• • High Society 
Todd Vanderwerff, The Onion A.V. Club TV series review.If nothing else, High Society should be the final nail in the coffin of Randian objectivism. I have no problem with the idea that people who rise from rags to riches are smart, hard-working, capable individuals. I'd say, in my experience, that that's often the case. I just am not so sure that's the case with their children, who often seem like some of the worst people to ever have lived, if the presentation of them on television is any indication. The CW's High Society is just the latest series to attempt to turn the lives of young, lithe, hot women in the big city into something approaching compelling television.     Share on Facebook

• Introducing Wall Street’s hottest offspring, Part II 
Gus Lubin And Courtney Comstock, The Business Insider Victor Niederhoffer has six daughters and one son. [....] Rand, 26, started a fashion company in Brooklyn. She is clearly named after her father's favorite author, Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand, Chapman University and serial killer love 
Matt Coker, Orange County Weekly - Navel Gazing (CA) The Fountainhead  Image  Inaccurate  The Mother of Objectivism and author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged "is the 28th notable figure to have a bust dedicated on the campus of Chapman University," reports Chapman Now. [....] [I]t's a good bet Rand is the only Chapman bustee whose first love dismembered little girls.     Share on Facebook

• • • Internal affairs: How Ayn Rand followers rationalize “welcomed” rape 
Amanda Hess, Washington City Paper - The Sexist (DC) Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Rand reportedly had this to say about the [rape] scene [in The Fountainhead]: “If it was rape, it was rape by engraved invitation.” But for young people with no practical experience with sex, Rand doesn’t provide any instruction on how exactly to seal the note. If your sex partner is biting you and beating you in the face, how can you be sure they’ve consented “internally”? Between Rand’s idealized heroes and heroines, why is the ideal sexual scenario a violent rape that the woman only privately desires? And for Rand, who was fond of invoking the tautological principle that “A is A,” when is rape not rape?     Share on Facebook

• • • Yevgeny Zamyatin: Libertarian novelist 
Jeff Riggenbach, Mises.org Daily Article Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  We The Living  Personal life  Whatever we decide about whether Rand read We in the '20s or '30s, there's simply no getting around the obvious similarities between Zamyatin's novel and Rand's Anthem. Both are set in the far future in a completely collectivized totalitarian society. Both are told in the first person by their main characters, in We by the mathematician and engineer D-503, in Anthem by the engineer Equality 7-2521. Anthem is the only work of fiction written by Rand to be written in the first person. In We, D-503 meets a woman, I-330, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives. In Anthem, Equality 7-2521 meets a woman, Liberty 5-3000, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives.     Share on Facebook

• Tyler Felton 
Idaho Mountain Express (Ketchum) Obituary.The words of Ernest Hemingway and Ayn Rand struck deep cords within him and he named many of his dogs after characters in Hemingway's books (usually "Jake").     Share on Facebook

• Fix him a manly meal tonight 
Melony Carey, Muskogee Phoenix (OK) Atlas Shrugged  Interestingly, three women authors did make the Man’s Essential Library 100 list. Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry,” a medieval mother’s guide for her son by early anti-misogynist Christine de Pizan, and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” evidently represent the women in touch with their more masculine side.     Share on Facebook

• Can the Smoker in Chief really lead America in health care reform? 
S.E. Cupp, New York Daily News As I approach my 10-year college reunion, it's clear that I missed a few classes that would have proved helpful. Those classes include "Leadership and Ethics" and "Ethical Theory," offered by the Program on Ethics and Public Life at my alma mater, Cornell University. See, I'm certain that at some point those classes would have covered the issue I've been grappling with recently, in which case I'd be able to tell you what Plato and Aristotle said about it. Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, too. I bet you Hobbes and Locke have really super advice on this one. And you just know Ayn Rand would be all over it. [....] With President Obama making his final push for health care reform, I ask you to consider the following "If, Then" theorem: If our health is the President's business, then the President's health should be our business.     Share on Facebook

• • Economist: Financial crisis result of idea failure 
Stacey Mieyal Higgins, Hotel News Now Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  In a sober discussion of the origins and consequences of the global financial crisis, Roger Bootle, managing director of Capital Economics Limited, explained Monday during the International Hotel Investment Forum why regulators were to blame and how capitalism will change as a result. [....] Why it happened: [....] Alan Greenspan’s “Atlas Shrugged” influence. “We can’t leave self-interested bankers and markets to their own devices,” Bootle said.     Share on Facebook

• Spitzer madam Kristin Davis busts into New York governor’s race 
Mike Colapietro, Daily Caller After she met fellow [Eliot] Spitzer critic Roger Stone on a radio show [Davis] started reading and writing about women’s rights, feminism, prostitution, drug policy and prison reform on her blog Manhattan Madam. Stone gave her Von Mises, Ayn Rand, Hayek and Friedman, and she decided she was a Libertarian.     Share on Facebook

• • SXSW 2010: The Low Anthem 
Jesse Ship, Spinner Anthem  Interview with Ben Knox Miller of the folk rock band The Low Anthem.[Q:] Where did the name come from? [A:] The name comes from an Ayn Rand book by the same title. We didn't realize this until we had been together for quite a while because it was thought up by one of the original members, an old childhood friend, who no longer plays with us. I have actually read the book and I don't like it much at all, so it is a bit strange to have that name, but at least the name is abstract enough to be interpreted in different ways.     Share on Facebook

• • • Individuality, freedom, and superiority: Returning to Ayn Rand’s problems 
Gus diZerega, Beliefnet.com - A Pagan’s Blog Rand's model of the individual is lacking in depth because it does not address how each of us as individuals came to be who we are. She simply takes them for granted as elemental forces of nature. As the African proverb puts it: "I am because we are."     Share on Facebook

• Keynes for today 
Johann Hari, The Progressive Capitalism  Book review: Keynes: The Return of the Master, by Robert Skidelsky.The notion that deregulated markets will reach an “equilibrium”—which provides the best of all outcomes—turns out to be a quasi-religious fantasy. The economic models “proving” it is so are lies and act, as Professor Paul Davidson puts it, as Weapons of Math Destruction, shoving us towards the abyss. Unregulated markets will seesaw wildly between booms and busts. Only tough regulation can stop the market from devouring its own internal organs, and only big government spending can prevent a bad recession souring into a depression. This was all willfully forgotten by the Chicago School economists and Ayn Rand devotees who conquered America. They didn’t prevail because they had the best arguments; their predictions were about as accurate as Sybil the Soothsayer’s. No, they prevailed because their arguments served the interests of the super-rich, who lavishly funded the campaigns of politicians who picked them up.     Share on Facebook

• • Letting the left claim the cerebral high ground 
Tasha Kheiriddin, National Post (Toronto) Atlas Shrugged  From bank bailouts to government health care, not in recent memory has socialism garnered such a toehold in American political discourse. Ayn Rand would recognize much of the statist nightmare of her famous Atlas Shrugged in Mr. Obama’s America: government ownership of lending institutions and car companies, increasing demonization of the rich, and an unelected “czar” in Washington for every policy area under the sun.     Share on Facebook

• • What Washington state does about its budget deficit is a taxing mess 
Jon Talton, Seattle Times Americans face a future where even the basic government services they long took for granted are in doubt. This may be heaven for some acolytes of Ayn Rand. But she wrote fiction.     Share on Facebook

• Make way for local elections 
Hafiz Noor Shams, The Malaysian Insider Atlas Shrugged  The 2008 Malaysian general election demonstrated that individual citizens do have the power to change the course of the country. It is a reminder that the kind of confidence in individuals that seemed to exist only in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged does exist in the real world. It blew away the feeling of helplessness that nothing can be done. It proves that in the face of a titan, individuals can be as fearsome as the titan can.     Share on Facebook

• • Bob Barr visits Cartersville 
Kursten Hedgis, Six Mile Post (GA Highlands College, Rome) Inaccurate  Libertarian Bob Barr arrived eight minutes late with smiles and waves for his Feb. 16 appearance sponsored by [Georgia Highlands College]'s Libertarian Club. [....] [He] spoke about the new RFID chips that are placed in passports so travelling will be, as he said with sarcasm, "easier for you." However, he explains this convenience often comes at a price, the ultimate price in his eyes: an individual's privacy. These trends and examples all lead to his main point, for which he quoted Ayn Rand, "The right to privacy is the basis of our freedom and liberty."     Share on Facebook

• Keynesian creationism: Part II of ‘A curious resurrection of libertarianism’ 
Max Borders, The Examiner (Washington, DC) Libertarianism was never really dead. [Jacob] Weisberg was drumming on the casket of a straw men made vaguely in the form of Ayn Rand and Fed pooh-bahs. He wove together a number of disparate narratives from prominent leftish intellectuals and passed it off as something epic.     Share on Facebook

• Look to grassroots to reinvent Toronto 
Stephen Kerr, Toronto Star Toronto is a bottom up, democratic city. No, we're not France, and we shouldn't try to be like New York. We should try to just be who we are. We don't need mega-projects imposed on us by "great men" whose greatest ideas came from an Ayn Rand novel. We need more democratic participation.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand’s books are deliciously anti-statist, but her philosophy is borderline Nazi 
James Delingpole, The Spectator 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.     Share on Facebook