I noticed all that immediately. What's wrong with the 500 people ahead of me that they didn't?

Whoops! Only 15 minutes to Kama Sutra time! I think I'll go see if I can't put mine into action before then.