•Pirated books worth Rs 1.25 crore seized 
Times of India In what they call the 'biggest ever haul of pirated books', the police have recovered over 34,000 fakes of titles ranging from Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Ayn Rand's We The Living, J M Coetzee's Disgrace, Robin Cook's Shock, John Gray's Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, Shobha De's Spouse, the Harry Potter series as well as works of John Grisham, Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon. 10:28 PM    View blog reactions

• •Vizard has one friend/fan left 
Masked Marauder, Crikey (Australia) Letter to the editor defending Australian businessman businessman Steve Vizard, who has been found guilty of "insider trading."I'm reminded of a gentleman named Hank Rearden from Ayn Rand's classic novel Atlas Shrugged. Vizard's no steel industrialist but the whole shambolic media circus reminded me of Hank Rearden going before a tribunal to defend his right to do business in steel because vindictive power motivated interests wanted to destroy him! 08:09 AM    View blog reactions

•‘Sky High’ works as super parody 
Craig Outhier, Orange County Register (CA) Movie review.'Sky High' also champions a message of inclusion that serves as a mild retort to the anti-populist, Randian subtext of 'The Incredibles.' 07:29 AM    View blog reactions

•The ‘health’ of business 
Ross Garside, The Daily Item (Sunbury, PA) Letter to the editor opposed to the naming of a government employee as presedient and Woman of the Year by a local businesswomen's group.Why is SEDA-COG involved with local railroad policy? How is that 'a proper function of government,' as Ayn Rand would comment? 05:45 PM    View blog reactions

•Pimp is just a four-letter word 
Mick Farren, Los Angeles City Beat Why "these parasites don’t deserve to be elevated to pop icon status."Neither the vast shopping list, nor even ['King of All Pimps' Jason] Itzler’s pompous propensity to quote Ayn Rand, could disguise how this pimp was as dumb – if not dumber – than his colleagues in the hood. 05:38 PM    View blog reactions

•Justice’s house targeted for development 
Steve Stanek, Budget & Tax News (The Heartland Institute) On a bid to have eminent domain employed to allow construction of a hotel on land occupied by Supreme Court Justice David Souter's home.Instead of a Gideon's Bible, each guest would receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. 05:32 PM    View blog reactions

• •Has Greenspan committed fraud? 
Dave Goodboy, Yahoo! Finance Interview with the author of Greenspan's Fraud, economist Ravi Batra.Rand taught that people should be selfish to make sure social welfare is maximized resulting in a society with high living standard. 10:04 PM    View blog reactions

• •Jack gets Rand-y 
Jack Crawford, New York Press Letter to the editor.These modern libertarians such as 'über-anarchist' John Zerzan, as your reviewer calls him (7/19), give the philosophy of Ayn Rand a bad name. She called them 'hippies of the right' about 40 years ago. I wish they would dissociate themselves from her as vehemently as she did from them. 09:55 PM    View blog reactions

•Say sayonara to abortion 
Ted Rall, Yahoo! News Commentary in opposition to Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.Despite repeated denials, it's clear that Sandra Day O'Connor's shoo-in replacement is an active member of the Federalist Society, the far-right cadre of scary college kids who worship Ayn Rand, dress like Tucker Carlson and care deeply about your sex life. 07:58 AM    View blog reactions

•Unconditional love: A truly disgusting phrase 
Greg Cross, Useless-Knowledge.com "About the author" note accompanying article.I am a 20 year-old college student who has been influenced by the ideas and writing of the brilliant Ayn Rand. 07:55 AM    View blog reactions

•The partner track 
Paige Arnof-Fenn, Entrepreneur.com How to decide whether to enter a business partnership.As Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and generations of economists have pointed out, people pursue their own self-interests. 08:08 AM    View blog reactions

• •The decline and fall of conservatism 
Butler Shaffer, LewRockwell.com There was a time when conservative thought was actually characterized by . . . thought! Such classic thinkers as John Locke, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer – to name just a few – rekindled discussions, in the years following World War II, about individual liberty and the state. A new group of conservative thinkers – including Leonard Read, Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, and Ayn Rand – arose to drag political and social philosophy out of its Marxist/socialist quagmire. 08:06 AM    View blog reactions

• • •A mystic reads Rand, Part III 
Jonathan Wilson, The Partial Observer "The third in a series in which I, the pastor of an evangelical church, respond to Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy."The Objectivist principles that Rand recognized are true because they are revealed to be true. 07:56 AM    View blog reactions

• •Chris Lewis: Tall poppy 
Peter Cresswell, Scoop (New Zealand) Commentary on the cause of high-profile tennis coach Chris Lewis's decision to leave New Zealand for the US.The dullards would rather be comfortable in their mediocrity than have their boat rocked by the truth, or try and deal with real talent. This is what Ayn Rand meant when she talked in an article about Marilyn Monroe of a particularly common variant of the hatred of the good for being the good 07:50 AM    View blog reactions

• •Welcome to Hotel Souter? Eminent domain ruling triggers backlash 
Beverley Wang, San Jose Mercury News On a bid by Logan Darrow Clements to have eminent domain employed to allow construction of a hotel on land occupied by Supreme Court Justice David Souter's home.He said his mission, like his long-shot bid for governor of California in 2003, is rooted in his passion for objectivism, a philosophy of free-will capitalism embodied in Ayn Rand's 1957 novel, 'Atlas Shrugged.' 09:36 AM    View blog reactions

• •Ayn Rand writer ignored the truth 
Yoke Sim Gunaratne, et al, In-Forum Letter to the editor.We, the members of the Fargo Human Relations Commission, disagree with the negative opinion expressed by Thomas A. Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute of Irvine, Calif., on the proposal of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs to formally apologize to the Native Americans for a 'long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies.' 09:29 AM    View blog reactions

•Responsibility 
Michael Hardesty, Berkeley Daily Planet (CA) Letter to the editor on coverage of a murder.The hype on this particular murder seems to have a political agenda behind it. If the woman had been an acolyte of Ayn Rand instead of an admirer of Cuba, would there have been the media outpouring that we have seen over the past couple of days? The question answers itself. 05:55 PM    View blog reactions

•I wouldn’t even ban The Footy Show 
Helen Razer, The Age (Melbourne) Opinion on why censorship is not the solution to terrorism. There are those things within the cultural milieu that are, in my view, destructive, offensive or just plain vile. These might include, but are by no means limited to, the novels of Ayn Rand, the radio broadcasts of Rex Hunt and nearly everything that ever happened on The Footy Show. 06:14 PM    View blog reactions

•Reinventing is easy if you talk the talk 
Ruth Wajnryb, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) Tom Cruise as an example of self-invention, both in character and appearance.It's an Ayn Rand world: the rugged individual is born, has hopes and dreams, is single-mindedly ambitious, but also kind to old people, children and animals. All Cruise has done is embrace enthusiastically the pursuit of happiness that is everyone's right. 09:42 AM    View blog reactions

•By the Bay, is “The Island” 
Christopher J. Perez, TheCelebrityCafe.com In director Michael Bay’s latest, [Scarlett] Johannson plays Jordan Two Delta who, alongside Ewan Mcgregor (Moulin Rouge, Star Wars) will find out that the semi-utopian world they have been living in is a lie. Their lives, it seems, have been determined for them since birth, a cross between Huxley’s Brave New World and something out of an Ayn Rand novel. 09:04 PM    View blog reactions

•How I learned to stop worrying and love the book 
Jonathan Meador, The Kentucky Kernel (University of Kentucky) If I buy Atlas Shrugged it doesn't mean I'm going to read it tomorrow, but in the years to come. Books take time, and at 20 years old, that's what I've got the most of (besides books). 08:59 PM    View blog reactions

•Wild musings 
Jenifer Strickland, Brush News Tribune (CO) On a bid by Logan Darrow Clements to build a hotel on the land currently occupied by Supreme Court Justice David Souter's home.Clements also intends to place copies of 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand in each room - another allusion to the loss of personal freedom - and further promoting the objectivist attitude that drives Freestar Media. 08:54 PM    View blog reactions

•Atlas shrugged in Dubai venture 
Florence Chong, The Australian  08:53 PM    View blog reactions

•American’t 
Ken Mondschein, New York Press Review of Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections, edited by anarchist John Zerzan.In the end, denouncing microwave ovens, contact lenses, and the division of labor as the root of all evil is naive on the level of a 16-year-old kid getting into Ayn Rand and embracing social Darwinism. 08:04 AM    View blog reactions

•But what I really want to do is design 
Rick Marin, New York Times On actor Brad Pitt's aspirations to architecture.What drives a huge star into a field likely to dismiss him as a dilettante? John Pawson, the British architect, said in an e-mail message, 'I think it reflects a need to reconnect with something which feels real, when you are involved in work which is very intense, but which is conducted in a sort of parallel universe, at one remove from the everyday world.' Hollywood depictions of the profession have veered from the macho to the sensitive: Gary Cooper in 'The Fountainhead' to Mike Brady. 07:57 AM    View blog reactions