• • Islam’s Affinity with Force and Fraud 
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The Fountainhead  |Objectivist author  | Imagine [Ellsworth] Toohey in a turban, or sporting a keffiyah and a pair of babouches. He could adapt to Islam, easily. It made no difference to him, either, which totalitarian system prevailed. He could submit to Islam, provided he could also subjugate the independent man and erase him from existence. His ends would comport smoothly with Islam’s – and his means, as well.  

• • The Many Appetites for Cruelty 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | Cruelty is intimately linked to sadism. A sadist is chiefly a nihilist. Like the villain James Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, who yells, “I want to break him! I want to hear him scream!” he wishes to erase the good so that the evil can exist unidentified as such and unopposed.  

• • The Court’s Mock Examination of Obamacare 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Individual Rights  |Objectivist author  | In Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged, Narragansett is a judge who has withdrawn his wisdom from the world in protest of the kind of “wisdom” exhibited by the Supreme Court. What he would actually be writing is an amendment. Doubtless he would have included the private realm of health insurance. It would have been a no-brainer.  

• • The ‘False Alarm’ of the Latest Executive Order 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | On Sunday morning, March 18th, I learned about the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order, signed into law by President Barack H. Obama on March 16th. As some news blogs noted, Friday was a curious time to inform the nation of the NDRP EO, or “EO 12919” (for Executive Order), an EO to which the mainstream media seemed oblivious and un-newsworthy. I immediately recalled Directive 10-289 from Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged, in which the Head of State, at the behest of his national economic planner, issues a decree that freezes everyone and everything in place to combat an ongoing, government-caused national “emergency.”  

• • • Stealing Ayn Rand’s Thunder 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  |Objectivist author  | A new book on Ayn Rand and Objectivism came out in February, from St. Martin’s Press, Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, by Gary Weiss. The book will be reviewed here at a later date. However, if Weiss’s Huffington Post article on Ayn Rand is any indication of its objectivity, or lack of it, it telegraphs the book’s inherent malignity.  

• Washington’s Rocket Bombs 
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Capitalism  |Objectivist author  | I do believe that had [George Orwell] not died of tuberculosis (1949), he would have become one of the first neo-conservative intellectuals and writers in the West. He had been creeping in that direction ever since the Spanish Civil War, driven by his growing and articulate animus for totalitarianism (born during WWII, during which he saw elements of it in British government domestic wartime policies). This direction could only have ultimately led him to renounce collectivism, but probably have not motivated him to advocate capitalism or found a fresh new political philosophy (as Ayn Rand did, but from a philosophical perspective, and not from a solely political one). In that respect, he was not a profound thinker or philosophical innovator. But he was a first-class and honest observer.  

• • Are Left and Right Meaningless Political Labels? 
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Personal life  |Objectivist author  | Book review: The Left is Seldom Right, by Norman Berdichevsky.
In a chapter too short by several hundred pages, Berdichevsky [...] tackles Hollywood’s Leftish paradigm and our Leftish literary establishment but leaves one unsatisfied. Ayn Rand is mentioned once as the only screenwriter in Hollywood who had lived under Communism, and a quotation from her HUAC testimony would have been illuminating.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged: A Sign Of The Times 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Personal life  |Image  |Video  | Interview with Atlas Shrugged Part One producer, Harmon Kaslow.
[Q:] I’m sure you learned a lot from working on this movie, is there anything that you learned that you want to share? [A:] First off, Hollywood spends millions of dollars marketing movies and for the most part these movies do not have a message nearly as compelling or as important as the message of Atlas Shrugged. We spent less than 1 percent of what Hollywood normally spends on marketing and we really relied on community level support and we got a lot of support from groups. Especially those that have a connection with the philosophy of the book, for example, Tea Partiers integrated going and watching Atlas Shrugged in to their tax day rallies and we ended up opening it on about 300 screens, we averaged more than five thousand dollars a screen which relatively speaking was a homerun.  

• • Quote of the Day - November 16, 2011 

Atheism  |Capitalism  |Personal life  | Isabel Paterson was a Canadian-born journalist and political philosopher, and a staunch defender of capitalism. She was a close associate of Ayn Rand, though they differed on issues of religion (Ayn Rand was an atheist).  

• • The Closing of the Muslim Mind 
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The Virtue of Selfishness  |Objectivist author  | To use novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand’s term, the Ash’arites argued in favor of a complete, universal, across-the-board “blank out.”  

• • The Idea of the “Fair Share” 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Syndicated  | How, with a straight face, can Mr. Obama and his Progressive spendthrifts deny the fact that they are executing a class warfare propaganda campaign against not only the wealthiest among us, but the moderately successful, given their claim that anyone amassing an income in excess of $200,00 annually is “wealthy.” There is a gigantic gulf between a small business owner who makes $200,000 a year and Warren Buffett or Jeffery Immelt. Atlas is shrugging...and he is disgusted. It is time to ask, “Who is John Galt?”  

• • Much Ado about Nothing: Fatal Fallacies about “Palestine” 
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Objectivist author  | “Peace” with the Palestinians is also a fallacy. As Ayn Rand succinctly put it, “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.” And the Palestinians are a tribe poisoned by generations of racial and religious hate. It is a population of nihilists, of zeroes. They are ruled by a terrorist organization that has declared Israel illegitimate and a legitimate target for eradication.  

• The American Spring: Gaffney’s Stand 
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On April 15th, 2009 I dropped everything and jumped in my car. I drove two hours to Atlanta, GA for a party with my kind of people. Newscasts that evening were saying that a few thousand people hit the street for the Tea Party rally; but, those who were there will tell you that at least 25,000 people were on hand [...]. [....] Volunteers were handing out free copies of the constitution; you could grab a “Live Free or Die” flag for a few bucks. Ayn Rand posters waved.  

• • The symbiosis between Islam and multiculturalism 
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The Fountainhead  |Objectivist author  | Multiculturalism has spawned such fashionable but insidious notions as “cultural diversity” and “cultural relativism” which merge into a bewildering kaleidoscope of trivialities, the great and the exceptional rendered equal to the base and the mediocre. “Enshrine mediocrity,” noted one of Ayn Rand’s most pernicious villains, “and the shrines are razed.”  

• • Lara Logan and the drooling beast 
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The Fountainhead  |Objectivist author  | “…I know the kind of terror it is….Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me – it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing then but your voice – your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own….” –Steve Mallory to Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.  

• • • Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged - Future fact disguised as fiction 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | Recently, on an unusually chilly weekend, I curled up with “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. The book has been touted for years as a primer on rational, conservative thought. Settling in for what I thought would be a dry, outdated tome of philosophy dressed up as an out-dated, dark tale, what I got was “future fact disguised as fiction”.  

• • Burning the Koran is self-defeating 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Objectivist author  | The Koran can no more automatically influence a person to become a Muslim and/or a jihadist than Atlas Shrugged can automatically turn a reader into an intransigent champion of reason, individualism, and capitalism.  

• The scarecrow of “violent language” 
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Objectivist author  | Since long before Barack Obama was elected president, no Republican, no member of the Tea Party, no conservative, no libertarian, no Objectivist, no prominent “anti-government” activist has ever advocated assassination or even an armed rebellion against the federal government. The best of these individuals has simply reminded the administration and Congress of the proper role of government in as forceful language as possible – note that the term is forceful language, not forceful action.  

• • Free isn’t freedom 
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I’ve always regarded Ayn Rand as a bit too categorical and heartless, but she came closer to diagnosing the dangers to our society than any of the lauded and beautifully educated theorists who made poverty and sloth desirable. A morally healthy society needs pride. And real pride comes from self-reliance, not charity.  

• • The TSA: Enabler 

Objectivist author  | As novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand noted, many years ago in a more “civil” and placid era: “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”