For another outstanding year, The Rational Argumentator has spread the ideas of Reason, Rights, and Progress to ever more readers. Indeed, it seems to be an established trend that TRA’s cumulative visitation more than doubles every passing year. As of today, the pages of TRA have had 283,544 visits during its lifetime. At the time of publication of the Fourth Anniversary Manifesto, the number of cumulative visits was 127,875. Between the prior manifesto and this one, TRA received 155,669 visits, or an average of 426.49 visits per day. Just during the past year, TRA’s cumulative visitation has increased by over 121.7%.

            Fifty new issues of TRA were published since the Fourth Anniversary Manifesto – with a total of 500 features, including articles, short stories, and musical works on a wide variety of subjects. TRA’s contributor base has broadened, and an extensive number of regular contributors has emerged. It is no longer surprising for a given author to have anywhere from 40 to 70 works published on The Rational Argumentator. Moreover, TRA’s queue of submissions almost always has works in it waiting to be published. We have no shortage of articles and are able to release issues as often as I have available time. Of course, TRA continues to welcome new contributions from new voices; our aim is to become a forum for all those who wish to fuel the New Renaissance.

            As always, we have endeavored to maintain TRA’s civil, tolerant, and cosmopolitan character. TRA welcomes a broad variety of views, provided that they are intelligently expressed and are based on reasoned arguments as opposed to prejudices, whims, and personal antagonisms. During the past year, TRA has hosted an extensive variety of debates where both sides behaved admirably and presented thought-provoking ideas for readers’ consideration.

            Technical improvements have also continued to take place. First, it is now far easier than before for me to publish the magazine, using an FTP (file-transfer protocol) program. Instead of needing to manually upload the html code for every page onto the site, I can simply paste the text of a given article into a template in Microsoft FrontPage, and transfer the resulting html file into the site’s directory of pages via FTP. This has considerably reduced the time required for publishing any given page and has thus allowed me to spend more time actually reading and reviewing contributions – which, after all, is what TRA is about.

            Furthermore, readers can now easily recommend the newer articles on TRA by clicking on the “Recommend This Page” link prominently featured in the heading and after the text of each of the new features. With this option, readers can send the page’s URL to up to three e-mail addresses – thereby introducing further intelligent, thoughtful audiences to TRA’s content.

            With every year, The Rational Argumentator has continued to improve both in its technical aspects and in the variety, quality, and quantity of content available. While it is impossible to predict the precise form that the improvement will assume, we can be sure that substantial progress will continue to take place and to benefit the spread of sensible ideas which can dramatically enhance billions of lives.

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre,  Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, weekly columnist for GrasstopsUSA.com, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov also publishes his articles on Helium.com and Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. His most recent play is Implied Consent. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

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