• Deep red sea 
Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Colorado Springs may be the capital of libertarian America--the local newspaper thinks that "waste, fraud, and abuse" is government, and the evangelical Christian groups and Air Force families that roost there may go almost that far--but how much "Atlas Shrugged" can a burg take? Colorado Springs voters last year rejected a property-tax increase. So will they themselves mow park grass and pave their streets? The city budget permits little of the former and none of the latter. This sounds like a place only a burglar and a firebug could love.     Share on Facebook

• Daniels just not very good at his job 
Gregory Travis, Bloomington Alternative (IN) Mitch Daniels' tenure as director of the Office of Management and Budget wasn't exactly stellar. The Blade's instinct for fiscal responsibility was there [...] but his lack of political courage, together with his fealty to the corporate line, conspired to render him no more than a budgetary yes man, prostrate in the shadow of his Objectivist overlords, Bush and Cheney.     Share on Facebook

• • Justin Fuller, author of Buffettologist.com, on history, money and ‘Magnum, P.I.‘ 
Christina Le Beau, Chicago Business Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Finds modern parallels in "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand's classics. "Anytime you have a financial crisis, her books come back in popularity."     Share on Facebook

• Dubai’s own stimulus plan 
Mishaal Al Gergawi, Gulf News (Dubai) Yes, I'm still a socialism-detesting objectivist.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand, Thomas Malthus, and the high cost of terrible ideas 
Bruce Watson, Daily Finance Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism argues that the purpose of life is the pursuit of happiness, and that the purpose of government is to aid that pursuit. Laissez-faire capitalism, objectivism argues, is the only system that truly protects individual rights. In Atlas Shrugged, Rand extends this idea to divide humanity into two groups: creators, who should be given free rein to do anything, and consumers, who should be tolerated if possible and crushed if necessary.     Share on Facebook

• • The dissatisfaction of compromise 
Nick Ottens, Atlantic Sentinel Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Image  Machiavelli warned against the practical dangers of seeking compromise. Four hundred and fifty years later, philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982) argued against the righteousness of it. In an article entitled “‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” published in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), Rand declared that, “There can be no compromise on basic principles,” nor, she opined, “on moral issues.” In “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion’,” published in the same volume, Rand elaborated. “Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates,” she noted, such compromises do not satisfy anyone; they dissatisfy everyone. “Those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim.” [....] Rand believed in absolutes and liked to reiterate from her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) in which she wrote: “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”     Share on Facebook

• Let’s grow together! 
Arvinder Kaur, Times of India The Fountainhead  Being particular that I develop a reading habit and an ear for music, [my brother Rara] would carefully choose the ‘must reads’ of those days. Apart from reading the classics, and The Diary of Anne Frank and The Fountainhead and so many others, we still had a hunger for Tintin and the Archies comics.     Share on Facebook

• • Christianity and capitalism: Peas in a pod or irreconcilable? 
Nikola Milanović, Stanford Review - Fiat Lux (Stanford U, CA) Ayn Rand Institute  Capitalism  Yaron Brook  Is Christianity compatible with Capitalism? Are the two systems based on mutually exclusive ethical foundations that make them incompatible? This was the question asked in the recent debate held between Jennifer Roback Morse of the Acton Institute and Dr. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute. The debate was sponsored by two groups, each supporting one perspective of the issue. The Catholic Community at Stanford, a collective group of students and faculty dedicated to liturgical programs and well known for their community service initiatives, invited Mrs. Morse. The Stanford Objectivists, a student group dedicated to studying the philosophy of Ayn Rand and perhaps best known for their unsolicited e-mails to students, invited Dr. Brook.     Share on Facebook

• Beargrease mushers, dogs work together toward common goal 
Andrew Krueger, FOX 21 Online (Duluth) Atlas Shrugged  Video  Some mushers brought their own soundtracks to accompany the sights [of the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon]. "I have a lot of music on [my iPod], but my big thing is I'm an audio books junkie," [Jason] Barron said. "I was listening to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged coming in here."     Share on Facebook

• Review: The Value of Nothing, by Raj Patel 
Gordon Laird, Globe and Mail (Toronto) [An] occasional weakness for portraying the world as a clash of malevolent ideas versus social movements often blinkers [global left] proponents to over-focus on things that reflect a dialectical and neo-liberal bent, like the World Bank, American finance and Ayn Rand. Patel is hardly the worst offender on this point, but it does constrain his analysis. Simply put, free-market fundamentalism is an obvious factor, but it cannot explain the fullness of our crisis.     Share on Facebook

• BioShock 2 AU review 
Tristan Ogilvie, IGN The original BioShock was arguably the best release of 2007, and indeed among the very best games of this console generation. Its complex Randian themes, sublime visual design and subliminal storytelling techniques made it ripe for analysis amongst tweed jacket-wearing literary types, and its blend of heavy artillery, security hacking and Jedi-besting superpowers made it a dynamic and rewarding shooting experience no matter how high your brow is set.     Share on Facebook

• Simpsons, The (TV series) (DVD) 
Dean Winkelspecht, DVDTOWN The Fountainhead  The biggest name to appear in this season was Jodie Foster in a female take of Ayn Rand´s novel "The Fountainhead."     Share on Facebook

• • BioShock 2 UK review 
Alec Meer, IGN While it's lovely that the voiceovers have a literate backdrop, this is not a game in which you will actively engage in consideration of utilitarianism and objectivism. It's a first-person shooter, first and foremost.     Share on Facebook

• Alan Greenspan fights back 
Geoff Colvin, Fortune Egoism  This bubble was catastrophic because self-interest failed. At Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), Merrill Lynch, and others, the firm's interest in its own profits should have stopped the housing bubble insanity. That's how the system is supposed to work. It didn't. For America's most famous libertarian, an Ayn Rand acolyte, that is more than troubling. It's foundation-shaking. It put him into "shocked disbelief," he told Henry Waxman's House Energy and Commerce Committee in October 2008. "I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." [....] Self-interest failed, Greenspan believes, mainly because no one, including himself, understood the costs of the extremely unlikely risks the big banks faced. "This is a once-in-a-century event," he says.     Share on Facebook

• • An honest IPCC scientist warns his colleagues: Don’t dismiss ‘climategate’ 
James G. Lakely, Big Government Ayn Rand Center  Keith Lockitch  The 13th Annual Energy & Environment Conference, held in Phoenix Feb. 1-3, isn’t the sort of place where global warming “deniers” are exactly welcome. In fact, by my observations, the skeptical caucus at the event consisted entirely of: James M. Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute; Keith Lockitch, a fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights; and me. [....] Lockitch gave a presentation arguing free-market economies are better positioned than socialist societies to deal with any severe weather events caused by climate change — and was called a “denier” and compared to a shill for “Big Tobacco” for his trouble.     Share on Facebook

• Secessionist scholars gather in Charleston 
Chris Haire, AOL News The specter of a heavily centralized national government [...] troubles Kirkpatrick Sale, a left-leaning scholar, neo-Luddite and founder of the Middlebury Institute, a pro-secessionist think tank in Vermont. Sale is also a member of the Second Vermont Republic, a group that hopes to one day return its state to its former status as an independent nation. For him, it's no surprise that the conference attendees would include those on the both sides of the ideological spectrum. "There has always been a part of the left that has been anti-authoritarian and decentralist," Sale says. "And then there are anti-authoritarians on the other side. Ayn Randian types, Paulists types. But that's the guiding principle: the anti-authoritarian impulse."     Share on Facebook

• Our love-hate relationship with taxes 
Charles P. Pierce, Boston Globe Barbara Anderson probably has affected Massachusetts politics more than anyone ever has who’s never been elected to anything. “To me,” she says, “taxes have never been about the money. It’s been about power and who’s in charge and who’s in control.” A native of western Pennsylvania, where her parents ran a hardware store, the former Barbara Hervatin enrolled in the DuBois campus of Penn State, where friends introduced her to the work of Ayn Rand. By 1980 and two husbands later, she found herself here, working as the executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation.     Share on Facebook

• • Watched any good books lately? 
David Stubbs, The Guardian (London) Atlas Shrugged  [In Mad Men,] the bookish Don Draper [...], anxious to stay on the leading edge and keep up with new trends, subjects himself to Rona Jaffe's The Best Of Everything, whose story of young women setting out in life after the second world war was a literary benchmark of female emancipation. Equally liberating, though some would argue obnoxiously so, was Ayn Rand's balefully influential Atlas Shrugged, the text which Sterling Cooper founder Bert Cooper urges his employees to read, proposing as it does the pursuit of pleasure as a moral obligation. This same Rand text crops up again in Skins, being read on a train by the malignant, too-clever-by-half Tony Stonem. Elsewhere, similar texts such as Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra encourage him to exert all of his powers to righteously selfish ends. It's an example of reading as the cerebral equivalent of press-ups – the prerogative of the obsessive, the psychopath.     Share on Facebook

• • Postscript 
Mike Ticher, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) It has surely been a rich and diverting week when the subjects canvassed by readers include the ''Randian philosophy of objectivism'' and the question of whether goats play chess. Ayn Rand intruded unexpectedly on the vigorous debate over video game classifications, in which those in favour of an R18+ rating seemed to have the numbers. Caleb Owens, who put the opposite view on Wednesday, points out that he is an ''avid gamer'', contrary to claims the following day.     Share on Facebook

• • Conservative view 
Larry Radtke, News-Press (Fort Myers, FL) Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  Re: "Rules for capitalism," Joseph Gormley, Jan. 29. Congratulations to Mr. Gormley for recognizing the hypocrisy of religious conservatives who advocate self interest in economics and self sacrifice in morality. He is dead wrong, however, to believe that our economy has ever been unregulated, that conservatives stand for capitalism, and that Ayn Rand is one of their heroes. In 1957, devout Catholic William F. Buckley, conservative icon and publisher of National Review, published Whittaker Chambers' vicious review of Ayn Rand's newly published "Atlas Shrugged." More recently, John Podhoretz in his The Weekly Standard review of Alan Greenspan's memoir "The Age of Turbulence," denigrated Greenspan's earlier association with Rand. As Federal Reserve chairman, Greenspan himself repudiated the principles of laissez-faire he once shared with Rand, thereby repudiating her philosophy, Objectivism.     Share on Facebook