• •US ‘fully supports’ Iraqi diplomatic effort involving Iran, Syria 
Susan Jones, Cybercast News Service Some Americans say the United States has no business negotiating with Iran and Syria -- its enemies. "These countries are responsible for the maiming and deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. 09:05 AM    View blog reactions

•Harris drawn to MBC, Staunton 
Steve Briggs, News Leader (Staunton, VA) Profile of office manager Mary Elizabeth Harris.Favorite books: I'm an avid reader. Right now I'm reading "Cash" by Johnny Cash, "Killing Rage: Ending Racism" by Bell Hooks, "The Color of Welfare," and I just finished "Atlas Shrugged." 09:02 AM    View blog reactions

•Music TV—White and wordy 
Caryn Brooks, Centre Daily (PA) [Rapper] John Brown (or the persona thereof) is the kind of guy whose seeming complete lack of self-awareness is wrapped in bulletproof hubris. He declares himself "an entity," not a rapper and presents himself as a walking business plan. Now, that kind of Ayn Randian self-determination is not out of place in the hip-hop world (see Jay-Z, Diddy, et al) but when the business plan in question is filled with buffoony bulletpoints, it's hard not be dismissive. 09:01 AM    View blog reactions

•The Lord (Black) is their shepherd 
Mark Fitzgerald, Editor & Publisher On a website run by Alastair Smith in support of Conrad Black.Smith's Web site approvingly quotes other like-minded figures such as Ayn Rand, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Maggie -- excuse me, Baroness -- Thatcher.  08:59 AM    View blog reactions

•A day with Stern and Suzuki 
Peter Foster, National Post (Toronto) Thomas Homer-Dixon and David Suzuki suggested at [a University of Toronto presentation] that what might be needed [to fight climate change] was to "curtail" the growth of developed countries, perhaps have a "steady-state economy." To anybody with the vaguest grasp of how economies work, this would amount essentially to outlawing mental activity. Indeed, it was exactly the suggestion of the villains in Ayn Rand's epic Atlas Shrugged. 10:48 AM    View blog reactions

•Angelina Jolie may join Council on Foreign Relations 
Jeff Musall, Associated Content In a role that might seem surprising, [Jolie] is slated to play the character of Dagny Taggart in the movie adaptation of the Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged" to begin production soon. 09:49 AM    View blog reactions

•My father, the socialist 
George Selgin, Free-Market News Network I gravitated to free-market economics, discovering Milton Friedman and the Austrians and also (for moral inspiration) Ayn Rand. Later I found two other students who shared my sympathies; I'm certain that they were the only ones in the whole student body. Back then, and quite unlike today, a student was more likely to be spotted carrying Mao's little red book than a dog-eared edition of Atlas Shrugged. 09:47 AM    View blog reactions

•Koch’s laws 
Daniel Fisher, Forbes Review of The Science of Success, by Charles Koch.Readers expecting a recipe book for business success will be disappointed, but those of a more philosophical bent will find Koch's observations fascinating. Not only has he digested the entire Ayn Rand syllabus of free market theory, but he's had the chance to put it to work from his headquarters on the plains north of Wichita. 09:42 AM    View blog reactions

• •Egocentrism: Just plain evil or necessary evil? 
Misbah Anjum, The Pine Log (Stephen F. Austin State U, Nacogoches, TX) Ayn Rand discusses the importance of ego in her book, The Anthem. The book revolves around a character who refers to himself as, much like everyone else in his society, we or us, never I or me. Rand grew up in a communist nation and much of her philosophy is centered around individualism. She portrays how ego is essential to society, how ego is the essence of individualism. 10:43 AM    View blog reactions

• •Ex-speaker Rants hunkers down 
Jennifer Jacobs, Des Moines Register (IA) On Iowa state representative Christopher Rants.Rants lends dog-eared copies of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" to the clerks [...]. "I tell them if they get it, and like it, they'll get more out of it than four years of college," said Rants, who has a Rearden Steel sticker on the window of his five-year-old Chrysler, another nod to Rand and free-market capitalism. 10:38 AM    View blog reactions

•Jimbo, the jumbo techie to make it all easy 
Rachel Chitra, News Today (Chennai, India) Interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.Q: Being a fan of Ayn Rand and contributor to wiki, what would you say to more number of articles found on him [sic] in Wikipedia than any other contemporary writer? A: That's news to me. I must check that up. 10:33 AM    View blog reactions

• • •Shifting ideology: from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx 
Michael McLaskey, Arbiter Online (Boise State U) The biggest problem with Rand in action is that the rich just pick up their toys and go home. 10:29 AM    View blog reactions

•Michael Crichton 
Charley Reese, LewRockwell.com Hype and exaggeration seem to have infected every aspect of American life. In this atmosphere, Crichton is like Ayn Rand's fictional ideal man of reason. Look at the data. Apply reason. Make sure the data is correct. 10:28 AM    View blog reactions

•Left BioCon futurist scenario building 
J. Hughes, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies A response to “Our Biopolitical Future: Four Scenarios,” by Richard Hayes.[Hayes] sincerely wants the world of 1995 back, when anyone enthusiastic about the medical potentials of genetics or nanotechnology was very likely to list The Fountainhead as their favorite novel. 10:25 AM    View blog reactions

• •Half-page books: ‘Land of Liberty’ 
Bill Steigerwald, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Interview with Brian Doherty, author of Radicals for Capitalism.Q: Of the big five of the libertarian movement – Von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman -- who is your favorite? A: Murray Rothbard, and I’ll tell you why. Rothbard, in one way, was the most distinctly libertarian of the libertarians. He was influenced a lot by both Mises and Rand, not so much by Hayek and Friedman. He brought together Mises’ deep economist’s understanding of why government economic intervention tends to fail and Ayn Rand’s sort of natural rights-based philosophy that argued that it is morally wrong for government to do certain things, whether or not it worked better -- even though it didn’t work better. 10:34 AM    View blog reactions

•Artful’s faves 
Linda Brazill, The Capital Times (Madison, WI) Article sidebar.Here are the movies that inspire interior designer Nate Berkus. "Auntie Mame," "Casino," "The Fountainhead," [...]. 10:44 AM    View blog reactions

•Films furnish style ideas 
Linda Brazill, The Capital Times (Madison, WI) Movies offer us a smorgasbord of interiors of every style and period. We can laugh at them, love them or seriously study them to pick up tips to perk up our own homes. The January issue of House & Garden magazine [is] a special issue devoted to "25 Fabulous Movie Interiors," ranging from the obvious like "The Fountainhead" (1949) and "Auntie Mame" (1958) to the creepy ("A Clockwork Orange," 1971) and the unexpected (Jerry Lewis' "The Ladies Man," 1961). 10:39 AM    View blog reactions

•Houstonist bites: BJ’s Buffalo Chicken Pizza 
Hector Chavez, Houstonist The atmosphere and decor is sports bar meets Ayn Rand art deco. 10:36 AM    View blog reactions

•DVD review: Flight of Fury 
Bill James, Monsters and Critics As if there weren’t enough moments of mental dissonance in Flight of Fury, allow me to add another.  According to the General Barnes, the X-77 uses an electromagnetic pulse to attain its cloaked status.  And if you’re on your fifth Heineken, that may sound like the most brilliant notion since objectivism.  However, a quick Googling will bring about interesting points regarding the F-117’s navigational susceptibility to electromagnetic pulses, such as solar flares. 10:33 AM    View blog reactions

• •Burning questions 
J. C. Lockwood, North Shore Sunday (Lynnfield, MA) On a stage production of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.In literature as in life, government is notoriously inefficient [...]. Consider [....] Equality 7-2521, the hero from Ayn Rand’s “Anthem,” who lives in a society so collectivized that the word “I” does not exist. It is not known, who finds solace — and a bright future — in the bowels of the city, which have never been sanitized completely, and in information in libraries that the Council of Vocations foolishly allowed to exist, or never quite got around to destroying. 10:25 AM    View blog reactions

• •Fountainheaded 
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show (Comedy Central) (Video) Humor. "Jon catches Stephen in the midst of his Objectivist Children's Sleepover."

•Enviro-socialism 
Mike Rosen, Rocky Mountain News (Denver) After his service as a medical officer in the Russian Army during World War I, Zhivago returns to his wife and son who had been living with his in-laws, the Gromekos, in Moscow. [....] Zhivago is greeted by a burly woman in semi-military garb [...] who acidly instructs him that the home has been confiscated by the government in the name of the people [...]. I can imagine lefty professors and the local chapter of the Young Socialists League at the University of Colorado at the People's Republic of Boulder, standing up and cheering that scene, but as one who's always preferred Ayn Rand to Karl Marx, I found it revolting (pun intended). 09:48 AM    View blog reactions

•School of Engineering enrollment declining 
Steven J. Eppell, The Observer (Case Western Reserve U) Letter to the Editor.Evil men conspire to control our minds by planting bits of information in our media. These bits form our ideas of fashion and acceptable culture. Ayn Rand describes such a man, Ellsworth Toohey, in The Fountainhead. Characters like Toohey rarely exist. However, information sprinkled throughout the media foreshadowing breaking trends certainly exists for the prepared mind to see. 09:46 AM    View blog reactions

• • •Rand’s philosophy provides insights 
Scott Miller, The Graphic (Pepperdine U) As I sat in my lecture class [...] last week, my professor was explaining a biblical passage from the book of Luke; he was afraid that it would sound too much like social Darwinism, so he quickly explained that it was nothing of the sort, and that it wasn’t “Ayn Rand, or ‘Atlas Shrugged’ stuff” [...]. As a reader, and moderate admirer of Rand, I couldn’t help but notice and mark the tone of contempt in my professor’s voice as he pronounced Rand’s name and magnum opus. While I am not in any way a Rand-roid (the nickname for Rand’s radical followers), I still bristle every time I hear someone try to put Rand down. 09:43 AM    View blog reactions

•Measure your society 
Aaron Shure, Huffington Post Orgies and wife swapping flourish most on the periphery of conservative communities. Yes, Hollywood talks a good game, but uglies bump the most not where Darwin fish waddle across Prius bumpers, but where American flag lapel pins fly. Why? Because in red state America there ain't nothing else to do. Meanwhile, in the blue states there's saving the environment, reading of Ayn Rand, flitting from belief system to belief system. 09:40 AM    View blog reactions