The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged , John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market , Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead : "He was born without the ability to consider others." (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.)

Hmm, where do you get the negative interest rate for 10 year T-bonds? http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=yield has them at 1.6% today. Or are you factoring in inflation?

I certainly agree that some of the surface measurement sites are situated poorly. However, given that "changes in borehole temperatures (Section 2.3.2), the recession of the glaciers (Section 2.2.5.4), and changes in marine temperature (Section 2.2.2.2), which are not subject to urbanisation, agree well with the instrumental estimates of surface warming over the last century" and that there is no statistically significant difference between the records from rural and urban surface temperature stations ("While there is little difference in the long-term (1880 to 1998) rural (0.70C/century) and full set of station temperature trends (actually less at 0.65C/century), more recent data (1951 to 1989), as cited in Peterson et al. (1999), do suggest a slight divergence in the rural (0.80C/century) and full set of station trends (0.92C/century) However, neither pair of differences is statistically significant.", as detailed in the IPCC report, it doesn't, well, appear to be statistically significant. Oh, and could we omit the petty attempts at vulgar "humor"?

We're now glossing over point 2 and making broad assumptions. Nevermind that "To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming." [Source] Hmmm... what's the phrase I'm looking for here... something about correlation and causation.

Perhaps you ought to take a look at this study. I quote: "The answer: This particular ice age didn't begin when CO2 was at its peak -- it began 10 million years earlier, when CO2 levels were at a low." "Taken together, the evidence suggests that the ice began to build up some 10 million years earlier than when volcanoes began pumping the atmosphere full of the CO2 that ended the Ordovician ice age." "Our results are consistent with the notion that CO2 concentrations drive climate."

May want to update your talking points...though I rather suspect you'll regurtitate the same set the next time a climate change discussion comes up here.

" This last one brings us to the ultimate death blow to the global warmers' argument. The warming we've experienced since the last glacial period has brought us grasslands, forests, jungles.... When the next glacial period comes, the planet will be covered mostly by icy tundra and extreme deserts again. Warming has only made this planet MORE habitable to us. I've got 12000 years of proof that warming is good. What do you have to the contrary?"

Dude...are you being deliberately obtuse? It's not just sea levels rising due to glacial melt, though that alone is problematic (though there's this thing called empathy where some humans sympathise with the plights of other humans...something you apparently lack). Potential consequences also include droughts, heat waves, disruption of various ecosystems, increased oceanic acidification due to greater CO2 absorption (up to a limit) and so many others. If you were genuinely interested, I could go into the details.