• A word from the Government’s Chief Scientific Hysteria Promoter 
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Atlas Shrugged  | “Britain’s worm population is exploited, under appreciated and underpaid”, says a new report, published today by the Ministry for Climate Change and Alleged Motoring Fine Evasion. [....] The report was compiled by Dr Bob Beard, the Government’s Chief Scientific Hysteria Promoter, who said: “There will inevitably be complaints by denialist flat earthers who still believe, in the early 21st century, that it is wrong to pay earthworms for services they have hitherto been providing for free. But as with our policy on Climate Change, so it is with our policy on earthworms: we have to operate on the Precautionary Principle. Suppose worms were to develop the ability to see and then to learn to read. The moment they opened a newspaper and realised the size of the economy reliant on their labours, they might well go on an Atlas Shrugged style strike or possibly gang together and undermine the foundations of houses or even attack humans. All right, so worms don’t look that dangerous, but they can be really slippery if you tread on them and could easily make you fall and break your neck.”      View blog reactions

• • • Ayn Rand’s books are deliciously anti-statist, but her philosophy is borderline Nazi 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Inaccurate  | What I find most off-putting about Rand is her hardness of heart. She has a Nietzschean (indeed, borderline Nazi) contempt for human frailty and a total lack of sympathy for the underdog. In her weltanschauung, you’re either a hero (rare) or — much more likely — a mere filler of latrines. Any form of charity, she suggests, is a kind of grotesque liberal indulgence towards people who really aren’t worth saving.      View blog reactions

• If we’re going to rage against cultural atrocities, let’s make sure we target the right 
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The Fountainhead  | The great Paul [Johnson] I’m sure could give me [...] a list of all the writers, film-makers, playwrights, painters, poets, sculptors, actors, directors, musicians and so on from history who weren’t incorrigible libtards. This list, I imagine, would be very short. I know Dr Johnson would be on it, because he quite rightly said that the first Whig was the Devil; George MacDonald Fraser would be there too of course; as too would composer James MacMillan; Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris and Kelsey Grammer (of Frasier fame: a registered Libertarian). And Michael Caine, he’d definitely be on the list — do you realise he chose as his Desert Island book Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead?      View blog reactions