•Oh, please, don’t tell me what I want 
Helen Razer, The Age (Melbourne) Masochism is the new social mechanism. It must be. How else to explain the mass compliance on reality TV with brutal personal trainers, unfeeling choreographers and barely qualified Idol judges who make Ayn Rand appear sensitive and clever by contrast? 08:08 AM    View blog reactions

•Changing the rules 
Steven Martinovich, Enter Stage Right Review of Redefining Sovereignty: The Battle for the Moral High Ground in a Changing World, edited by Orrin C. Judd.Echoing Ayn Rand when she famously wrote that a state was only legitimate when it protected the rights of its citizens, Judd writes that "Americans have moved on to a paradigm that requires that a regime only be recognized as sovereign if it has democratic legitimacy." Where previously the test consisted only of international recognition of sovereignty, the new test includes the nature of the state claiming the sovereignty. 09:33 PM    View blog reactions

•Wealth must be created first 
Adam Twardowski, Bismarck Tribune (ND) Letter to the editor by a high school student.Wealth is not a static entity that exists in a fixed amount in the world. Production, which Ayn Rand defined as “the application of reason to the problem of survival,” is the means by which wealth is created. 07:14 AM    View blog reactions

•Café society 
Toronto Star On writers who like to do their work at coffee shops. She sits at the back of the café with her lined notepad, her books — poems by Billy Collins, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead — and a look of dreamy possibility. Where will her thoughts take her today? 07:02 AM    View blog reactions

•Bright side of enlightenment 
Parvez Feroze, The Independent (Bangladesh) Letter to the editor.In today's world there are those who were born Muslims but deserted their faith on receiving "enlightenment" from the West with its technology and science and writers like Ayn Rand and by ignoring those of the West like Ron Hubbard. 07:00 AM    View blog reactions

• • •Introducing The Objective Standard 
Craig Biddle, Capitalism Magazine The editor of a new periodical describes its philosophy and goals.In a word, we advocate Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and apply its principles to the cultural and political issues of the day. 10:50 AM    View blog reactions

•Elect this! 
Riggs Fulmer, The Vanguard (Portland State U) Opinion column.Governmental corruption is so commonplace as to be taken for granted, thousands are being slaughtered in Iraq and Afghanistan (take these as metonymy for the many violent conflicts around the world) in base pursuit of lucre and corporations have increasingly unchecked powers, economically (fuck you, Ayn Rand), and, thus, politically. 10:48 AM    View blog reactions

•Why the low-fat diet is stupid and potentially dangerous 
Anthony Colpo, The Common Voice Fatless Shrugged. It was Ayn Rand who once said that the most noble and productive goal for a person to engage in was the pursuit of their own happiness. If the achievement of your own happiness is important to you, then kick the low-fat diet's sad, sorry, melancholy butt right out of your life--it's a loser. 10:43 AM    View blog reactions

•Grammy winner takes centrestage 
The Telegraph (Calcutta) On an upcoming performance by Vishwa Mohan Bhatt in Jamshedpur.“This slew of classical programmes comes after a splendid theatre performance by XLRI students. The play was adapted from Ayn Rand’s The Night of January Sixteenth, which revived the theatre tradition at the institute,” said a XLRI student. 10:39 AM    View blog reactions

•Prepare to be challenged 
Dayna Papaleo, City Newspaper (Rochester, NY) Review of Astra Taylor's film documentary, Žižek!, on director Slavoj Žižek.An acolyte of French Freudian Jacques Lacan and proponent of socialism, Zizek is, to put it bluntly, brilliant. [....] Taylor's camera follows Zizek as he delivers lectures to packed houses in far-flung locales like Buenos Aires and New York City, shops for DVDs (Zizek's favorite American film is, not surprisingly, The Fountainhead), and gives a tour of his cozy apartment. 07:07 PM    View blog reactions

•Clean the cabinet of Cooley 
Liz Garrigan, Nashville Scene Commentary on Dave Cooley, deputy governor of Tennessee.We’d speculate that he’d sooner read a treatise by doctrinaire Democrat James Carville or a comic essay collection by redneck hero Jeff Foxworthy than be passing sleepless hours with the heady novels of Ayn Rand or philosopher William James’ Pragmatism. 07:03 PM    View blog reactions

•If the dead could spit 
Adrienne Maree Brown, AlterNet Interview with hip hop poet Saul Williams.Q: What books, music, or films changed your life? A: Autobiography of Malcolm X, autobiography of Assata Shakur, and of Miles Davis. Temple of my Familiar by Alice Walker, The Famished Road by Ben Okri, and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. For films, Slam, Mary Poppins, Naked, and Farewell My Concubine. 09:23 AM    View blog reactions

• •A different kind of invisible hand 
AlwaysOn Transcript of comments by Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine, in a session called "Surviving in the Turbulent 2000s."The angriest mail that I get in response to columns that I write at Forbes [...] are not from people who are anti-capitalists and left of center. [....] They are actually from a kind of Ayn Rand libertarian type whenever I write a column talking about the importance of morality in capitalism and how the two work together. A free enterprise will perish in two generations if it doesn’t have the underlying foundation of morality. That isn’t true [they say], capitalism is morally sufficient on to itself. And they never make the argument. They say because Ayn Rand said so. It is just sort of an amazing little cult out there. 08:01 AM    View blog reactions

•Pirated books rate high with book lovers 
Preeti Verma, Expressindia Be it a novel or a classic, a cheaper version is always available round the corner, on the roadside and there are many, book lovers, who visit these haunts for a favourite book. Harry Potter, Sidney Sheldon, Ayn Rand, Dan Brown, Shobha De, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham...you name it and they have it. 09:23 PM    View blog reactions

•Socialized medicine and rationing 
George Reisman, Free-Market News Network A branch of Britain’s National Health Service was upheld by a judge of the country’s High Court in its refusal to pay for the expensive cancer drug required by a 54-year-old woman to extend her life, and who had brought suit to compel it to pay. The judge wrote that he found nothing “irrational” in the refusal to pay, which was based on the proposition that "`The primary care trust has to care for the whole population . . . . We have other people in our community who don't have a strong voice, and we have to consider them.'" This rationale and its acceptance by a judge is an illustration of what Ayn Rand, with good reason, used to describe contemptuously as a “collectivist stewpot.” 10:37 AM    View blog reactions

•Short fuse Bradley all right until he’s wronged 
Joe Roderick, Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, CA) Profile of Oakland A's outfielder Milton Bradley.Bradley's favorite book, "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand, is also a favorite of A's general manager Billy Beane and his former disciple, Paul DePodesta, who was the Dodgers GM during Bradley's two turbulent seasons in L.A. 10:35 AM    View blog reactions

•Six economists and $513,000 could change the way the world thinks about flat tax 
Allister Heath, The Business (London) The UK Treasury’s model of the economy [...] assume[s] that if the top tax rate were to double from the current 40% to 80%, revenues would also double and taxpayers would not modify their lives in any way [....] The truth, of course, is that such a massive tax increase [...] would trigger economic Armageddon. Millions of people would quit their jobs, leave the country or shift to the underground economy – as Ayn Rand put in her bestselling classic novel, Atlas Shrugged, the wealth-creators, thinkers and doers would go on strike. 07:47 PM    View blog reactions

•The science of smiling 
Leon Neyfakh, Harvard Crimson Profile of research lecturer in psychology, Tal Ben-Shahar.He loved Ayn Rand. He even founded the Harvard Objectivist Club. 08:52 AM    View blog reactions

• •Watch out, Washington: Overburdened taxpayers may shrug and shake your complacent world 
John “Jack” Wadsworth, Canton Repository (OH) Letter to the editor.Fiction truly becomes reality. Case in point is the fictional work “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. Atlas, who has the world on his shoulder, can no longer bear the heavy weight of the world and shrugs, and the world shakes. 08:46 AM    View blog reactions

•Smoking ban ignores rights of property owners 
Mitchell Wilcox , Montana Kaimin The UM Objectivist Club is planning a ‘Smoke In’ to protest the ban at a local bar in the near future. 07:23 PM    View blog reactions

• •Galbraith’s slander 
Tibor R. Machan, Free-Market News Network Column responding to a quote by economist John Kenneth Galbraith: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."In recent times the only advocate of what might be called “a superior moral justification for selfishness” has been the late Russian born American novelist Ayn Rand. 07:19 PM    View blog reactions

•Greenspan’s memoirs 
New York Sun Editorial.As a Wall Street economist in the 1960s, he worshipped at the hem of Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shrugged" and founder of the creed known as Objectivism. 08:20 AM    View blog reactions

•Hatred of censorship drove cartoons’ editor 
Dan Bilefsky, International Herald Tribune Profile of Flemming Rose, editor of the Danish Jyllands-Posten, who chose to publish cartoon depictions of Mohammed in that publication.Rose [...] says he was a hippie in his university days. [....] His worldview changed, Rose said, when he went to Russia in the 1980s and saw firsthand the repression of the Soviet regime. He befriended dissidents, devoured books by Solzhenitsyn, Hannah Arendt, and Ayn Rand, and traveled throughout Asia and the Middle East. 07:48 PM    View blog reactions

•Bang for your buck 
Daniel Akst, Slate "You have $1. How should you spend it to do the most good?"Without understanding local circumstances, your carefully prioritized donation could be doing more harm than good [....]. One way around this problem is to take what might be called the Ayn Rand approach, which is to invest the dollar in whatever business seems most promising because capitalism produces the greatest good for the greatest number, and the marketplace rewards those things people need and want most. 07:42 PM    View blog reactions

•The metamorphosis of Henry M. Bowles III 
Henry M. Bowles III, NUviews I began to question teachers and classmates. Gradually, my questioning turned into criticism, particularly when I realized these people were not capable of truly defending their liberalism. My sources were primitive—Internet news, think tank sites, Ayn Rand—and I argued in clumsy strokes. 06:10 PM    View blog reactions