• • Notes on an Occupation 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | A conversation with the top one per cent. He is dressed in a pinstriped suit and has a cigar tucked into his breast pocket. He wears a banker’s hat and carries with him Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, filled with the free market ideas that have shrugged off people and our environment for too long, as a fellow camper points out. Turns out, he’s not the veritable one per cent, but a creative Occupier doing a kind of guerrilla performance.  

• That’s Oprah-essive! 
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The corollary of The Secret is that if you're poor, uneducated, or unhealthy it's your own damn fault for not wishing hard enough. (It's just so terribly Ayn Rand, despite its Australian author, Rhonda Byrne.)  

• ‘Gretzky’s Tears’ 
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Capitalism  | Book review.
[Author Stephen] Brunt describes the high-flying 1980s and presents great sketches of the sleazy, unscrupulous businessmen who epitomized the decade. It was these Gordon Gecko types who signed Gretzky's paycheques, and who bought and sold the hockey genius. [....] [Peter] Pocklington, who sold Gretzky for $15 million a decade after picking him up for relative pocket change, sold used cars, did battle with the meat packers union and generally bilked the Alberta treasury while simultaneously trumpeting an Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian capitalism.  

• Green sell: Do you buy it? 
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Capitalism  | The evolution of green from a movement of zealots as fierce as anything politics and religion have spawned into a mainstream marketing phenomenon has been fascinating [...]. [....] But the marketing schtick I've dubbed "Ayn Rand goes green" may soon be on the wane.  

• Pot Prince’s falling out with Fraser Institute 
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“Since those early 1980s days when I was filling my head with the ideas of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and the Austrian School of Economics, the Fraser Institute was invaluable, and I am more proud to speak under The Fraser Institute banner than perhaps any other.” So said Vancouver's infamous marijuana seed salesman Marc Emery, prior to delivering a speech in the Fraser Institute’s Opus Speakers series last fall.  

• Bookwinked into bed 
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It's generally agreed by those of all sexes that a fondness for the Da Vinci Code, Ayn Rand, Dianetics, The Secret, and anything by Ann Coulter or Eckhart Tolle will get you booted out of bed by most thinking singletons.  

• • Citizen Izzy 
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On Canadian media businessman, Israel "Izzy" Asper.
Camp counselors Nathan Divinsky and Allan Gotlieb, a future ambassador to the U.S., were preoccupied playing chess, according to [Larry] Zolf. [....] According to Zolf, Divinsky preached the right-wing gospel of Ayn Rand to the impressionable young campers. "[Divinsky] got nowhere with me, but did make an impression on Izzy, who liked Ayn Rand's ideas of rugged individualism and unfettered freedom and certainly preferred those ideas to my North End view of street-socialist thuggery for the greatest good for the greatest number."  

• Giants of citizen media meet up 
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[Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy] Wales has been cited quoting free-market thinkers Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand, and his wiki-projects are studies into those incentives -- social norms and rules -- that facilitate the production of information.  

•Marc Emery, martyr to the cause 
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Commmentary on the marijuana activist, who was recently arrested in Canada for extradition to the US.
Emery was eager for his day in court. He told me, “My idea is that it’s gotta be legal by the time I go to court. That’s my target date, then it’ll be redundant. Or maybe I’ll get my Howard Rourke [the hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead] moment in the sun, where I tell the jury, yes I did it, I'm proud of it, and here's why I did it, find me not guilty even though I did it.”