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Reason, Rand claims, is man's only means of both grasping reality and acquiring knowledge. What evidence did she present for this view? Unfortunately, none at all.

Let me just note that, in the light of evidence brought to light by exponents of Wittgenstien's Family Resemblance theory of concepts and discoveries about the large role played in concept-formation by the cognitive unconscious, Rand's theory appears rather implausible.

Logic enables us to judge the validity of our own deductive reasoning, but much of the time we need to reason non-deductively — either inductively, or in terms of likelihoods, or of causes and effects, none of which fits within the rules of formal logic.

The only way to make this true is to define mysticism and skepticism analytically -- i.e., as the only alternatives to "reason."

What if our space probes and the Curiosity rover are the equivalent of those reed boats thousands of years ago? It's worth pondering. We may be at the start of a long, slow journey whose climactic moment comes thousands of years from now.

That said, it's undeniable that technological change and fast human time can profoundly affect events unfolding in slow time.

Maybe our grandchildren will have a chance to take a life-extension pill. But not us. And that has to be OK. Making scientific promises we can't keep will do a lot of harm. Ultimately it undermines the public's trust in both science and people who prognosticate about it.

We need to think about the future as a set of overlapping timelines. Some events take place in human time. Others exist in the slow time of Homo sapiens or the planet's carbon cycle — or even the Milky Way's collision course with Andromeda.

In a sense, we are trapped in accelerated time.

Putin is happy that Russia's geography grants him access to massive natural gas deposits, as well as the pathways to export that natural gas to Europe, particularly to Eastern Europe. This provides him with economic and, thus, political leverage over former Warsaw Pact states. But he is nervous.

Are they aware that when I took power there was political chaos and criminal anarchy, with ordinary Russians robbed of their dignity? In Putin's mind, he restored a large measure of order -- without which no progress is possible in the first place. And whatever his numerous faults, he is painfully aware that he is not in total control.

President Richard Nixon went to China to negotiate with Mao Zedong because it was in America's interest to do so; the fact that Mao had just killed millions in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not an over riding detail. So where is my Nixon? Putin must think.

The Russian Far East, an area roughly twice the size of Europe, has a paltry population of fewer than 7 million that may fall to fewer than 5 million in coming decades.

But geography dictates that Russia's alliance with China is mainly tactical. While Russia is delivering increasing amounts of oil (and probably natural gas soon, too) to China, something for which Beijing is grateful, the two giant nations share long borders in the Far East and in Central Asia that through the centuries have been volatile.

on the other side of the border Russia faces a population of 100 million people in Chinese Manchuria. Resource acquisition is the principal goal of Chinese foreign policy, and the Russian Far East is rich in reserves of natural gas, oil, timber, diamonds and gold.

Nixon would understand Russia's geopolitical insecurities and partially assuage them, in order to gain some leverage over China, just as four decades ago he had moved closer to China in order to gain some leverage over Russia.

For a U.S. State Department Arabist, a posting to Syria was, in a thematic sense, fundamental to a successful career.

Given the fact of almost two dozen Arabic-speaking countries and only one Hebrew-speaking country to which one could be posted, an American diplomat's professional lifetime might be spent among Arabs much more easily than among Israelis. Not to develop sympathies would be inhuman.

The Arabists knew that it was a myth that Syria did not experiment with democracy like Israel. Syria had held three relatively free elections in 1947, 1949 and 1954, and all broke down more or less along ethnic, sectarian, tribal or regional lines, with military rule resulting after each failure.

It is tempting to deride the old-time Arabists of the Cold War era from the vantage point of 20/20 hindsight. After all, they dutifully communicated the diplomatic positions of one Syrian dictator after another to Washington, and especially so during the three-decade-long rule of Hafez al Assad.

the Arabists dealt with the political reality as they found it.

The tragedy of al Assad family rule in Syria is not that it produced tyranny: That tyranny, remember, produced sustained domestic peace after 21 changes of government in the 24 years preceding the elder al Assad's coup.

The Arabists were in Syria and other countries not to plan American grand strategy or to tell dictators how to behave in the midst of a titanic struggle with the Soviet Union (in which America, perforce, supported many dictatorships) but to report perceptively on what was going on in their parcel of the world.

The Middle East, wracked by clan, tribal, ethnic and sectarian unrest, will always require area specialists with years of experience living in the region to help Washington make sense of it all.

Supporters of the Iraq War lauded Crocker's efforts to help stabilize Iraq, even as Crocker himself had warned in a 2002 memo that an American invasion of Iraq would unleash internal and regional chaos.

Mostly we think of Darwin’s “descent by natural selection” as a chance transformation of newly arrived mutations—usually physical—into an asset rather than a liability, which is then passed along to the next generation.

By being born “early,” our youth is amplified and elongated, and it continues to stretch out across our lives into the extended childhood that makes us so different from the other primates that preceded us.

All of the evidence emphatically points to our direct, gracile ape ancestors steadily extending their youth. They were inventing childhood.

Within a month of gestation primate brain cells are blooming by the thousands per second.

But for most species that growth slows markedly after birth. The brain of a monkey fetus, for example, arrives on its birthday with 70 percent of its cerebral development already behind it, and the remaining 30 percent is finished off in the next six months. A chimpanzee completes all of its brain growth within twelve months of birth.

even arriving in our early, fetal state, with less than a quarter of our brain development under our belts, we are still born with remarkably large brains.

evolution doesn’t plan. It simply modifies randomly and moves forward. And in this case, remember, remaining in the womb full term was out of the question. For us it was be born early, or don’t be born.

we simply haven’t yet gathered enough clues to know precisely when an early birth became unavoidable. There are, however, a few theories.

The lake, the streams and the rivers that fed it, and the variability of the weather made the area a kind of smorgasbord of biomes—grasslands, desert, verdant shorelines, clusters of forest and thick scrub. The bones of the extinct beasts that lie by the millions in the layers of volcanic ash beyond the shores of Lake Turkana today attest to its ancient popularity.

In fact it was so well liked that Homo ergaster, Homo habilis, and Homo rudolfensis were all ranging among its eastern and northern shores 1.8 million years ago

Viewed from either end of the spectrum, none of the clues about his age have made much sense to the teams of scientists who have labored over them. Each was out of sync with the other. Some life events were happening too soon, some too late, none strictly adhering to the growth schedules of either modern humans or forest apes. Still, the skeleton’s desynchronized features strongly suggested that the relatives of this denizen of Lake Turkana were almost certainly being born “younger,” elongating their childhoods and postponing their adolescence. Apes may be adolescents at age seven and humans at age eleven, but this creature fell somewhere in between.

While we don't really have 500 billion different ancestors, we can still look at the reverse of that idea: is there a single common ancestor that every person on Earth shares? As we know with Mitochondrial Eve, that answer is a resounding "yes" - but let's now take a look at the Most Recent Common Ancestor, or MRCA. The name says it all, really - this is simply the most recent person who, through any and all genetic lines, can be connected to every single person alive today.

at an early meeting, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that achieving this goal might require bombing Cuba, the suggestion "scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan," according to White House aide Michael Deaver. Haig was marginalized, then resigned, and Reagan never seriously considered sending U.S. troops south of the border, despite demands from conservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and William F. Buckley.

Reagan's political genius lay in recognizing that what Americans wanted was a president who exorcised the ghost of the Vietnam War without fighting another Vietnam. Although Americans enjoyed Reagan's thunderous denunciations of Central American communism, 75 percent of them, according to a 1985 Louis Harris survey, opposed invading Nicaragua.

The legend goes like this: Reagan came into office, dramatically hiked defense spending, unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative (his "Star Wars" missile shield), and aided anti-communist rebels in the Third World. Unable to keep pace, the Kremlin chose Gorbachev, who threw in the towel.

This combination of electoral and psychological anxiety led Reagan, late in his first term, to begin a dramatic rhetorical shift. Declaring that "nuclear arsenals are far too high," in January 1984 he told the country that "my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth."

When they did meet in Geneva, in November, Reagan whispered to Gorbachev, "I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands."

By 1988, though the Soviet Union had not yet released Eastern Europe from its grip, Reagan was explicitly denying that the Soviet Union still constituted an "evil empire" and had begun calling Gorbachev "my friend."

Commentary's Norman Podhoretz declared that neoconservatives were "sinking into a state of near political despair."

By 1984, after Reagan withdrew troops from their peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Podhoretz moaned that "in the use of military power, Mr. Reagan was much more restrained" than his right-wing supporters had hoped.

In 1986, when Reagan would not cancel his second summit with Gorbachev over Moscow's imprisonment of an American journalist, Podhoretz accused him of having "shamed himself and the country" in his "craven eagerness" to give away the nuclear store.

the irony is that in Reagan's own "war on terror," his policies more closely resembled Obama's than Bush's.

Almost five years later, in his final moments as president, he told press secretary Marlin Fitzwater that "the only regret I have after eight years is sending those troops to Lebanon." Then he saluted and walked out of the Oval Office for the last time.

Of course, the 9/11 attacks gave Bush a massive jolt of popularity and sent Congress diving for cover, all of which made the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq much easier.

For many contemporary conservatives, being a Reagan disciple means acting as if there are no limits to American strength. But the real lessons of Reaganism are about how to wield national power and bolster national pride when your hands are partially tied.

That means understanding that America's foreign-policy debates are often cultural debates in disguise.

Obama needs to remind Americans that their most successful Cold War presidents -- Reagan included -- saw the conflict as a primarily economic struggle.

In the nascent economic and ideological struggle between the United States and China, wars that Washington cannot possibly pay for -- and which leave the country more reliant on foreign central bankers -- don't make America stronger; they make it weaker.

There may be possible technological solutions to both problems that don't require the combined lifelong effort of millions of humans. We don't have (a) strong artificial intelligence, (b) self-replicating machines that can work from raw materials extracted from their natural environment, (c) "magic wand" space propulsion technologies (which may themselves be Fermi paradox solutions insofar as their existence implies either flaws in our current understanding of physics or drastically efficient and thereby destructive energy sources), or (d) the ability to re-engineer ourselves. If any one (or more) of these are achievable, then all bets against space colonization are off.

These conditions do not apply in space. You don't get to breathe the air on Mars. You don't get to harvest wheat on Venus. You don't get to walk home from an asteroid colony with 5km/sec of velocity relative to low Earth orbit. You don't get to visit any of these places, even on a "plant the flag and pick up some rocks" visitor's day pass basis, without a massive organized effort to provide an environment that can keep the canned monkeys from Earth warm and breathing.

here could even be another universe less than a millimeter away from ours which we don’t know about, because that small distance is measured in some fourth spatial dimension which we can’t move in because we’re trapped in our three. Rather as if you imagine a whole lot of bugs on a big sheet of paper, their two-dimensional universe, they might be unaware of another set of bugs on another sheet of paper. So there may be other universes separated from ours in an extra spatial dimension.

Urbanization is a factor. When you’re in the countryside, your kids are an economic resource very early. They can help in the fields, they can look after the animals; there are piles of stuff they can do from the age of 4 or 5. Kids are an economic resource, which is why rural families tend to be larger.

Feminism, I suspect, is as much a consequence of falling fertility as a cause, though I am sure they reinforce each other.

see the failure of the Catholic Church: It ends up encouraging patriarchal social norms that push women toward ultra-low fertility, such as in Italy.

Much of the reproductive revolution happened by keeping young kids from dying. Now we need another revolution to keep the old fitter for longer.

If chaos theory taught us anything, it’s that societies head off in all kinds of directions we couldn’t predict. Fifty years ago, if we had taken a slightly different path in industrial chemistry and used bromine instead of chlorine, we’d have burned out the entire ozone layer before we knew what the hell was going on, and the world would have been very different. There’s always scary stuff out there that we may not know about. You can’t predict the future. You can just try and plan for it.

Since "reason" must always operate with the assistance of emotion (i.e., Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis), it is pointless to gripe about a clash between "reason" and emotion. A clash between "reason" and emotion is really a clash between two emotions, one of which is in league with "reason."

Like Soviet officials organising the tractor industry, it must, under I-502, determine a maximum quota for production. This was originally set at 2m square feet of marijuana plants, although so far only 687,644 sq ft has been licensed, and officials now decline to offer a precise figure. No more than 334 shops may be licensed (although local bans mean that limit may never be reached).

Meanwhile, the LCB has deliberately suppressed supply to limit the risk of marijuana being diverted to other states or to children, which would upset Uncle Sam. It is as if those Soviet officials were setting local tractor quotas even as the Kremlin enforced a nationwide tractor ban.

First, it will stop governments from wasting lots of cash locking up people who haven’t hurt anyone. Second, it will raise tax revenue. Third, it will put criminals out of business.

Washington’s experience suggests that the third promise may be hardest to keep.

All states can learn from the trailblazers. This is already happening: after a string of well-publicised incidents in Colorado involving edible products, including two deaths, Washington’s governor tightened the rules. Colorado legislators have copied Washington’s (controversial) provisions for assessing whether drivers are stoned. The market is ill-understood; regulators will need to be flexible.

The drug is also linked to more worrying outcomes, particularly among the young, and may raise the risk of schizophrenia. Alas, federal prohibition has made it difficult to investigate pot’s medical properties.

In most states officials and dispensary-owners conspire in the fiction that customers are all “patients” and shops merely non-profit “co-operatives”. The doctor’s “recommendations” needed to procure marijuana are easy to obtain.

The relationship between medical-pot advocates and legalisers can be fraught. In Washington, the main opposition to I-502 came from a medical industry worried, with reason, that it would find itself folded into the same legal regime as recreational pot shops.

Colorado and Washington have earmarked a lot of marijuana taxes (in Washington, 81%) for worthy causes such as school construction and drug education. But revenue forecasts have proved inaccurate in Colorado, and the licensing chaos in Washington will have a similar effect.

President Barack Obama and Eric Holder, the attorney general, have given the two legalisation experiments a cautious green light. But if a drug hawk replaces Mr Obama after 2016, he or she will not find it hard to revive the war on weed in states that thought they had ended it.

“Either we should wipe out the black market, or we should not,”

That will not happen until the federal prohibition is lifted. That may seem remote, but opinion is shifting fast. “I see [legalisation] as a second-term [Hillary] Clinton thing,” says Mark Kleiman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Earl Blumenauer, a pro-legalisation congressman from Oregon, thinks marijuana will be rescheduled within three years. Bipartisan coalitions can be found for reform.

Drug laws are anything but set in stone.

This is not a critique of market economics; it is simply a description of them. If we want a world with cheap (if uncomfortable) air travel and amazing smartphones, then bless the market. (Although it doesn’t hurt to remember that the smartphone, like the Internet that it surfs, depends in ways direct and indirect on government seeding.) If we want a world with productions of “Così Fan Tutte” and radiation treatments for clerical workers who get breast cancer, then submitting ourselves solely to the market is not the way to get them.

In these debates, it is the mixed-up liberal who is the actual pragmatist, seeing what works, while the free marketers are the slaves of a beautifully utopian line of thought.

Lots of things are unprofitable if you narrowly consider outlays and income—including most of our roadways. To say that the post office runs at a loss is to say that it subsidizes a system of conveyance and communication. This in turn makes possible trillions of dollars’ worth of enterprise. (The magazine business, for instance.) Nobody asks whether the Interstate Highway System is profitable, but if you did you’d have to point to its vast maintenance costs, which are in the billions, and mostly paid for by state and federal taxes. At the same time, of course, the system contributes substantially to national productivity. The right unit of consideration isn’t the road; it’s everyone who uses it, and how we benefit from its existence—its “externalities.” The same goes for public-transportation systems that alleviate the residential pressures on the big city, reduce traffic congestion, bring in employees, and enable a substantial amount of “value creation”—but none of that will ever show up on the balance sheets. Running at a loss represents the subvention of public goods.

How, for instance, will each nation position its military and police its territory? How will the Arctic states deal with China and other nations that have no formal jurisdictional claims but have strong interests in exploiting Arctic resources? How will Arctic and non-Arctic states work together to manage those resources beyond national jurisdictions, on the high seas and in the deep sea?

NATO’s top military commander, Adm. James G. Stavridis of the United States Navy, warned in 2010 of an “icy slope toward a zone of competition, or worse, a zone of conflict” if the world’s leaders failed to ensure Arctic peace.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose economy is reliant on its rich deposits of oil and natural gas, clearly understands the benefits of a northern sea route and of the hydrocarbon deposits on his nation’s continental shelf, and has emphasized the importance of peace and cooperation in the Arctic. So have leaders of other Arctic nations. But we have heard virtually nothing from President Obama, even as he has made the dangers of a warming earth a priority of his second term.