Bay Area Book Program

Since 2006, GGO and Quent Cordair Fine Art have sponsored the Ayn Rand Institute's "Free Books to Teachers" program in several Bay Area counties. This list of counties includes San Francisco, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Solano, Sonoma, and Monterey. This school year we are expanding the program to also include Napa and Santa Cruz counties, and we are soliciting donations to achieve this goal.

The ARI book program is an excellent way to spread Ayn Rand's ideas to individuals at a time when they are deciding their core beliefs.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, please email 'goldengateobjectivists[at]gmail[dot]com'.

Health Care Activism - Contact your Representatives

As announced in a prior e-mail to the group and prior post, health care is our very timely current topic for intellectual activism. I will be sending out e-mails with opportunities for us to spread the Objectivist perspective, and hope many of you can participate with whatever time you have available.

Our first opportunity is to bring rational ideas to the attention of our elected representatives – and to show them, compellingly, that a smart, informed opposition to the ObamaCare debacle does exist.

To make it easier for you to contact your representatives, we have pulled some resources together:

List of representatives, with addresses, e-mail forms and town hall meetings. (Thanks, Kirk, for pulling this together!) If you are not on our e-mail list yet, and would like to obtain this list, please e-mail us at goldengateobjectivists[at]gmail[dot]com, and we will send you the list and add you to our mailing list.

Helpful links to articles you can read up for your own arguments, or share as links with the representatives (or print & mail to their physical office addresses.)

“Health Care is Not A Right” by Dr. Peikoff

Dr. Lewis’ analysis of the house bill

The Objective Standard has many great articles on healthcare. Craig Biddle, the publisher, is giving people the permission to buy a pdf of an article, and then distribute it free of charge as intellectual activism. You can find one great article, “Moral Health Care vs Universal Health Care”, here. If you want to forward the article to your representatives or others, please go to TOS and pay the $4.95 to buy your own pdf copy to support the magazine.

Let’s get a lot of e-mails and letters out to the representatives. They will likely not share our ideas – but it’s much harder to honestly claim the opposition is an ‘angry mob’ when we can show the intellectual quality of the argument for free market health care.

P.S. It is also a good idea to use these same links and materials with your own personal networks – distribute the TOS article to friends & family who may be sympathetic, or post the links to the articles to your Facebook/MySpace pages etc.

Group agenda and new monthly meeting schedule

At Saturday’s meeting, we reviewed the survey input we received from many of you (thank you!) and set out the agenda for the Golden Gate Objectivist club as follows:

The club will have monthly meetings, with an alternating schedule between political activism and social events. Every second month we will meet in Emeryville at 10am on Saturday where we will focus on intellectual activism. Heike will lead this effort. The first topic of focus for the club will be healthcare.

Every alternating month we will meet for a social event on Saturdays, usually in the afternoon or evening in San Francisco. Caroline will be responsible for the social agenda.

There was quite a bit of interest in a study group, but we need a volunteer to be responsible for the organization of it. If anyone would like to volunteer to head up the study group, please let us know.

Please mark your calendar with the following dates:
Saturday September 19th 10am: Meet at the Doyle St Cafe, Emeryville
Saturday October 3rd: Social trip to Napa. The plan (subject to change) is to meet at the Cordair Gallery at 11am, followed by lunch at 12pm then a visit to two wineries in the afternoon, possibly followed by dinner.
Saturday November 7th 10am: Meet at the Doyle St Cafe, Emeryville
Saturday December 5th evening: GGO holiday party in San Francisco (possibly Tres Agaves restaurant).
Saturday January 9th 10am: Meet at the Doyle St Cafe, Emeryville
Saturday February 6th: Social Event in San Francisco, tbd.

We will send out follow-up information to our e-mail list (e.g., a list of contacts for local congressmen/senators to make our voices heard on the health care debate.) If you are not on our mailing list, and want to make sure to receive all this information, please e-mail us at goldengateobjectivists[at]gmail[dot]com

We look forward to this more regular schedule, to meeting many more of you, and to contributing to the voice for Objectivist ideas in the important debates in our country.

Protesting Socialized Health Care

Thanks so much again to everyone for the great turnout and participation at yesterday's protest in San Francisco against socialized health care. We can be proud of what we accomplished. We distributed approximately 440 of our essay-packets, focusing on the moral aspects of the issue, directing people to read Ayn Rand and to visit ARI's website to learn more about the philosophical issues at stake.

Thanks to Sally Zelikovsky with the Bay Area Patriots for organizing the event. Thanks to Dr. John Lewis for giving us permission to reprint and distribute his article, "There is No Moral Right to Health Care," and his excellent analysis of HR3200. Thanks to Roxanne for letting us include her essay, "Immorality of Socialized Medicine," and thanks to AFCM for permission to reprint Dr. Peikoff's speech, "Health Care is Not a Right."

NOTE TO MEMBERS -- Please consider posting the above links to these excellent and important essays to your social lists and to your Facebook, etc.!

The first coverage I found on-line of the event was on Instapundit, one of the most widely read blogs on the internet. Glenn had linked to a video of the protest, and he posted a note I sent to him in response, which includes a mention of our group. There is additional video of the event posted here.

There were 13 of us present throughout the day, about half of whom enjoyed socializing for a couple of hours afterwards, across the street at Taylor’s. Great job everyone!

Health Care "Reform" Protest, Friday Aug 14th, 1-5pm

GGO members are invited and urged to participate in the protest, this coming Friday afternoon, August 14, 1-5 p.m. The protest has been relocated to the Justin Herman Plaza (across from the Ferry Building). For additional details, please visit the protest organizer's website. If you can attend for all or even part of the time, please email me at qcordair (-at-) comcast.net so that we can coordinate our efforts, signage, informational flyers, etc. By participating in the event, we won't likely affect Speaker Pelosi's vote, but many attendees need and want information that will help them identify the underlying moral, philosophical issues. We can help with that. :)