• • • Reviewing Atlas Shrugged: This is John Galt Speaking 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Image  |Objectivist author  | (PDF.)
While “Atlas Shrugged” is chock-full of political drama [...] don’t make the mistake of assuming it’s mainly about politics, for its thrust and theme is much wider and deeper than that. In Rand’s own words, it deals with “the role of the mind in man’s existence” - and, “as a corollary, the presentation of a new ethics - the morality of rational selfinterest.”      View blog reactions

• • And the rot rolls on across America 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | Detroit, the city of my youth, a once-proud, once-vibrant population center of 1.8 million, has devolved into but a shell of its former self, a Starnesville straight out of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” eaten alive bit by horrifying bit by the creed of the second-hander.      View blog reactions

• •The rot rolls on in Wisconsin 
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The Fountainhead  | “Creation comes before distribution — or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary.” — Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead.”      View blog reactions

• • Free will’s role snuffed in Tucson shooting 
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We The Living  | On WDBZ’s 1230 AM radio station blog in Cincinnati, Ohio, poster “WDBZ” reported that: “Loughner listed Ayn Rand’s ‘We Are Living’ as one of his favorite books. Ayn Rand is Tea Party hero credited with inspiring its philosophy.” (“5 reasons that the AZ shooter Jared Loughner is a teabagger,” www.thebuzzcincy.com, Jan. 10th.) Ayn Rand’s book is actually titled “We The Living” -- and the fact that Loughner also listed “The Communist Manifesto” and “Mein Kampf” as his favorite books as well, simply indicates that Loughner read different things. I’ve read all three of those books too, and a number of others on Loughner’s YouTube profile list to boot -- but I’m not out shooting Congresswomen.      View blog reactions

• • EPA’s global garbage begets corporate bootlicking 
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Capitalism  | “The greatest guilt of modern industrialists is not the fumes of their factory smokestacks, but the pollution of this country’s intellectual life, which they have condoned, assisted and supported.” - Ayn Rand      View blog reactions

• • Science as handmaiden of politics 
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“Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.” -- Ayn Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” 1961.      View blog reactions

• • Two cents: Less for more vs. more for less 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” - Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged” (1957).      View blog reactions

• • The lessons of 2010 
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Objectivist author  | “In a passive, indifferent way, the majority of the Russian people were behind the White army; they were not for the Whites, but merely against the Reds; they feared the Reds’ atrocities. I knew that the Reds’ deepest atrocity was intellectual, that the thing that had to be fought - and defeated - was their ideas. But no one answered them...The Reds won.” - Ayn Rand, discussing her experience in the Russian Revolution in “The Lessons of Vietnam,” 1975.      View blog reactions

• • The coming civil war: Producers vs. parasites 
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“The task of defining ideas and goals is not the province of politicians and is not accomplished at election time: elections are merely consequences. The task belongs to the intellectuals. The need is more urgent than ever.” - Ayn Rand, “The Wreckage of the Consensus,” 1967. When Ayn Rand wrote the above words 43 years ago, the country was still stocked with a large majority of producers. Yes, the so-called “welfare” state and interventionist economics were on the rise, and had been for decades, but many more people than not supported themselves and their families by their own efforts. If you still think that’s true, you had better think again.      View blog reactions

• • Un fails to challenge causes of world hunger 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  | As the philosopher Ayn Rand has noted, “If those nations were taught to establish capitalism, with full protection of property rights, their problems would vanish. Men who could afford it, would invest private capital in the development of natural resources, expecting to earn profits. They would bring the technicians, the funds, the civilizing influence, and the employment which those nations need...Instead, they prefer to seize men’s earnings - through taxation - and pour them down any foreign drain, and watch our own economic growth slow down year by year.” (“Theory and practice,” 1962.)      View blog reactions

• • Conform, or you die! 
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The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution  | “The demand to ‘restrict’ technology is the demand to restrict man’s mind… Technology can be destroyed, and the mind can be paralyzed, but neither can be restricted. Whenever and wherever such restrictions are attempted, it is the mind - not the state - that withers away.” - Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” 1971      View blog reactions

• • Your life is your own! 
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“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.” - Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead,” 1943. All political systems, by their very natures, are based on a prior code of ethics; for, before one can have a view of man as a social entity, one must have a view of man as an individual first.      View blog reactions

• • Teaching methods put our kids behind the eight ball 
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Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology  | “The primary purpose of concepts and of language is to provide man with a system of cognitive classification and organization, which enables him to acquire knowledge on an unlimited scale; this means: to keep order in man’s mind and enable him to think.” - Ayn Rand, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” 1979      View blog reactions

• • National service and slavery 
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Anthem  | Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead.” - Ayn Rand, “Anthem”      View blog reactions

• • The radical left: Chickens coming home to roost 
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“In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.” -- Ayn Rand, “The Anatomy of Compromise,” 1964      View blog reactions

• • Racism: Pin the tail on the donkey 
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“Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge--for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility for exercising rational or moral judgment.” -- Ayn Rand, “Racism,” 1963.      View blog reactions

• • FCC’s ‘net neutrality’ is nonsense 
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Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge or effort, should be private property — by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.” — Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of Airwaves,” 1964.      View blog reactions

• • Ideas really do matter 
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Atlas Shrugged  | “When loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels.” — Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged,” 1957.      View blog reactions

• • Doctor throws log on health care debate 
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Atlas Shrugged  | “I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?” – Dr. Hendricks, from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, 1957.      View blog reactions

• • Search for truth crumbling into hot-air hysteria 
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Back in Galileo’s era, and for most of the centuries afterward, hypotheses were adjusted to fit the facts. Now, in a more pliable time, we reverse that process: we alter the facts to fit the desired hypothesis. As Ayn Rand once observed, “It is on the basis of this kind of stuff that you are being pushed into a new Dark Age.” (The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971.)      View blog reactions