• • Thoroughly modern Marx Pt.1 
Paul Jay, Real News Network Capitalism  Video  Interview with Leo Panitch, economist and Professor at York University.[Panitch:] The Ayn Rand ideology that Greenspan found his thinking on has taken a big hit.     Share on Facebook

• 5/29 pm ku sports ticker 
Stephen Montemayor, University Daily Kansan (KS) Atlas Shrugged  A little required reading this summer as the College World Series nears: Ryan McGee's "The Road to Omaha: Hits, Hopes and History at the College World Series". [....] As soon as I polish off Atlas Shrugged (only 419 pages to go!), my summer reading list may have to include this one.     Share on Facebook

• The doomsayers: Are capitalism and the earth’s climate both doomed? 
Edward Cline, Capitalism Magazine Objectivist author  [Representative Henry Waxman] would rather [...] rebellious Americans did not exist at all, so he could effortlessly lord it over a nation of selfless, obedient, dependent serfs, and thus postpone his own doom and that of the nation. He would hate the idea and fear the chance that Americans would say “no” to his power-grubbing, and so necessarily hate them. Ultimately, in the final analysis, he would rather they just shut up, or go away -- or die. That is what Ayn Rand called the death premise.     Share on Facebook

• •Identity politics: A wedge in time 
Michael Sears, The Oregonian (Portland) Capitalism  Ayn (rhymes with "mean") Rand's notion that the individual is the genitor of American prosperity, and that all collective actions detract from that progress, has become the battle-cry of the Libertarian party. Republicans, looking for an expanded base, court these "individuals uber alles" as a way of maintaining the status quo: identity politics "special rights" are hurting individual Americas they cry.     Share on Facebook

• Treason from the left 
Nelson Hultberg, The Exception Magazine Atlas Shrugged  In Foreign Enemies and Traitors, Matthew Bracken has created a brilliant Atlas Shrugged like narrative of how [the] issue of "national sovereignty" might play out amidst the economic meltdown now consuming us.     Share on Facebook

• What is the fetishism of commodities? 
Thomas Riggins, Countercurrents.org [Marx said] "When I state that coats and boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self evident." This has been remarked upon both by the most astute of thinkers (Bertrand Russell) and the most pedestrian (Ayn Rand).     Share on Facebook

• What is money? 
P.V. Subramanyam, Myiris Ayn Rand says "money is the root cause of all good". Indian philosophy says "money increases desire - and like ghee and wood to a fire - increases desire and misery." Immaterial of whether you take the western view or the eastern view, all of us have at some point chased money, have we not?     Share on Facebook

• Literary moxie: Student awarded for love of information 
Kathryn Menu, Sag Harbor Express (NY) The Fountainhead  [Kristen Fisher] is not your average, “Twilight” obsessed reader, opting instead for classics like Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” E.M. Forester’s “A Room With a View” and Edith Wharton’s “Summer.”     Share on Facebook

• Urban kings 
Becky Bosshart, Las Vegas Weekly On a recent Monday afternoon, Hollywood-based artist Gear Boxxx_Rox, 30, was transforming a front corner of the Arts Factory [...] from drab red cinder block and stucco into a dark neo-tech scenario, or “imagine bio gears meets sci-fi light surrealism.” His gear-turning postmodern mural made the Arts Factory look like the cover of an Ayn Rand novel. This irony should be apparent to anyone who has ever been inside. This is no cold mass-production factory. The 32,000-square-foot building houses 25 art-related tenants, including 16 independent art galleries.     Share on Facebook

• Designers have a point: Match regulation with a need for it 
Bill Cotterell, Tallahassee Democrat (FL) If libertarians ran the country, Charles Darwin, Ayn Rand and Neal Boortz would be on the currency and Social Security would be run by the lottery.     Share on Facebook

• • A thought experiment on ‘right to self-determination’ 
China Post (Taipei) Capitalism  Human beings do indeed have the inalienable right to determine their own political status. But only individual human beings have this right, not “the people of a given geographical region.” As novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand explained, the term “individual rights” is a redundancy. There is no other kind of rights and no one else to possess them.     Share on Facebook

• Next tea party steeped in patriotism 
Brent Batten, Marco Island Eagle (FL) Ayn Rand Institute  Capitalism  The next big tea party is brewing for Sept. 12 at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the National Taxpayers Union, the Club for Growth and the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, among others, the 09.12.09 National Taxpayer Protest seeks to build on the momentum generated by the April tea parties.     Share on Facebook

• • A final thought on the Andrews-McArdle affair 
Paul Solman, PBS - The Business Desk Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  The problem I have with vituperation -- about me, Ed Andrews, his dog, Megan McArdle or Ayn Rand, for that matter -- is its fundamental incivility.     Share on Facebook

• • Zizek on Parallax and architecture 
Alan Saunders, ABC Radio National - By Design The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Audio  Interview with philosopher Slavoj Zizek, professor at the Institute for Sociology at Ljubljana in Slovenia.[Q:] You [say] “My knowledge of architecture is constrained to a couple of idiosyncratic data: my love for Ayn Rand and her architectural novel The Fountainhead and my admiration of the Stalinist 'wedding cake' baroque kitsch.” [....] Why The Fountainhead? [A:] Ayn Rand is an interesting phenomenon. [....] Ayn Rand’s idea is enlightened egotism, no compassion for others, [...] brutal capitalism. So while she tries to formulate the very [...] core of liberal capitalist ideology, she does it in such a way that she's an embarrassment. She's very popular [....] but nobody publicly refers to her, though her influence is crucial.     Share on Facebook

• BioShock 2 coming 30 October 
Toby Knight, ElectricPig Bioshock 2 returns you to the failed underwater utopia of Rapture - an one-time Art Deco paradise run along the principals of Objectivism, now crumbling and leaking following the catastrophic events of the original game.     Share on Facebook

• • Library film series gets down to business 
Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star (MO) The Fountainhead  Cinematic portrayals of corporate giants and individual entrepreneurs will be featured in the next free film series at the Kansas City Central Library [....] “The Fountainhead” (1:30 p.m. June 13): An avant-garde architect (Gary Cooper) defies convention and destroys his own buildings when they fail to meet his idealized conceptions. Based on Ayn Rand’s novel.     Share on Facebook

• • The swine (aka the State) are AWOL 
Ilana Mercer, WorldNet Daily Capitalism  When Objectivists eulogized the dazzling Randian Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq., most downplayed her trenchant opposition to the unfettered flow of migrants across the 1,940-mile-long border with Mexico.     Share on Facebook

• SA’s sexiest speaks… 
Thamar Houliston, iAfrica.com (Cape Town) The Fountainhead  Interview with Lyndall Jarvis, FHM's Sexiest Woman.[Jarvis:] I love reading (she's reading 'The Fountain Head' by Ayn Rand).     Share on Facebook

• Overcoming the poverty of ambition 
David Michael Green, Counterpunch The right has been incredibly successful at fomenting the Ayn Randian construction which worships selfishness in such great glory that it is enshrined in public policy. The result has been an incredible transfer of money over the last three decades, the decimation of the middle class, and a polarization of wealth that has put us now on par with any well-functioning banana republic one might care to choose.     Share on Facebook

• Poe’s bookcase stands in North Raleigh 
Josh Shaffer, News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) [Eliza Kraft] Olander founded a company that established Burger King and Applebee's restaurants in the Triangle, and when you ask to see her favorite books, she reaches for Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook