Joe wouldn't mind.

He told me he intends to pass it on anyway.

An email preceded this where Joe asks me about a Cicero quote. He said it's one of those things he finds distasteful about the Internet, challenges like Cicero quotes accompanied with a present-day quip like, "2,500 years and we haven't learned anything yet." 

Joe asked if I could confirm the quote.

And that took all of ten seconds. 

And several more minutes to learn more about Cicero than I ever cared to. I answered Joe. But I failed to keep my answer simple and came across overly harsh. 

Joe is 80 years old, that is relevant, he has organized his time too wisely to include time for a hammering political treatise in the form of a big fat f'n book. He resists reading it, and suitably so, while his hiking partner half his age goes on and on an don an don an don I'm imagining this, because Joe mentions feeling guilty about not wanting to read it.

So here is the third in a string of emails to Joe. IT'S PRIVATE !111!1 oh wait, nothing is. 

Apologies for my email sounding harsh, I realize now, all the "you's" in there can be misunderstood as "you" and not my family who sends me similar challenging things that get looked at then trashed and not recirculated as expected, especially when they tell me to send it on.

But here is something I do think is interesting and why Adrian thinks Atlas Shrugged is interesting. 

Just one piece of it that helps see what is going on in the book. This one little piece helps understand what came before and where it goes.

This is a column by a Delingpole, a British guy writing about the similarities between the British Progressive resistance to shale gas fracking [in Britain] with Rearden Metal in Atlas Shrugged. He calls Progressive resistance a nonsensical, dishonest, canting campaign.

From the book:

They said Rearden Metal is a threat to public safety. They said its chemical composition is unsound, it's brittle, it's decomposing molecularly, and it will crack suddenly without warning [.....] They're experts, though, the men on that committee. Top experts. Chief metallurgists for the biggest corporations, with a string of degrees from universities all over the country.

As that relates to present day shale gas:

Delingpole enumerates 5 big lies about shale gas that Matt Ridley brilliantly nailed.

1) polluted aquifers

2) methane

3) excessive water use

4) hundreds of chemicals 

5) earthquakes

None credible

Spouted by experts and green campaigners and concerned citizens all the time

No wonder they're concerned

They do no expect the expert chosen to speak is a campaigner beyond reason and are actually liars and paid advocates for massively well-funded and well-advanced anti-fracking campaign. 100 x larger than pro-fracking campaign

So poisonous meme spreads from corporate liar --> green activist --> useful idiot --> gullible prat --> Home Counties Tory voter.

Wow! Tory voter lower than gullible prat.

Back to Ayn Rand, who foresaw the swelling of unlikely pressure groups. This is from Atlas Shrugged, careful not to confuse it with current events.

"I don't like the resolution passed by the convention of grade school teachers of New Mexico" said Taggart. 

"What resolution?" 

"They resolved that it was their opinion that children should not be permitted to ride on the new Rio Norte Line of Taggart Transcontinental when it's completed because it is unsafe."

The article concludes, yes, the school teachers, they would know, just as ___ would know and ___ knows and those bright clued up sparks in the ___ know, perhaps they learned from ____ who would never ever lie, link to column on Right-wing site of that person caught up in lying. 

he'd never just make stuff up, would he?

Coming up on 1,000 comments, and very quickly in the commenters are fast to note  Ayn Rand actually predicted shale gas fracking before the process was invented. 

[In the book, there IS a character, Ellis Wyatt, who hooks up with Rearden after the Feds destroy Colorado economy who has the unique ability to attain oil and gas from places nobody else can]

Internet information is distorted because of the frenetic politics regarding the present day fracking. It is not so easy to sort through untainted information.

From conservpedia, obviously a conservative response to wikipedia that cannot be reliable on anything political because so many activists have their hand in it, so they came up with their own that doesn't allow that, but then that starts another type of censoring. It's their censored version of how Ellis Wyatt fits in the story of Atlas Shrugged and as a character in a novel, his place in comparison with present day political-economic activities. 

http://www.conservapedia.com/Ellis_Wyatt