• • • On the Set of Atlas Shrugged Part II 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Image  | The movie is now shooting (digitally, with Arri Alexa cameras) around the Los Angeles area. On Wednesday I visited a giant empty warehouse in downtown Los Angeles (near, naturally, a train track) to witness day 10 of a planned 31 day shoot (slightly longer than Part I’s 27 days, but with a far more leisurely couple of months of pre-production). This warehouse will be Rearden Steel’s foundry and Hank Rearden’s office. In the novel, Rearden invents an amazing amalgam known as Rearden metal only to have his industrial progress hamstrung and his property stolen by an ever-more-repressive state attempting to centrally control an economy already choking under too much government management.  

• Meet Some of Reason’s Donors! 
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Name: Bill (and Kathy) Schjelderup. [....] How would you describe your politics? libertarian — Free Minds, Free Markets. How long have you had them? Since my teen years. Probably from reading a lot of science fiction, Ayn Rand etc.  

• • Former Sen. Alan Simpson Calls Rick Santorum “Rigid and Homophobic” 
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Atlas Shrugged  | In [...] LGBT/GOP news, the Republican governor of New Mexico (and dark horse vice presidential candidate), Susana Martinez, lost her openly gay hair stylist, who quit to protest Martinez's stance against same-sex marriage. Could this be the beginning of a gay Atlas Shrugged-style strike against looters and breeders?  

• • Ayn Rand to High School Student: “Your questions do not make sense” 
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I am well, well aware that this is the sort of thing that makes her foes consider Rand an absurd crank, but to me it all feeds in to why I love her. See this report from the San Diego Union Tribune’s web site on a high school student in 1963 who wrote various then-huge literary lions to ask them about the use and meaning of symbolism in their work. Rand found his definition to be untrue--and thus “your questions do not make sense.”  

• • • Eye to eye with Ayn 
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The Fountainhead  |Leonard Peikoff  |Personal life  |The Fountainhead movie  | Ayn Rand: In Her Own Words, a 2011 documentary produced with the cooperation of Rand heir Leonard Peikoff, presents a warm and fuzzy portrait of the notoriously prickly novelist and philosopher.  

• • Back to Economic Basics 
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What does it mean for a person to mean something? Purpose and intention are affirmed in the very act of communicating a denial of them. Thus, as Ayn Rand and others have noted, such things are self-evident. The concept “proof” presupposes them.  

• • • Is The Tea Party Devoted to “a Philandering, Russian Atheist” (Ayn Rand) and, If So, Is that a Bad T 
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Atheism  | As often happens when you get social cons and liberals together, libertarians come up in conversation, either as a non-relevant factor or as the poster-child for all that is wrong and rotten in the world. And as the great Jerry Tuccille once wrote (in one of the great political memoirs of all time), it usually begins with Ayn Rand.  

• • That ’80s Show 
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Individualism  | Book review: Back to Our Future, by David Sirota.
[David Sirota] carelessly conflates economic individualism with something closer to the leader principle. This allows Sirota to link any imposing charismatic figure, from Michael Jordan to Pat Robertson, with the writer who stands near the center of his personal demonology, the pop philosopher Ayn Rand. Jordan’s Nike ads, Sirota writes, “exalted Jordan as sports’ equivalent of Yahweh”; his personal story fit “every individual-glorifying myth the biggest Ayn Rand fan could ever hope to invent.”  

• • • Atlas Shrugged Part I 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Video  | It’s a blessing, I suppose, that Ayn Rand, who loved the movies, and actually worked extensively in the industry, isn’t alive to see what’s been made of her most influential novel. The new, long-awaited film version of Atlas Shrugged is a mess, full of embalmed talk, enervated performances, impoverished effects, and cinematography that would barely pass muster in a TV show. Sitting through this picture is like watching early rehearsals of a stage play that’s clearly doomed.  

• • • Who is John Galt? Behind the scenes of Atlas Shrugged 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Video  | On the week Atlas Shrugged Part 1 hits the theaters, Reason.tv goes behind the scenes to speak with the people both on and off the silver screen to explore the mysterious question that haunts the world of Ayn Rand’s epic, Atlas Shrugged.

 

• • • Atlas Shrugged : The movie 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Leonard Peikoff  |Personal life  |Image  | Hank Rearden, metal magnate, faces a bureaucrat from the State Science Institute across his desk of burnished steel. The bureaucrat tells Rearden that he would be wise to sell his amazing new amalgam, Rearden metal, to the government. Rearden refuses. The bureaucrat presses him: Why can’t he see the benefit of selling to a government that can and will condemn the metal as unsafe if he refuses? Rearden replies with cool contempt: “Because it’s mine.” [....] I am in the anteroom of Rearden’s office, watching one of the last shooting days of the film version of Atlas Shrugged, a project Rand’s fans have both wanted and feared for decades. Who gets to call this movie “mine”?  

• • • Atlas Shrugged: Is A (the movie) really A (the novel)? 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Ayn Rand Archives  |Atlas Shrugged  | Anyone with a passionate interest in Ayn Rand and her opus will want to see, and will surely appreciate on many levels, this film version of a third of the novel. Early word is encouraging for the film’s producers, John Aglialoro [...] and Harmon Kaslow. The world of Objectivist fans, those with a passionate attachment to their own vision of the book, seem likely unsatisfiable by anything that doesn’t spring directly from their imaginations to the theater of their minds.  

• • • Behind the scenes of Atlas Shrugged the movie 

Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Video  | Reason.tv presents exclusive, behind-the-scenes footage of the movie adaption of part I of Ayn Rand’s epic and hugely influential novel, Atlas Shrugged, which tells the story of a United States crumbling under the weight of government intervention and the “men of the mind” who fight against their collectivist exploiters. This sneak peek offers a glimpse into the post-production process as well as portions of a never-before-viewed scene from the movie.  

• The week in stupid - Cable pundits on the Gifford shooting 
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Video  | Immediately following last week’s tragic events in Tucson, television pundits fell over each another to assign blame. According to the professional talking heads--and despite any actual evidence--the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords could be pinned on the Tea Party, Ayn Rand, gold enthusiasts, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, heavy metal, marijuana, and/or the “heated rhetoric” of cable news. Reason.tv trawls the archives and compiles the dumbest responses from America’s dumbest pundits.  

• • “We need a libertarian Che Guevara”: Activist Starchild on Ron Paul, Ayn Rand… 
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Egoism  |Video  | [Starchild:] Ayn Rand, perhaps the largest single influence on libertarianism [...] was brilliant and she did the movement a lot of good in many ways—radicalizing people—but I think she also did the movement a lot of harm in many ways. The libertarians become, I think, very enamoured of big business through her influence, very selfish in their worldview.  

• • • Ayn Rand & the World She Made - Q&A with Anne Heller 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Personal life  |Video  | Anne C. Heller’s critically acclaimed and best-selling 2009 book, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, is new in paperback (we’re tempted to say that it makes a great Christmas gift, though it’s clear that Rand didn’t believe in the holiday or the altruism that attaches to it!). Reason’s Nick Gillespie talks with Heller about Rand, whom the biographer says remains the great explicator of capitalism’s virtues and remarkably undervalued by the literary establishment.  

• • You’ve come a long way, baby 
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if the “right to keep and bear arms” is truly a right, I can no sooner accept government control over the types and quantities of arms than I could accept government control over the types and quantifies of speech. The practical answer is given by Ayn Rand: that as long we have a legitimately constituted government, we must cede our individual rights to these more powerful and dangerous weapons to the government on our behalf.  

• • Dave Nolan, R.I.P. 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Dave and I came to libertarianism by similar paths, growing up reading Robert Heinlein’s individualist-oriented science fiction and then discovering Ayn Rand’s writings. It was many discussions and debates with my MIT YAF friends that persuaded me to finally read Atlas Shrugged in the summer of ’64, a summer during which I spent many evenings distributing Goldwater literature door-to-door in the Miami area where I grew up.  

• • • From Ayn Rand to the iPod - Chris Lehmann on “Rich People Things” 
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Egoism  |Individualism  |Video  | Interview.
What do TARP, Wired Magazine, The New York Times, David Brooks, Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Malcolm Gladwell, and libertarianism have in common? They’re all “rich people things,” according to journalist Chris Lehmann [....]. In his engaging new book of essays, drawn from his contributions to The Awl, Lehmann explains why what he calls the “airless dogma” of Rand, the “hollow...comic sociology” of Brooks, and other excresences of wealth suck.  

• Are we all Friedmanites now? 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | That Fed Chairman Bernanke claims to be a disciple of Milton Friedman, and that Alan Greenspan was a follower of both Friedman and Ayn Rand, suggests that the Federal Reserve, the pre-eminent economic bureaucracy in the world, is a throne of libertarianism.