The important part is, we figured it out before it was too late.

I thought that Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead were novels

AYN RAND
Hello, I'm Ayn Rand. I wrote a novel based on my Objectivist philosophy called The Fountainhead, but I don't think 700 pages was quite enough to get my point across, so I will write the exact same novel, only it will take 1100 pages this time.

READERS
Hey, great.

HEROINE
I'm Dagny Taggart. I am a railroad tycoon, woman-in-a-man's-world, stunningly beautiful heroine. I am the only person capable of running this railroad. I am the only woman in the universe worth a damn. I am also the only woman in the universe with a real job. I am basically the only woman in this novel.

LOVE INTEREST #1
I have worshiped you, the only woman in the universe worth a damn, from afar for my whole life.

HEROINE
That's nice.

LOVE INTEREST #2
I have worshiped you, the only woman in the universe worth a damn, naked on the forest floor. Yet I will nobly step aside in the name of noble idealism, despite the fact that I love you and want you, the only woman in the universe worth a damn, desperately.

HEROINE
Okay.

LOVE INTEREST #3
I worship you, the only woman in the universe worth a damn. Let us have creepy rape fantasy sex now. I will not ask permission to do all these kinky things to you, but luckily you want to be forced into all the kinky things, you dirty bitch.

HEROINE
This is clearly true love! Stick it in me.

ALL
Who is John Galt?

AYN RAND
I am not telling. Instead, please listen to someone pontificate about my Objectivist philosophy for a while.

SOMEONE
[Pontificates]

VILLAINS
There are many of us, but we are all exactly the same. We are caricatures of evil socialists and embodiments of pure evil. Let us create a perfect socialist world order ruled by the inept! We all suck! Socialism sucks! Ha ha!

HEROES
We are all exactly the same. We are noble and perfect and have very angular and insolent faces. We can read each other's minds and the minds of everyone else in this novel, leaving less room for misunderstanding and more room for pontificating. And we are all in love with Dagny Taggart, the only woman in the universe worth a damn.

ALL
Who is John Galt?

VILLAIN
[Threatens hero.]

HERO
[Flips coin]
If it's heads, I will gaze apathetically. If it's tails, I will laugh heartily.

VILLAIN
Although these are the only two things any of you heroes have done for the past 800 pages, I am shocked at this response! How could you! How dare you!?!

HERO
I will now pontificate about Ayn Rand's philosophy. It has been at least 50 pages since you've heard it.

AYN RAND
It is so convenient that all of my heroes are in perfect agreement about my philosophy so that their pontificating is so interchangeable.

ALL
Who is John Galt?

JOHN GALT
Hello. In this, the culmination of all the pontificating, I will explain Ayn Rand's philosophy for a full 57 pages. No, I am not kidding. This one monologue will last for 57 pages. Oh and also, I love Dagny.

DAGNY
I love you too. Man, this is really going to suck for Love Interest #3.

LOVE INTEREST #3
Despite my passionate love for you and enjoyment of our rape sex, and the fact that there is no other woman on earth worth a damn, and the fact that I sacrificed my life's passion on your behalf, and that I spent my entire fortune to get a divorce to be with you, I will now nobly step aside in the name of noble idealism.

DAGNY
Great! I will miss our creepy rape sex. Farewell.

LOVE INTEREST #3
Bye.

READER
Wait, what?

ATLAS
[Shrugs]

THE END

It's hilarious.

I'm going to bookmark your post.

but unfortunately I copied it many years ago and I've lost the source.

And I know what you mean about old books. Just last week I bumped into a number of boxes in the basement that I've not looked at for a dozen or more years, and many of them contain books. After going through them, I don't recall reading but maybe 10% of them. I'm not even sure if Goodwill or places like that even want them anymore.

This is flawless.

many years ago and no longer have the source.

But yes, it is truly flawless, so well done and so true. Cracks me up every time I read it!

Now I finally understand it. And it only took about 2 minutes.

Like swimming through hot tar.

was becoming a live-action documentary and you threw it away…too bad you didn’t stack it together with the Ayn Rand books and just let things evolve.

There are lots of organic chemistry textbooks and monographs on the other hand.

Never the twain shall meet.

Well, it takes up a lot of space. But I have an Ayn Rand book.

It is a conundrum. I do not like throwing books away, but to give it away risks causing harm to another that tries to read it.

Ayn Rand, a philosophical biohazard.

A rather brilliant locution.

If you ever find yourself discussing Ayn Rand, be sure to wear a mask.

and the acne too.

It was a good text. I found my old plastic modeling set the other day and it still had all the bonds.

Last edited Mon Dec 15, 2025, 06:43 AM - Edit history (1)

..., one by Strietwiser, and one by Cram - since I was curious about what a Nobel Laureate would do with an undergraduate organic chemistry textbook.

When my son went to France on an undergraduate research grant to study polymer derived ceramics, I scanned a textbook at Princeton for him, since he never took an organic chemistry course but would be working with polymers.

My boss donated a copy of March to him. He still hasn't taken an organic course the little brat. (He's a nuclear materials scientist finishing up his Ph.D.)

To return to Nobel Laureate textbooks:

The standard for Nobel Laureate textbooks is to my mind, Pauling's "The Chemical Bond," which I understand people still read.

It's one on my shelves, and I'm never getting rid of it.

If I recall correctly it was written in the 1930s or 1940s.

I've got the 1948 edition. I agree; my copy is a bit frayed but it's a keeper.

Any RW books here weren’t bought by me.

Love this OP😀

I doubt anyone here is a devotee of Ayn Rand; but one can't critique her work properly without having read it. There's no shame in having investigated the widest possible array of viewpoints – indeed, there can be no real intellectual integrity without it.

...I am quite glad that I know who she was, as pernicious as she was.

She made a lot of trouble for our times with her simplistic pseudointellectual claptrap. There were powerful people who took her seriously.

As I grew older, I came to decide why it can't work: it requires brutal self-honesty, and that is exceedingly rare. People want to think of themselves as special, and they are often willing to decide they are exceptional absent any evidence. Then they demand to be treated and paid as though they are exceptional. Then there is also the fact that judging people as inferior without getting to know them is fraught with peril.

Also, I read a biography of Ayn Rand from a man who knew her personally, and discovered she was a hypocrite (My Years with Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden). That was a pretty good book in its own right.

I still maintain she is widely misunderstood by the political right. Her work is seen as a justification of greed, which it is not. Rand hated greed.

and turned it backwards. If your car does not run in "D", there is no guarantee it will run in "R".

They appeal to a lot of teens which was when I first read them. They had a certain novelty for me as some one raised in a more leftish political environment.

Even then I noticed the part where the leads (Dagny and Hank) were driving though a wilderness and she says “People talk about unspoiled wilderness with no billboards. Well here it is for them. I hate people like that.”

As a military brat without any really cohesive political philosophy at 15 or 16 who was still always a fan of unspoiled wilderness, that made me reconsider enthusiasm for a book that if nothing else seemed calculated to annoy my grand-dad, a significant (and very annoying ) influence in my life. He huffed that “this woman is in the pay of American business-men and their dog eat dog worldview”. He was right I realized when I was around 21 and confronted with the daily realities of American capitalism.

As TurbineGuy notes above, her worldview was very warped by her experiences in the Soviet Bloc. I also agree with DUer snot upthread. It’s a useful exercise to interrogate worldviews alien to one.

It’s one of the negative aspects of the present time that people feel mere exposure to the opposite side can somehow contaminate one.

For me lately it’s grounded in the dawning realization that possibly these damn AI infested things are distributed or embedded in ways one wasn’t expecting and below the threshold of conscious awareness. I am still not sure of where it is just broken human behavior versus broken human behavior worsened by junk tech.

Those things have no idea what the human host is thinking and may bombard one with stuff one follows out of negative curiosity rather than positive. A shitty initial state may be really hard to recover from. Which is why I am for rebooting the whole damn thing rather than struggling with irreversible brain rot forever to please some shit corporation.

Morrison and Boyd is harder for the enfeebled modern mind to focus on. So if you consume junk while procrastinating, that seems to set you up for being slammed with more junk setting off a vicious cycle. Seems to make every difficulty with education or pursuit of good health worse.

God those books are rubbish though. But still, it is fun to read conservatives. I should read this Public Choice Theory jerk James Buchanan at some point.

I think of it often when I see people admiring pictures wilderness into industrial parks for wind and solar energy, which to my mind, is no different than admiring an oil field.

Whose fictional books were actually good and quite readable.

Rand was ponderous and perfect for the purpose. I have always doubted that any of the proponents read them. They merely waved them around like the Bible exclaiming, “It’s all in here. This famous writer agrees with us!” Never mentioning that they were the only people who said she was famous and they hadn’t really read anything in the books.

I made the mistake of taking 2 semesters of organic chem in 8 weeks of summer school. 3-4 hours of lecture every morning M-F and lab for 4 hours every afternoon, and then homework. Test every Monday morning. Killer.

This was the summer right after I finished nursing school. I had fantasies of applying to med school after finishing nursing school. The prof was a good guy, and knew pretty much everyone in the class was taking the course because they needed it for some reason other than wanting to be a chem major. He was generous with the curve so no one would fail. The final exam was not graded on a curve, and I was a combination of relieved, embarrassed and proud to pull off a C on the exam - 140 point out of 200. Relieved that I passed, embarrassed to be happy with a C for the first time ever, and proud that I had managed this without cheating. During that final exam, I noticed that a number of other students in the class had written formulas on the legs of their scruffy jeans and had probably been doing so all along, which would have accounted for the As some people were getting every week, while many of us were scraping by. Never occurred to me to cheat.

With a C in organic, I never even bothered to fill out any med school applications, as, back in the early 1970s, no one would even look at you if you didn't have an A in organic.

I will always wonder how I might have done in that class had I taken it over 2 regular semesters. I had nightmares about it for years, always the same - it was the last week of class, and I hadn't done any of the homework or labs, and my dream self was wondering if it was too late to drop the course. My real self should have dropped it 2 weeks in.

I kept that damn book for years as a symbol of having survived the class.

I hate hearing from people that it's all "memorization," probably because of the bad habit of being required to being familiar with named reactions. I think that's because they're badly taught.

One has to take an upper level class, generally in physical organic chemistry, to understand that it represents a systematic science that is quite independent of what are often special cases represented by named reactions.

It is the mechanism that matters, not the name. The Cope rearrangement and the Diels Alder condensation are actually the same damn thing, if one looks at it appropriately in my opinion.

I remember, when I was familiar with named reactions, and quite proud of being so, I encountered a book that was classic in my times, March's "Advanced Organic Chemistry," which dispensed with named reactions. At first I found it bothersome, but after a while I got it through my thick head that there was a point to that.

I have no idea whether editions of March are still in use, but hopefully young undergraduates (and old undergraduates, as they may exist) are exposed to something along those lines.

If you go to the "science" section of any general bookstore, one will be surprised to find any chemistry related books, which is a terrible disgrace to my mind. Many of these boil down almost to biographies of the "cool" scientists. I deeply regret that many, most, university bookstores have now been outsourced to Barnes and Nobel. This is a horrible thing, although I will confess that today's students can find quite a few books on line and download them if their University has a good library.

I have a hard time deciding whether I really want paper books or electronic books. I'm sure my home office, which is pretty much wall to wall books, would need to be three or four, maybe even more, times larger if the books on my thumb drive - and the journal articles as well - as well as those on my hard drive, were all paper. It's true that electronic books allow for searching, but when one does a targeted search electronically, one loses some of the ability to stumble across things that appear almost randomly, but nonetheless prove to be important.

(When I'm reading history, my hobby, I insist on paper, because generally I read history at bedtime.)

I trust you are happy with the nursing profession. It is, I think, one of the world's most important professions.

1. Kekule's dream about a snake with its tail in its mouth leading him to figure out the 6 carbon ring structure
2. OH means an alcohol
3. Saponification means making soap

And, if you need to smell something contained in a flask, gently wave your hand over the opening to waft a bit of the aroma toward you. I had forgotten that, and got a huge blast of ammonia that nearly knocked me over.

I spent most of my career as a peds nurse practitioner, which struck a good balance between nursing and medicine. I enjoyed the independence and problem solving aspect of it, the nursing "whole patient" orientation, and also was grateful for not having to be the one to break bad news to parents about dire diagnoses. I was happy to leave that part to my physician colleagues.

I worked until 1 month shy of my 70th birthday, at which time, due to my dislike of electronic medical records, COVID, and people wanting telemedicine visits, which I do not consider safe, it was suddenly time to be done. The only part I miss is new babies and first-time parents. That was always my favorite. I love to teach, and new parents are usually eager learners because there's so much they don't know.

But thanks for the interesting discussion

Organic chem (and inorganic chem) pretty much scared me even in high school.

NNadir is right that it’s not rote memorization but it’s still a lot of info to organize for a novice. I decided to keep a respectful distance from both post high school.

you learn to hate the carbon-based molecule with every fiber of your being, or as I put it, every carbon-based molecule of your being.

He also told me Organic Chem has put an end to many pre-med dreams.

""It's been long enough," said John Galt. "The society we abandoned should have turned into an utter disaster. Now we can remake it in the proper Objectivist spirit."

The titans of industry emerged. What they saw shocked them into total disbelief.

"It's clean!" said Dagny.

"And orderly!" said Francisco.

"Everything looks like it's made of Reardan Metal," said Hank, "but I can't imagine how they did it!"

"They're riding in cars that smell like they're burning gasoline, but how?" said Ellis.

Orren stepped forth. "The people who you employed at poverty wages remembered they knew how to make the things you invented after you left. They rebuilt the factories. They capped the well you tried blowing up. They gathered up your industrial waste and made things out of it. And they invented all new things. And now that you're not skimming the till, they can pay themselves enough to live on and still return a profit. Society is ten times better now than it was when you were running things."

"Is that all they did?" John sneered.

"Nope," Orren said. "They also built a guillotine in case you guys ever came back, and there are a few people who are ready to meet you..."


** Note Bene - not my original work - found on the Internet long ago.

is a first edition of Laurence Tribe's textbook, American Constitutional Law, from my con law class back in the Pleistocene era when there was such a thing as constitutional law. I can read that book now and weep, and I'll bet Laurence Tribe weeps even harder.

but i was over it about 1/2 way through atlas shrugged when i realized what arrogant azzwholes her characters are.

I feel that way all the time..I look at stuff I wrote a few weeks ago or last week and think “this person is an ass”. That’s not a humblebrag though i just realized it sounds like one. Like one is growing that fast. It isn’t. I can’t remember ever having written anything I look back at approvingly. But if I did it would probably be routine science. Though that is rubbish too it is less cringey.

It’s just hard to find humility in a hostile environment and without it one is doomed to be a bombastic ass. I am resigned to it. I figure my best bet is to reduce the amount of time I am embittered/angry and arrogant and increase the periods where I am more thoughtful, externally focused etc…it is all one can do

Public figures must be a different breed from us. We all have the grace that anonymity grants us. It is so hard to be human under the harsh light of scrutiny.

No Exit nailed it..who was that? Sartre? It’s what makes Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon such a nightmarish notion. When I first heard about it I felt revulsion and thought Bentham must have been a total ass. He was an in fact a utilitarian..figures..those guys are jerks, although on the surface it sounds like a concept with some sense it’s usually awful in its execution.

(P.S. : out of curiosity NNadir, who is that in your profile icon? I have wondered. I always look at the unfamiliar icons. You would recognize mine ).

Last edited Mon Dec 15, 2025, 08:42 AM - Edit history (1)

She made her husband great, not the other way around.

One of their children described Franklin and Eleanor's marriage as an "armed truce."

However that may have been, in serving as his eyes and ears, and in many ways his conscience, she pushed him into the pantheon of the country's greatest Presidents, and in fact, one of the world's greatest leaders in any country.

Come to think of it, she may have been the greatest Democrat in any century.

Your icon is Darwin.

I like what quotes I have seen of hers.
Armed truce ..lol..

yeah..mine is poor Darwin..from what I have read about him social Darwinism would be offensive to him which seems to be the only use anyone has for him anymore in the oligarch class - eugenics and social Darwinism.

I fear that our machinic minded overlords these days are more friendly to intelligent design or even creationism than evolution. Which is why I chose that.

for a good grounding in how not to live one's life. I did.