• • Former Woodbridge student pens suspense novel 
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Leonard Peikoff  | [Novelist Kira] Peikoff got a bit of a boost from a supportive father. She told him she had an idea for a book and hoped to get it out in 10 years. Her father, Leonard Peikoff, who lives in Irvine, told her she should do it now and arranged for her to take a year off to write. Leonard Peikoff, who writes non-fiction and is an expert on Ayn Rand, said he had seen the talent in his daughter from a young age.  

• • Why businesses bash business 
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It is one of the most infuriating things I experience: businesses that sponsor total disrespect toward business. Ayn Rand called this “the sanction of the victim,” suggesting that these are good people who accept bad things said about them. I think they are not such good people (although, of course, in important ways they are). It is they, after all, who create all those valuable things I listed above. But in one serious respect, they are being vicious: They are undermining their own very valuable existence by fueling the fires of anti-business sentiment, not only for a worldwide audience, but in their own psyches.  

• • The ‘Atlas attack’ card 
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Alan Greenspan  |Atlas Shrugged  | I read, “Call it ‘Atlas snubbed’” [Business, July 17], and writer Al Lewis must be right. So he thinks if people the likes of conservatives, Tea Party followers, libertarians, Paul Ryan, Clarence Thomas, Alan Greenspan or Rush Limbaugh respect the writings of Ayn Rand, then her books must be bad. Lewis plays the “personal attack” card at its best implying that people cannot respect the writings of an author unless that author agrees with all of the reader’s personal views.  

• Is charity religious? Important? 
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Last week we offered an online poll with seven options to choose what sacrifice means to you. The majority of voters, 53%, chose Option 3: “The death of Jesus is the only sacrifice required for my atonement.” [....] The next largest group, 21 percent, chose Option 5: “I use my resources to support charity and justice, not organized religion.” [....] Mensarino said: “Option 5 ...#7 dodges the question and #6 [“What’s mine is mine, and I feel no obligation to share with those who are needy.”] is reserved for the likes of Ayn Rand and Gordon Gekko.”  

• • • Tibor Machan: Ayn Rand, libertarians and the needy 
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Capitalism  |Image  | A recent letter to the editor published in the Register, written by someone apparently eager to besmirch Ayn Rand – which many have tried, in vain – stated: “Rand’s libertarianism has an underlying philosophy that says, if you are not particularly smart, ambitious, disciplined or wealthy, and you become homeless, hungry, financially ruined and suffer from premature illness or death, then that is entirely your fault.” Neither Rand nor libertarians say any of this. What both do say is that, if you are in such a condition, you have no authority to deprive others of their resources.  

• • • Statists have something to fear in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ movie 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Image  | Rand’s fictional works are powerful not because they are flawless or without annoying features, but because they are based on simple truths that the public doesn’t usually hear. Haters of Rand’s philosophy find her ideas to be dangerous, which, indeed, they are to the cast of unseemly characters running our national and state governments.  

• • • Wealth the only cure for poverty 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | The movie Atlas Shrugged, Part 1, was released last weekend, and I asked many of my liberal friends who are unwilling to pour through the book to go see the movie. I hoped it would help them better understand Rand’s message and move them a little closer to a free-market way of thinking. Due partly to the mediocrity of the movie, and to Rand’s smack-between-the-eyes delivery, my hopes were dashed. How, then, to convey the essence of the message to the well-intentioned, but deluded, who accept today’s received wisdom that business and capitalism are evil? [....] Rand’s essential message is that capitalists and business people are the creators of wealth and prosperity, and when we cripple their enterprises and expropriate their property, everyone eventually suffers.  

• • ‘Atlas Shrugged’ thumbs up and down 
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Atlas Shrugged  | There are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year-old’s life: “The Lord of the Rings” and “Atlas Shrugged.” One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.  

• • ‘Atlas Shrugged’ thumbs up and down 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Capitalism  | Regarding the movie “Atlas Shrugged, Part One”: I was pleased to finally see a movie with some big business leaders presented more like heroes instead of the usual portrayal as villains. It actually showed them as vigorously pursuing profit, but attempting to achieve it by providing superior service and products instead of underhanded financial and political manipulation.  

• • • ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as relevant as ever 
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Altruism  |Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Personal life  |Image  | “Atlas Shrugged,” we must remember, was a fiction that presented just two one-dimensional looks at life: Absolute freedom is the only good, and anything that hinders that freedom is evil. And, oh yeah, there is no God. Ayn Rand created a made-up world. In the real world, she refused to believe the government’s warning about cigarettes and ended up with lung cancer.  

• • ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as relevant as ever 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | Ayn Rand’s perspective absolutely holds up today. A minority of people are crying out to be left alone. The majority want to be taken care of by the producers. The takers exceed the producers.  

• • • 50 years of reading Ayn Rand 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Anthem  |Atlas Shrugged  |Night of January 16th  |The Fountainhead  |We The Living  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  | I was won over to Rand in part because I already held individualist views, having survived Soviet communism and a Nazi parent’s brutality. Such collectivist, communitarian regimes held out no attraction to me. Yet I lacked the education to figure out why a human individual should be acknowledged as the center of values, and Rand helped me figure this out. Right or wrong, I found Rand (whom I met in 1962 for a 30-minute private chat but who later banished me, too, from her group of close-knit students) sensible, passionate, a bit bellicose and all-around very insightful about nearly all aspects of philosophy. Then, three years after its publication, came “Atlas Shrugged.” I read it on a single day; that is how vivid and good a read it was and, judging by its phenomenal sales worldwide, still is.  

• • • ‘Atlas Shrugged’ on screen still rings true 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Image  | While the literary polish of Rand’s 1,000-plus-page novel is unparalleled, the cinematic version of her philosophical peregrination that questions which society is preferable for mankind — one of rational self-interest or one meant to level all individual output — upholds her objectivist worldview and ought to stoke the debate about free society and the role of government. Not only is the film a winner for holding firm to Randian philosophy, it also brazenly and refreshingly brings a political perspective that is almost universally absent from the big screen; so much so in fact it could become a cult classic, especially among Tea Partiers and their admirers, not to mention hordes of libertarians.  

• Could Obama really be a socialist? 
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My father was an avid champion of Hitler and a fierce anti-Semite, whereas I grew up to embrace libertarianism in politics and a refined version of Objectivism in my general philosophy. A great many folks I know don’t at all think as their parents did. In the case of Obama it seems his socialist grandmother had considerable influence on him (judging by his own testimony).  

• • Count the jobs lost 
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Atlas Shrugged  | For Economics 102, and what your taxing the wealthy can do, please read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.  

• Goodwill paid its president $354,000 
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Ayn Rand Institute  | Trinity Broadcasting Network and the Irvine-based Ayn Rand Institute were [...] mentioned [in Charity Navigator's 2009 report on charity executive's compensation] as examples of organizations with payrolls that included executives’ siblings who made $100,000 or more.  

• • Letters blog: A Robin Hood for the upper middle class? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | The Great Ayn Rand novel of the 60s named “Atlas Shrugged” depicted this kind of a country were the creators of wealth were stepped on and the people with pull prospered. Read this novel and it will scare you how prophetic it is.  

• It’s a mad, mad, mad, ‘Mad’ world 
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My eldest daughter wanted to know what all the fuss is about. I told her she could watch the [ Mad Men], figuring she would quickly lose interest in a story about ancient history. The slow pace and lack of special effects would surely deaden her appetite before she ever got to the naughty bits. I was wrong. She devoured the first two seasons. She wanted to talk about themes, the nature of the hero in a modern world. She wanted to know more about Ayn Rand. I was feeling pretty good. It was like we were two intelligent adults having a serious and spirited conversation.  

• Evening Tea Party rallies take over 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Signs at the rallies included, "Hope and chains?" "Love my country, fear my government," "Obama care to die for," "Drink tea, not Obama's Kool Aid," "Who is John Galt?," "Liberals are cowards," "Obama Lies," "Stop Illegal Immigration," "You are not entitled to what we have earned," "Taxed Excessively Already," and "Give me liberty, not debt."  

• • Celebrate true meaning of love on Valentine’s Day 
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The Fountainhead  |Objectivist author  | The nature of love places certain demands on those who wish to enjoy it. You must regard yourself as worthy of being loved. Those who expect to be loved, not because they offer some positive value, but because they don't – i.e., those who demand love as altruistic duty – are parasites. Someone who says "Love me just because I need it" seeks an unearned spiritual value, in the same way that a thief seeks unearned wealth. To quote a famous line from Ayn Rand's novel “The Fountainhead”: "To say 'I love you,' one must know first how to say the 'I.'"