• Greg Mangus at Mercy Lounge 
Adam Gold, Nashville Scene Chark Kingsolving assembled a crack team of local musicians to flawlessly execute a note-for-note recreation of Rush’s “2112” — the 20-minute suite that opens the band’s breakthrough record of the same name. [....] If Ayn Rand-informed Canadian prog rock ain’t your bag, it’s probably safe to assume Muscle Shoals-informed blue-eyed soul and gritty mod rock is.     Share on Facebook

• WikiLeaks mastermind Julian Assange: Evil genius or visionary hacker? 
Luisita Lopez Torregrosa, Politics Daily Atlas Shrugged  As they said about John Galt in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged:” Who is Julian Paul Assange?     Share on Facebook

• Amber Heard heats up The Joneses and pursues The Rum Diary 
Monsters and Critics The Fountainhead  [In The Joneses] twenty three year old Amber Heard, a rising star in Hollywood’s youth brigade, plays the sex obsessed fashionista daughter who beds men twice her age. Heard told Monsters & Critics that she immediately related to Jenn Jones. “The first act of the film you start to notice that something is really off. My character is desperately seeking affection. She realizes she’s just looking to understand love. She’s a vulnerable character that’s cheeky and tough on the outside. There were some layers there and I thought it was a real character that made sense not just to me but to a lot of girls.” Heard has ways of dealing with life’s ups and downs and she approached the role armed with things that inspire her. Amber Heard in The Joneses “My religion is philosophers, poets, artists, and thinkers, especially Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I don’t need anything else.     Share on Facebook

• Census plan continues to dog Harper 
Michael Den Tandt, Toronto Sun This is the most puerile argument of all: That killing the long-form census is a nod to this government’s “libertarian” sensibilities. It’s all about rugged individualism, we’re expected to believe. [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper is such a fine and principled libertarian. He presides over a government that spent, in the 2009-10 fiscal year, $237.8 billion, up from $207.9 billion the year before. This fiscal year the finance department projects spending of $249.2-billion — and a deficit of $53.8-billion. Every hen-house, outhouse and fence-row in Canada has received infrastructure funding. Ayn Rand move over.     Share on Facebook

• What is orthodox Republicanism? 
David Schultz, OpEdNews The Palin makeover of the GOP combines Goldwaterism and Reaganism with a cult of personality, a multi-media advertising campaign, and a dose of Ayn Rand libertarianism. But Palinism is also built on what historian Richard Hofstadter labeled the paranoid style in American politics. It is an anti-intellectual world view nurtured in a fear that outside forces are threatening a way of life that includes faith in God, free enterprise, and democracy.     Share on Facebook

• No mystery in Sharon: Book-signing is a thriller 
Kathryn Boughton, Litchfield County Times (CT) Biographer Anne Heller will be present [at the Sharon Summer Book Signing ]with “Ayn Rand and the World She Made.”     Share on Facebook

• Samuel Edward Konkin III 
Jeff Riggenbach, Mises.org Daily Article [Sam Konkin’s] new roommate, another chemistry grad student, named Tony Warnock, turned out to be a big fan of everything related to Ayn Rand. Through Warnock, Sam was introduced not only to the writings of Rand, but also to those of a couple of economists — Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard — and to those of Robert LeFevre, the real-life anarchist philosopher on whom Robert A. Heinlein had based Professor Bernardo de la Paz.     Share on Facebook

• Freedom fest, taxes, deficits 
Gary Rust, Southeast Missourian (Cape Girardeau, MO) Wendy and I recently attended Freedom Fest, a three-day annual gathering of conservatives, libertarians, gold and silver investors, health food proponents, Ayn Rand readers, stock investors etc. It was an intellectually stimulating experience.     Share on Facebook

• When lightning strikes, be glad the public employees are there 
H. Bruce Miller, The Source Weekly - The Wandering Eye (Bend, OR) In ancient Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus – described by one website as “ambitious and an entrepreneur – the kind of man Ayn Rand might have appreciated” – made a fortune with his free-enterprise firefighting business. When a fire started in the city he’d rush to the scene, buy up the adjacent properties at bargain prices and then have his crew put the fire out.     Share on Facebook

• Two brainiac oddballs and one mean bastard 
Steven Wishnia, The Indypendent Capitalism  [George] Steinbrenner epitomized the Ayn Rand arrogant capitalist. He never swung a bat or threw a ball at anything close to a professional level, but he was quick to claim credit for the Yankees’ victories and to insult players publicly when they lost, in terms like “fat toad,” “he spit the bit,” and “Mr. May.” Like every other baseball owner, he found ignoring steroids highly profitable.     Share on Facebook

• Newberry Library Book Fair 2010 features over 120000 books 
Carole Kuhrt Brewer, Chicago Now - Show Me Chicago Atlas Shrugged  The highly-anticipated 26th annual Newberry Library Book Fair is expected to draw over 100,000 book lovers and collectors to the hallowed halls of this treasured Chicago institution, designed by architect Henry Ives Cobb, and built in 1893. [....] Some of the collectibles that dealers and the public will be clamoring for at this year’s sale include first editions of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” Fredic Brown’s “Space On My Hands,” and Thomas Harris’s “Silence of the Lambs.”     Share on Facebook

• A love-fest in Indigo 
Bill Thompson, Cincinnati Enquirer Even though they were preaching to longtime choir members (“We could have sold out a second show,” said Chuck Miller, the radio station’s general manager, who promised more events in the hall), [Indigo Girls Emily] Saliers and [Amy] Ray took nothing for granted. They faithfully thanked everyone after every song, and chatted about their visit (“This campus is nice,” Saliers said at one point, “in an Ayn Rand kind of way”).     Share on Facebook

• Collier County Commission puts off decision on Jackson Laboratory 
Frank Gluck, News-Press (Fort Myers, FL) Jim Smith, a member of the free-market Ayn Rand Society of Naples, put it this way: “Government doesn’t create jobs, it just re-distributes them.”     Share on Facebook

• Pinch of patience pays off 
Peter Caranicas, Variety Atlas Shrugged movie  GSK & Associates bookings: [....] costume designers Jennifer Soulages on Paul Johansson’s “Atlas Shrugged,&rdquo.     Share on Facebook

• Why WikiLeaks is the Pirate Bay of political intelligence 
Samuel Axon, Mashable It seems almost as if [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange is trying to live out the radical philosophies of Ayn Rand. We all know the stories of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — computer whizzes who dropped out of college because they had technological revolutions to tend to. Assange is in some ways cut from the same cloth, though his choice has not yet earned him dramatic wealth, and his commitment to openness is more radical.     Share on Facebook

• ‘X-Men: First Class’ drafts Twilight vampire Edi Gathegi to play biracial mutant Darwin 
Mike Fleming, Deadline New York Atlas Shrugged movie  Atlas Shrugged  Gathegi, who played Laurent in the Twilight films, just wrapped production on the Paul Johansson-directed adaptation of the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged.     Share on Facebook

• Unstable platform 
Ed Kilgore, The Democratic Strategist Capitalism  I strongly suggest a reading of the Iowa Republican Party Platform by anyone who accuses "liberals" or "the media" of exaggerating the extremism of today's conservatives. [....] It’s hard to miss principle number seven, which would have satisfied Ayn Rand even on one of her crankier days: “The individual works hard for what is his/hers. Therefore, the individual will determine with whom he/she will share it, not the government. No more legal plunder. Legal plunder is defined as using the law to take from one person what belongs to them, and giving it to others to whom it does not belong. It is plunder if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what that citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.” Given that principle, it’s not surprising that elsewhere the platform flatly calls for the abolition of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (along with minimum wage laws), and of the federal departments of Agriculture (!), Education and Energy. It also appears to oppose any anti-discrimination laws of any sort.     Share on Facebook

• Combating Tea Party populism with conservative ‘inactivism’ is a fantasy 
Scott Galupo, U.S. News & World Report - Scott Galupo Atlas Shrugged  Let’s not even get into the sophomoric Manichaeanism of Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto or the revival of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. (I happen to think that many of the conflicts of modern American politics are as much between competing liberties as they are between government and civil society.)     Share on Facebook

• Crackdown G20 
Joshua Ostroff, Exclaim! BioShock used objectivism and collectivism as philosophical underpinning of their dystopian third-person shooter while first-person parkour game Mirror’s Edge offered up a story of state security run amuck.     Share on Facebook

• Rush iPhone app sure to drum up interest 
Jesse Sposato, Appolicious The $2.99 Rush iPhone app is one I can get behind because I like Rush. As any self-respecting drummer has, I have watched videos of Neil Peart playing, drooled over pictures of his drum kit, and tuned in to his beats when listening to Rush songs. My fascination with Rush’s drummer made it particularly interesting to read in the “Spirit of Radio” section—which features music and facts about the Canadian trio—about how the lyrics of the song “Anthem” are inspired by novelist Ayn Rand, whose ideas were an early influence on Peart.     Share on Facebook