• • A prophetic perspective from 1975 
Ron Ewart, Canada Free Press Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Even well before 1975, 1957 to be exact, another author predicted the future for America in exquisite detail. That author was Ayn Rand in her novel, “Atlas Shrugged”. She accurately predicted the sad state of America as it exists today.   View blog reactions

• Rightbloggers mourns Michael Jackson’s death—as good news for Obama, Ahmadinejad 
Roy Edroso, Village Voice - Runnin’ Scared (New York) Ayn Rand Institute  Yaron Brook  In a Pajamas Media video segment, Bill Whittle and his guests, Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Center and Terry Jones of Investor's Business Daily, explored "The Michael Jackson Effect: Shenanigans in DC & Lockdown in Iran."   View blog reactions

• • The 9 worst books ever written 
Peter McEllhenney, The Examiner Atlas Shrugged  Rand: Atlas Shrugged. A monument to monomania. Bludgeoningly repetitious. Deeply paranoid. Indifferent to the craft of fiction. And 1,000 pages long.   View blog reactions

• • Six missing Israeli soldiers 
Israel National News "The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see." -- Ayn Rand   View blog reactions

• Do-it-yourself sermons 
Archie Whitehill, Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA) Have you ever consorted with the great minds of history, those who were original thinkers who drove our civilization forward? The great philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, teachers all, who give us meaning to our existance, to life, to the universe, to everything? You need not agree with those minds as you explore them, minds such as Kant, Francis Bacon, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand, and Susan Haack, to name but a few of thousands.   View blog reactions

• The economy: It’s always someone else’s money 
Richard Deight, Orange County Register (CA) As a nation, we like our entitlements. Perhaps the worst example, Social Security, is a gigantic wealth-redistribution and Ponzi scheme that would mean a prison sentence for the ringleaders if anyone but government ran it. Also at the top of the list is the ADA, which transfers private property rights from the able-bodied to the handicapped. "Special rights" trump individual needs and self-determination every time. After all, we must all do our part to provide for the "greater good." If Ayn Rand were alive today, she would have a field day.   View blog reactions

• • Socialized healthcare is a severe threat to individual liberty 
Andrew Foy and Brenton Stransky, American Thinker Altruism  In Radicals for Capitalism Brian Doherty stated Ayn Rand's belief that, "people don't care if something doesn't work as long as the dominant morality of altruism tells them that it is right." For opponents of government-run healthcare to succeed they must not only convince the public that the Administration's plan will fail to deliver on its promises but also explain how the plan will severely infringe on individual liberty, which the government of this country was designed to protect.   View blog reactions

• Saver nation 
John Nadler, International Business Times FreedomFest 2009, scheduled for July 9-11 [...] in Las Vegas, will smash all records, with over 1,000 expected to attend, including dozens of experts, authors, think tanks, and media. [....] See Missouri history professor Steven Watts on “Fantasyland, Walt Disney, and the American Dream,” followed by “Playboy, Hugh Hefner, and the American Dream”…..plus Don Hauptman on Ayn Rand's Playboy interview.   View blog reactions

• • State of the city: Good 
Greg Glover, WRCB-TV (Chattanooga) Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Half an hour into a speech that was sometimes somber, sometimes mystical, Mayor Ron Littlefield declared, "Ladies and gentlemen, the state of the city is good." [....] He cited urban reports, commissioners, CEO's, an antebellum speechmaker, Ayn Rand and Niccolo Machiavelli in calling on the citizenry to rise to the challenge of an uncertain economy and keep Chattanooga at the forefront of whatever is next.   View blog reactions

• Hicksville High School’s class of 2009 
Hicksville Illustrated News Ayn Rand Institute  Anthem  Nancy Desai, Class of 2009 Salutatorian. [....] She participated in and placed second at the regional level of the American Legion Oratorical Contest and was an Anthem Essay Finalist in the Ayn Rand Institute Essay Contest.   View blog reactions

• • Tea parties amd going John Galt: America’s new direction? 
Sylvia Bokor, Capitalism Magazine Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Objectivist author  "Capitalism," novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, "is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." In a completely free society, the government's role is solely to protect individual rights. It leaves men free to produce or not as they choose, to work to the best of their ability or not as they choose, to trade with others, to benefit from their own effort, to save and invest and support charities as they choose. But over many decades government has increasingly violated our rights and eroded our freedom.   View blog reactions

• Gift of the write stuff can lead to problems 
Michael Riley, Asbury Park Press (NJ) Reading can expose you to all kinds of crazy ideas — those of Karl Marx and Ayn Rand just to name two. And don't get me started Nietzsche. . . . What it is about all that "Will to power, God is dead" stuff that attracts males in late adolescence? Personally, I blame violence-laden video games.   View blog reactions

• • Creeping statism 
Lori Grof, Tulsa World Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  For ammo - ideas to combat the evil principles of statism - read “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,” a collection of essays by Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan.   View blog reactions

• • Mistakes were made, and sometimes admitted 
Robert J. Gregorio, Catholic Star Herald (Camden, NJ) The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  [Alan Greenspan] admitted to Congress last year that the bedrock foundation of his economic rationale was flawed. He had taken guidance from Ayn Rand, celebrated apologist of egoism (her 1964 title might give her away: “The Virtue of Selfishness”). It was his idea to deregulate the financial markets and allow them to regulate themselves because he thought that the banks’ self-interest would collectively police the whole apparatus. But give him credit for fortitude. He took ownership of his naive faith in lawless individualism. Digging out from the rubble of Vietnam and from today’s depression that has wrecked the lives of millions, it helps to hear such rare apologies from on high.   View blog reactions

• Violent direct action is terrorism, not protest 
D. Christian Moore, The Examiner I support a robust and engaged civil society, complete with free expression from all sides of the spectrum. Heck, I am an objectivist and a strict constitutionalist, I want people protesting everything, just so politicians know we will hold them accountable.   View blog reactions

• • • Farrah’s brainy side 
Amy Wallace, Daily Beast Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Personal life  A recent email exchange with the late Farrah Fawcett reveals the unlikely friendship between the Charlie's Angels star and the novelist Ayn Rand, who helped the actress understand her place in culture—and longed to cast her in a TV version of Atlas Shrugged.   View blog reactions

• The source of the current economic crisis: “A Chicago state of mind” 
Maidhc Ó'Cathail, Global Research Capitalism  “Then Clinton-era ‘reform’ of investor protections, led by Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, enabled the ‘financial supermarkets’ at the core of this collapse -- including Citigroup where he became a senior executive alongside CEO Sandy Weill,” [says Jeff Gates]. [....] “Rubin successor Larry Summers (now Barack Obama’s top economic adviser) fought for ‘reforms’ that de-regulated financial derivatives -- magnifying the impact of the crash as those arcane arrangements grew from $88 trillion a decade ago to a market that now represents transactions with a face value of $600 trillion,” Gates says. “Add to that toxic mix the easy credit policies of a central bank overseen by Alan Greenspan, a disciple of Ayn Rand, a Russian-Ashkenazi philosopher and market fundamentalist.”   View blog reactions

• Technoprogressives and transhumanists: What’s the difference? 
Mike Treder, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies It’s not always easy [...] for me to appreciate [...] some of the extreme Ayn Randian dogma that makes up a small segment of transhumanist viewpoints.   View blog reactions

• • Guilford College gets ethics grant 
Business Journal (Greensboro, NC) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Guilford College has received a $500,000 grant from BB&T to support programs exploring the ethics of capitalism, according to an announcement. The gift is the latest from the Winston-Salem bank to colleges around the country for programs centered on morality and ethics in capitalist society. [....] The grants typically encourage the study of the writings of Ayn Rand, a free-market philosopher who is greatly admired by BB&T Chairman John Allison. At Guilford College, students will read and discuss Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged as well as works by John Maynard Keynes, Paul Krugman and others as part of a new “The Moral Foundations of Capitalism” course.   View blog reactions

• • Meg & Dia are smart singing sisters 
Tom Lanham, San Francisco Examiner Atlas Shrugged  Egoism  “I don’t enjoy reading modern books at all,” [Meg Frampton] says. “For education, I’ve relied on classics by Fitzgerald, Salinger, because I’m really interested in the way they saw things.” That’s how the exotic Korean-American beauty [...] stumbled across her most crucial text: Ayn Rand’s 1957 classic “Atlas Shrugged,” which details Objectivism, the author’s controversial philosophy of pursuing one’s own self-interest. “That’s the book that really got me going,” she says. “When I read it, it was the absolute truth, and that was how I was going to live my life. There’s a bad connotation to the word ‘selfish,’ but there shouldn’t be — it means that you look out for yourself, not walk all over people to get what you want. And if you’re doing it the way Rand says, you actually help others along the way.”   View blog reactions