• • Less government is better government 
Michael Huggins, Rebel Yell (U of NV, Las Vegas) Capitalism  |Egoism  | I have been looking for an ideology that fit me. I am not conservative. I am not liberal. I am definitely not a libertarian, nor a socialist. So I have spent a long time researching what would be the best fit for me, and I found something that is close. I am a believer in “objectivism.”     Share on Facebook

• • Obama ‘End of America-Ism”: Sad Variant of Global Warming Alarmism 
John Tamny, Forbes The Fountainhead  | If the earth could talk, it would likely channel Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark in The Fountainhead in response to the alarmists fearful of its destruction: “But I don’t think of you.”     Share on Facebook

• Notre Dame Football Recruiting: Brian Kelly Is Almost Done Cleaning Up the Mess 
Dan Stockrahm, Bleacher Report - Notre Dame Fighting Irish [Sheldon Day] scored 85 touchdowns in the tough North Central (Indiana) Conference, despite never playing offense in his life. Has never missed church, plays a mean jazz-flute, and is smarter than Ayn Rand ever was.     Share on Facebook

• • Outrage fatigue: Or, accepting that the Republicans just are that bad 
Dante Atkins, Daily Kos Mitt Romney has consistently presented a different vision. It’s an ideology that professes that if only plutocrats like him were less restrained by consumer protections, labor, and regulations, that they could produce all the jobs America needs through trickle-down economics, even as the stepladders to the middle class that government has already provided continue to be gutted in the name of personal responsibility. It is a vision born of a decades-long effort to rehabilitate the principles of Ayn Rand and transform them into a socially acceptable philosophy on governance while interweaving a theocratic social agenda thought unthinkable only a few years ago.     Share on Facebook

• • On the money? 
Nigel Andrews, Financial Times (London) Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  | Last year, that prophetess of capitalism, Ayn Rand, almost saw – from her cloudy eminence in the afterlife – her novel Atlas Shrugged brought to the big screen. Part one of a proposed three-part adaptation hiccupped into movie theatres in April. For critics and audiences it was simultaneously too little and too much. Rand’s vision of an unconstrained laissez-faire Utopia seemed as challengingly batty as ever. Yet the film was under-cast, under-directed and under-powered.     Share on Facebook

• • • Dr. Yaron Brook Explains Why Ayn Rand Was Right 
Kerry Lutz, Financial Survival Network Altruism  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Yaron Brook  |Audio  | Dr. Yaron Brook has led the Ayn Rand Institute for the past 11 years. He believes the most important debate of out time is not economic but philosophic: you are not your brother’s keeper. Rather, your primary purpose is to the live the best life that you possibly can. This means being your own master and living on YOUR terms. You will be the most successful when you are the freest to pursue your goals and dreams. Unfortunately, this important debate is all but ignored during most political campaigns. Until we address this threshold issue, not much human progress will be made.     Share on Facebook

• • Refusing to refudiate: ‘Alaska by Heart’ a successful Palin spoof 
David A. James, Daily News-Miner (Fairbanks, AK) Atlas Shrugged  | Book review: Alaska by Heart: Recipes for Independence by Sarah Pagen, by Patricia Monaghan.The book is a rambling account of Pagen’s life, including her brief foray into the public school system (“propaganda schools,” as she call them), her marriage to her dog-mushing husband Tommy (son of a Chicago cement magnate) and the development of her intertwined religious and political views (a mixture of Jesus and John Galt, the fictional protagonist of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” who Pagen believes was a genuine historical figure).     Share on Facebook

• Republican Truth and Real Truth: GSEs and the Housing Bubble 
David Coates, Huffington Post Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | If there is anything that can be salvaged out of the Republican fairy tale on the origins of the housing bubble, it is the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy and its failure adequately to see the danger of a bubble and move to regulate it. That much of the Ron Paul case has merit. But what Ron Paul regularly omits to mention, when making that case, was that the Federal Reserve was then under the leadership of Alan Greenspan: the Ayn Rand enthusiast, the deregulation guru, and the advocate of the efficient market hypothesis thesis that so mistakenly reassured the banks amid their speculative frenzy. The housing bubble arose not because the Federal Reserve was dominated by heavy-handed Keynesian interventionists, as the Republican candidates now imply. The housing bubble arose precisely because it was not so led.     Share on Facebook

• • Keep pushing to privatize 
Fred Ehrstein, Belleville News Democrat (IL) Capitalism  | With deregulation and austerity, we will soon have the perfect Ayn Rand Utopia.     Share on Facebook

• Extremism isn’t America 
Kevin J. Gagen, Belleville News Democrat (IL) Americans need to acknowledge that maybe 20 percent of the population think the wrong side won the Civil War. [....] It’s horrifying to see these people now teaming up with followers of Ayn Rand, Edmund Burke, the John Birch Society and other fringe groups previously shunned by Republicans for their extreme views. These cancerous views aren’t true American values. Readers should recognize this blind hatred, repudiate it, and stand up for the principles of equality and justice for all before our democracy gets seized by neo-fascist extremism.     Share on Facebook

• Don’t judge a book ... especially in weightlifting 
Beth Bragg, Anchorage Daily News Atlas Shrugged  | Competing at the Olympics wasn’t just a goal, but a reasonable goal. Then this Atlas shrugged. [Angela Candage-Parra had] had enough.     Share on Facebook

• It’s time to take uniforms — and schools — seriously 
Jack Spillane, Standard-Times (New Bedford, MA) Individualism  | Society is different now and we genuflect at the altar of individualism. Ayn Rand is more a 2012 saint than Mother Teresa.     Share on Facebook

• Government and Its Rivals 
Ross Douthat, New York Times The Fountainhead  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Syndicated  | When liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community. Liberals are for cooperation and joint effort; conservatives are for self-interest and selfishness. Liberals build the Hoover Dam and the interstate highways; conservatives sit home and dog-ear copies of “The Fountainhead.” Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.     Share on Facebook

• The Mask is Off 
Ebben Raves, American Thinker Never mind that [Mitt Romney’s] biggest qualification is that he is a businessman. So is George Soros. Pretty much the same kind of business, too. Woe on to anyone who is a threat to the status quo that challenges him, though. They will be attacked with a fervor never unleashed on a Democratic opponent. Now why is that? As always, money and power. And, as Ayn Rand told us, the biggest pile of either resides in Washington, DC.     Share on Facebook

• Is Africa Too full of ‘lazy’ Intellectuals? 
Andrea Bohnstedt, The Star (Nairobi) If you faff around on the web like I do (faffing? research, people, research!!), this blog post was difficult to avoid in the past two weeks: ‘You lazy (Intellectual) African scum’ really kicked up some dust on the internet. The post was a dialogue between the narrator, a Zambian, and a beefy white man called Walter. [....] It takes a moment to step back and realise that Walter is not a real person – Walter is a fictional device, exaggerated, not unlike Ayn Rand’s characters, I found.     Share on Facebook

• • Price mechanism keeps oil supplies in balance 
Trevor Dahl, Grand Forks Herald (ND) I commend the Herald on its outstanding editorial about peak oil (“There will be oil,” Page A4, Jan. 27). [....] The editorial’s statement that our greatest asset being the human mind is spot on. As Ayn Rand once stated, “wealth is a product of man’s capacity to think.”     Share on Facebook

• • 2012 Outlook, Part 1: When Leverage Fails 
Ty Andros, GoldSeek Atlas Shrugged  | “When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you...you may know that your society is doomed.” ~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged     Share on Facebook

• MMObility: The best Glitch apps and websites 
Beau Hindman, Massively Feed Your Glutt - If the market is your thing but you want to get it down to a science, this website is for you. One of the best things about it is that it shows you newest auctions, best deals, worst deals and more. Ever wonder how much someone might be overcharging for that Ayn Rand doll? Now you know. (Just don’t buy it.)     Share on Facebook

• Live Blog: CNN Florida Republican Presidential Primary Debate 
Lisa Wang, Harvard Law Record Atlas Shrugged  | Ron Paul doesn’t want to go to the moon–there are no copies of Atlas Shrugged up there.     Share on Facebook

• • • Nation suffers under Obama 
Lisa Chandler, Star-Tribune (Casper, WY) Atlas Shrugged  | Regarding “Ann Rand was wrong,” by William Missouri Downs, Letters/Jan. 24. Everything worth living for and fighting for most definitely has a price -- and in Ayn Rand’s book, “Atlas Shrugged,” the author metaphorically depicts the confiscation of all freedoms that we, as a nation, enjoy and benefit from -- transportation, the food we eat, the advances of science and medicine, the arts, commerce, education, manufacturing and the freedom of competition.     Share on Facebook