Got an email the other day from Michael Hardy regarding a journal entry I made in 1998. Michael (who was an active poster -- as I was -- back in the old days of the now-defunct MDOP mailing list) points out that there is no evidence that Leonard Peikoff was ever anointed by Ayn Rand as her intellectual heir. This claim is thus probably a mere assertion on Peikoff's part. Not that the notion of an "intellectual heir" is legitimate, since it assumes that a philosophy is a kind of intellectual property that can be deeded to a single person like a house or physical estate. And that assumption does violence to the very nature of ideas. But it's just like Peikoff to claim that a philosophy is a closed system over which property rights can be asserted. Those Randians are weird.