•Telecoms high-flyer brought to earth by tax inquiry  
Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Financial Times (London) Background on accused tax evader Walt Anderson.Since the early 1990s the man who investors across the US and Europe knew as Mr Anderson was also known as Mark Roth, William Prospero and Ragnor Danksjold a name with associations to a character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, according to court papers. 08:34 PM    View blog reactions

•Alan Greenspan: Fed seems less independent 
Charles J. Zwick, Miami Herald Greenspan has been influenced by Ayn Rand and by Milton Friedman, the Nobel Laureate, as is Martin Feldstein, a candidate to be Greenspan's successor. President Bush is also a devotee of this school. 08:32 PM    View blog reactions

•The human personality, just laws, and laissez faire 
Gennady Stolyarov II, Enter Stage Right According to philosopher Ayn Rand, "The moral is the chosen. Morality ends where a gun begins." Forcing an individual to be "moral" is a contradiction in terms and devalues both the human personality and the very significance of morality. 08:27 PM    View blog reactions

•Criticism: Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit by David Castronovo 
John Sutherland, The Times (London) Book review.The objection to Castronovo’s method is that it is too easily skewed. Throw in some different texts — say Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (Alan Greenspan’s free-enterprise Bible), Robert A Heinlein’s proto-fascist Starship Troopers (a book that would be, I suspect, much to Donald Rumsfeld’s taste), Lloyd C Douglas’s The Robe (the biggest middlebrow seller of the 1950s, still popular in the “Red” states), or Jacqueline Susann ’s Valley of the Dolls (biggest kitsch bestseller, now a cult gay book) — and the literary sociologist will come up with an entirely different picture of 1950s culture. 08:22 PM    View blog reactions

•Valuing love 
Nathaniel Branden, Plebius Press I find the advocacy of 'universal love' puzzling -- if one takes words literally. Not everyone condemns sexual promiscuity, but I have never heard of anyone who hails it as an outstanding virtue. But spiritual promiscuity? Is that an outstanding virtue? Why? Is the spirit so much less important than the body? In commenting on this paradox, Ayn Rand wrote in 'Atlas Shrugged': 'A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men -- the same morality demands that you surrender your soul in promiscuous love for all comers.' 08:17 PM    View blog reactions

•Gold’s future as money - Q&A 
Nelson Hultberg, GoldSeek [Men] will always work to move their society toward what they conceive as the ideal. Sadly the worldview that has been instilled into them is precisely the opposite of the truth; and any objective investigation into the history of the 19th century will document such. To those who doubt, see Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ludwig von Mises' Human Action, and George Reisman's Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. 01:32 PM    View blog reactions

•Speaker: Religion’s impact on election oversimplified 
Eric Harkreader, The Sentinel (Carlisle, PA) Report on Rev. James Gilchrist's speech, "Religion in American Politics," given at Dickinson College."The misconception is that religion in America is a dichotomy, but, in fact, it is an entire spectrum of religious and political composition," he says. The simplified view overlooks whole segments of the population, including religious liberals such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., as well as secular conservatives such as members of the Libertarian Party and author Ayn Rand. 11:46 AM    View blog reactions

•A massive fraud? 
Christopher Hume, Toronto Star Analysis of Bruce Mau's design philosphy as experessed in his exhibition, Massive Change.The notion of the designer as god-like creator reached a peak with Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. That's the novel in which architect Howard Roark blows up his own building rather than see it compromised. Mau's collaborative approach stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Rand's rugged individualism. 11:36 AM    View blog reactions

• • •Ayn Rand: What a noble mind was there o’erthrown 
Alan Cochrum, Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, TX) A negative assessment of Ayn Rand's ideas based on selections from Atlas Shrugged and episodes from Rand's personal life as portrayed in the memoirs of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden."Loudly as Miss Rand proclaims her love of life, it seems clear that the book is written out of hate," Granville Hicks wrote in a New York Times review of Atlas noted in both of the Brandens' books. The salvo comes fairly close to the bull's-eye, although contempt might have been a more precise word. For every action of praise for a Randian hero, there is an equal and opposite reaction of scorn for the unheroic and villainous. 11:00 AM    View blog reactions

•Heavy-metal guitarist arrested in sex assault 
Courier News (Bridgewater, NJ) Details behind the arrest of Static-X guitarist Tod Rex Salvador, aka Tripp Eisen.Eisen cut a striking figure with his dyed dreadlocks, white-face makeup and black eyeliner on stage. According to a fan Web site, the cryptic sayings on his T-shirts come from works by Ayn Rand, the Cold War author of polemical novels that espoused a politically conservative viewpoint. 11:59 AM    View blog reactions

•An attack on property rights 
Santa Maria Times Op-ed on the Kelo v. New London Supreme Court case. (Appears to be based upon the recent Ayn Rand Institute editorial by Larry Salzman and Alex Epstein.)We are reminded of a point of view expressed by philosopher/author Ayn Rand: "The idea that 'the public interest' supercedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning - that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others." 02:12 PM    View blog reactions

•Paling away 
Melissa McClements, The Guardian (London) Interview with author Chris Paling.Born in 1956 in Derby to teacher parents, Paling began writing as a teenager and has been doing so ever since. His mother's love of American writers such as James Michener, John Steinbeck and Ayn Rand influenced his reading and, consequently, shaped his ideas about fiction. "I like books by those writers because they have a strong narrative - I found I couldn't be arsed with a lot of British writers because so many of them - and still to this day this is true - don't bother with narrative," he explains. 11:25 PM    View blog reactions

•Reshaping the fantasy 
Mick Farren, Los Angeles City Beat "Reflections on modern sci-fi, and why the new ‘Battlestar Galactica’ is perfect for our times."Was Robert Heinlein a pop Ayn Rand advocate of capitalist national socialism who was unfortunately embraced by David Bowie and the Manson Family? Did Arthur C. Clarke intimate that the cosmos was infinitely beyond human imagination, and divinity could exist as a black monolith or the silver saucers of Childhood’s End? Or were both merely tellers of amazing stories? 09:29 AM    View blog reactions

•State of Fear: A review of the novel by Michael Crichton 
Marco den Ouden, HoweStreet.com The late Ayn Rand was often pilloried by critics but occasionally one of her books garnered a review that made her smile. One such was by Lorine Pruette in the New York Times. Pruette wrote of The Fountainhead that it was “the only novel of ideas by an American woman that I can recall”. Michael Crichton’s new novel takes a departure from your standard sci-fi fare and is truly one of the few sci-fi novels of ideas that I can recall.  11:07 PM    View blog reactions

•Canada’s most annoying band is somehow its most famous music export 
Dan Verbin, Excalibur (York U, Toronto) It's not Rush's banal instrumentation or 12 minute songs about Bastille Day that really irks me. It's the lyrics to their songs. Their Ayn Rand-influenced, quasi-new age inspired, existentialist lyrics with a Scientology bent, all penned by Neil Peart, make about as much sense as a Dr. Phil self-help book. 11:03 PM    View blog reactions

•Hannah Luber chats with gostanford.com 
gostanford.com Interview with water polo player, Hannah Luber.What's by my bed at the moment? Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in Portuguese by Douglas Adams, The Best American Travel Writings 2004, and The Master and The Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Once all these polo shenanigans are over I may get to finishing them. 11:00 PM    View blog reactions

• •Reading List: Dr. Doug Barrett 
Emily Godwin, The Flor-Ala (University of North Alabama) Interview with Doug Barrett, professor of quantitative methods in the Economics and Finance Department.A lot of philosophers do not speak in a language to communicate with the layperson. Rand did, and she did that on purpose. 10:47 PM    View blog reactions

•The national ID Trojan horse 
Ron Paul, Wilson County News (TX) As Ayn Rand said, the “Savage’s whole existence is public.”  11:29 PM    View blog reactions

• •Top architect sees new hotel model 
David Stratton, Gaming Today Profile of Joel Bergman, architect of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las Vegas .When Joel Bergman finished reading Ayn Rand’s classic 1943 novel, "The Fountainhead," he vowed to dye his hair red and become Howard Roark, the architect so idealistic that he would blast to kingdom come a housing project he designed rather than allow its short-sighted owners make any alterations. 11:23 PM    View blog reactions

•New title touts ultimate in luxury 
Don O'Briant, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Magazine roundup.Reason (March) focuses on Ayn Rand at 100 and explains why the author of "The Fountainhead" is more relevant than ever. References to her have popped up in Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's speeches, on "The Simpsons," and in a review of "The Incredibles." 09:52 PM    View blog reactions

•Two-faced civil libertarianism 
Tibor Machan, Desert Dispatch (Victorville, CA) As Russian-born American novelist Ayn Rand had her main character point this out in her blockbuster novel, "Atlas Shrugged" (1957), what's wrong with the world is that everywhere people are complicit in their own oppression -- what she called the principle of the sanction of the victim. And one way they do this is by forgetting about principles they invoke when it is to their liking when it applies to someone else whose goals they do not champion. 09:49 PM    View blog reactions

• •IT’s up to you 
Shane Schick, IT Business Canada "How to approach the team vs. individual performance debate" in the field of information technology.When Ayn Rand called her 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged,” she provided those who didn’t care to read the 900-plus page book with a better plot summary than anything they’d find in Coles’ Notes. The underlying theme is that cultures such as ours sacrifice the interests of the individual in favour of the many. 09:39 PM    View blog reactions

• •Brittan stands firm through the years 
John Blundell, The Scotsman Review of Against the Flow by Sir Samuel Brittan.I am impressed by his two articles on Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. Ayn Rand was by far the most daring exponent of individualism, or as she termed it "Selfishness". I have simply never encountered a British intellectual to give Rand a mature consideration let alone read her books. 09:28 PM    View blog reactions

• •The pursuit of happiness 
Chris Watson, Santa Cruz Sentinel "Book briefs" column.Why is it, exactly, that this radical capitalist’s never been out of print? Was it because her novels are filled with inspiring characters and intriguing plots? Yes, but it was her philosophy too. Neither a conservative, liberal, anarchist nor libertarian, Rand believed in reason, the individual and the search for happiness. 09:46 AM    View blog reactions

•Eva Mendes: More than just a Revlon face 
Ricky Lo, Philstar.com What kind of guys do you find attractive? "Those who have self-confidence, ambitious and lovable. If he reads Ayn Rand, so much the better." 10:31 PM    View blog reactions