• Big Brother 12: The puppetry of the pea-brains. 
Tallulah Morehead, Huffington Post Atlas Shrugged  The Penguin isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. He wouldn’t be the sharpest knife in the drawer even if he were the only knife in the drawer. If he’d been in Norman Bates’s kitchen, Janet Leigh would still be alive today. The Penguin is duller than Atlas Shrugged.     Share on Facebook

• Activism in America: The conservative takeover 
Erik Loomis, GlobalComment.com Capitalism  Conservatism has also benefited from its commitment to an ideologically fundamentalist version of capitalism. The teachings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman have become sacrosanct for conservatives: to stray from orthodoxy threatens excommunication. This ideology, embodied in plans to strip the American welfare state, support the outsourcing of jobs overseas, and export disaster capitalism around the world, guides the conservative movement. It gives conservatives a common language, set of beliefs, and cultural references. In short, it provides them an architecture of activism. On the other hand, progressives have no clear ideology today.     Share on Facebook

• • Why you should ask your kids for receipts 
Russell Frank, State College News (PA) The Fountainhead  During the first week of my journalism ethics class (no oxymoron jokes, please – I’ve heard them all), I asked the students to keep track of all the lies they told. Most of the lies were both predictable and forgivable: “My English teacher…asked the class to define ourselves through a piece of literature. I said ‘The Fountainhead’ because I knew enough about the book to talk a little about it and it is also extremely popular and acclaimed. However, I have never actually read the book. I lied to impress the teacher...” (“The Fountainhead?” Nice try.)     Share on Facebook

• Brooks a poor commencement speaker pick 
Alex Buckey, Rice Thresher (Rice U, Houston) [New York Times columnist David] Brooks embodies the political philosophy that, next to more obvious candidates like fascism or objectivism, I have always hated most: the one that hides behind labels like “independent thinking” or “sensible moderation” as a way of refusing to engage with the political process. He wants to be respected as an intellectual without ever having to make a potentially risky commitment to a policy or idea.     Share on Facebook

• VG designer Ken Levine updates BioShock movie, “still an active thing” 
Kevin Coll, Fused Film BioShock  Capitalism  [ BioShock] takes place in an underwater city, in an alternate 1960, based on the free market principles of Ayn Rand, but things have gone disastrously wrong.     Share on Facebook

• Homo-conservative love tryst 
Troy Williams, Q Salt Lake (UT) For the Tea Party patriot who goes to sleep with his dog-eared Ayn Rand Reader on his nightstand, the poor are poor because, well, they deserve it. The underemployed queer just hasn’t pulled himself up by his rainbow-colored bootstraps.     Share on Facebook

• • Frisky reader revealed: May we, Maynard? 
Kelli Bender, The Frisky Atlas Shrugged  [Q:] Please state your name, age, and location for The Friskyverse. [A:] My name is Nora, I’m 25, and I now live in the Cleveland area. [....] [Q:] Favorite book [...]? [A:] Favorite book is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. (I actually have a pretty big Atlas tattoo down my side).     Share on Facebook

• • Congratulations to Joe Miller 
Ken Bylund, SitNews (Ketchikan, AK) Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  My hat’s off to you, Joe, best of luck; enough honest effort will bring this once great ship of state back into safe waters. Only hope you can be strong in the face of bribery [aka compromise and arbitrary justice]. These seem to be the primary tools in Washington. Best advice -- buy a copy of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand, read it again, or better, get the Audible read by Anna Fields... refresh that keen memory as to what we are.     Share on Facebook

• • Names and faces 
Times Leader (Wilkes Barre, PA) Ayn Rand Institute  The Fountainhead  Essay Contests  Jared Hinkle, a recent graduate of MMI Preparatory School, received a second-prize award in the Ayn Rand Institute’s annual “The Fountainhead” essay contest. Hinkle, the son of Robert and Donna Hinkle, Weatherly, received a $2,000 prize for his essay. Students who entered the contest could choose from three topics for discussion. The contest is open to high school juniors and seniors and encourages students to explore themes and characters in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel “The Fountainhead.” Essays are judged on style and content and must demonstrate an outstanding grasp of the philosophic meaning of the book. Hinkle submitted his essay under the review of Grete DeAngelo, social sciences instructor. He will attend the University of Chicago, where he will major in biology with a concentration in neuroscience.     Share on Facebook

• • Taking stimulus dollars isn’t hypocritical 
Jarrett Skorup, Mackinac Center for Public Policy One of the Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy is that “Sound policy requires that we consider long-term effects and all people, not simply short-run effects and a few people.” Minimizing government involvement in the economy is a step towards this goal and one individuals should be constantly working towards. But in the meantime, it’s not hypocritical to take what the government is handing out. As the novelist Ayn Rand once wrote, “Minimizing the financial injury inflicted on [taxpayers] by the welfare-state laws does not constitute support of welfare statism...initiating, advocating, or expanding such laws does.”     Share on Facebook

• • Busted: Stories of the financial crisis 
Joshua Clover, The Nation Alan Greenspan  Capitalism  Egoism  In 2008, after two decades as head of the Federal Reserve (where his insistence on low regulatory standards and lower interest rates helped inflate the credit bubble), [Alan Greenspan] had a revelation on par with Saul on the road to Damascus. There was “a flaw in the model...that defines how the world works.” That flaw was greed: the “self-interest of lending institutions” failed to protect shareholders, much less customers. The evident irony is that greed—the self-interest of individuals, spread across the society—is exactly what’s supposed to make capitalism work. This is a tenet of classic liberalism, raised to a fundamentalism by Ayn Rand and her protégé Greenspan.     Share on Facebook

• Police kill hostage taker who besieged Discovery Channel 
David Kravets and Kevin Poulsen, Wired Magazine - Threat Level Daniel Quinn is a kind of anarcho-environmental Ayn Rand — an idea-driven author who’s Ishmael trilogy has inspired followers around the around the world. “Ishmael for them does what the movie The Matrix did for a lot of people,” says Ted Bolha, a Pittsburgh man who formed a local discussion group for Quinn readers.     Share on Facebook

• • Mariemont juniors place in national essay contest 
Rachel Richardson, The Enquirer (Cincinnati) Ayn Rand Institute  Anthem  Essay Contests  Image  Four Mariemont High School juniors were named among winning essayists in this year’s Ayn Rand Institute “Anthem” essay contest. Katie Wray placed in third in the prestigious writing competition. James Donnelly, Karyn Georgilis and Kate Hassey were named semi-finalists. The Institute received more than 16,000 essay submissions in the national competition. Students select one of three topics related to book as an essay topic.     Share on Facebook

• The passions (and perils) of Pamela Geller 
Doug Chandler, The Jewish Week Atlas Shrugged  Geller describes herself as a keen believer in individual rights — “the well from which all things spring” — and says the name of her blog [Atlas Shrugs], launched in 2004, reflects that. The name refers to the title of Ayn Rand’s most famous book, which is an inspiration for Geller.     Share on Facebook

• • Beck and followers merely ranting 
Michael Precin, Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL) Atheism  [Glenn] Beck doesn’t get his beliefs from the gospels. He gets them from the writings of the atheist Ayn Rand. Her basic philosophy is right out of a Dickens novel. You know, if you give Oliver Twist more gruel you will never get a good day of work out of him again. This is the sort of belief that allowed 1 million Irishmen to starve to death when the potato crop failed.     Share on Facebook

• • • A final word on Ayn Rand . . . 
Jason Lee Steorts, National Review Online Atheism  The Fountainhead  . . . from Mr. Lester Joe Santos, a hermit who dwells in a cave in the desert of the American Southwest. On rare occasion he sends epigrammatic critiques of my labors. One cannot be sure he actually exists, and certainly I give no promise. “Mr. Steorts,” says he, It seems that what you believe, but have not written directly, is this. Ayn Rand wants to glorify the heroic in man. Whittaker Chambers thinks this must come at the expense of God. But it all depends on what “glorify” and “heroic” are taken to mean. Rand denies God’s existence because she is enslaved by a certain definition of it. She then fills the concept of the absolute, which ought to have been empty, with her ego and its “reason.” Thus embarked on the path of gravest temptation, she speaks—beware it!—of “man-worship.” And she is all the more dangerous for her power to make highly concentrated symbols.     Share on Facebook

• • The government’s ‘un-American’ home-ownership crusade 
The Week Ayn Rand Institute  Don Watkins  Yaron Brook  Best Opinion: Forbes [....] There are myriad tax breaks associated with buying and selling a home, and the government now backs a jaw-dropping 97 percent of all new mortgages. But the real estate bubble has demonstrated just how misguided — and, in fact, "un-American" — this approach is, say Don Watkins and Yaron Brook at Forbes.     Share on Facebook

• Karl Marx hates Saturdays 
Tyler Jett, Independent Florida Alligator (U of FL, Gainesville) Capitalism  Florida vs. Miami (Ohio) is not just about an easy win. The game, along with the seven other matchups pitting top-10 teams against overwhelmed opponents this week, is about sports theory. On one end of the spectrum sits the NFL, a wildly popular form of American socialism priding itself in parity. College football sits on the other end of the spectrum, a capitalist venture that would make Ayn Rand proud.     Share on Facebook

• Transcontinental shift: Hollywood is all aboard Union Station 
Richard Verrier, Los Angeles Times - Company Town Atlas Shrugged movie  Atlas Shrugged  In recent years, [Union Station] has been the site for dozens of car commercials, feature films including “Drag Me to Hell,” “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” and the upcoming adaptation of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” as well as such TV shows as “CSI: New York,” “Cold Case” and the reality program “Top Chef.”     Share on Facebook

• • Jeremy Efroymson: Philanthropist and grassroots arts activist 
Dan Grossman, Jeremy Efroymson: philanthropist and grassroots arts activist Atlas Shrugged  [Efroymson] admires the character of steel magnate Henry Rearden in Ayn Rand’s mega-opus Atlas Shrugged — not exactly a primer on philanthropy and/or non-profit management — for his decisiveness and passion for excellence. “If you let life become a committee, it becomes difficult to trust your instinct,” he says.     Share on Facebook