• Sasquatch! Music Festival day three is Flaming Lips with boobs 
Quinn Omori, ChartAttack [Comedian Eugene Mirman] somehow even made a conversation about Ayn Rand absolutely hilarious.     Share on Facebook

• • Daily briefs: Action news for the post-ironic urbanite 
Chris Packham, The Pitch - The Plog (Kansas City, MO) Capitalism  A poll commissioned by the city demonstrates a plurality of Kansas Citians favoring a half-cent sales tax for rapid transit. I don't doubt it, and truthfully, as a Libertarian Christian Anarchist Objectivist, I'm kind of torn. On the one hand, not only do I want to get the government out of peoples' lives, I also actively want to smash the state, preferably with the cheapest well-vodka-based molotov cocktails money can buy. I'm a budget anarchist. But, on the other Ayn Rand-reading hand, regressive sales taxes are satisfyingly tough on the sub-poverty Untouchable caste, whom the last fifteen grinding years of laissez-faire economic liberalism haven't yet crushed completely flat. So, there's that on top.     Share on Facebook

• • Have games grown up yet? 
Wayne Santos, High-Def Digest Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Over the course of the game, players [of Bioshock] will find that [Kevin] Levine and his crew have crafted an experience that dissects the ideas proposed in famed philosophical novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, giving them a chance to explore an undersea city constructed by a prototypical Randian Superman who tired of having his genius used by the mediocre, and created an undersea utopia where he and other similarly gifted individuals could get away from the vast numbers of the average that relied on their genius to survive.     Share on Facebook

• Dis-order in the court! 
Rushville Republican (Rushville, IN) Night of January 16th  The Rush County Players are in rehearsal for their last production of the 2007-2008 season. "Sandbag, Stage Left … Or, One Dead Dolly" is "a parody of courtroom dramas like Ayn Rand’s ‘The Night of January 16’."     Share on Facebook

• Nation needs to step back from abyss in November 
Mary Potratz, Morning Sentinel (Waterville, ME) Atlas Shrugged  Letter to the editor.Atlas shrugged violently when John McCain, with a grain on his face, sang his sick version of a song and claimed, "When military gather" they "joke about things like that."     Share on Facebook

• Greed is not good—so what do we do about it? 
Susan Jacoby, On Faith (Newsweek/Washington Post) Private greed can only be checked by a certain amount of legal redistribution of wealth (my apologies to Ayn Rand and Ron Paul). And greed that directly leads to death or physical injury for others must be severely penalized, in all societies, through the criminal justice system.     Share on Facebook

• Atlas shrugged, my family closed ranks 
Liu Jun, China Daily Atlas Shrugged  (Reference in title only.) On a family’s experience during the earthquake in China’s Sichuan province.     Share on Facebook

• • The price of promoting conservative thought 
The Week Daily Capitalism  University of Colorado at Boulder Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson has started to raise $9 million to hire a Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy. Peterson says the move will foster “intellectual diversity” at the reputedly liberal campus. Similarly, regional U.S. bank BB&T Corp. has donated more than $1 million to schools that agreed to require students to read novels by free-market “objectivism” philosopher Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• • I nominate Carl Icahn for Dickepedia 
Max Keiser, Huffington Post Capitalism  Reagan is dead, Greenspan's gone, and deregulation, various neo-liberal antics, and the Washington Consensus have proven a bust. Ayn Rand has been exposed as the communist loving strumpet she really is; favoring corporate welfare over individual freedoms. The biggest welfare recipients ever to stalk the globe are Ayn Rand loving U.S. companies tied to the State for survival; Boeing, Lockheed, Corrections Corp. of America, Microsoft, Monsanto, Berkshire Hathaway to name a few.     Share on Facebook

• Mull converted daydreaming into dream job 
Carma Wadley, Deseret News (Salt Lake City) Profile of Brandon Mull, author of the Fablehaven book series.Although he's read a lot of things, fantasy has always been Mull's genre of choice. "I'm a sucker for the fantasy classics: 'Narnia,' 'Harry Potter,' 'Lord of the Rings."' But he also cites the influences of Orson Scott Card — "I love 'Ender's Game"' — and Louis Sachar — "I'm a huge fan of 'Holes"' — and puts Frank Herbert, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut and Ayn Rand among others on his list.     Share on Facebook

• • Reading your way to a Y chromosome 
Rachel Shukert, Salon - Broadsheet Thanks to the Art of Manliness blog, I am provided with a reading list that will instruct me in "How to Be a Man"! [....] Books by female authors occupy three slots on the list of 100 titles [...]. Of these, we have Mary Shelley and Harper Lee [...] and Ayn Rand, who is to traditionally female attributes like empathy and interpersonal relationships what Grover Norquist is to functioning government.     Share on Facebook

• From stem to Stern, the NBA never has had a worse season 
Nick Canepa, Union-Tribune (San Diego) Atlas Shrugged  Our Brent Schrotenboer wrote a wonderful piece late last week on late Padres pitcher Eric Show, who died of a drug overdose in 1994. The first time I met Eric, I sat next to him on the Padres bus heading for Manhattan to Shea Stadium. He was reading Ayn Rand (“Atlas Shrugged”). Heady stuff. How many players have read that thing? But that was Eric.     Share on Facebook

• • Reading people 
Mark Hughes Cobb, Tuscaloosa News (AL) The Fountainhead  Image  “What do reading choices reveal about one’s character?”And then there are the signs that the person is either a soulmate or someone to hide the children from: Lots of Ayn Rand, Scientology or other polarizing fields of study; heavy on Harlequin romances or hard-boiled mystery; shelves filled with nothing but “Star Wars” novelizations.     Share on Facebook

• For 5 hours ‘NT’ meant ‘no telephone’ 
Alex Zaharov-Reutt, iTWire Atlas Shrugged  From 9.30am to 2.30pm, Australian Central Standard Time, Telstra customers in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT) knew what it felt like to have no mobile telephone service thanks to a fibre optic cable being cut in mysterious circumstances. [....] [Telstra spokeswoman Jane] De Gault – no relation to John Galt who in a fictional world may have been responsible for the cable cut – [said] that the outage “had a very broad impact”, that it had taken crews some time to discover that a cut fibre optic cable was the reason behind the outage.     Share on Facebook

• Obamanomics 
Tribune-Review (Pittsburgh) Ayn Rand Institute  In denouncing [Social Security] privatization, [Barack] Obama rips from the Democrats' playbook a worn, tattered page: force higher-income workers to pay more into the system. And more and more until their wealth is redistributed. Or until government's S.S. Ponzi Scheme ultimately sinks. [....] "We should be debating not how to save Social Security but how to end it," writes Ayn Rand Institute analyst Alex Epstein. That would be a start.     Share on Facebook

• Life on Mars 
Tom Murray, Edmonton Journal Last year's Snakes and Arrows showed that [Rush] had more to offer than their noted obsession with Objectivist author Ayn Rand or other science-fiction themes.     Share on Facebook

• • Lowly, near-blind proofreader ‘lived and breathed poetry’ 
Ron Csillag, Globe and Mail (Toronto) Obituary.[Eric Layman] was already a fixture on Toronto's coffee house scene when he earned a BA in modern languages in 1967 from the University of Toronto, where he'd belonged to a club called Radicals for Capitalism. For a while, he sold advertising for The Globe and Mail before landing at The Canadian Jewish News in 1974. He returned to U of T in 1977 and completed a master's degree in comparative literature with an emphasis on German writers, including his personal favourite, Goethe. Other influences were author Ayn Rand, Appalachian folk ballads, philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Beethoven and Joan of Arc.     Share on Facebook

• Communication: Narcissism can ruin your dealings with others 
Steve Adubato, Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ) On the book Freeing Yourself From the Narcissist in Your Life, by Linda Martinez-Lewi.Using psychological profile case studies from her private practice as well as famous people she thinks to have been narcissists -- Ayn Rand, Pablo Picasso and Frank Lloyd Wright -- Martinez-Lewi offers ways to recognize, cope and overcome those in your life with narcissistic behavior.     Share on Facebook

• United States of insecurity 
Gabriel Matthew Schivone, ZNet Egoism  Interview with Noam Chomsky.[Q:] What are the implications of private control of public resources, such as education [...] or healthcare, telecommunications, social security, etc.? [A:] [....] [One goal of the Bush Administration is to] break down the social bonds that lead to people having sympathy and supportive feelings about one another. [....] If you want to increase the control of concentrated private power you have to drive [those feelings] out of people's heads. You have to create the kind of people that Ayn Rand is talking about, where you're after your own welfare and you don't care what happens to anyone else. You have to think, "Why do I have to care about that disabled woman across town who doesn't have enough food to eat? I didn't do it to her. That's her problem. She and her husband didn't invest properly; she didn't work hard enough, so what do I care if she starves to death?" Well, you have to turn people into pathological monsters who think that way, if you want to ensure that unaccountable, concentrated, private power will dominate the world and enrich itself.     Share on Facebook

• In search of Buckley 
Victor S. Navasky, New York Times Atheism  Book review.If [William F.] Buckley’s image was ideologue, his editorial role was transideological — a patcher-upper, keeping combatants like the ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers [...] from jumping ship, while throwing overboard the embarrassments (including John Birchers, writers for the by then anti-Semitic American Mercury, Ayn Rand Objectivist-atheists and miscellaneous misbehaving staff members) and simultaneously attracting some extraordinary, not yet politically formed younger talents.     Share on Facebook