• Norway: Women philosophers aplenty 
Jan Petter Myklebust, University World News Among the philosophical canons, few women are represented. An exhibition at the University of Oslo library is asking why. [....] Of last century philosophers, the exhibition includes: Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919); Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Simone Weil (1909-1943) and the Wittgenstein pupil GEM Anscombe (1919-2001).     Share on Facebook

• Accomplished senior has many options 
Joan Kern, Sunday News (Lancaster, PA) Atlas Shrugged  In his spare time, [Ronald] Fox reads "anything — science fiction, nonfiction, fiction." The most recent book he remembers enjoying was Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged."     Share on Facebook

• • Decisions decisions 
Alec Torelli, CardPlayer The Fountainhead  One of my favorite novels is Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” I thought of the main character who’s an extreme individualist, Howard Roark. I asked myself, “What would Howard Roark do?”     Share on Facebook

• An obnoxious regency character who fits right in on Wall Street 
Djelloul Marbrook, NewsBlaze [Jane Austen's Emma] would have regarded the likes of Dick Cheney and George Bush as vulgarians and an Obama presidency as a gaffe, but in her sense of entitlement and the inflatedness of her persona she inhabits every bank, every Starbucks, every café and street in America. Emma is huge in a particularly distasteful way. Everyone else is wallpaper. She mows us down, she hijacks our attention, she makes us think about her when we have better people and better things to think about. She's like a big black fly in the bedroom. But she couldn't have foreseen how distasteful her 21st Century iterations would be. After all, she hadn't had the opportunity to read Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• • The enforcement of education 
Nick Ottens, Atlantic Sentinel Capitalism  [Ayn Rand] repeatedly stressed that the state has to limit itself to the basic tasks of providing defense, policing and courts of law: to protect men against their neighbors and settle legal disputes among them. A government monopoly on education would have been immoral according to Rand and impractical as a free market of supply and demand is better equipped to deliver the best service at the most economic of costs than any army of bureaucrats. Facts prove her right.     Share on Facebook

• A few of his favourite things 
Daily Gleaner (Fredericton, NB) Atlas Shrugged  Profile of David Hanford Balmain.Favourite book: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• • • New ‘dessert and show’ set for mid-February 
Kevin Mcclintock, Carthage Press (MO) Night of January 16th  The Carthage High School Theatre Department will proudly present next month the “Night of January 16th” by Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• Stossel fights the “food police” 
John Del Signore, Gothamist The problem with [John] Stossel's Ayn Randian ranting is that taxpayers already subsidize much of the health care costs connected to obesity.     Share on Facebook

• • Granier and Cisneros 
Axel Capriles, El Universal (Caracas) Atlas Shrugged  Marcel Granier [...] seems to be a character of the lineage of John Galt and Hank Rearden, the leading characters of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. They are the archetypes of creative strength and individual freedom who do not yield to power.     Share on Facebook

• What has happened to the president? 
Morris B. Margolies, Jewish Chronicle (Kansas City, KS) Atlas Shrugged  The billionaires of America, whose holy book is Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” have been buying up members of Congress to fight any piece of legislation that threatens to reduce their already obscene profits. Hundreds of lobbyists are all over Washington, D.C., working their tails off for such mammoth money-makers as the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.     Share on Facebook

• The man who made BioShock 2 
Chad Sapieha, Globe and Mail (Toronto) Q: What was it about the original game’s plot that set it apart from other interactive stories? A: Well the setting was derived in part from the philosophy of Ayn Rand – not as a direct critique per se, more as a kind of exploration of moral extremism. That led to a fairly rare tone, I think, the wild commercial neon and upbeat period tunes coupled with the walking nightmares that Rapture’s citizens had become.     Share on Facebook

• • Saving civil society and a culture of merit 
Beverly K. Eakman, The New American Atlas Shrugged  Egoism  There [is] contention as to whether empathy and sacrifice are valid elements of a “civil society.” Contradicting philosophers like Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) have argued that self-interest, and even selfishness, were key to our nation’s high standard of living; that so-called selfishness — putting oneself and loved ones first is at the heart of what the Declaration calls the “pursuit of happiness.” The endless “sacrifices” that are part and parcel of the Christian ethos, they maintain, has had the unintended consequence injecting the heavy hand of government into every aspect of people’s lives.     Share on Facebook

• Take a stand 
Thom Carnevale, Daily Planet (Telluride) Capitalism  An illegal war fought with debt, a housing boom enabled by the de-regulation policies of George W. Bush and his predecessor, Bill Clinton, and a Republican Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan — an adherent of Ayn Rand, set in place the ingredients for the economic meltdown.     Share on Facebook

• • The main attraction 
Seth Boyer, Daily News (Anchorage) Cold War Kids tend to play with the duality between more Bohemian views of idealized socialism and the harsher realities of a capitalist society. [Nathan] Willett has gone on record saying two of his biggest influences have been [Josiah] Royce and objectivist Ayn Rand. That said, Cold War Kids are fully capable of simply getting people out on the dance floor. "Something Is Not Right With Me" is raucous, upbeat and danceable. It was even featured on an episode of HBO's "Entourage" -- about as far from Rand as one can get.     Share on Facebook

• • Make the irresponsible accountable 
Mandy De Waal, ITWeb The Virtue of Selfishness  What our country seriously needs is a crash course in accountability, and globally there's no one better placed to impart profound lessons on responsibility than Ayn Rand's former lover and intellectual heir, Nathaniel Branden. A strong champion for the philosophy of objectivism, Branden is a world authority in the field of self-esteem, and has written over 20 books, including best-sellers like The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem; The Virtue of Selfishness (with Ayn Rand); Taking Responsibility; Self-Esteem at Work; and My Years with Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• Lose faith in government 
Matthew Shaffer, Yale Daily News (Yale U, New Haven, CT) Libertarians — small-government advocates — have allowed themselves to be satirized in the press as Randian egotists and bizarre ideologues — rich anarchists who attribute mystical perfection to markets. There are some weird libertarians. But belief in small government can reasonably rest on the recognition that man is so stupid, so corrupt and so deeply fallen that almost every time we give more power to bureaucrats — no matter how good our intentions — we are likely to do more harm than good.     Share on Facebook

• • Don’t blame banks 
Glenn Woiceshyn, National Post (Toronto) Capitalism  Objectivist author  Government printing of money to fund its spending (not to mention forcing banks to give low-interest loans to risky home buyers) leads to artificial booms that necessarily end in bust. To blame such busts on banks is a moral obscenity. As a champion of capitalism and an admirer of Ayn Rand [...], I would advocate, among other pro-capitalist things, the privatization of money, thereby preventing such busts. Gold, not paper, would be the standard of money, and governments would not be able to print it to fund their wasteful and destructive spending. As Ayn Rand observed, government controls breed more controls, and your editorial is a clear and sad example of this.     Share on Facebook

• A book-smart brain can make stupid, heartless decisions 
Wayne L. Parker, Sun Herald (Biloxi, MS) “Conservatives” like to ridicule “liberals” for thinking only with their hearts and not with their brains, and in my Ayn Rand-inspired “intellect and ego” days I held that sentiment too. But I know now that only the heart is true, whereas our intellects are highly vulnerable to distortions caused by ignorance and ego-induced self-deceit, and so can’t be trusted with actions that impact large parts of the world.     Share on Facebook

• • Rules for capitalism 
Joseph Gormley, News-Press (Fort Myers, FL) Altruism  Capitalism  Egoism  Economic conservatives believe society functions best when individuals and corporations relentlessly pursue self interest. The role of government is to get out of the way. Greed is good. This behavior has the unintended but certain effect of moving all of society forward. In the words of one of their heroes, Ayn Rand: “If civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” Isn’t that the opposite of “What would Jesus do?” What kind of creative thinking do religious conservatives use to deal with this ideological problem? My problem with unregulated capitalism is it doesn’t work.     Share on Facebook

• What evolutionary biology has to tell us about organizational behavior 
Jim Mcgee, FastForward Warren Bennis made the following claim at the beginning of [Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices]: “When you dig in and begin to understand the four-drive framework of human nature, I doubt that you will ever look at your organization, your work group, your world, your family in the same way. Or yourself, for that matter. I also doubt that you will cling to or be content with a simplified hegemony of one basic Uber Alles motive anymore; the sort of stuff we read in the pages of economic texts that venerate acquisition and self-interest exclusively or in the classic Freudian writings that elevate the psychosexual drive to the exclusion of others, or certainly in the faux-heroic pages of Ayn Rand.” (Warren Bennis, Editor’s Note, pp. xiii-xiv.) I thought this was a bit of marketing puffery before I finished Driven. Since then, I think Bennis has it just about right.     Share on Facebook