Russell Hasan's Blog

 It has become a trend to talk about the books on someone's bookshelf that you see in the background of people on their Zoom meetings, and to analyze what their books say about a person's personality. The way my webcam is set up, my bookshelf is not in the background, so you would never see it. So I thought I would share a list of the books on my bookshelves: Harry Potter Books 1 through 7 Dragons of Autumn Twilight The Crystal Shard A Spell for Chameleon ElfQuest Volume 1 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress John Locke's Second Treatise of Government F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom A copy of all of my own books: Rob Seablue and the Eye of Tantalus, The Office of Heavenly Restitution, Project Utopia, The Prince, The Girl and The Revolution, The Golden Wand Trilogy, The Apple of Knowledge, Golden Rule Libertarianism, What They Won't Tell You About Objectivism, XYAB Economics, A Law and Economics Approach to Litigation Costs, A System of Legal Logic, and On Forgiveness Atlas...

 I was reading the entry entitled "Contemporary Philosophy" on Wikipedia and reading the subsection on "The Professionalization of Philosophy" and it said something like, and I paraphrase: "Now only philosophy professors can be philosophers, and philosophy is something that is done by publishing academic papers in highly technical trade journals, which non-philosophers cannot understand and which are not designed to be read by non-philosophers, and the age of the amateur philosopher with no technical training and no PhD who writes genius philosophy books intended for a mass audience, the age of philosophers like Descartes or Spinoza or David Hume, is over," and I remember thinking, "That's me! They're talking about me! I'm a precocious amateur genius who writes philosophy books! They are saying the age of me is over!" And I don't think my age is over. Here I am.

1. "Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?" (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, which is an almost verbatim statement of one of the ideas of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, although Rand spent her entire life denying that Nietzsche influenced her.) 2. "...for these truths hold good for everything that is, and not for some special genus apart from others. And all men use them, because they are true of being qua being. ... For a principle which every one must have who understand anything that is, is not a hypothesis. ... Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong ...

These are my 10 favorite quotes by random famous people: 1. "Always do right. This will please some people, and astonish the rest." - Mark Twain. 2. "Lack of money is the root of all evil." - Mark Twain. 3. "Suppose you were a member of Congress. And suppose you were an idiot. But I repeat myself." - Mark Twain. 4. "The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated." - Mark Twain. 5. "Learn like you'll live forever, live like you'll die tomorrow." - Mohatma Ghandi. 6. "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." - Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, himself quoting Pablo Picasso, while discussing the Mac Operating System. 7. "Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken." - Oscar Wilde. 8. "It's a republic, if you can keep it." - Benjamin Franklin, when asked what form of government the Constitutional Convention had chosen for the USA. 9. "You are never alone, when alone." - Cicero. 10. "I'm g...

These are the top ten (my ten favorite) quotes said by philosophers Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche: 1. "How can you return to me if you do not leave me?" - Nietzsche 2. "Build it as a monument to that spirit which is yours . . . and could have been mine." - Rand 3. "Sometimes, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you." - Nietzsche 4. " Insist  on it." - Rand 5. "God is dead, and we are the ones who killed Him." - Nietzsche 6. "Are you happy, Mr. Superman?" - Rand (Yes, this is Rand, not Nietzsche - she is referring to him. It's one of my favorite lines from The Fountainhead.) 7. "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." - Rand 8. "A philosopher must always be forgiven for his first followers." - Nietzsche 9. "It's the soul, Peter, the soul, not whips or swords or fire or guns." - Rand...

 I have not seen a simple list of the virtues enumerated in Atlas Shrugged, so I made this list: 1. Reason 2. Purpose 3. Self-Esteem 4. Rationality 5. Independence 6. Integrity 7. Honesty 8. Justice 9. Productiveness 10. Pride For Ayn Rand's explication of these virtues, see pages 932-33, Atlas Shrugged, Signet Paperback Edition. One can further subdivide this list: Reason, Purpose and Self-Esteem are "the Big Three Virtues," Rationality, Independence and Integrity are "The Intellectual Virtues," and Honesty, Justice, Productiveness and Pride are "The Social Virtues." These three sets of values comprise the bedrock foundation of Objectivist morality.

Most libertarians would point to the principle that one should never initiate violence and use force only for self defense as the core axiom for liberty—the axiom that I call NVP, the Non-Violence Principle. Here I write to propose a second axiom, based on some recent conversation with my fellow Libertarian Party members. I know one LP member who opposes big government except for public education to give poor kids a leg up. I know another who opposes big government except for Social Security for retirees, on the belief it isn't fair to deny someone benefits they paid into for decades. I know a third who opposes big government except for welfare and food stamps for the very poor. This person is convinced that a Marxist revolution will happen if all welfare is cut. I have also heard a Libertarian talk about the "real" pain and suffering of the poor that is alleviated by welfare, as if the pain caused by big government is not equally real. These people, and I now suspect m...

Are libertarians left or right? Are libertarians left or right? This is not an easy question to answer, for several reasons. First, no one definition exists of what is a libertarian. Ask twenty libertarians, by which I mean people who self-define as libertarian, what is a libertarian? and you will get twenty different answers. Being libertarian might mean you consider yourself a member of a libertarian movement, or a Libertarian Party , of that you believe in one of the many different types of libertarian philosophy, like Austrian or AnCap. Second, when you ask are libertarians left or right, you assume that left and right are the only two options. Many libertarians think of themselves as neither left nor right. What is left? what is right? Many libertarians say that the left vs. right analysis is a false dichotomy. The famous libertarian Nolan Chart was designed to be a visual explanation of this fact. These libertarians do not choose to see things as left vs. right. They see left as...

I have to share links to my two new books on Amazon--just to make it easier for you to find them! A Law and Economics Approach to Litigation Costs: The Proportionality Test for E-Discovery Law And On Forgiveness Love them or hate them, this nobody can deny: my nonfiction books are unique!

I recently pushed two new nonfiction books: On Forgiveness And A Law and Economics Approach to Litigation Costs. On Forgiveness explores forgiveness, not from a religious point of view, but instead from a psychological perspective. It explains self-forgiveness, and the way your self-esteem benefits if you forgive yourself for your own flaws. The other book is aimed at lawyers, and people who hire and pay lawyers. If you are grappling with understanding why your lawsuit is so expensive, this book may help. Fans of the Law and Economics jurisprudence also have to read this book. I present some new ideas on that topic, and those ideas are must-read ideas. Please do check them out on Amazon!

The Government is Borrowing Money to Fight Coronavirus. What Does That Mean? Russell Hasan Where is All This Money Coming From? The federal government is borrowing trillions of dollars to pay for the coronavirus bailout. What does that actually mean? Where does that money come from? Who pays for it? And if the government can give away $2 trillion, why don't they do so more frequently? The best analogy is a farmer and seed stock. A farmer harvests seed. Some of the seed, he and his family eats. Some of the seed, he saves to plant a future harvest. The seed he saves? That's his seed stock. Economics is simple, with a few basic premises. To spend money is to consume stuff. To make money is to create stuff. You pay for the stuff you consume with the stuff you create. If someone spends money to eat food, that's like eating some of the seed. The consumer's money pays for the seed. If someone invests money, that's like paying for seed stock. If someone gives ...

The short answer is: no, and it's because of the coronavirus. In chess, when a player can take two of your pieces on his next move, if you move one to safety, then the other is lost, and this is called being forked. Donald Trump is forked. If he eases social distancing to save the economy, your grandparents die (along with up to a million other people), and the voters will blame him. If he doesn't, the economy dies and we all lose our job and starve to death. There is no winning move for him to make. Voters won't understand, or won't care, that it is not his fault and the virus is to blame. Ironically, the Democrats were weak foes whom I believe Trump would have beaten easily, but in the coronavirus, Trump faces an enemy as tough, as resilient, as crafty, and, yes, as contagious as he is. It is precisely the type of opponent he is ill equipped to handle and was not ready for. I'll be voting Libertarian and have no skin in the RepPa vs. DemPa game, but right now t...

Today we're going to learn about the Libertarian Party! Come on! It will be fun! Everyone knows about the USA's two party system, with the Democrats and the Republicans. Did you know that there are other political parties in the United States? Well there are! And the Libertarian Party is the largest third party in America. Generally, Democrats are liberals and Republicans are conservatives. Members of the Libertarian Party are usually libertarians. There is no one definition of what makes a person be libertarian, but their ideas are often based on one of four thinkers: philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, economist Murray Rothbard, or economist Ludwig von Mises. Libertarians support unregulated free market capitalism. Issues they feel strongly about include: legalizing drugs, giving people the right to own guns, and cutting taxes. The Libertarian Party generally supports any policy that maximizes individual freedom and limits governme...

What is the philosophy of Objectivism? Let's learn about it together! I bet you'll learn something new! Objectivism is the name of a philosophy--a set of ideas--developed by novelist Ayn Rand in the 20th Century. Objectivists are people who practice Objectivism. What do Objectivists believe? They think that a person should be happy, and that your happiness is the moral and ethical purpose of your life. They claim that rationality and reasoning are your main tools to succeed in the world, and that success causes happiness. They promote capitalism and individualism, feeling that the individual is more important than society. Did you know? The 1980s were called The Decade of Greed because many people were influenced by Objectivism at that time, including high-ranking officials of the Reagan Administration. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was also a known Objectivist. Who was Ayn Rand? She was born in 1905 in Russia to Jewish parents. She lived through the 1918 Communist...

As the coronavirus crisis triggers a forced switch for schools and colleges to online learning and for office workers to work from home, it is worth speculation that some of these changes are permanent. Schools and businesses are figuring out how to do everything remotely online. That know-how is worth money, and, even after the crisis is over, they will need to recover their investment in that know-how, probably by continuing to use it. Also, real estate costs money. People are always going to pay for their homes, so if people work at home or learn at home, then the cost of the office or the campus vanishes, costs go down, so profit goes up. Sadly the joy of the experience of being on campus or in the office is lost, but once people get used to its absence they may not care. Tomorrow may be here today, earlier than any of us wanted to see it.

The coronavirus crisis has caused an unprecedented level of volatility on Wall Street, accompanied by one day which saw the largest single-day drop on almost 30 years. Why stocks are collapsing is simple: the coronavirus is going to cost every business money, so they will have less profit and pay smaller dividends, so their stock is worth less. Such a correction is actually how the market is supposed to work: prices send signals to tell people what things are really worth, and the stocks are now not worth as much as they were in our recent economic boom. A more interesting question is why is there so much volatility? It has been reported in WSJ, and is obvious if you look at recent charts of the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average, that most of the volatility is either right when the market opens or right before it closes. They say that investors buy and sell based on news. I think the major institutional investors have ways to buy and sell US stocks while the market is...

It was recently in the news that "6 million Android phones are at risk of being hacked." Then if you dig deeper it turns out these are the older devices in poorer countries with versions of the Android OS which Google has stopped supporting. Let me explain what "not supported" means. It means if the OS developer finds a bug or exploit (a vulnerability a hacker can exploit) they are not legally obligated to push a fix or security update. So, yes, an unsupported OS is a hacker's paradise, but that's not news, every tech person already knows that. A lot of people say a lot of things are fake news these days, but that one might really actually deserve to be called fake news. It would be like saying that people have invented this great thing called the wheel and that's worth a headline. Wheels are great, but that's not news.

While everyone is aware now that the Astros stole signs using a camera in center field during their tainted World Championship 2017 season, everybody seems to have forgotten the initial allegations that made reporters begin to dig: New York Yankees players alleging the 'Stros were stealing signs during the 2019 playoffs. Why isn't MLB investigating and handing out punishment for that? Maybe because MLB in its fear of the players' union cut a deal for prosecution immunity if the Astros confessed, which is reason why the culprits, those Astros players, were not and never will be punished by MLB. Were the League to do its job and rake some muck, the Astros players and the union would call their lawyers and sue, and MLB fears messy litigation. Do you job, Rob Mansfred!

Master legal reasoning. Improve your writing and hone how to draft a brief. Understand the intersection of political philosophy and the law, and how that should shape your legal arguments to judged and juries whether you are a seasoned lawyer or pro se. Impress your friends with your grasp of logic. This paper provides a new system of logic, including philosophical principles and logical notation, based on the work in logic done by Aristotle and later by Ayn Rand but also with a nod to modern Analytical philosophy, which is extremely useful to lawyers for analyzing facts to determine whether they satisfy the elements of a claim, as well as organizing arguments to a jury and presenting evidence. A libertarian politics emerges from the system of logic as a byproduct of the logical analysis of the intersection of law, politics, and philosophy. Required reading for lawyers and citizens who want to understand the law and how and why it impacts them. Learn more at  https://www.amazon....

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