•Live free! (Or die trying) 
Zach Dundas, Willamette Week (Portland, OR) With the Libertarian Party, a 35-year-old outlaw of American politics' Wild West fringe, holding its biennial national convention in Portland this weekend, citizens of this tax-loving, gun-hating People's Republic could be forgiven for thinking between 600 and 700 aliens have invaded. (And they're all reading The Fountainhead!) 08:07 AM    View blog reactions

•A Jamestown resident teaches babies to communicate through sign language 
Sean Flynn, Newport Daily News (RI) Jamestown resident John Galt said he and his wife, Dagny, had read about babies learning sign language and even bought books on how to do it, but never had the time to go through the material. 08:28 AM    View blog reactions

•If Bill Gates doesn’t want the money, I’ll take it! 
Tom DeWeese, Magic City Morning Star (ME) Commentary responding to Bill Gates' reported statement on being told he is the world's richest man: "I wish I wasn't. There is nothing good that comes out of that."As Ayn Rand so clearly put it, "Money is a is a tool of exchange that can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them" Money is made possible only by men who produce. There is nothing evil about it. 07:12 PM    View blog reactions

• •The X-box age 
Kenneth R. Gregg, LewRockwell.com Commentary about libertarian and Objectivist responses to the Iraq war.Bush certainly likes his position as Leader of American War, so pro-war objectivists, like the ones who dominate ARI, for example, are more than happy to follow his lead, although for their own reasons. Today's arguments are just a repeat of arguments upheld some two score ago. There were no articles on it in the major objectivist journals, although I seem to recall some in the minor ones, and there were certainly discussions and debates about this in objectivist groups. 09:01 AM    View blog reactions

• • •Time for Objectivists to come clean 
Scott McPherson, LewRockwell.com Commentary on Objectivists who supported the war in Iraq.My Objectivist friends, stop fighting so passionately for the great morals and values of our country under the leadership of a government that has abandoned both. Admit you were wrong, learn from the mistake, and help us steer our country back onto its once-noble and proud course in the world, one defined by "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations." Ayn Rand wrote that "justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists" – and reality has never been clearer. 08:55 AM    View blog reactions

•Who says I can’t admit my errors? Let me list some 
Chris Satullo, Philadelphia Inquirer The '90s tech boom created a cadre of brash young millionaires who carried themselves like heroes of an Ayn Rand novel. Not much social conscience in evidence. 09:57 AM    View blog reactions

•Manatee’s ‘mad spree of deceptions’ 
Joan Altabe, Bradenton Herald (FL) On local commercial architecture.Then there's the Lakewood Ranch Medical Center. The design of the facade is so unrelievedly embellished, without a visual breathing space anywhere, it raises the specter of the architectural peacockery Ayn Rand described in her novel "The Fountainhead": "It offered so many columns, pediments, friezes, tripods, gladiators, urns and volutes that it looked as if it had not been built of white marble, but squeezed out of a pastry tube." 09:51 AM    View blog reactions

•Healthy & wise young 
Nadeshda Zareen, Indian Express (Mumbai) Why give up what Ayn Rand describes as the “power to tame fire between two fingers”? 09:45 AM    View blog reactions

•How the beach read lets us get lost on vacation 
Kerry Lengel, Arizona Republic According to the National Review, "Sold with a sunscreen inside the cover, [Gloria Steinem's 1963] The Beach Book contained suggested fantasies: 'You have just dealt a crushing defeat in public debate to (choose one: William Buckley Jr., Hugh Hefner, David Susskind, Ayn Rand), who is being laughed off the stage.' " 09:39 AM    View blog reactions

•Bill Gates: Philanthropy on trial 
Frank Martin, Orange County Register (CA) Letter to the Editor.I take exception to Orange Grove columnist Tibor Machan's comments about Bill Gate's philanthropy. Machan seems to speak from a strict Objectivist viewpoint. The problem is that human society and relationships don't neatly fit into his or Ayn Rand's idea of the "good" of pure selfishness. It drives economists crazy but not all human actions can be clearly explained by a totally logical system. 10:39 AM    View blog reactions

•Multiculturalism breeds terrorism 
Glenn Woiceshyn, Capitalism Magazine Ayn Rand, in her seminal essay entitled “Global Balkanization,” wrote, “There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred—brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way—then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred.” 10:38 AM    View blog reactions

•Why fascism is a glass house 
Peter Franklin, The Guardian - Comment is Free (London) "The great authoritarian regimes of the 20th century were all suckers for the cool, clean lines of modernist architecture."Am I saying that all modernists were Nazis? Well, no. For a start, many of them were communists [...]. Then there were the architects (literal and metaphorical) of Scandinavian social democracy, who quietly practiced their own polite form of modernism alongside their own polite form of eugenics [...]. And let's not forget the libertarian modernism of hyper-capitalist America, whose ideological implications were not lost on Ayn Rand. 10:33 AM    View blog reactions

•Local filmmakers shoot ‘dramedy’ in Hackettstown 
Sheila Abrams, The Warren Reporter (NJ) Script writer Wayne Thorpe of Port Murray and director Rob Buck of Chester made "Conference Room C" the lead-off project for their new film production company, Howard Roark Productions. "It's named for the protagonist in Ayn Rand's [novel] 'The Fountainhead,' who would rather blow up the building he's designed than see it compromised," Thorpe explained. 03:58 AM    View blog reactions

•Identity issues at core of tale about family of con artists 
Jacqui L'Ange, Cape Times (Cape Town, South Africa) Review of Green-Eyed Thieves, by Imraan Coovadia.While Firoze watches his brother pull off a heist in the Buffalo, NY, Diamond Exchange, he ponders the relative sexual merits of works by Kahlil Gibran, Ayn Rand, Ian Fleming and DH Lawrence. He remembers the busty blonde on the cover of Atlas Shrugged. "That image in its hill country of décolletage (a word as lovely to a 12-year-old boy as its smiling francophone cousin lingerie) shaped our fantasy life in a South Africa that banned girly magazines and relaxed its Calvinism only for works of high literature which boggled the Dutch Reformed morals of the government censor." 03:47 AM    View blog reactions

•Parting glances: Pages from a book (Pt. 11) 
Pridesource.com As fall approached T.D. and I saw less and less of each other. He spent a lot of time with Eleanor, a straight friend his age. They became Ayn Rand Objectivism clones. 06:29 PM    View blog reactions

•Economics and statistics 
Rob Tarr, Capitalism Magazine Granted, [Ludwig von] Mises' economic theories are set upon his untenable theory of "praxeology". But I am of the firm opinion that most, if not all, of his economics can (and should) be reset upon Objectivist foundations. For example, the principle of "methodological individualism" is, in my view, the correct application in economics of the Objectivist principle of concept-reduction. 09:06 AM    View blog reactions

•Rift develops between evangelical homeschoolers & constitutional individualists 
Frederick B. Meekins, The Conservative Voice [Kevin] Swanson burst into a tirade about [Alex] Jones not having enough about God on his website and condemned him as a "Randian" individualist possessing an incorrect worldview. 09:04 AM    View blog reactions

•Demolition city 
Mehammed Mack, LA Weekly On a plan to build affordable housing on the grounds of "Tara," an historic West Hollywood home.The house has hosted an illustrious list of guests as the first stop of the two-part Modern Forum — a kind of intellectual salon where people like Ayn Rand, Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein once deliberated on important topics and current affairs. 08:58 AM    View blog reactions

•Doing business with the Taliban 
Daniel Davies, The Guardian - Comment is Free (London) On the situation in Somalia.It looks like the stable equilibrium for an anarchy is something like the Taliban. That's a pretty decisive argument against the anarcho-capitalist theory given that it is meant to be one which values individual freedom. But this also has practical consequences for those of us outside the Ayn Rand sphere of influence. 05:55 PM    View blog reactions

• •The suicide bomb morality 
Robert Tracinski, RealClearPolitics Ayn Rand remains a controversial figure, scoffed at by both left and right. But this phrase, "perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing"--could there be a better description of the Palestinians' suicide bomb society? 08:26 AM    View blog reactions

•Odyssey to America 
Justin Raimondo, AntiWar.com On the plight of "Adil," a young gay Moroccan who is trying to emigrate to the United States.it reminds me of Ayn Rand's We the Living, her 1936 novel of life in Soviet Russia. There is a passage in the book in which the heroine confronts her Communist lover with the fact of her own betrayal, and adds this pungent political commentary to give her speech a little bit of extra sting: "You came and you forbade life to the living. You've driven us all into an iron cellar, and you've closed all doors, and you've locked us airtight, airtight until the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it's doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left – look!" 08:22 AM    View blog reactions

•Uneven Steven 
Luke Y. Thompson, Denver Westword Movie review.The screenplay for Undiscovered was penned by one "John Galt," who shares the name of an Ayn Rand character, and whose biography is one of few curiously missing from the official website's "cast and crew" section. Perhaps Rand rose from the grave and bitch-slapped Mr. Galt a few times, because his movie objectively sucks. 06:00 PM    View blog reactions

•Novel escapes 
Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Phoenix Reviews of novels that "will transport you to places and lives far from those you know."A certain soul-crushing scene from The Fountainhead makes its way into my brain about this time every year. Ayn Rand describes a summer traffic jam -- masses of people escaping the city in a lemming-like exodus to the beach, which in all its bourgeois insignificance might as well be a cliff for them to hurl themselves off of. It’s this grim take on a summer vacation that comes to mind when I’m stuck in a two-mile back-up on the Sagamore Bridge. 05:53 PM    View blog reactions

•Outspoken author hoping for another best-seller 
Wendi Winters, The Capital (Annapolis, MD) Profile of author Jerome Tuccille.[Tuccille] skewered the Libertarian movement, and its high priestess Ayn Rand, with his autobiographical book, "It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand." 05:47 PM    View blog reactions

•An Internet rigged by providers? 
Antonia Zerbisias, Toronto Star Column supporting "Net Neutrality" measures to prevent Internet providers from charging more for certain kinds of data."Any law enforcing `Net Neutrality' would be a terrible blow to Internet freedom,'' said Alex Epstein, a fellow at the far-right Ayn Rand Institute, in a statement. "Just as cable companies have a right to apportion their bandwidth between Internet and television data, so Internet providers have a right to apportion their bandwidth between standard and premium Internet data." 07:39 AM    View blog reactions